Eyewitness to history

When we think about the chroniclers of the passing scene, the witnesses to the cultural history of our times, how many of us think of John Charles Daly? And yet, once you think about it, he seems so obvious, I wonder why it took me this long to figure it out.

Most people probably think of John Daly as the urbane host of CBS's What's My Line? from 1950 to 1967, a job at which he excelled. But if you'd been around back then, you likely would have been familiar with a different side of John Daly: that of a newsman, first for CBS Radio, and then at ABC television. And as it happens, Daly reported on some of the biggest news stories of the era.

He became known to audiences as CBS's White House correspondent, where he announced many of President Roosevelt's speeches. Later, he moved to New York to become the anchor for CBS's long-running news program The World Today, and that's where Daly was on December 7, 1941 when he was first on the air with the bulletin that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.


During the war, Daly was a correspondent on the front lines in the European and North African theaters. In 1942, he was " one of the first to report . . .of the growing concerts regarding the Nazi treatment of the Jews" based on reports coming from unoccupied France. He was covering the American advances through Italy in 1943 when  General George Patton slapped two soldiers  he accused of malingering (they were suffering from "shell shock") and was one of the reporters who brought the story to the attention of General Eisenhower. (Daly agreed to sit on the story at Eisenhower's request; "I need this man. I can't win the war without Patton.") Back home, it was Daly who broke another story on CBS: the death of President Roosevelt in Warm Springs, Georgia on April 12, 1945.


After the war, Daly hosted You Are There, the program that dramatized historic events as if they'd been covered on the radio. By 1952, Daly had moved to ABC, where he'd become vice president of news and public affairs, winning three Peabody awards, and he was anchor of ABC's evening news from 1953 to 1960. At Daly's suggestion, the network carried live coverage of Senator Joseph McCarthy's hearings on communist infiltration of the Army; neither CBS nor NBC were doing so, and it was cheap programming for a network that was a distant third in the ratings. Daly's "worldly charm" was so apparent, NBC responded by replacing longtime anchor John Cameron Swayze with a team of anchors, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. In 1959, when Vice President Richard Nixon engaged Nikita Khrushchev in the famous " Kitchen Debate ," guess who was there to cover it? John Daly. He wasn't one of the panelists of the Kennedy-Nixon debates, which might have been one of the few things he didn't do, but he represented ABC in the negotiations with the other two networks and the campaigns.

In his 17+ years on What's My Line?, Daly was witness to people from every segment of society: politics, entertainment, sports, and art. Joe Louis was one of the Mystery Guests, as was Colonel Sanders. Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Bishop Fulton Sheen, Herman Wouk, Ronald Reagan*, Victor Borge, Lucille Ball, Walt Disney, Frank Gifford, Sean Connery, Gypsy Rose Lee, Edward R. Murrow, Carl Sandburg, Billy Graham, Steve Allen, Ernie Kovacs, Jacques Cousteau, Chuck Yeager, Pearl Buck, Eleanor Roosevelt; all sat next to Daly as the blindfolded panel tried to guess who they were. Blonde bombshells, Supreme Court justices, political party chairmen, football heroes, various Congressmen and governors, television stars: they were all on What's My Line?, either as Mystery Guest or guest panelist or both. And Daly saw them all.

*Ronald Reagan wasn't the only future president to appear as Mystery Guest; on the syndicated version, which Daly didn't host, Georgia governor Jimmy Carter stumps the panel.

In addition to the celebrities, there were the ordinary people who made up the bulk of What's My Line?'s guests, and from that chair as moderator, Daly could see how the American workforce was changing, how jobs that were done by people in 1950 were becoming mechanized by 1967, and how women were increasingly present in jobs that had formerly been done exclusively by men. People working in the aerospace industry were now side-by-side with those twisting pretzels by hand; it had to be a profound demonstration of the new American economy, presaging perhaps the economy of today.

Daly's life at the center of things doesn't end here, though. After What's My Line? ended, Daly served as head of the Voice of America through 1968. His second wife, Virginia, was the daughter of Chief Justice Earl Warren, and it was Daly who served as an intermediary between Warren and the Nixon administration in negotiating the date of Warren's resignation from the Supreme Court. He was a member of the Peabody Awards Board of Jurors, and throughout the 1980s he hosted forums for the American Enterprise Institute; indeed, a 1982 forum he moderated was on the topic " Terrorism: What Should Be Our Response? "

What, then, do we have? As a newsman, John Daly covered the New Deal, Pearl Harbor, World War II, political conventions, and the Cold War. As host of What's My Line?, Daly saw most of the cultural icons and political leaders of the 1950s and 1960s, not to mention the changing work habits of Americans from the post-war boom to the space age. During these times, he was, in the words of authors Jeff Allen and James M. Lane, "one of the most well known and highly regarded people in the country." For over 50 years, he observed the evolution of trends in politics, entertainment, sports, and American culture itself. By any definition, it is a remarkable career. Does anyone else compare? The only name that comes to mind is Edward R. Murrow, whose impact was formidable, but I'm not sure even Murrow's experience equals the length and breadth of Daly's.

John Charles Daly died in 1991. He never wrote his autobiography, which is a shame, because it would have been one of the most fascinating cultural histories of the 20th century, by one of the most fascinating men of the century: a man who was an eyewitness to history. TV