On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT BY MARVIN KITMAN The other night John Chancellor or David Brinkley mentioned the word "Republican" on the NBC evening news, and suddenly I...
...Not even the playing of "God Bless America" four or five times could stop the horns...
...Roosevelt dropped in to visit Adlai Stevenson...
...Now it is unlikely that my grandchildren will ever witness an organized spontaneous demonstration, and this is only one of the great rituals of American politics fast disappearing from television...
...And they let it go at that...
...I'm an authority only on the former...
...Arizona, the original and unequaled sunshine state (which usually draws boos from California, the other original and unequaled state...
...Yet the roll calls have traditionally provided an occasion for the most creative expression at the conventions...
...I'll just sit there transfixed...
...The rule is that the leader of a delegation is only supposed to say that his state casts so many for this soand-so or that so-and-so...
...The peculiar ringing reaction I've had to a certain word since the convention has prevented me from dropping the matter...
...The outburst was scheduled to last exactly 15 minutes...
...This, I say to myself paraphrasing Eric Sevareid, is what American politics is all about, 200 years into self-government...
...The horn players probably didn't even hear it...
...The night after the Reagan demonstration I had a nightmare...
...The party managements are cutting everything that used to be fun to speed up the pacing on TV...
...Isn't it great," I said...
...If there's a big write-in vote for Mao Tse-tung in November I am going to be very suspicious about the making of the President on television, I don't mind telling you...
...The network reporting teams, normally fiercely competitive in getting to the bottom of any trivia question, apathetically wondered who supplied the horns...
...With only two networks doing the so-called gavel-to-gavel coverage—NBC and CBS—you would think one of them would have the decency to follow the official program...
...Neither do the ears, judging by the way no one listens to the speeches...
...I first began noticing there was something unusual about the horns when my 17-year-old daughter Suzy came home that night and found me sitting mesmerized in front of the set...
...Instead of siding with the joyless TV executives and sitting on the state chairmen in order to tighten up the program, the party machinery should encourage the hiring of new speechwriters to pump honesty and vitality into this ritual...
...A nominating event, when the nation's eyes are on the politicians, is no place to cut out cliches...
...And did the diabolical organization embark on the next step in the experiment last month in Kansas City: to find out what higher, or lower, species might do under similar circumstances...
...Many states," NBC's Edwin Newman has written, "like to point out their distinguishing qualities...
...They looked like zombies, their faces as drained of emotion as Dan Rather's has been since Watergate...
...Still, we can't be sure that what happened on the night of the horns is not a rerun of Richard Condon's old Manchurian Candidate story...
...Considering how boring the conventions are without the theatrics, this is very much like a man cutting his own throat so his children will be halfway to the orphans' picnic...
...I was in the Korean trenches again with the 9th Calvary in 1953...
...I'm too young...
...But I remembered those horror stories the noncoms used to tell us about how dirty the Chinese fought...
...It was almost as if the horns had entranced the reporters...
...Usually when I hear a ringing in my ears, I just answer it and that's that...
...The famous "man who . . ." speeches are going, too, on the grounds that they, and the demonstrations that follow them, arc nothing but cliches...
...Reagan...
...It sounds like locusts," she said, making a face...
...They were on the skimpy side at the Democratic Carter celebration in New York and nothing to shout about at the—excuse me if I pass over the word here—convention at Kemper Arena...
...A convention is a unique controlled environment...
...I knew this for a provable fact, having heard them on an ABC movie starring Gloria Swanson as a bee-lover...
...I may even believe that the Panama Canal is the major issue in the election...
...I realize this sounds paranoiac...
...They can blow bubbles, their secretaries or horns...
...Normally, the demonstrators join in the last few lines of the song, then sit down...
...By the time it had gone on for an hour, I was wild with ecstasy...
...Despite his profound insight, the television producers have made matters even worse by no longer covering the podium properly...
...The horns may blow in November, as I go out to the polls, and suddenly I may start screaming Reagan...
...The Republican convention was out of control...
...Certainly the sound was having an unsettling effect on the Ford people...
...Sit down and watch the drama of American politics with me...
...To me the horns sounded like a swarm of killer bees...
...In addition, every time the head of a state delegation got up to announce a vote in New York or Kansas City you could sense the conventions' temporary chairmen and the networks squirming, their trigger hands on gavels and switches...
...How can we be sure that the television audience was not an uninformed participant in some sort of psychological experiment...
...It was as spontaneous as they come in the electronic age...
...Had I written it, I would have pointed with pride to the opening roll-call declaration of the distinguished head of the New York State delegation, Mayor Abraham Beame, penned by the writer and political scientist Victor Navasky: "The great, virtually bankrupt state of New York, whose great party chairman is currently under indictment, and whose foremost mayor can barely reach the microphone, is proud to cast its...
...The eyes normally have nothing to watch at a convention...
...Perhaps the TV viewer's mind can be manipulated at some subsequent date when the stimulus is repeated...
...When does a suburban kid from New Jersey ever get to hear a locust...
...The parties are driving themselves out of the TV business by taking pundits like James Reston of the New York Times seriously when they say the people want fast-moving, fun-free conventions...
...But no...
...As a demonstration specialist, I can tell you that this year's were lousy...
...I forgot to ask how she knew what locusts sound like...
...This year—nothing...
...The favorite-son speeches, for example, are on the way out...
...As far as I can determine, what I am suffering is a hangover from the Republican convention—the after effects in my head of a sound first heard during the demonstration for Ronald Reagan the night of August 18...
...But 1 was in Europe that summer and missed it, not realizing there wouldn't be any more...
...That was the historic night of the horns, of the only spontaneous demonstration worthy of the description during TV's summer convention season...
...The faithful can do anything they want in spontaneous demonstrations, as far as I am concerned...
...Until, that is, the Right-wing stalwarts started blowing horns for their fearless leader...
...Is it possible that the clinical psych department at a leading university, say, the City University of New York, a hotbed of Republicanism, handed out the horns to conduct one of those weird experiments social scientists love—a kind of nationwide sensory deprivation test...
...Both run away from the roll call of the states as soon as a result is definite...
...It drove the GIs nuts...
...Where did those strange instruments come from...
...This time I'm really worried...
...Later, I realized the thousand or so horns had actually made a Chinese sound...
...The Chinese, knowing their enemy was afraid of the dark, would put on their sneakers and blow their crazy horns...
...On Television THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT BY MARVIN KITMAN The other night John Chancellor or David Brinkley mentioned the word "Republican" on the NBC evening news, and suddenly I started hearing doorbells...
...When it got dark the American GIs would do the normal thing: climb into their sleeping bags...
...Not that this happened in real life...
...They say one took place in 1960, when Mrs...
...At its best, TV convention coverage is theater—a theater of redundancy...
...As Reuven Frank, the NBC News executive who invented most of what we call network convention coverage, explained: "If there are no cliches, what have you got in politics...
...Walter or John or David reported that somebody was handing them out while the delegates were waiting to get through the security checks...
...Come to think of it, I don't recall ever seeing any of the really disorganized eruptions...
...Could the mad psychology department have discovered that mice, when their ears are overloaded with the din from Chinese horns, vote negatively...
...That is why I was so thrilled by the organized spontaneous demonstration for Ronald Reagan the night his name was finally placed in nomination...
...In these circumstances, unpleasant overstimulation of the ears causes trauma, as you could readily see by looking at the Ford people...
...A At any rate, the massed Reagan instruments certainly did not produce a positive American sound, like the wholesome air horns you usually hear at Madison Square Garden and other sports palaces...
...There are two kinds of spontaneous demonstrations at nominating conventions these days...
...Virginia, mother of Presidents...
...They can drop balloons from the galleries, or water bags or even their pants...
...The latter is also known as the unauthorized or genuine demonstration...
...the beloved island of Hawaii, where East meets West in the spirit of Aloha...
...I put my hands over my ears, but the ringing continued...
...Cliches all...
...The Army trained me to fight Communism by covering basketball games, and I did that to the best of my ability at Fort Dix, New Jersey, for two years of the Korean War...
...the organized spontaneous variety and the disorganized kind...
Vol. 59 • September 1976 • No. 18
