Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control . . .

Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control . . .

by Fred W. Friendly
Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control . . .

Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control . . .

by Fred W. Friendly

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Overview

This discourse on the importance of television in society presents Friendly's uncannily prescient views on the corrosive effect of money on the news business, the sensationalization of news reporting, and the viewing public's appetite for quality broadcasting.

With Edward R. Murrow, Fred Friendly practically invented television journalism. Through telling anecdotes and penetrating analysis, he recalls his collaborations with Murrow, from their stinging documentary on Senator Joseph McCarthy to CBS's pioneering coverage of the burgeoning civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. Friendly also recounts his resignation as president of CBS News in 1966, when the network ran reruns of I Love Lucy instead of Senate hearings on the war in Vietnam. Following that controversial decision, he began writing this memorable book.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307824400
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 03/06/2013
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 384
File size: 2 MB

Read an Excerpt

1 Something of a Hero: Milo Radulovich
 
There is an indoor tennis court now where Studio 41 used to be, but on the third floor of that windowless labyrinth above the railroad tracks of Grand Central Station, some early television history was enacted. With his penchant for understatement, Ed Murrow referred to such broadcasts as “minor footnotes.” I first heard him use the phrase on the day of the first See It Now program, in November 1951.
 
In the course of his introduction, Ed said to the television audience: “This is an old team trying to learn a new trade.” It took us two years to learn that job. There was a one-hour report from Korea at Christmas 1952, which was the first combat report via television, but for the most part we were, as Ed said, just a bunch of old radio hands learning the hard way that cameras need something more than emulsion and light valves to create electronic journalism. The missing ingredients were conviction, controversy and a point of view. The industry found them on the night of October 20, 1953, when Murrow looked up at the television camera and said: “We propose to examine … the case of Lieutenant Radulovich …”
 
Just thirty seconds before air time Murrow took a final sip from the glass of Scotch at his feet, offered me my customary gulp and said, “I don’t know whether we’ll get away with this one or not, and things will never be the same around here after tonight, but this show may turn out to be a small footnote to history in the fight against the senator.” He meant the junior senator from Wisconsin; the Radulovich program was television’s first attempt to do something about the contagion of fear that had come to be known as McCarthyism, and when he said that things would never be the same again, he meant at 485 Madison Avenue, headquarters of the Columbia Broadcasting System. However, this was only a guess, since no one in the management ever discussed the Radulovich case with us, either before or after the show.
 
Ed was usually nervous before a broadcast, but on this night his involvement created a special empathy which everyone in the control room could sense. Though it was the first time a nationally televised news broadcast had engaged itself in controversy, Murrow always believed that we were six months late with such a program. Others had been critical of television’s and Murrow’s apparent unwillingness to cope with the problem of blacklisting and guilt by association. Murrow’s personal courage in World War II was part of the legend of combat reporting, but that was against a common foe, his detractors argued. In 1953 the question was being asked whether—and when—Murrow would stand up and be counted. I remember one delegation of civil-liberty professionals admonishing him for hiding his conscience behind the neutrality of a camera. Ed and I argued that we weren’t going to use our microphones and cameras as a monopolized pulpit from which to preach, but that when there was a news story that dramatized the problem of guilt by association we might be able to make our point legitimately.
 
We did not tell anyone at the time, but the thought of doing a half-hour study of McCarthy and his investigations had been considered as early as the spring of 1953, when we instructed our camera crews to begin compiling filmed records of all the senator’s speeches and hearings. We had tried our hand at a series of live interviews in which McCarthy would appear on one program, and one of his earliest critics, Senator William Benton of Connecticut, on another. I failed to budget enough time for them, and the experiment got out of hand with the two senators hurling broadsides against each other.
 
When one visitor accused Murrow of not denouncing McCarthy, declaring that it was fear of upsetting his comfortable nest that prevented him from speaking out, Murrow politely replied, “You may be right.” When a McCarthy supporter criticized Murrow for a radio report which he considered unfair, and proclaimed his faith in McCarthy’s crusade against Communism in government (“His methods may be a little harsh but he’s doing a nasty job that needs doing”), Ed took a long drag on a cigarette and again said, “You may be right.” It was his way of conserving his convictions and energy for the proper foe. In the meantime we kept compiling the McCarthy record without a shooting budget while waiting for the right incident that would provide us with a “little picture”—our shorthand for a real situation which would illustrate a national issue.
 
I first heard of the Radulovich case in the CBS lobby one day in October 1953. Murrow was late for a lunch date, I was returning from the cutting room, and as we passed each other, he handed me a wrinkled newspaper clipping. “Here, read this,” he said. “It may be our case history. I don’t know how we missed it on the wires, but the Detroit News has been doing a hell of a job with it. It’s the story of an Air Force lieutenant who is losing his commission because his father and his sister are supposed to be left-wing sympathizers. Let’s have someone check it out.”
 
That afternoon reporter-producer Joe Wershba left for Dexter, Michigan. By noon of the next day he had met Radulovich and read most of the transcript of the Air Force hearings.
 
First Lieutenant Milo J. Radulovich, aged twenty-six, a meteorologist in the Air Force Reserve and a student at the University of Michigan, had been asked to resign his commission because his sister and father were secretly accused of radical beliefs. When Radulovich refused to resign, an Air Force board at Selfridge Field ordered his separation as a security risk. According to Wershba, Radulovich was attractive, articulate and willing to participate in the broadcast. “He’ll make a convincing witness and I’d like to get it on film before he changes his mind. I have a date to see his father, and I’m working on his sister, who lives in Detroit. The Air Force officials here won’t talk, but I can film the air base and the town of Dexter. It’s a big story here and the townspeople will talk. Can I have Charlie Mack and his camera crew out here tonight?”
 
Mack, a veteran of the newsreel business and Murrow’s favorite cameraman, left Washington a few hours later; forty-eight hours after that, we were looking at the film.
 
Wershba’s “dope sheets” were sometimes more comprehensive than the film they accompanied, but in the Radulovich case they were unnecessary, for after each interview he called to brief us. From the beginning the material seemed promising. When our reporters were doing well they would promote their stories with phrases like “first rate” or “pretty good stuff.” But when the material was truly exciting, there was often a note of restraint. “Fred,” Wershba said now, “please try to see this film tonight. I don’t want to try to evaluate it from this end, but if there is any sound on the track and the picture is as good as Mack thinks it is, we may have something here.” His last words were: “And tell the lab not to scratch the film.” When a reporter says that, you know he has something.
 
On the way home that night I went by the screening room which, with our cutting room, was located in a loft at 550 Fifth Avenue. After watching and listening to five minutes of Lieutenant Radulovich (“The [Air] Force does not question my loyalty in the least … They have presented me with allegations against my sister and father … to the effect that … [they] have read what are now called subversive newspapers, and that my sister and father’s activities are questionable … The actual charge against me is that I had maintained a close and continuing relationship with my dad and my sister over the years”) I called Murrow, and after apologizing for bothering him just before his nightly radio broadcast, I suggested that he see the Radulovich film that night. He said that he’d go home for dinner and then meet me in the cutting room.
 
Before Ed arrived, Wershba had called again. “I don’t want to prejudice you before you see it, but we just interviewed Radulovich’s father. He’s a Serb, has been in this country for forty years, is a veteran of World War I, and works at the Hudson automobile factory. He’s written a letter to President Eisenhower about his son.” Wershba read me the text, which concluded: “Mr. President … they are doing a bad thing to Milo … He has given all his growing years to his country … I am an old man. I have spent my life in this coal mine and auto furnaces. I ask nothing for myself. [All] I ask is justice for my boy. Mr. President, I ask your help.” Wershba’s last words were: “We are shipping the film tonight, but let me know first thing what Ed thinks of the interview with Milo.”
 
When Murrow saw the film, he was jarred. Whenever someone appearing on one of our programs spoke with great conviction and force, Ed would say, “The guy has a fire in his belly.” He said that now about Radulovich, but he was also impressed with the young officer’s control.
 
“What about the sister?” he asked me. “Will the Air Force talk?”
 
“No.”
 
“Will the townspeople talk?”
 
“Yes. Wershba says a former American Legion head who runs a gas station will speak up for the lieutenant, and here’s the transcript of the trial.”
 
Radulovich had not been allowed to face his accusers, or even to read the specific allegations against him. I told Ed that I was sure there was a broadcast here. He agreed but said, “We can’t cover this in ten minutes. What would you think of our doing an entire half-hour on it?” I said that I was for it, but that we should make the decision after we had seen the footage of Radulovich’s father.
 
The next afternoon we watched the old Serb speak in his halting accent. We saw the sister, unwilling to talk about her own political beliefs, but angry that they should be the criteria for her brother’s loyalty. Radulovich’s counsel, a Detroit lawyer, was eloquent and persuasive, and so were the legionnaire and the officer of the UAW local to which the elder Radulovich belonged. But the star was Milo. “If I am being judged by my relatives,” he said, “are my children going to be asked to denounce me? Are they going to be asked what their father was labeled? Are they going to have to explain to their friends why their father’s a security risk?… This is a chain reaction if the thing is let stand … I see a chain reaction that has no end …”
 
“Let’s do an entire half-hour on Tuesday night,” said Ed. “Let’s see if we can get the Pentagon to comment. You try to get CBS to give the broadcast some promotion and I’ll work on the ending.”
 

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