He Was There

I’d started newspapering while I was still in college at the University of Texas, and actually I had worked as a copy boy in Houston during my high school years. So I had been in news full-time since 1936, and parttime before that.

Well, there was a magazine called American Boy , which was in competition with the Boy Scouts’ magazine, Boy’s Life . I bought both of them every month. And American Boy ran a series of novelettes that were intended as sort of career-guidance material. They took a career and glamorized it quite considerably. The only two careers that interested me at all were journalism and mining engineering. I thought I might be a mining engineer until I flunked physics. I couldn’t figure out how a pulley worked. I still don’t know why a pulley works. And I decided that if you don’t know how a pulley works, you better not go down a mine. So I took up journalism. I was terribly lucky: I was in a high school that, rare in that period, had a journalism course. An editor from one of the newspapers had convinced the Houston public school system that he should teach a course in the five high schools there, and he was a brilliant teacher, I thought. Fred Birney was his name, and he captured my imagination immediately. He was also the sponsor for the school paper; he saw that it got put out on a regular basis and was done well. He had a great devotion to accuracy and to the truth. I think he was the inspiration for my career.

I was very lucky in that regard too. I covered the Battle of the Atlantic when it was still a major story, although it was very hard to tell anything about it, the secrecy was so great. Then I covered the air war from England, when that was the major story from Europe.

I did the first raid in which they permitted correspondents over Germany, along with Andy Rooney and Homer Bigart and a couple of others. I didn’t land on D-day—I was overhead in a bomber—but I came in on D plus four. And then I was recalled to England to prepare for an airborne operation that was going to be the greatest assignment of the war. We were to drop in Rambouillet Forest and take Paris. But, unfortunately, politics got in the way. De Gaulle insisted that the French forces go into Paris first. He took a terrible chance. It’s possible Paris could have been lost over that. The Germans had orders, as we know, to burn Paris, and they were preparing to do it when we finally got there. But we had held off for a couple of days because de Gaulle insisted that we wait for Leclerc’s forces to come in and lead the parade down the Champs-Elysées. So we didn’t drop then, but we kept getting set up for other airborne operations, and finally, in September, we were called up for what turned out to be Market Garden in the Netherlands. I stayed on the Continent and covered the Battle of the Bulge and then after the war set up the United Press bureaus in the Low Countries and covered the Nuremberg trial. And then to Moscow for two years.

Just to do a television show. Nobody in the Washington bureau had any experience doing that.

No, no. Never seen a television camera before. [Laughs.]

There really wasn’t much. It had started in 1948 and this was only 1950. It was a studio presentation done with whatever newsreel they could purchase. We had slides with pictures and some film and some voice on film. But it was a very, very primitive performance compared with what we have today.

Well, first of all, we did the news. That was different from what developed later. I took the news of the day, and with a director I worked with all day, I would say, “What can you do to illustrate this?” The words came first, illustration came second—it was really a kind of pictorial radio news. But it was informative because we were concentrating on the story and not on the pictures. We were following the old news standards with the competitive eagerness that came from United Press, which helped a lot too.

Well, television had been there in ’48, but they didn’t have anywhere to send their pictures. There weren’t many stations linked. So in effect ’52 was the first one.

Yes, it sure did. Broadcast news followed an almost inevitable course. Every step of the way could have been predicted, except perhaps the miniaturization of equipment, and then the satellite and the tape. Of course, when I started everything was on film. It had to be developed, printed, and so forth. With tape we skipped all those steps, and that gave it an immediacy that we hadn’t achieved before. When we found that we could transmit by microwave relay, and then later by satellite, that also brought a facility to the medium that most of us hadn’t expected. So for a long time words dominated the medium, and while that perhaps was unsatisfactory for a visual medium, it did provide greater concentration on the stories themselves, rather than on the presentation of the stories.

Presentation became dominant as the capabilities increased, to the degree that in a lot of cases I felt the importance of the stories was lost. We went for the stories that could be illustrated and left alone the ones that required careful examination through text. This distorted the whole value of television news, to my mind. And distorts it to this day. I’m afraid—and I said this early on—that those who expected to be fully informed by television expected what could not be, and the fact that television was being accepted as the principal news source by a greater and greater percentage of our population was creating considerable difficulties for the democracy. An uninformed democracy is dangerous. Thomas Jefferson told us that the country that expects to be ignorant and free expects what never can and never will be. We are perpetuating ignorance by making television news so easily assimilated that people do not go to print any longer. This is dangerous.

Yes, to a degree. I went into the trip planning probably on doing an editorial when I came back, but not necessarily knowing what we were going to say. I had thought from the beginning that our involvement was proper. I thought giving military advice to the South Vietnamese, in an attempt to establish a democracy there, was proper. As it became our war, I got more and more concerned about it. The pacification of the villages—what the devil?—if they’re supposedly fertile for democracy, then why do we need to pacify them? And we kept building these forces because the Vietnamese army couldn’t get itself organized adequately. All of this began to prey on me as it did on a lot of other Americans, of course. But I’d been out there, and I had been pretty well convinced by the military that we were winning this battle. And now, suddenly, after looking at the light at the end of the tunnel, to have this success of the Tet offensive. I talked to Richard Salant, the president of CBS News, about it, and I said, “You know, this country is confused, we’re all confused. How about my going out, having a look, and doing a first-person story? Just what does it look like to somebody who’s shared this growing disillusionment over these years? What does it look like on the ground?” And that’s what we did. And that led to the report I did.

No, not really. I thought it would have an immediate shock value. I was quite certain of that because we had never done anything like it before. I’d always avoided commentary. So I knew there would be some reaction. But I didn’t expect high-level reaction. Nothing else had tilted Lyndon Johnson. And I’m not sure these reports did tilt him in any way. I think they probably were just one more straw on a great bale of twigs that he was carrying on his back at that moment.

Well, I think Johnson was getting pretty upset about the very same things that were bothering the American people. I think he had become disillusioned with the military and what they’d been telling him about the nature of the war. He saw his popularity slipping, and he had to face the possibility of running and being defeated. I think all of it just gave him the idea that he’d better get out while he could.

Oh, yes, my enthusiasm for what we did then remains as strong as ever. I think it was just an incredible achievement of American technology and adventure and a nation’s dedication to what appeared to be an impossible task. To do all of that in a decade is an exceptional performance, and the astronauts themselves were an exceptional body of men.

It does, and there are good reasons. We proved we could do it—we proved it dramatically. We set the pattern for man escaping his earthly environment, and we know we can repeat that and will, if we’re willing to spend the money. What NASA needs today is to define an objective that can justify the great expense of manned flight. Further exploration of inner space can pay off in technical developments such as the Tokyo Express that Reagan held out as a promise. That plan disappeared almost immediately from the drawing boards, but the ballistic rocket plane providing that thirty-minute trip to Tokyo, that sort of progress, will come someday as a result of the exploratory sciences. There are many things to be done out there. I do have some doubt about whether the orbiting city is worth the candle at the moment. There’s a price to be paid for all of this, of course, and it’s terribly expensive. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of science to be done with unmanned vehicles. We can find out a lot about Mars without risking lives and without the terrible extra expense of building the proficiency into the machine that can protect the people aboard. So I’m inclined to bend toward unmanned exploration.

On the other hand, I went to Space City in Moscow last summer and got caught up with the space people again. I don’t know—there is such a challenge for man to do this, there’s such a kind of moral imperative for man to do what he can do. Get out there and do it. There’s so much pride in the accomplishment of that kind of exploration that I wonder if maybe it’s not worth it, after all.

I was just very lucky. It originally was a radio program called “CBS Is There.” They decided to make it into television, so they asked me if I wanted to participate, and of course I did, very much so. I had the opportunity to work with some superb people. Charles Russell, the producer, and Sidney Lumet, the director, and John Frankenheimer, who was a young assistant director at the time; our floor manager for some of the programs was YuI Brynner. And the players that we had! It was all live, out of New York, at first, and it was on a Sunday evening, when the theaters were dark. So here was an opportunity for a lot of stage people to try television without giving up their stage careers. We worked around their schedules. We blocked on Saturday morning, before their matinées, rehearsed all day Sunday, then did the show live at six-thirty. So we had a chance to work with a young actor who was coming up very fast, Paul Newman. And his wife, Joanne Woodward. And Kim Stanley, and Shepperd Strudwick, and E. G. Marshall. We called them Sidney Lumet’s stock company. Each of them would appear every three or four or five weeks, in something. One of Newman’s first roles for us was as Nathan Hale.

Yes, I did. It had been one of my favorite subjects in school, despite the poor teaching of it, which still goes on today, I regret.

I’m not happy with the way history has ever been taught, in any class I ever went to. I mean history is the drama, for heaven’s sake, of human existence. And history is the story of people, and how they coped, how they met problems, and of the competition between them, the rivalries between them. With all the emotions—jealously, hate, love. And it’s never taught this way. It’s taught in this dull rote—dates and places. People never come alive. All these people lived dramatic lives. Every history lesson, every hour in history class, ought to be a terribly exciting lecture on the lives and loves of these people. And their personalities. Because the personalities of these leaders, and of those who sought to be, is what affected history. But we don’t learn it that way, and as a consequence history is a course that most people hate in school. It’s just a shame.