I was coach or player on some two hundred documentaries. I faced polite competition within CBS News, particularly from the newsmen who reported on a daily or weekly basis. They called themselves “hard news” and because documentaries took more time, the phallic overtone was obvious. In those early days, there was a common problem for Read More
December 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, I was on Langdon Street in Madison Wisconsin. April 12, 1944, the day Franklin Roosevelt died, I was on a hillside in Germany. The day man first landed on the moon, twenty-five years later, was expected to be a similar nation-binding day. Two months before the Read More
Twenty years after World War II my combat memories no longer throbbed. Twenty years is more than half a generation. Writing about an event twenty years later is neither journalism nor history. I embarrassed myself because I could not rise again to those first emotions. “Every hero becomes a bore at last.” Yet World War Read More
In more modest days CBS News had rules about screen credits. The front credits could not contain anyone’s name, and the back credits could not be longer than thirty seconds. All credits were to be approved by a vice president; and no administrator, including vice presidents, could take any screen credit, ever. It was different Read More
Some eight years after World War II, radio gave way to television. Walter Cronkite became the most noted broadcast correspondent on television succeeding Edward R. Murrow, the most famous radio correspondent. It was not easy for Murrow or any of the radio correspondents on his team. Words now had to work with pictures, and radio Read More
Before portable electronic cameras, before computers, before digital editing—when television was young—we were strung together on the Parthenon by three cameras connected to the control truck by long cables. The first camera established the Parthenon from the front. The third would take close-ups of the royal couple. The second camera was a long shot down Read More
I went to Versailles where the curator suggested Princess Grace of Monaco might do a tour of the Chateau similar to the Tour of the White House. For that permission, he expected CBS to raise funds for the restoration of the castle, and there also might be petites remerciments for those who helped. A Grimaldi Read More
On St. Valentine’s Day 1962, one out of every three Americans saw A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy. The worldwide audience was over one hundred million. She didn’t want to do the broadcast, and neither did I. Her press secretary later told me that Mrs. Kennedy preferred a book rather Read More
A few weeks later the Cold War intervened. Germany was divided between east and west. Berlin had been split into an Allied command and a Soviet zone, and the Germans of the east were flocking the west by the thousands. Berlin itself was isolated, cut off from American ground and rail supplies, except by one Read More
On my way back from Salinas, I stopped in New York and signed a generous contract Tom Ryan had negotiated. Although my job would not start until October, I would be given a full year’s pay. Sig needed me. I rented an apartment from plans in a building then being erected. The rental included a Read More