The Nation's Pulse/The Best TV Documentary of 1988
Teachout, Terry
THE NATION'S PULSE THE BEST TV DOCUMENTARY OF 1988 T he authors of the endless paeans 1 to John E Kennedy appearing in the elite media last November were hampered considerably by the fact that the...
...As word of the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald is broadcast, you suddenly and forcibly realize that the conspiracy theories with which you grew up are absurd, that the assassin was captured within two hours of the shooting and that nobody in his right mind doubted at the time that he was the assassin...
...Ben and Jerry donated ice cream...
...Various WashingHow many undeserved radar tickets were issued last year...
...Even if only one percent of the tickets issued last year were wrong, that's one hundred thousand undeserved tickets...
...No after-the-fact commentary...
...Chet Huntley, visibly stunned, quickly vanishes from the flash studio to pull himself together and prepare for the evening wrap-up...
...Department 937829 One Microwave Plaza Cincinnati, Ohio 45249 Please send me your free report TRAFFIC RADAR: How it works, and why it gets wrong readings...
...Cheddi Jagan said that responsibility for sexual harassment in the workplace in Guyana was due to anticommunism...
...The operator has to decide...
...They came to Harvard for a three-day conference on "Anticommunism and the U.S.: History and Consequences" sponsored by the Institute for Media Analysis...
...Blanche Wiesen Cook explained, "Everything fine and creative in American thought has been splattered and smeared" by anticommunism...
...Some experts say up to thirty percent of them were incorrect...
...PBS even went so far as to broadcast a program consisting entirely of footage from Kennedy's press conferences, those shameless exercises in media manipulation that made Ronald Reagan's infinitely less polished attempts at schmoozing the press look like outtakes from "The Gong Show...
...Over ten million tickets were issued last year...
...Don Feder, in the Boston Herald, likened the happening to "cockroaches gathering to protest DDT...
...Here's why You may find this hard to believe, but traffic radar doesn't tell the operator which vehicle he is clocking...
...How many ways is anticommunism bad...
...Arts & Entertainment deserves high praise for having chosen to ignore the Kennedy myth and show instead the poor but honest face of broadcast news before the fall...
...many seemed to have just crept out of the woodwork...
...a) 1,012,317 b) 649,119 c) 0 d) No one knows Unfortunately, the answer is d) No one knows...
...But it was also, in a strange way, innocent...
...As a result, it took nearly an hour for David Brinkley to scuttle local programming in Washington, D.C...
...She noted "how smarmy we seem before the world...
...We first hear from MacNeil when he manages to commandeer a telephone at Parkland Memorial Hospital and call New York...
...Frank McGee, one of the network's top correspondents during the sixties...
...The group is one of a growing number of radical left beehives that are trying to reshape the universe by saying old things in new ways...
...No tacky commercials...
...The institute "saw the evolution of anticommunism as a pathology which had become the civic religion of the U.S...
...It might be the closest car, it might be the fastest car, it might be the biggest car...
...Just the thing itself, endless and numbing and, in the end, spellbinding...
...The conditions under which TV news operated in 1963 were unbelievably primitive...
...It certainly paid generous tribute to his telegenic charm on the anniversary of his death...
...The funeral ceremonies, the Kennedy Administration's final (and, of course, fitting) triumph of show over substance, dominated most of the broadcasts devoted to the assassination...
...Fortunately, cable TV provided one exception to the flood tide of oleaginous banality: Arts & Entertainment's "JFK Assassination: As It Happened," the best of the Kennedy tributes and, for my money, the best TV documentary of 1988...
...and Bill Ryan, an NBC radio reporter who happened to be in the studio when the bulletins came in...
...The conference was dedicated to Sean McBride, "a giant of a man .. . the only person ever to be awarded both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Lenin Peace Prize," and a onetime chief of staff of the IRA...
...It figures...
...Most of the Kennedy TV specials were understandably content-free, consisting chiefly of film clips of the young hero accompanied by canned music and fruity voiceovers...
...it is instead a smokescreen for "reaction...
...The first half-hour evening news programs on CBS and NBC had been broadcast only a few weeks before...
...Chet Huntley's grim features could have been carved out of a tree stump, and Bill Ryan, the radio man, looks like he just drove up from Grover's Corners for a day in the big city...
...Financial supporters included Sallie Bingham and Abby Rockefeller...
...Lyndon Johnson marches before the waiting cameras, reads a terse statement and is whisked away into a helicopter...
...In a message to participants, the Institute for Media Analysis traced the genesis of the Harvard gathering to a "seminal paper" entitled "The Black Hole of Anticommunism" by Joel Kovel, an IMA board member and Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies at Bard College...
...The first thing you see is three men sitting at a plain wooden table in NBC's cheaply decorated "flash" studio: Chet Huntley, who co-anchored "The Huntley-Brinkley Report," the nation's most popular network newscast in 1963...
...Now we've released a report that explains radar and radar errors, in plain language...
...Opposition to Communism is unrelated to Communism...
...44 T FK Assassination: As It Hap-J pened" is a rare opportunity to see what TV news looked like in its awkward age...
...Try and imagine that happening today...
...The conventional wisdom about the assassination of John F. Kennedy was that it was the making of TV news...
...Despite its length, it leaves you eager for more...
...None of the on-screen faces are especially pretty...
...The paranoiacs would come crawling out of the woodwork on Sunday, when Jack Ruby shot Oswald before a live TV audience...
...A lot of hot air, in other words...
...That's all...
...Action Information Bulletin, which specializes in exposing American intelligence agents abroad, have turned their creative efforts to finding new ways to give peace a chance...
...Perhaps TV learned the uses and abuses of glamour from Kennedy himself...
...The conference (thirty-eight panels and plenaries) thoroughly covered the dire consequences of anticommunism: it deflowers us, poisons our bodily fluids, kills the poor, makes us fight wars against innocent people, demolishes time, spreads heterosexuality, destroys paid maternity leaves, fosters antilesbianism, eradicates abortion rights—well, it just poisons and ruins everything...
...T ike all good dramas, "As It Happened" begins in medias res, about forty-five seconds after NBC broke into its local programming in New York at 1:45 p.m...
...Jesse Jackson's treasured adviser on foreign policy, Jack O'Dell: "Anticommunism is the ideology of hatred that has been a spin-off of the big lie about the Soviet Union...
...The way broadcast news usually revisits a great historical event was Terry Teachout is a member of the editorial board of the New York Daily News...
...A man-in-the-street interview is conducted outside Rockefeller Center...
...One of the interviewees is black, an unexpected sight in 1963...
...Jacqueline Kennedy, her stockings caked with blood, walks behind it...
...To be sure, NBC's coverage of the assassination was crude—at times astonishingly so...
...He cited a report that said that "as regards sexual gratification, public officeholders show particular favor to those who submit 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989...
...The age of minicams and satellites was a decade away...
...In the wake of that long weekend, the flash studios were scrapped and the bureaus were expanded and the networks began to take themselves seriously as purveyors of news...
...There were sponsors like Bella Abzug, Gore Vidal, Bernie Lown, and William Styron...
...No microphones are shoved into the unwilling faces of victims...
...One recalls the televised chaos that enveloped the shooting of Ronald Reagan and marvels at this sober spectacle...
...and plug into the network...
...Off camera, the situation in New York was, as Ryan later told viewers, one of "controlled panic...
...Nothing else...
...No one says anything particularly fatuous or overbearing...
...on November 22, meaning that no programs were going out to NBC's local affiliates around the country...
...This is very important...
...Small wonder...
...The People's Daily World liked it...
...No frame-by-frame rehashing of the Zapruder film...
...Kovel: "Anticommunism is always cynical manipulation...
...Harvey Klehr is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Politics at Emory University and the author, most recently, of Far Left of Center: The American Radical Left Today (Transaction Books...
...When MacNeil first abandoned the motorcade and ran into the Texas School Book Depository, Lee Harvey Oswald obligingly steered him to the nearest telephone...
...The interviewees unanimously blame the assassination on right-wing cranks...
...CBS's neat and tidy retrospective, with Dan Rather on hand to grease the skids and make the rough places plain, seemed hopelessly sterile by comparison...
...THE NATION'S PULSE THE BEST TV DOCUMENTARY OF 1988 T he authors of the endless paeans 1 to John E Kennedy appearing in the elite media last November were hampered considerably by the fact that the object of their affections is now thought by reputable historians to have spent most of his waking hours screwing obliging women and forging his name to the collected works of Ted Sorensen...
...Its co-founders, William Schaap and Ellen Ray, fresh from the Covert David Evanier is writing a novel about American Communism...
...The control room in New York is unable to put his voice on the air, and Frank McGee, after fiddling helplessly with a mysterious-looking black box, is forced to repeat MacNeil's end of the conversation, sentence by sentence, for the benefit of the folks at home...
...Just call us toll-free or mail the coupon...
...Meanwhile, Oswald's Marxist past and his membership in a group called "Fair Play for Cuba" are reported, and you breathe, together with Bill Ryan and Frank McGee and the rest of the country, a sigh of relief: Thank God he was a Commie...
...Silent film from Dallas is thrown on the air unscreened, still wet from the developing process...
...To top it all off, the entire NBC network was "down" at 1:30 p.m...
...The mood was idiotically happy...
...Kennedy's one lasting accomplishment, after all, was to have taught a generation of hungry politicians that it is better to look good than to be good...
...0 AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS ANTICOMMUNISM AND MENTAL HEALTH by David Evanier and Harvey Klehr T we've hundred people came to I Boston just days after the November election to see and hear Gus Hall, Angela Davis, Cheddi Jagan, Alexander Cockburn, Philip Agee, Jack O'Dell, and Julian Bond expunge a terrible thing...
...We can deal with that...
...At one panel someone from the floor said that any criticism of the Soviet Union or Marxism was "pimping for the bourgeoisie...
...On camera, Huntley, McGee, and Ryan, trying with mixed success to remain calm, tell the viewers everything they know, which consists of a steady stream of bulletins ripped directly from the AP and UPI wires...
...The CBS special was followed by a house ad for "Murder, She Wrote...
...The bronze coffin bearing Kennedy's corpse is manhandled into a waiting hearse...
...demonstrated to perfection by CBS's two-hour compilation of carefully edited highlights of that network's coverage of the assassination and its aftermath...
...As It Happened," by contrast, consisted solely of an unedited videotape of the first six hours of NBC's live coverage on November 22, 1963...
...It was "unique, remarkable and welcome...
...And since radar operators are human, they don't always guess right...
...Most on-thescene coverage was filmed rather than videotaped, which meant that it had to be developed before it could be shown on the air...
...It is altogether appropriate that this uniquely tawdry achievement should have been so extensively celebrated by TV on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Kennedy's assassination...
...And it's yours free...
...Though by Terry Teachout NBC's Robert MacNeil had been riding in the Kennedy motorcade, he was unaccompanied by a cameraman...
...Even Pete Hamill, whose will to believe was long unrivaled among liberal journalists, admitted in his hard-breathing tribute to "JFK: The Real Thing" that the ultimate legacy of his boyhood idol consisted of "some of the greatest political speeches I've ever heard...
...Free report Our engineers had to know every detail about traffic radar before they could design Escort and Passport, the most respected names in radar detection...
...There are no live pictures from the scene of the shooting...
...In one clip, we see a young Texan standing outside Parkland Memorial Hospital holding a sign that reads "Yankee, Go Home...
...At 6:05 p.m., Air Force One arrives at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, and NBC is finally able to do the thing it does best: show live pictures...
...Or it might not...
...Irving R. Levine, NBC's man in Rome, checks in with a fuzzy-sounding transatlantic telephone call...
...At the end of the broadcast, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley materialize in their respective studios, their voices firmly under control, ready at last to put theirstamp on the terrible events of the day...
...Something awful has happened, and everyone wants to be as dignified about it as possible...
...Since Ryan was the only other person in sight who knew which end of a microphone to talk into, he was hastily pressed into service...
...But this tinny note of disillusion was omitted from the various television specials devoted to the life and death of John Kennedy...
...The IMA spells anti-Communism without a hyphen...
...You know the rest...
...Live "stand-uppers" were invariably shot fromfixed, prearranged points...
...At length, MacNeil passes along the official announcement of Kennedy's death...
...Blanche Wiesen Cook, a historian, announced that "there are more of us than there are of them...
...Alger Hiss Professor Kovel traced the pathology back to unique American paranoid tendencies as embodied in Melville's Moby Dick...
...with word of the shooting in Dallas...
...Name Address City State, bp CINCINNATI MICROWAVE) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 27 ton correspondents are hustled in front of the camera and told to say something...
...Let us count the ways...
...Indeed, almost an hour passes before there are any live pictures from anywhere other than TV studios in New York and Dallas...
...He is the editor of Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers, 1931-1959, forthcoming from Regnery Gateway...
...Dwight Eisenhower, in New York to give a speech, offers a few scrambled, calming platitudes...
...The problem was that "they" were keeping the truth from the American people...
...Nobody knows where it comes from, although some have hunches...
...They came from Sewanee, Tennessee, and Ukiah, California...
...The radar unit displays one number...
Vol. 22 • February 1989 • No. 2
