Springtime for Nixon
KITMAN 22, MARVIN
On Television SPRINGTIME FOR NIXON by marvin kitman The highlight of the spring TV season was what I have dubbed "The Richard Nixon Show," a CBS miniseries of sorts that threatened to run as long...
...In television, nobody remembers the specifics of anything that happened more than 24 hours ago anyway...
...I loved the way Variety compared this speech to comments made by Nixon's second in vice, Spiro Agnew...
...When you open the book nowadays, the money falls out...
...As the relentless moral mayven and emeritus-for-life of CBS News, as champion of the investigation into its controversial Westmoreland documentary, Anatomy of Deception, he should immediately set up an inquiry into the buying of the Nixon video tapes—even if he was involved in their purchase himself and there was something more here than met his eye...
...For example, it is easy to seethewords "file footage" at the bottom of the screen and think, "Hey, this must be authoritative, official...
...Sauter charged the newspaper critics of the Nixon deal with having a "double standard...
...I wouldn't have been surprised to see him early some morning on Captain Kangaroo, offering a special kiddy version of his role in Watergate...
...When was the last time you heard that word on TV, and on a Sunday...
...Van Sauter is the most famous news boss since Roone Ar-ledge, and he gets away with things in the press that they would tar and feather Arledge for...
...It didn't help, either, that on 60 Minutes regular correspondent Morely Safer did the lead-ins and segues to the commercials...
...On Television SPRINGTIME FOR NIXON by marvin kitman The highlight of the spring TV season was what I have dubbed "The Richard Nixon Show," a CBS miniseries of sorts that threatened to run as long as the Oscars...
...As all the critics noted, the President was less guarded than in his past TV performances...
...Still, if ever there was a case of viewers requiring expert objective help it was while listening to President Nixon, who isn't called "Tricky Dicky" for nothing...
...Heck, he could even claim he blew up the Maine in Havana Harbor and get William Randolph Hearst off the hook posthumously...
...But the Nixon tapes may yet be his Watergate...
...What for...
...The "I'm No Crook" press conference is still embroidered on the crewel work of my mind...
...Van Gordon Sauter knows that, and he knows how confused the American people have become about journalistic rigor thanks largely to TV...
...His picture should be put on U.S...
...Actually, "True Confessions," another title I thought of for the new Nixon tapes, ran a total of 90 minutes on three programs from April 7-15...
...I tell you, the fellow is a financial genius...
...After a mere 12 jobs in 14 years, Sauter is on his way to becoming the next president of CBS entire...
...Pictures lie, too...
...Each time I saw him owning up for all that money it seemed like the great American success story...
...I myself have been remiss in not chastising newspaper coverage of television more often in these essays...
...The reports on Van Sauter's LA blast, for instance, neglected to mention his own many crimes against journalism, such as rerunning the news on Nightwatch, making CBS Reports vanish into thin air, and killing Captain Kangaroo as an 8:00 a.m...
...to 8:30 a.m...
...The real difference is a new lack of pretense to j ournalism...
...The press couldn't criticize CBS News' decision fairly, he argued, without criticizing itself as well (newspapers run memoirs like Nixon's all the time, don't they...
...The interviews were really excerpts by CBS News from a 38-hour chat, for which the ex-President had been paid $500,000 as a minimum...
...The famous speech I am referring to was delivered last March at the Los Angeles Academy of TV Arts and Sciences...
...Replacing George Washington might be inappropriate, though...
...Frampton opposed the decision not to press for an indictment after Watergate, and in a prophetic memorandum he wrote:" I wonder if 10 years from now history will endorse the notion that Nixon has suffered enough...
...we were too chintzy or too slow or too poor to get out there ourselves and do the story...
...The man is positively Nixonesque...
...The only thing that has changed is the guy doing the interviewing...
...He's the new bleeping sound...
...I'm not counting his many TV appearances while he was President to assure the people he was telling the truth then...
...In fact, the designation means, "This is old film...
...Much has been made of the financial crunch at CBS News lately...
...See the multipage interviews with him in New York magazine or Newsweek...
...Here was a model for every American boy growing up to be President:" Don't tell the whole truth and nothing but...
...Next season he could admit to having slipped the Jimmy Carter briefing books to Ronald Reagan in 1980...
...Of everything that has been said about the historic TV event itself, the thoughts I will remember most came from the former president of CBS News, Van Gordon Sauter...
...First of all, most people don't understand how the medium works: They believe everything they see on the tube, the way they used to believe everything in print...
...He has made a career of leaving buildings just as they burst into flame, observers note, citing how he flew away from CBS Sports and from managing the Los Angeles affiliate while the fire was licking at his wings...
...From the titular head of CBS News, it is an odd argument that there is no difference between printed excerpts from a memoir and the Nixon video tapes, a 38-hour package staged for profit by the President and his business partner, Gannon...
...and who knows where next when...
...For Sauter's view did have the kind of logic to it that I hadn't heard since Agnew's lectures on the press...
...Nixon publishing his memoirs (and thereby adding several millions of dollars to his net worth) should remind us that unlike his aides who were convicted of crimes, Mr...
...The Nixon videos, with his associate Frank Gannon playing the interviewer, were fascinating of course...
...Whenever some news scandal rocked CBS News during his regime he made speeches proclaiming that standards have to be maintained, not smudged...
...Now, it's different," they insist...
...Every time I looked up there was our excommunicated President confessing again...
...The tapes, at the very least, broke new ground for the station...
...One night he was being candid on 60 Minutes, the next night on American Parade...
...currency...
...Previous CBS News executives would not touch Nixon with a 10-foot CBS-New York Times poll...
...The dumbo on this occasion was CBS News, a particularly amazing fact...
...The TV reporter is the public's representative in a dialogue...
...Is that what Ed Murrow and Fred Friendly would have said...
...Why, $500,000 is the Nightwatch budget for a whole year...
...Not that this often happens even on the legitimate TV news programs...
...He can say it and everything will be all right...
...Imagine his getting paid so well to tell the truth —after he had presumably done exactly that at least once before with David Frost...
...breakfast institution for American children (it is being moved again from 7:00 a.m...
...One tends to be thrown off by little things on news shows...
...Yet we TV viewers assume that the person interviewing President Nixon is a reporter, a member of the CBS News staff...
...The man has committed monumental crimes, yet they humanized him...
...Frank Gannon's distinguished career as an apologist makes David Frost seem like Walter Lippmann...
...The$100,000 bill would be more Nixon's speed...
...At the moment he's serving as executive vice honcho of the CBS Broadcast Group, whose duties include overseeing CBS News—and he runs the news division as a fiefdom, its current president, Ed Joyce, being his faithful Indian servant and hat carrier...
...The powerful men around him have also lost their jobs and been disgraced, but many of them will have lost their liberty and livelihood...
...When David Frost, in his days as a journalist, tried to peddle The Nixon-Frost Interviews to CBS News in 1977, it sniffed and denounced "checkbook journalism...
...I would suggest further that the inquiry be conducted by George Crile, CBS News' leading investigative reporter...
...By editing the tapes, CBS News made Nixon look good...
...Ask a mildly challenging question today and you get a reputation for being a troublemaker, as Roger Mudd can testify...
...Certainly you need somebody with impeccable qualifications to ask tough follow-up questions...
...If a TV drama or movie script needs a four-letter word, the director can now call in the President...
...Sauter's seduction of the print media is one of the great unreported stories of our time, too...
...He is supposed to seek out the answers to questions the subject would rather not be asked...
...It was the single thing he said during the miniseries that stuck in my mind...
...You would be demoralized by what is going on while you sleep...
...But it certainly showed that Nixon has a head for business...
...And that is exactly what has been happening...
...The President's vocabulary represented a significant breakthrough for mature language on the tube...
...Nixon, on the other hand, will continue to be supported in lavish style with a pension and subsidies at the taxpayer's expense until his death...
...Nixon will have the last say about his own role in Watergate if he is not prosecuted...
...They are so poor that they are rerunning the news— the first two hours of Nightwatch are also the second half of the early-morning (2-6 a.m...
...The moral principles involved are clearly set forth in CBS' old "blue book," as they call their legendary compendium of rules and manners...
...In one of the excerpts on 60 Minutes he relaxed to the point of saying "shit...
...He has been on salary but not doing much since his suspension because of Westmoreland—that is, except taking the full blame for the last maj or achievement in ethics and high standards at CBS News under Sauter's presidency...
...As I watched somewhat incredulously, I couldn't help thinking of George Frampton, a lawyer who worked with Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski...
...Or to the Teapot Dome Scandal in the Harding Administration...
...Indeed, at the going rates Nixon would be wise to invent new sins for himself...
...That's what journalism is about, print or TV...
...Let me explain briefly...
...If you sell it bit by bit, you can keep selling...
...Curiously, almost everybody else associated with that famous documentary has been promoted, starting with Van Sauter...
...The prospect of Mr...
...Yet Van Gordon Sauter did so with equanimity...
...Who said crime doesn't pay...
...The network's willingness to shell out half a million to a has-been who is also a proven crook was very strange, especially since the conversations lacked any news peg...
...There's a sucker born every minute, as Barnum explained...
...Whatever happened to virtue being its own reward...
...show...
...It's file footage...
...Too bad it wasn't Frampton who became head of CBS News and was in a position to decide about buying Richard Nixon in concert...
Vol. 67 • May 1984 • No. 69
