On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television When Conventions Mattered By Reuven Frank A few things in life are certain. One is that when the broadcast networks announce how many fewer hours they will devote to the...
...On Wednesday of convention week, the Credentials Committee report reached the floor...
...On Thursday, July 24, the gavel sounded shortly after noon...
...The 1952 civil rights plank was not as divisive, but it made for loud, mean, riveting television...
...Lodge said he was sure the committee rulings would be overturned because ofwhatthepublic—and presumably the delegates—had seen on television...
...The chair announced the roll call of the states to put forth names in nomination...
...Doyle told me later that he noticed the boss of the Chicago Democratic machine, "Colonel" Jacob Arvey, in the crowd...
...Seven Southern states sent double delegations: a set of Eisenhower supporters and another committed to the candidacy of Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft, son of the 27th President...
...Both were held in Chicago, just a week apart, and the nominees who emerged were General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Illinois Governor Adlai E. Stevenson...
...And that, it would seem, was the beginning of the end...
...and the "voice from the sewers" urging Franklin D. Roosevelt to a third term came at a time when the networks covered the conventions sporadically and, as they do now, arbitrarily...
...Periodically the cameras peered outside at the crowd waiting with their tickets for the evening session that was not to be...
...The session did not adjourn, and on the third ballot Stevenson was nominated...
...Doyle, who had no idea, picked a number out of the air...
...Within a day or two, the convention leadership was deluged with phone calls and telegrams from Republicans in the 38 states now reached by live pictures...
...Neither side will be speaking from personal knowledge...
...His floor manager, Illinois Senator Paul H. Douglas, a doughty fighter and a distinguished liberal, needed time to organize an anti-Stevenson coalition and moved for adjournment...
...The two had met several times...
...The first delegation to come up was Georgia, where the committee had ruled in favor of Taft...
...From the beginning, tension existed between television journalists trying to report what seemed newsworthy and political managers who wanted to get the greatest possible promotion for their candidates and cause...
...The band played unheard...
...The chairman ruled that although reporters could attend the hearings, no cameras would be allowed in the room...
...Appealing for unity, he pleaded with the assembled delegates not to subject the Grand Old Party to the obloquy of having its brass overruled...
...Because of Thursday's drama, an extra session was held Saturday morning to finish...
...The networks, reduced to stationing their equipment in the hallway, descended upon any committee member who came out for a break...
...Television had already played a big part in the Democrats' march to Chicago...
...The imminence of national political showdowns sold television sets...
...The networks, just as predictably, will reply that conventions are no longer occasions of compelling news, but clumsily arranged week-long political commercials the parties hope to foist on viewers without coughing up the usual advertising rates...
...There had to be programming to justify the sale of TV sets, but advertising income was not yet enough to equal the price of production...
...Candidates' acceptance speeches remain worthy of network coverage because they are significant public policy events...
...He defeated an obscure politician campaigning as a stand-in for President Harry S. Truman, who, when his man was defeated, appeared on television to withdraw from the race...
...The nomination duly followed...
...Some time after midnight, Robert Doyle, the producer of the network pool that was the only set of cameras allowed on the floor itself, was arranging equipment for a feed at 6 a.m...
...In 1948 the Democrats, urged on by the young Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey of Minneapolis, had passed a fairly strong civil rights plank...
...Kefauver put his name forward for President in the New Hampshire primary, the first ever covered on television...
...Speaker after speaker ascended the podium to make the case for one candidate or the other...
...We can't do this anymore," he said...
...The only entertainment program NBC continued to present from New York was Howdy Doody, a children's favorite and a significant profit earner...
...When Dirksen delivered his final paragraph it was an anticlimax...
...Politicians can't be seen fighting...
...The cameras showed a newspaper photographer knocked down in the turmoil and a Wisconsin delegate carried out on a stretcher...
...The West and the South took over the party and nominated Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater...
...But the public was breathless...
...The party organization, from Truman down the line, wanted Stevenson as the nominee, and they got their way...
...There was conflict, disappointment and history...
...Privately, the word was to beware of lipreaders...
...It has been some time since that was not known well before the opening gavel...
...On the aisle sat Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the losing Republican in the previous two Presidential contests, but still a force in the party...
...So having gone to the expense of shipping equipment, technicians, journalists, and managers to Philadelphia—where the two major parties and the Progressive Party decided to hold their conclaves because it was on TV's coaxial cable—the networks found a silver lining: They turned out the lights of their New York studios during the Republican and Democratic procedings, sent the actors and musicians home on unpaid leave, and made their convention staffs fill the schedule...
...That was the last time either party has required more than one convention ballot to pick its standard bearer...
...The hall erupted with cheers, shouts, boos, and catcalls...
...The son profited from the father's record: Since Reconstruction, in what was still the Democrats' "Solid South," a Republican could only obtain a patronage job at Federal offices and court-houses through political patronage during Republican Presidencies...
...The proceedings were slow and cumbersome, interrupted repeatedly by a delegate requesting that his delegation be polled—of ten on minor matters like points of order...
...You may be on television...
...Journalists wince when politicians and political consultants refer to news coverage as "free media...
...It was risky business, but given the committee's approval of the Taft contingent, the cause would otherwise be lost...
...Following a lot of wrangling, in full public view, the Taft delegations were approved...
...Some in those booths told me later that they were genuinely fearful...
...The last to rise for Taft was Illinois Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, with rubbery jowls, curly gray hair and a voice like a cello...
...It took two ballots for Kefauver to beat Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy—the last ever second ballot...
...The public's greatest concern is the selection of nominees...
...Four years earlier the Republican convention had proved a study in transition...
...Primaries have stolen the news value from the conventions, but there is more to it than that...
...To begin with, in the truly old days—the golden era of radio—there was no gavel to gavel coverage...
...After a long, tense process, the Eisenhower delegation from Georgia was seated, 607 to 531...
...There were snake dances and points of order, hijinks and the polling of delegations...
...Star reporters, like Elmer Davis, made reputations for the skill and wit they summoned forth in their newspaper convention dispatches...
...Cities everywhere outside that coastal strip received their convention reports by the U.S...
...You are losing us the election...
...Truman won despite the Dixiecrats and the Progressive Party's nominee, Henry A. Wallace, siphoning offDemocratic votes...
...The "live" network in 1948, linking stations that could carry programs as they were being transmitted from New York, extended only from Boston in the North to Richmond, Virginia, in the South, with a spur from New York City to Schenectady...
...They became the stage for spotlighting the two great issues of those American decades, civil rights and the Vietnam War...
...Conventions these days are limited to four evening sessions...
...Take a good long look___Don't vote 'til you see the whites of their eyes...
...In 1984 Walter Mondale, the former Minnesota Senator and Vice President under Jimmy Carter, would not disclose his running mate...
...Protesters arrived not so much to confront the delegates but because the conventions were televised...
...Open the door," they cried...
...It was nearly the end of the era when party platforms were taken seriously...
...Five decades on it is difficult to comprehend the impact of those hearings: Crowds gathered in front of appliance store windows in all the major cities...
...New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller was booed from the podium...
...Mail, in the form of blurry 16millimeter film recordings of the television pictures...
...As always happens when television cameras are being moved about, a crowd gathered...
...the young demonstrators chanted in Chicago in 1968...
...The whole world is watching...
...Radio coverage, too, was more journalism than publicity...
...But when it came to Ute GOP Credentials Committee, public hunger was mocked...
...They also realized that it could be a menace—a forum where mistakes were magnified and weaknesses unmasked— and should be approached with the utmost care and calculation...
...But in the run up the floor fights were intense...
...Eisenhower's floormanager, Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., had planned all along to go over the party leadership's head and appeal directly to the delegates...
...The galleries picked up the shouting...
...One of the indelible images of that week is Douglas standing below the podium, shouting up at Rayburn, his face dark, his veins protruding, demanding recognition...
...Television alone eventually came to be viewed by members of the political class as the perfect propaganda vehicle...
...In 1952—more than half a century ago, well beyond the memory of most of those now arguing what the networks should cover—the conventions of the majorparties were bursting with news...
...The rest was speeches...
...Arvey shook his head...
...Fifty million...
...Delegates from Mississippi and Alabama walked out of the convention to reassemble in Birmingham as the States' Rights ("Dixiecrat") Party, nominating South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond for President...
...virtual unknowns, Senators and gangsters were transformed into household names—Rudolph Halley, Frank Costello, Karl Mundi, Virginia Hill...
...John Chancellor, then a beginning radio reporter, told me later that he was standing in the back of the hall with Douglas' daughter who was muttering, "No, daddy, please don't...
...After 11 hours only nine names had been placed in nomination...
...The choice was accepted by acclamation...
...They were determined not to make the blunders they had seen their opponents commit...
...Doyle walked over to Arvey and asked whether he had been watching the day's dramatic proceedings...
...Through the 19th century and most of the first half of the 20th this dynamic was not a problem...
...Taft's forces controlled not only the Credentials Committee but also the Republican National Committee itself...
...Extensive convention broadcasts are similarly obsolete...
...to NBC's Today show, then the only network morning information program...
...But otherwise there is little journalism to be achieved nowadays at the conventions...
...Republican foot soldiers began to display a nastiness that had not been in evidence before...
...He recalled how often he, one of the Republicans' most popular orators and fundraisers, had been to New York to help the party...
...One is that when the broadcast networks announce how many fewer hours they will devote to the party conventions this summer than they did four years ago, prominent politicians will denounce them for greed, insensitivity and violation of the public trust...
...Every delegate and alternate found a small card on his seat warning: "Watch yourself...
...The inherent divide in the Republican Party was on dis play...
...They were instructed not to read newspapers, or yawn, or flash fancy jewelry...
...After Kennedy and Nixon in 1960, news occurred at the conventions even though the nominee was known in advance...
...In 1952 the Democrats scheduled five days of 10 sessions, day and evening...
...Gavel to gavel coverage began in 1948, while the infant television was finding its legs at great cost to the networks...
...Come out of the shadows of states' rights," Humphrey implored the South, "and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights...
...Dirksen looked down at Dewey, pointing with his imperious pinkie...
...The commotion lasted 23 minutes...
...When the revered former President Eisenhower, trying to ameliorate the widening divisions in his party, decried differences being exaggerated by "sensation-seeking colyumnists and commentators," an angry roar arose from the crowd, and hundreds turned to shake their fists at the broadcasting booths...
...In 1956, a renominated Stevenson let the convention pick his running mate...
...The convention secretary called the roll of the states...
...You'll judge his physical and intellectual vigor—and whether he can 'take it' under pressure___This year television assumes a new and profound role in your life—and in the life of America...
...Arvey asked how many people were watching...
...Sometimes the anchorman could be heard updating another development, but the rest of the time there was only the din of the crowd...
...We lookterrible...
...In 1952 the Democrats' first day in Chicago was devoted to the party platform...
...California Governor Earl Warren declined the second spot on the ticket, but urged Eisenhower to select Senator Richard M. Nixon as his running mate to appease the conservatives in the party...
...Occasionally a reporter would rush out and explain what had been going on...
...The producer called it great television for giving viewers a real insight into how things worked...
...It's only a glass wall," one of them said...
...He urged the delegation to rethink its support for Eisenhower...
...See and know the man you vote for...
...The Republicans convened first...
...We followed you before," he said in his buttery bass tones, "twice down the road to defeat...
...The largest number of pledged delegates belonged to Tennessee junior Senator Estes Kefauver, who had become a national hero during the televised hearings of his Senate Special Committee on Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce—the medium's initial live news "hit...
...Then he turned to the New York delegation, situated directly beneath the podium...
...Special interests lobbied to have their concerns addressed, and debates were rancorous...
...And the cameras were invited in...
...The chants of "We Want Willkie...
...Some will remember when every Monday the New York Times carriea three or four reports on the sermons delivered in major churches the day before...
...The party's national chairman announced that there would be no closed-door meetings...
...By the time Stevenson prevailed it was well past midnight...
...Kefauver was nominated near midnight...
...Banners waved, fists shook, no one remained seated...
...Texas' Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the House and chairman of the convention, refused...
...Their monopolistic hold on the nation's airwaves, it will be declared, should require them to bring the proceedings to America, gavel to gavel, as in the old days...
...One manufacturer advertised in the New York Times: "This year, you won't just read what a candidate says...
...It was Dewey's misfortune that his mustache and his overbite made him seem, when shown in profile, to be always chortling...
...In between, the camera was fixed on the closed committee room door...
...Political conventions generated news, and political news was a common interest, discussed and debated in barbershops and hiring halls almost as much as sports...
...On the Saturday before the start of the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, he announced that he would name New York Representative Géraldine A. Ferraro...
...The Republicans left, the hall was swept, and a week later the Democrats arrived...
...Most of the platform passed without contention, but the civil rights "plank" aroused animosities that were to roil the party for decades...
...In those days, however, primaries were not yet held in enough states to ensure the victor the nomination...
...Oh, be careful...
Vol. 87 • March 2004 • No. 2
