Read It Now
Barnouw, Erik
Read It Now Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control, by Fred W. Friendly. Random House. 325 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Erik Barnouw HPo Fred Friendly,, former president of CBS News—ebullient,...
...Reviewed by Erik Barnouw HPo Fred Friendly,, former president of CBS News—ebullient, hard-driving, swashbuckling, sometimes arrogant, as he himself tells us—we owe an immense debt of gratitude for Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control...
...In form, most of it is a memoir...
...Due to Circumstances is several kinds of book...
...In his closing chapters Friendly turns to an analysis of the problems of television...
...fewer would have...
...His words of generosity may well make them squirm...
...Friendly remained, producing CBS Reports, and in 1964 becoming president of CBS News...
...In these expository passages he is far less at home than in the narrative portions...
...Friendly makes many generous comments about the two men who ultimately became his adversaries—William S. Paley and Frank Stanton, respectively chairman of the board and president of the CBS parent corporation...
...A joke more precise than many a press release pictured a network vice president, on his way to lunch, telling his secretary: "If the boss calls, get his name...
...A special virtue of the memoir portions is that they provide superb glimpses of Murrow in action...
...The departing executive has moved into adjacent occupations—in independent production, motion pictures, or government—in which relations with networks are crucial...
...But in his final advocacy of the Ford Foundation satellite proposals, looking to establishment of a well-financed noncommercial television system alongside the existing "mercantile" system, he is a persuasive pamphleteer...
...In writing it, Friendly has probably closed some doors for himself, but he has opened them for others...
...Perhaps an uneasy awareness of this made him all the more ready to slam the door on his executive job and slam it hard...
...Few other men could have written such a book...
...At stake is the use made of a national resource, the broadcasting channels...
...The collaboration ended when Murrow left CBS to head the U.S...
...Information Agency...
...If so, so much the better...
...That far more may be involved is clearly and dramatically illustrated in the pages of Friendly's book...
...In the detailed recounting of numerous brushes, encounters, compromises, and explosions, the Friendly memoir makes its most impressive contribution...
...He has given us his version of events that presumably had a different look to others...
...If they too now provide memoirs, we may move toward a dispelling of that secretiveness that has too long surrounded the exercise of "the public interest...
...In that McCarthy era, Murrow and Friendly attempted to deal forthrightly with issues of the day, including McCarthy himself...
...If all parties concerned have generally been sphinx-like about the departure of presidents, the reasons are clear...
...Instead he wrote this extraordinarily absorbing and challenging book, which gives us the most vivid glimpse we have had of broadcasting decision-making at the top...
...He puts his main point in words spoken by Paley himself in 1936: "Too often the machine runs away with itself . . . instead of keeping pace with the social needs it was created to serve...
...As president of CBS News we see Friendly making decisions which as producer and writer he would surely have contested with vehemence— decisions which as president he seeks to rationalize, but unconvincingly...
...There is a tragic lack of published material on this towering figure, and this book would be welcome if it did no more than fill in gaps in his story...
...There has therefore been no inclination to slam doors...
...In writing so candidly about an executive stratum that usually remains an enigma, Friendly may well precipitate further writings...
...After his front-page exit from the CBS News presidency early in 1966, Fred Friendly did not maintain ritual silence...
...Top management at times gave strong support and apparently wanted to like what was being done, but the process involved a constant state of tension, along with financial pressures...
...For Friendly finally tells us—and this provides one of the most dramatic aspects of the book—that in their shoes he probably would have acted as they did...
...The sudden mysterious vanishing of network presidents has in recent years become a commonplace of upper-echelon broadcasting life...
...The disappearances have been treated as though they were private family quarrels of no concern to the public...
...But at the same time Friendly gives us a series of case studies in decision-making...
...Several incidents in the book bear this out...
...Much of this concerns the collaboration between Edward R. Mur-row and Fred Friendly that began in the late 1940's with the recording / Can Hear It Now, continued with the radio series Hear It Now, and moved into television with See It Now...
...The Murrow-Friendly team began the See It Now series at a time when, as Friendly puts it, "the central nervous system of the vast broadcast industry was so conditioned that it responded to self-appointed policemen and blacklists as though they were part of the constitutional process...
...His final indictment is not of men but of a machinery they have created, a machinery which he feels now controls them...
...After each such incident fog has closed in...
Vol. 31 • June 1967 • No. 6
