Brinkley goes on to recount one of the more ironic consequences of his reporting on civil rights: "The manager of an affiliated station in North Carolina called me a traitor to my home state and in the crudest terminology of the time and place, a 'nigger lover.' He tried to get me off the air but failed. [Then] he hired a reporter, previously unknown, deeply unskilled and something of a rural tin-horn. He put him on his local station each night immediately following NBCNews and gave him the assignment to 'answer Brinkley's lies.'

Every night he came on just after our news program and carefully explained that I was a 'turncoat Southerner turned Northern radical' incapable or unwilling to tell the truth about the problems in the South, most of the troubles caused by 'outside agitators' like me.

He did his job so effectively he became an admired public figure, whereupon he chose to turn his new popularity to his own advantage and run for the United States Senate. He ran. On the strength of his attacks on me, he was elected. His name: Senator Jesse Helms, Republican, North Carolina.

Howard K. Smith encountered even more serious problems. He was fired by cbs News following a documentary he did on events in Birmingham, Alabama. Smith was one of "the Murrow boys", those reporters hired by the legendary Edward R. Murrow on the eve of the Second World War, who distinguished themselves in their coverage of the war. Smith was on the last train out of Berlin after Pearl Harbor, stayed on the Continent to cover the war, and then was one of the first reporters back into Germany after the surrender. Like many of the Murrow boys, and, of course, Murrow himself, Smith had some problems adjusting from wartime to peacetime. He had a strong penchant for commentary, which, during the war, cbs thought was just fine. But in the Fifties, with the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the cbs brass became squeamish about his views, especially when they were left of center. Smith, however, kept pushing the envelope in his commentaries, which did not endear him to top management.

The final rupture came over a documentary Smith prepared on a series of racial incidents in Birmingham in 1961. It featured an attack by Ku Klux Klan members on protesters who had just arrived from out of town. The Klan used bicycle chains, blackjacks, brass knuckles, and baseball bats to make its point. The city's police commissioner, "Bull" Connor, and his force sat passively in their headquarters across the street until the riot was over. Smith was outraged: "Witnessing the savage beatings in Birmingham was my worst experience since the opening of the concentration camps at the end of World War Two." In his commentary at the conclusion of the program, Smith used the well-known--if still unsubstantiated--quotation from a speech by Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Once the documentary was complete, it was screened by a battery of lawyers and network vice presidents. As the lights went up at the end of the showing, one of the lawyers went immediately on the attack: "Smith's quotation from Burke is straight editorial. It's out." What followed, Smith says, was a long, bitter hour. In the end he concedes that even with the cuts forced by the brass, "We had a respectable documentary . . . effective enough to get the city commission of Birmingham to sue cbs for a large amount."

But for Smith there was no redemption. cbs President William Paley ordered him to New York immediately. In anticipation of that meeting, Smith sent Paley a memo, the essential point being that giving equal weight to Bull Connor and to Chief Justice Earl Warren, and leaving it at that, was the equivalent of saying that truth is to be found somewhere between right and wrong, equidistant between good and evil. The civil rights issue, he argued, was not one over which reasonable minds might differ; one side was clearly justified by the Constitution, the other clearly not. In Smith's account of their meeting, Paley threw the memo across the table saying, "I've heard all this junk before. If that is what you believe, you had better go somewhere else." And so he did, to abc, to the great benefit of that network.

The assassination of President John Kennedy was a major watershed for television news in this country. Whatever warts have since been discovered in Kennedy's persona, at the time of his death he was a much beloved president. When tears welled up in Cronkite's eyes as he announced that Kennedy had died, he reflected an emotion almost universally shared by the American people.

Television's three-day nonstop coverage of the aftermath of the event went a very long way in calming a deeply shaken and, at the margin, almost paranoid population. It was crucially important at this time of highest anxiety for the networks to conduct themselves responsibly. After all, just a year before, the United States and the Soviet Union had come to the brink of nuclear war over the Cuban missile crisis. Were the Russians behind the assassination? Should we launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against them if they were? The tv networks firmly said "no" and "no" to those questions in the early days after the assassination, and the country began to breathe easier. One can almost hear the breathless tones and the purple prose of the tabloid programs if something like a presidential assassination were to befall us today. But in November 1963 the networks and their anchors behaved with great seriousness and dignity, and in so doing achieved new levels of respect in the eyes of most Americans.

As noted at the beginning, the war in Vietnam, too, was a major turning point for Walter Cronkite and for network news generally. Tv pictures of American Marines using Zippo lighters to set fire to a Vietnamese village, supposedly "in order to save it", burned themselves into the American psyche. There can be no doubt that television helped to shape Middle America's feelings about the war, although it was the number of body bags that finally turned them against it. Cronkite was the first anchor publicly to oppose continuing the war. Brinkley was less open in his opposition, though he harbored personal feelings that were apparently even stronger than Cronkite's. Brinkley writes, "I thought it was a total abomination that should be stopped immediately, that every life lost there was wasted for no purpose, and that Johnson was to blame because he lacked the political courage to halt a pointless, endless bloody war that could not be won."

Then there was Howard K. Smith. On many issues, Smith was more liberal than his colleagues. But in the case of Vietnam, he went on supporting the war long after most Washington pundits had given up on it. Though his son Jack had been severely wounded in the Battle of the Ia Drag Valley in 1965, Smith continued to believe in the domino theory. This was obviously a product of his years of working in Hilter's Germany in the 1930s, where the lesson that appeasement only encourages aggression made an indelible impression upon him. Smith did programs and commentaries defending U.S. policy in Vietnam right up through the bloody riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. But as he now admits, it got harder and harder: "My commentaries, critical of the anti-Vietnam rioters and in favor of fighting on in Vietnam, ran head-on against the liberal mainstream. I lost old friends, as a bison loses hair, in large swatches. [Walter] Lippmann was a most regrettable loss.

"As I collided again and again with long admired friends, I heard Cromwell's imperative as if directed across the ages specifically to me: 'I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.'"

The fact that Smith supported the war while his fellow anchormen opposed it may seem to dilute the thesis that the evening news programs as a group were centrist and so pulled government to the center. Not so; the fact that there was not one monolithic view on a subject as significant as the war gave the networks a certain credibility with their viewers. In a sense their dissensus reflected the national ambiguity. When finally all the anchors, and the majority of the nation, wanted to bring the war to an end, Richard Nixon was elected on a pledge to bring peace with honor to Vietnam. In 1968, almost no one imagined that it would take seven more years to end the war, and few believed that the end, when it did come, would not be honorable at all.

In the arena of presidential politics, moderation was again the order of the day for the anchors and their networks. The network news programs were skeptical and nervous about conservative Republican candidate Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964. But they were no more enthusiastic for the campaign of the liberal Senator George McGovern in 1972. Extremism, in the defense of anything, found no aid or comfort in network news rooms. It is therefore particularly notable to read Brinkley's analysis of the person of Barry Goldwater: "I liked Senator Goldwater. I thought some of his political views were extreme and excessive, but it seemed to me he was only saying what he figured an Air Force general from the Arizona "desert was expected to say. There was little or no meanness in him. On the contrary, there was a real friendliness and generosity in him and he was always good company when he was not surrounded by those of his followers who behaved like political banshees."

Essay Types: Book Review