More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Khrushchev had a visceral sense of the impact of Sputnik on ordinary people, how terrifying and awesome it seemed. The Soviets, he boasted, could do this anytime. They would produce rockets like this by the dozens—“like sausages.” When the Americans finally launched a satellite, he belittled it (although in scientific terms it was considerably more impressive than the Soviets’). The American satellites were small, like oranges, he said.
TELEVISION WAS TURNING OUT to be a magic machine for selling products, and the awareness of that was still dawning on Madison Avenue in the late 1950s. Yet the ad men had already discovered that television favored certain products and could sell them more readily: beer, cigarettes, various patent medicines and, above all, such big-ticket items as cars.
As far as Jones could tell, it was a generational thing. He believed all the top people at all the top agencies had made their reputations by handling words—words were what they understood and responded to. Television made them uneasy. Some of them looked down on it; some of them feared it. Few of them seemed to realize the extent to which it had already changed their own industry.
As far as Jones was concerned, television was the dog and print was the tail, and the generation that dominated the ad agencies was letting the tail wag the dog.
Jones had learned a great deal in his experimental period, and he was confident he knew, as few others did, how to sell a product visually. In particular, he was pleased with a commercial he had done for Campbell’s tomato juice in which he had used time-lapse photography to show the life of a tomato as it grew into one of the lucky vegetables chosen for the honor of being in Campbell’s tomato juice.
unpredictable breed as far as they were concerned, but he was a good son of the Midwest—born in St. Louis, educated at Washington University of St. Louis, and currently working in Chicago at Burnett, which fancied itself a bastion of Midwestern values in a profession dominated by Eastern and Californian elitism and snobbery.
It was in the immortal words of Henry Ford II, “a little shit box.” It lacked power, it lacked size, and it lacked style. It was two feet shorter than the smallest Chevy of its time, and its 1300cc engine seemed an insult to the colossal engines Detroit was producing.
To the degree that Detroit took the VW seriously, it was pleased because it ended the pressure to build a small low-performance car, which industry critics had been demanding since the end of the war.
In addition, General Motors was about to come under a new and different kind of political and social scrutiny than in the past. By the time the stabilizing bar was added, in 1963, the number of lawsuits against Chevy on the Corvair was mounting and within a year would reach a hundred.
Among those following the flaws of the Corvair and the crippling accidents left in its wake was a young man named Ralph Nader. He had already set out on a lonely path as a kind of one-man consumer critic of Detroit and what he considered its lack of concern for the greater good of its consumers, including on the issue of safety. GM, in turn, would lash out at Nader and would be caught in the act.
The $64,000 Question was the top-rated show on television. Studies showed that approximately 47.5 million people were watching. The sales of Revlon (“the greatest name in cosmetics”) skyrocketed. Some Revlon products sold out overnight, and the show’s master of ceremonies had to beg the public to be more patient until more Revlon Living Lipstick was available. The head of Hazel Bishop, a rival cosmetics company, subsequently blamed his company’s disappointing year on the fact that “a new television program sponsored by your company’s principal competitor captured the imagination of the
...more
He posted a chart in the meeting room with the ratings on it; if the ratings were down, it was the fault of the contestants. Were the contestants too old? Too young? Were they attractive enough? The criticism was often brutal. (The Revsons apparently did not like a young psychologist named Joyce Brothers, who appeared as an expert on boxing.
Of all the people associated with the quiz-show scandals, the one who remains most indelibly burned on most people’s memory is Charles Van Doren. He was the bearer of one of the most illustrious names in American intellectual life and he captivated the audience as no one else ever did. His manner—shy, gentle, somewhat self-deprecating, like a young, more intellectual Jimmy Stewart—was immensely attractive, for he was smart enough to win yet modest enough to seem just a little uneasy with his success.
Then it began to change. Van Doren asked Freedman what made him so sure that he, Van Doren, would actually win on the show. At that point Freedman gave him a brief but somewhat sanitized history of radio and television game shows, explaining that they were all controlled in some way, because the producers had to hold the interest of the audience as well as educate it. It was not a question of truth, or documentaries; rather, it was show business. Why, look at Eisenhower, he said. A book came out under his name, but it was most likely produced by a ghostwriter.
In the end his total winnings came to $129,000; but given the draconian taxes of the period, he actually took home only about $28,000. Stempel asked to challenge Van Doren one more time but was told that Van Doren would not take him on.
The press, especially the city’s more vulnerable newspapers, particularly those already suffering financially from television’s ever more powerful reach—the World Telegram, the Journal American, and even the Post—feasted on the story as a means of showing that their prime competitor was not to be trusted.
has NBC ever asked you whether the show was rigged?” Again Enright said no. “Well, the reason that none of us has asked,” Werblin continued, summing up the morality of the networks on the issue in those days, “is because we don’t want to know.”
Gradually, the congressional investigation kept coming back to focus on Charles Van Doren, the young man who had charmed the entire nation. Van Doren steadfastly maintained his innocence and claimed that he had received no help. That meant he continued to lie to the prosecutors, to the New York grand jury investigating the quiz shows, to the media, to his employers, to his family, and to his own lawyer.
Only Congressman Steve Derounian announced that he saw no particular point in praising someone of Van Doren’s exceptional talents and intelligence for simply telling the truth. With that, the room suddenly exploded with applause, and Goodwin knew at that moment ordinary people would not so easily forgive Van Doren.
Some commentators wrote of the quiz shows as the end of American innocence. Starting with World War Two, they said, America had been on the right side: Its politicians and generals did not lie, and the Americans had trusted what was written in their newspapers and, later, broadcast over the airwaves. That it all ended abruptly because one unusually attractive young man was caught up in something seedy and outside his control was dubious. But some saw the beginning of the disintegration of the moral tissue of America, in all of this. Certainly, many Americans who would have rejected a role in
...more
The other thing it showed, and this was to be perhaps its most powerful lesson, was that television cast everything it touched: politics, news shows, and sitcoms.
If Charles Van Doren was the major new star of television in the late fifties, then he was to be replaced by John Kennedy as the new decade started.
He was the editor of a number of important collections, including The Great Treasury of Western Thought, and The Joy of Reading, but his ability to promote the books, and thereby enhance both their sales and his own reputation, was limited by his wariness of going on television. He was aware that if he made a book tour, he was not likely to be asked about the history of Western thought, or about the relative influence of Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas Aquinas on our lives, but rather about Freedman, Enright, and Revson.
The first and most jarring of these images was of angry mobs of white rednecks, pure hatred contorting their faces, as they assaulted the nine young black students who dared to integrate Little Rock Central High. The second and almost equally chilling image came a few weeks later, showing the same black children entering the same school under the protection of elite U.S. Army paratroopers.
Arkansas was a moderate state, as much a Southwestern state as it was truly Southern. Its medical and law schools had been integrated a decade earlier, without even a court order. Orval Faubus, the governor, was considered a moderate and there was no feverish quality to his voice when he spoke about issues of race.
The plan called for integrating at the high school level and working downward, one grade, one year at a time. Originally, Virgil Blossom, the school superintendent, wanted to do just the opposite—beginning at the lower levels and working upward, on the theory that younger children would have less learned prejudice. But he found that white parental fear in the lower grades was more intense: parents were less nervous about their teenagers than their first-graders.
The list shrank to seventeen names, and then, as rumors and doubts continued, only nine. That pleased the white leadership. The entire process had been designed to minimize the emotional impact of integration on the whites. If the local black leadership was not entirely thrilled with the cautious approach, it had accepted it as law, for the Blossom plan clearly met the test of the Supreme Court and had been approved by the federal district court.
They accepted the idea of “social justice”—that is, a fairer legal and political deal for blacks—but they remained wary of what they considered “social equality”—which implied an integrated dance at a country club, for instance.
At the heart of their position was a desire to do business as usual and an acceptance that when it came to the crunch, the presence of a white redneck mob in the street was a greater threat to tranquility and daily commerce than was the integration of a school system or other public facilities.
Little Rock authorities felt particularly comfortable with the Blossom plan because the nine black students were chosen not merely for their exceptional educational abilities but for their strength of character as well. They came from middle-class families, black middle-class to be sure, which meant smaller incomes than that of white middle-class families, but they all had a strong sense of home and family.
Though it was part of the white mythology that the NAACP in New York pushed unwilling parents to sacrifice their children to its subversive aims, the real drive to integrate usually came from the children themselves. The parents were nervous about a possible confrontation, but the children felt it was time to get on with integration. The Brown decision had been handed down three years previously, when they were twelve or thirteen, and with the idealism of the young, they trusted in their country and its laws. As Terrance Roberts told a reporter who asked him in the early days whether he was
...more
They did not understand that others, less powerful, less successful, and less influential, would have to live with their decisions and might resent them. Daisy Bates, the head of the local NAACP, was aware of the class tensions that ran through the crisis, the rage on the part of the poor whites because they had to bear the burden of integration while the upper-class whites would be largely unaffected by it.
What was foremost in Orval Faubus’s mind at that moment was not the education of the nine black children or the 2,000 white children whom they would join at Central High but rather his own political future in a state where, in the three years since Brown, race was beginning to dominate local political discourse.
Later, after Little Rock had been torn apart by Faubus’s decision to block integration, Ashmore noted that there had been plenty of earlier signs of which way he might go, since in the past whenever there had been any kind of crunch, Faubus had always followed his sense of what the preponderant feeling was among the poor whites, whom he knew so well and with whom he could so readily identify. His politics were the politics of class.
What he did was very simple: He announced that he was unable to maintain the peace (thereby encouraging a mob to go into the streets), and then he placed the Arkansas National Guard on the side of the mob: Its orders, despite the specific mandate of the district court, were to keep the blacks out of the schools.
She arranged for a police car to protect them. But as they approached the school, they were abused and threatened; when they finally reached the school, they were turned away by a National Guard captain, who said he was acting under the orders of Governor Faubus. What are your orders? someone asked one of the soldiers. “Keep the niggers out!” he answered. The confidence of the mob grew greater by the minute as it found that the law-enforcement forces were on its side. Sensing this, the ministers and children quickly retreated.
Before Elizabeth left, her mother called the family together and they all prayed. Alone and unprotected, Elizabeth approached the school, and the crowd started to scream at her: “Here she comes! Here comes one of the niggers!” But she saw the National Guard troopers and was not scared, because she thought the soldiers would protect her. She tried to walk into the school, but a guard thrust his rifle at her and blocked her way. She walked a few feet further down to get by the guard but was blocked again by two other soldiers. Some white students were being let in at the same time, she noticed.
A man she had never known, Ben Fine, the education reporter for The New York Times, who was there to write his story on how Little Rock had stayed so calm, came over and put his arm around her and tried to comfort her. “Don’t let them see you cry,” he said. An elderly white woman (the wife of a white professor at a black college) came over and also offered her solace and tried to face the crowd down. The woman, despite the howls of the mob, managed to get Elizabeth on a bus and out of the combat zone.
the white mob, its rage and madness mounting as it closed in, the lone young black girl who seemed to be bearing herself with amazing calm and dignity—was John Chancellor, a young reporter with NBC. He had watched Elizabeth Eckford’s perilous journey with growing fear: one child, alone, entrapped by this mob. He was not sure she was going to make it out alive. He had wanted a story, a good story, but this was something beyond a good story, a potential tragedy so terrible that he had hoped it wasn’t really happening.
He became in the process something of a film nut, and he came to understand, as few others of his generation did, the journalistic power of images.
“Okay,” he said, “you can do what you want with me, but the whole world is going to hear about it and see it.” The men stopped, he later speculated, because they had mistaken his tape recorder for a camera. It had been, he decided, like holding up a talisman to some primitive tribal chief, but it worked. With that, he walked to the car and drove away.
stories, then television correspondents, armed as they were with cameras and crews, were something more: They were not merely witnesses, but something more, a part of the story.
Little Rock became the prime example of that, the first all-out confrontation between the force of the law and the force of the mob, played out with television cameras whirring away in black and white for a nation that was by now largely wired.
What was happening now in the country was politically potent: The legal power of the United States Supreme Court had now been cast in moral terms for the American conscience, and that was driven as much as anything else by the footage from the networks from Little Rock. The President, uneasy with the course of events, had failed to give any kind of moral leadership, and he had deliberately refused to define the issue in moral terms; now, almost unconsciously, the media was doing it instead, for the ugliness and the cruelty of it all, the white mob encouraged by a local governor tormenting
...more
“Can you believe this?” Chancellor had said. “This means that men are really going to go to the moon.” “Yes,” said Ashmore. “And here we are in Little Rock fighting the Civil War again.” It seemed to symbolize the time warp they were in. At the beginning of the story, Chancellor
Chancellor now became their first star in the field. Every night NBC led with his story, in part, Chancellor suspected, because Reuven Frank understood what was happening—not only on the streets of Little Rock, but in the American psyche. It was perhaps the first time a television reporter rather than a print reporter had put his signature on so critical a running story. Chancellor not only worked hard but, to his credit, he never thought himself a star. An anchorman, he liked to say years later, was someone who ran the last leg of a relay race; and some fifteen years later, when he did in
...more
He would gather information and then call Chancellor anonymously from a pay phone just outside the school. The first of his calls took place at the very beginning of the crisis. Chancellor did not have time to check out the information before he filed that day, but late that night, upon his return from Oklahoma City, he found the information to be accurate.
(Some thirty years later, at a conference at Fayetteville where panelists looked at the events of Little Rock in retrospect, Faubus began to sanitize his version of what had happened. His view by then, created to tidy up his place in history, was that through his actions he had only been trying to push President Eisenhower to act. Some one thousand people, almost all of them pro-integration, were attending the symposium, and one morning just before Faubus spoke, he and his old antagonist Ashmore had breakfast together. Faubus gave his version of what he was going to say, and Ashmore wished him
...more
Ike was very much in conflict within himself over whether integration was right or wrong; his essential sympathies were with neither the nine children nor the mob in the street but primarily with his new and extremely wealthy and conservative Southern golfing and hunting friends, those old-fashioned Southern traditionalists who found integration objectionable.
That first morning, an Army officer came to Daisy Bates’s house, where the children had gathered, and saluted her. “Mrs. Bates,” he said. “We’re ready for the children. We will return them to your home at three-thirty.” It was, said Minniejean Brown, one of the nine, an exhilarating moment. “For the first time in my life I felt like an American citizen,” she later told Mrs. Bates. For the moment, the law of the nation had been upheld against the will of the mob and the whims of a segregationist politician.
