Seen and Unseen

“You’ve done this before, right?”

Once again, this is a departure from chronological order: We will return to the 1950s shortly, but first, an account from June of 1964.

We pick up from the end of my very first post last December, “Memories and Fragments,” which ended with my just having started as a summer intern at CBS News, and my phone calls to my father, to my mother, and to Ava Gardner, telling her that, as I had just started at CBS, I would be late for our meeting that night.

Ava was not happy. She predicted, correctly, that all of my Hollywood connections would be severed, because, as she tersely put it, “You are one of them.”

The first thought that went through my mind, I must confess, was the last moments of the classic 1956 sci-fi movie (and lightly disguised political drama) “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” when aliens from space have assumed the forms of their human victims, and lead actor Kevin McCarthy, one of the few real humans left, looks into the camera and, sweat streaming down his face, yells, “You’re next!”

The second thought that went through my mind was that, of course, Ava was quite correct. My mother used to refer to most journalists as “the assassins,” with very few exceptions – her friend Mike Wallace, Los Angeles Times jazz critic Leonard Feather, and a few columnists, notably Ed Sullivan, who later invited her to be on his Sunday night television show. If they couldn’t get any dirt, many would make it up.

My father used to say, “They make up stuff about me all the time.” One example: After spending some time with us, a reporter (I believe he was from Time magazine) wrote a story saying we had “three yachts.” So I called the reporter and asked where the yachts were. He began by talking about my grandfather’s open fishing boat; I challenged him to define that as a yacht. “It got punched up in rewrite,” he explained. Okay, that’s one. The second was a rowboat; again, “It got punched up in rewrite.” And the third? “Well like I said, it got punched up in rewrite.” My thought: (With apologies to Ted Mack,) that’s truly amateur hour.

But I’m not certain I fully appreciated that until the editor of a Great Metropolitan Newspaper who knew me called one afternoon to ask whether I had given an interview to one of their reporters using Black English.

“I wouldn’t give an interview to the Amsterdam News using Black English,” I replied.

“I didn’t think so,” he said. A reporter there had filed an “interview” with me. To be charitable, perhaps she talked to someone she thought was me. Again, amateur hour.

My third thought was that I was sorry to miss Ava, who said we couldn’t see each other, not even in London. (Dear Reader, if you skipped my first post, you should know that we would meet over, as she called it, “a snort” – vodka – and to hang out, meaning gossip, nothing more. I was 17 years old!)

One reason I really liked her was that she was smart and perceptive – and was really down to earth, not one of the nouveau riche celebs. And for whatever reason, she liked me, because we could have a good time. In our last meetings, I remember reciting Chesterton, much of whose work I committed to memory in high school, and which she found hilarious (Chesterton, not me, I believe).

But I digress.

Interestingly enough, the one huge exception to Ava’s prediction was… African Americans. Black musicians and actresses were quite happy to hang out, because they and I live in a compartmentalized world, where we could all be seen but unseen. And as I quoted my father in the December post, “You’re not going to tell them what really goes on, are you?” (Spoiler alert: I did, in 1965, to keep CBS competitive, airing a story that was true but that was not yet, ahem, public. But again I digress.)

Ava just assumed I might be tempted to betray her to get ahead at CBS. Really? Ridiculous, I thought, but given how she had been beaten up by the assassins, I totally understood.

So I spent that summer learning how the half-hour CBS Morning News went on the air every day, with director Vern Diamond and his crew taking the elevator down from CBS News headquarters at the top of the Graybar Building at the east end of Grand Central Station, carrying the reels of film through the crowd in Grand Central to the CBS studio in the west side of the building. They were followed minutes later by Mike Wallace and more of the crew bringing script, prompter and more.

One Monday in June, summer camps throughout the Northeast opened, and mothers seeing their kids off to camp crowded Grand Central well after rush hour. Some saw Mike going through the station, and a crowd quickly gathered. “There’s Mike Wallace! Can we have an autograph! Can we…” (today it would be a selfie).

Avoiding such crowds, I assumed, was the reason that Walter Cronkite and Don Hewitt, executive producer of the CBS Evening News, wired up the Graybar building so Cronkite could anchor from his office, without going through the press of evening rush hour commuters in Grand Central station to reach the studio. That also meant, as the studio was also the working newsroom, they could add breaking news to the broadcast far more easily.

And that is why, dear reader, starting with the launch in September of 1963 of the first 30-minute network evening news, you heard announcer Harry Kramer (who minutes earlier would have been the announcer for “The Edge…..of Night” soap opera), say, “Direct from our newsroom in New York, this is the CBS Evening News, with Walter Cronkite, and…” (followed by the “clicker,” now long forgotten, a vertical graphics list of all of the CBS News correspondents who would be on that night’s broadcast, and from where) “…Charles Collingwood in London, Marvin Kalb at the State Department, Morley Safer in Saigon, Nelson Benton in Little Rock…” (and on and on), showing the depth of CBS correspondents, while at NBC, anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley reigned, not showcasing NBC’s correspondents.

But at the time, Huntley and Brinkley truly prevailed in ratings, reaching an audience that CBS could not match or exceed for years. But one NBC producer, whom I consulted for advice once I caught the journalism bug, told me that CBS was the place to go, “because they have the depth of excellent journalists.” And as I quickly learned, not just correspondents.

That summer, there were two important stories, and one was Vietnam. If the story was big enough – and the Gulf of Tonkin certainly was – the film would be sent to Tokyo, and would be inserted into the Morning and Evening News by satellite from Japan. But on a typical day, footage from the war would be flown to the U.S, to be broadcast later. One Vietnam reporter, asked the difference between radio and television, replied, “Two days.”

But here, the CBS Morning News had an advantage: film from Vietnam would land at Kennedy Airport at 7 am, too late for the NBC Today show. A CBS courier would bring the exposed footage from JFK to Manhattan, and the film would be plunged into “the soup” – the film processor. When it came out, it was black and white negative, and the 10 a.m. deadline was imminent. Morning News producer Av Westin would stand in the corridor between the four film edit rooms as the editors quickly ran through the footage. “I’ve found the open,” would shout one. Another: “Here’s the narration!” A third: “B roll here!” And they would assemble a finished film story in minutes, then add it to the reels of film Vern Diamond and his team would carry across Grand Central.

Usually, there was no time to screen the finished story before it hit air during the Morning News broadcast. That was OK: The reporter’s notes were on crumpled typewritten paper stuffed into the shipping bag, and the report could be edited and introduced from his notes (and they were all men at the time). But for one day, when video from the B roll was projected on the CBS network, it included dancing by people who were, ahem, not dressed for U.S. television. That prompted a 12 noon update for the West Coast, where the broadcast was carried at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time.

The other big story of the summer was civil rights. On July 2, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act into law. But the continuing breaking news was from the field.

1964 was Mississippi Summer, when volunteers from around the U.S., many white, traveled to the South to try to register Black people to vote. Many African Americans had been lynched – murdered – for trying to register Black voters, and the white volunteers knew it would be dangerous. How dangerous became clear when three young volunteers, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, disappeared in June. It was national news, often the lead story, throughout the rest of June and all of July. On August 2, their bodies were found. The story changed: Now it was white people also being murdered by the Klan.

Later that summer there were urban riots, starting with Harlem, then spreading to Brooklyn, Rochester, and Jersey City. The Harlem riot started the day I after returned from the GOP convention in San Francisco – also the day after my birthday – and it was just a few blocks from where I was staying, and I went to see what was happening, watching young people smashing windows and Asian shop owners putting signs in their doors and windows, “I’m colored, too!” to no avail. It was just the beginning.

CBS, the other networks and the major newspapers were caught in a vise of their own making: Their reporters and correspondents were all white. Suddenly the call went out from the midtown Manhattan newsrooms, we need one (and usually only one) Black reporter.

As a summer intern, I was, as I repeatedly joked, “the lowest for of human life in the newsroom,” so I was in no way being considered for (or prepared for) street reporting. Little did I know what I would be asked to do just a few weeks later, but once again I am getting ahead of myself. Keep reading.

Instead, I spent most of my time in the Graybar building, learning how broadcasts were produced. In those weeks I also worked with people I would know in later years. There were so many stars and truly skilled journalists – reporters, writers, producers, film editors, directors, far too many to name.

Mike knew what he wanted visually, and he hated being framed close up. On the Morning News set, one shot was a medium frame of Mike against three vertical gray flats (this is before network news was in color). The other shot was wider, with a big screen showing a live image of a correspondent, film or graphic, projected by an eidophor. A what? I couldn’t quite believe how it was done: a video image was bounced off of electrostatically-charged hot oil. No, to use the phrase late night host Jack Paar made famous just about then, “I kid you not.”

Another big story that summer was politics, and I was able to go to both political conventions, the Republican National Convention in the San Francisco Cow Palace, and the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. At the GOP convention, I was around the fringes, as befitting “the lowest form of human life in the newsroom,” as Republicans booed Nelson Rockefeller, then Governor of New York, and nominated conservative Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater for President. But in Atlantic City, I wanted to be closer to the action.

And the action started early: Lyndon Johnson had become President the previous November, after the assassination of John F. Kennedy; LBJ was unopposed and would be nominated to be the Democratic candidate. But he didn’t want “his” convention to be sidetracked by a swelling movement to force him to accept Robert F. Kennedy as his vice-presidential running mate. Johnson had no use for the Kennedy clan. And LBJ was really worried that civil rights would split the convention floor wide open. And so it did:

It was still Mississippi Summer, and the segregated Mississippi convention delegation was being challenged by the integrated Mississippi Freedom party, led by Fannie Lou Hamer. As a result, the convention hall seats for the Mississippi delegation would remain empty, as officials tried to devise a compromise between the two competing delegations.

That fight between the two delegations reached a climax the weekend before the convention, in a public session called to hear testimony from the competing Mississippi delegation. The television networks all prepared to broadcast, live, Fannie Lou Hamer’s widely anticipated remarks on the struggle to register Black voters in her state. But LBJ was having none of it. Unable to prevent Hamer from testifying, the president announced he was going to hold a news conference at exactly the same time of Hamer’s testimony. The networks all switched to LBJ. And the Mississippi delegation seats stayed empty.

My father rented a small house near the convention hall, and during the convention I would get up early, go to the hall for the 10:00 morning news, return to the house to try to get some sleep, then return to the hall at the end of the afternoon to help with live convention coverage, which went until well after midnight.

NBC’s Huntley and Brinkley were so popular then that their broadcasts from the GOP convention in San Francisco dominated the audience ratings, and the CBS audience was shrinking. The gap between #1 NBC and #2 CBS was so great that CBS decided, for the first and last time, to remove Walter Cronkite as the anchor. He would still lead the Evening News, but then Cronkite would end by handing it over to his replacements in the anchor booth. They were Robert Trout, whose intelligent, urbane hosting of political broadcasts went back to radio and President Franklin Roosevelt, and a newcomer, Roger Mudd, CBS Capitol Hill correspondent, who had become a star after his live nightly reports from the steps of U.S. Senate on the progress (or not) of the civil rights bills, which faced a determined but ultimately unsuccessful filibuster by Southern segregationist Democrats.

Of course Trout and Mudd were supported by a huge team of correspondents, producers and technicians, and it was in Atlantic City that I met correspondents and producers with whom I would work for years later, including Bernard and Marvin Kalb, with whom I became friends and colleagues for more than six decades, until Bernie’s death after reaching age 100 (and sharp as a tack) and Marvin reaching well into his 90’s (and still sharp as a tack).

Wanting to be closer to the action than I was at the Cow Palace, I went to Bill Leonard, the executive in charge of CBS News convention coverage – and yes, the man I met when I was in pre-kindergarten when I would help my classmate, his son Willy, get home after school every afternoon.

My request: Could I be allowed to go on the convention floor?

Leonard looked at me as if I had lost my mind. Each TV network, including CBS, had eight floor passes, all color-coded green, he explained, one each for the four floor correspondents, and one each for the four cameraman (and they were all men) assigned to work with them. If I could get a ninth green floor pass for CBS, he said skeptically, I could go on the floor. So I thanked him and left.

But I thought I had a solution: Courtesy of hanging out with my father, I knew President Johnson was so worried about “his” convention and civil rights that LBJ had a secret stash of green floor passes for special friends including and especially reporters for Black newspapers and magazines, an innovation that he hoped would encourage more favorable coverage from the Black press. I knew the office where the passes were held and who was running it. So I went over to the office and asked whether all of the green passes had been assigned. It turns out they had some extras, and I was able to get one, green floor pass #0188, “Photographer.”

I walked back to the CBS newsroom and showed Bill Leonard my floor pass. “I won’t ask,” he began. “OK, you can be on the floor. You can be Mike’s floor coordinator.” Mike was gleeful: He was the only floor correspondent with an assistant.

CBS had divided the convention floor into four quadrants, and a correspondent-cameraman team was assigned to each section. Mike’s quadrant included the Mississippi delegation, which was still empty due to the floor fight, so that is where we could sit and hang out between his live reports from the floor.

Watching Mike Wallace cover the convention floor, a CBS colleague said later, was a post-graduate course in political journalism. All of the floor correspondents did their homework, but Mike felt he had to prove himself, still a newcomer to CBS News, who still faced skeptical veterans who felt he had too much entertainment in his background, including having hosted a late night TV show just a few years earlier. Years later, one CBS correspondent told me that whenever he and Mike were on a story, Mike always surprised him by knowing more background than he did.

So, scanning the convention floor and monitoring CBS coverage, Mike would turn to me and say, “Let’s go over to talk to…” one newsmaker or another. Or, “Look over there, he’s just come onto the floor, let’s go!”

At one point one night, we were at the edge of the convention floor. Mike turned to me.

“Nothing’s happening,” he said. “I’m going back to the newsroom to get a new vest” – that’s what the floor correspondents were wearing that was packed with electronic equipment to connect them wirelessly with producers as they roamed the floor. He also wanted to go to the men’s room. The cameraman also floated off.

So I went back to the Mississippi delegation. As an intern, I had no wireless comm gear, so I sat next to a black CBS wireline phone that had been installed on the convention floor. And I looked around, enjoying the scene until Mike returned.

And then I saw her.

Fannie Lou Hamer, head of the Mississippi Freedom Democrats, was walking onto the floor, wearing a green convention floor pass. (Now where would she have obtained one of those?) She was headed straight for where I was sitting.

No time to think, I picked up the CBS phone, and I was connected to Don Hewitt, who was running the floor correspondents.

“Fannie Lou Hamer is on the floor, get someone over here!”

“Who is this?”

“Adam Powell, Mike’s floor guy.”

“Where’s Mike?”

“He’s off the floor. I see Kuralt! I see [Bill] Stout! Frank McGee [NBC floor correspondent] is already here!”

“I can’t move them. Let me give you to Av.” Av Westin, producer of the Morning News and my boss as an intern, was in the control room as executive producer of CBS convention coverage. Av came on the line and snapped a quick “What’s happening.”

“Fannie Lou Hamer is on the floor heading right to me!”

“Where’s Mike?”

“He’s off the floor. McGee is here! ABC is on my shoulder!”

“We can’t move anyone. You’ve done this before, right?” And before I could say, Yes on college radio, he continued, “There’s a floor mike there.” “Got it.” “Look up. See balcony camera 44? He’s waving at you.” “I see him” “That’s your camera. You’re on in 15 seconds.”

No time to think. Hamer was now right next to me. When they came to me, she was just starting to speak. To keep CBS competitive, all I had to do was get the handheld microphone in front of her and line up the shot from camera 44 in the midst of the press scrum around me.

“Hey CBS get down!” McGee yelled into my ear. Turns out I was blocking his shot. And years later, I saw that I was also blocking ABC’s shot: Watching the award-winning “Eyes on the Prize” documentary series, which used ABC’s footage, I saw myself in profile, holding the CBS microphone in front of Hamer. And watching “Eyes” with me on tht occasion were my then small sons; one turned to me and asked, amazed, “Dad, is that… you?”

And so it was.

Back in 1964, my next memory is of Mike Wallace racing onto the floor to take over.

And my memory after that, still in the media scrum, was that my days as an MIT computer science major were, as of that moment, so over.

And so they were.

MIT didn’t and doesn’t offer journalism courses; instead, over the next three years, I combined minors in mathematics and architecture with a major in a then brand-new MIT department, political science, which had been carved out of its previous home in the MIT psychology department (How MIT is that?), with faculty including Ithiel de Sola Pool, Lucian Pye and more. More of that later.

Back summer internships, where reporting live from the convention floor was just a start: The next summer, 1965, I was again a summer intern at CBS, this time learning about planning field coverage and newsgathering. And in my third and final summer internship, in 1966, before my senior year, Av Westin offered me my first full-time job that would start the following June. But before that last summer internship was over, Richard Salant, President of CBS News, walked up to me and gave me an assignment so far beyond anything I expected to have that I was terrified. And in the next 20+ years I worked with Salant, in various jobs at CBS and then at National Public Radio, where he was on the board and I was VP in charge of news, I never had the courage to ask him why in the world he thought I would do anything in that assignment other than fall flat on my face and embarrass him and CBS News. Instead, it changed my life.

But that was in the future, and it will have to wait for another chapter. Today, August 27, 1964, was enough of a turning point on which to end - for now.