by Lisa Napoli
Next, the 312-member Mormon Tabernacle Choir, imported to South Dakota for this special occasion and positioned in front of the majestic Mount Rushmore, launched into a rendition of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” as director Smith commanded his crew, from seventeen hundred miles away, to “cue the buffalo.” A local cowboy fired a gunshot, mobilizing a gigantic herd that stampeded across the screen like a scene out of a Western. Locals laughed at the big-city folk staging the wild, but around the world, the shot provoked awe, offering a glimpse at a frontier most people had never seen. It was, observed NBC anchor David Brinkley, “not so much what they saw but that anything was seen at all.” The images were not just real, they were live. They were television.
The cascading power of Telstar immediately became apparent. Curious citizens flocked to the tiny town in Maine that housed the powerful receiving antenna, and newspaper columnists waxed rhapsodic about its potential to transform worldwide communications. By the year 2000, they predicted, communicating via space would become a billion-dollar business. This possibility, however, also unleashed concerns. Responding to reports that negotiations were already under way to transmit the Miss America beauty pageant via satellite, columnist Dick Shippy of the Akron Beacon-Journal fretted about the vacuous image of the nation that would be presented to the rest of the world.
At least on this maiden Telstar voyage, Europe got a glimpse of a shining exemplar of America, the charismatic president of the United States. Though he was personally committed to sending a man to the moon, Kennedy was well aware that much of the nation remained skeptical, even wary, of space exploration. As the action of the demonstration broadcast moved to the White House, the international audience was allowed to peer into his regularly scheduled presidential press briefing—something no one outside the press corps, much less the United States, ever got to see. The president acknowledged his virtual visitors—several hundred million people in sixteen countries—as well as the gravity of this achievement.
“This is another indication of the extraordinary world in which we live,” he said. Carrying messages from both sides of the planet “is of course a very essential requirement for peace, and I think this understanding, which will inevitably come from the speedier communications, is bound to increase the well-being and security of all people here and . . . across the ocean.”
Could live TV erase the world’s divisions? Would wars cease when we could speak across borders in real-time? Would individual cultures begin to erode? As the technology was refined and governments hashed out the details of which companies would be allowed to commercialize the skies, it would be years before we could know, years before this kind of broadcast was possible on a regular basis. The ultimate ramifications of instant global communications were, for now, only imagined.
There was, however, one clue in the aftermath of that milestone Telstar broadcast. Though he’d been quoted in the papers saying for weeks that he wouldn’t devalue the dollar in order to stem the tide of gold, once the whole world heard the same words uttered directly by the president, live, on television, the dollar rose, and the price of the precious metal dropped. Of all the firsts Telstar could claim, this was perhaps the most powerful. Thanks to this potent technological marvel of satellite and television, a politician had swayed the markets.
* * *
Fourteen months later, on a Friday in November 1963, a limo carrying four journalists rode five cars behind President Kennedy, who was en route to deliver a speech at the Trade Mart in Dallas. The press corps was on high alert. Extreme right-wing protestors who despised the president had been issuing bomb threats before his other appearances. His United Nations ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, had been struck in the head by a protestor a few weeks before. There had been talk that the president should not make the trip.
Ever grateful for the press’s lucrative business, the phone company had outfitted this car with a futuristic luxury, a two-way device called a radiotelephone, which allowed a caller to reach an operator who’d then patch him through over the phone lines. As one of the reporters allowed to travel in this well-placed vehicle, UPI White House correspondent Merriman Smith muscled his way to the front, even though it was technically the turn of his rival Jack Bell of the Associated Press to sit in that plum seat.
In one devastating instant, three loud cracks shattered the pomp and circumstance of the parade. Smith, a collector of weapons, instantly identified the sound as gunfire. Grabbing hold of the radiotelephone, he asked the operator to patch him through to the regional newsroom, then dictated what he’d just witnessed to the rookie reporter who answered the call. Reporters, especially those who worked for the wire services, had to be skilled at spouting off-the-cuff dispatches; in a breaking-news situation, there was no time to write. Bell pounded Smith on the back, demanding his turn on the phone, and only after Smith was certain this urgent news had been received did he surrender it.
Four minutes later, his bulletin crossed the wire, cinching his place in history as the first to transmit the terrible news.
“Dallas, Nov. 22 (UPI): Three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade today in downtown Dallas.”
An instant later, at subscriber newspapers and stations around the world, wire machines beeped, five times, indicating that urgent news was about to cross and required immediate attention. Over at the assignment desk at UPI Newsfilm on West Fifty-Sixth Street in New York, Reese Schonfeld marveled that a president had paraded openly in an uncovered car. At his Dartmouth graduation years before, commencement speaker President Eisenhower had arrived on campus accompanied by a veritable army of guards, who immediately fanned out to protect him. He blurted to a colleague with the bravado of a wizened newsman his concern about the second-string cameraman on duty in Dallas that day, “If that fucking Lawrence missed the shot, I’ll fire the bastard.”
Over at CBS News headquarters at Grand Central Terminal, Walter Cronkite put aside his brown-bag lunch of cottage cheese and pineapple and rushed into action. Only weeks earlier, news executives had prevailed on their higher-ups to allow them to expand the nightly newscast to a half hour—debuting the lengthier program with filmed reports from as far away as Saigon and Tokyo, and a one-on-one interview with the president at his home in Hyannisport. Critics had wondered if there would be enough material to fill each night’s broadcast, and local affiliates balked at having to generate a longer newscast of their own—until they realized a longer broadcast would plunk more advertising revenue into their coffers. To fill the time, the news now included commentaries and features and quirky news bits and Cronkite’s new signature sign-off, “That’s the way it is.” At midday, with the nightly newscast still hours away, the searing studio lights were powered off. The state-of-the-art cameras would take at least ten minutes to warm up.
Presented with this earth-shattering news in the middle of the day, Cronkite knew he needed to urgently convey what he’d learned to the American people, even without pictures. Ten minutes into the live performance of the soap opera As the World Turns, up popped a slide, interrupting the action: BULLETIN. And then the voice of the man who would one day be called the most trusted in America calmly, sternly informed the audience that, “In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade.” The soap opera resumed, and a few minutes later came the BULLETIN slide again, as Cronkite’s voice delivered a tiny dribble of more detail. Back to the soap opera again, and ten minutes more elapsed before the newsman appeared visible on-camera, seated at a desk in the newsroom, as his colleagues rushed frantically around. NBC and ABC followed with their own, similar bulletins. An hour later, all three networks dutifully, solemnly, announced the cataclysmic update: President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was dead.
As they witnessed this procession of events, the staff at UPI Newsfilm felt like warriors without a battlefield. Reese had scant footage to offer subscribers and no airtime of his own to fill. He ached to have even a toe in the coverage of this monumental story.
Salesmen for the service frantically worked the phones, calling stations to peddle two biographical documentaries they’d produced about the president during the 1960 election cycle—which now served as instant obituaries. When Reese learned that Harry Truman happened to be in New York, he rushed over to the Carlyle hotel with a crew, hoping to extract some sort of comment from the former president. So did all other press in the city. The dazed man faced the assembled pack of reporters.
“Are you going to Washington?” Reese shouted, desperate for a crumb of news.
“I’m going upstairs, I’m going to bed,” the former president said—clearly stunned.
Meanwhile, Reese’s boss, Burt Reinhardt, hopped a flight to Dallas in search of amateur footage. Before becoming a deskbound news administrator, Reinhardt had done time in the field. As a still photographer for the military during World War II, he’d been present for General MacArthur’s amphibious landing on the island of Leyte in 1944—although modesty kept him from discussing the details. He’d joined Movietone as a cameraman after the war, and as he’d moved up the ranks in management, he had helped indoctrinate Reese into the business.
Word was that a garment maker named Abraham Zapruder had, much to his own surprise, inadvertently captured the gruesome assassination on his eight-millimeter home movie camera. That world-class news photographers didn’t have better pictures astonished him. Reinhardt was authorized to bid high, but by the time he arrived, Zapruder had accepted Life magazine’s offer of $50,000. (Days later, they paid $100,000 more for expanded rights.) Licensing these precious twenty-six seconds of footage allowed Life to print thirty chilling still images of the assassination. Screening the complete film on television would have seemed disrespectful.2
The enterprising Reinhardt, reasoning that other amateur cinematographers might have captured the gruesome moment, visited all the eight-millimeter processing labs in the city, leaving his business card behind.
“If any film of the JFK shooting shows up,” he told them, “let me know and I’ll give you a hundred dollars.”
The next day, the Dallas bureau chief of United Press rang him up at his hotel. “Burt, we got a lady here, Marie Muchmore, she says she’s got a piece of film showing the Kennedy assassination. What should we do?”
“Lock the door,” Reinhardt shouted, rushing over to the bureau to learn more. Miss Muchmore, he discovered, had taken a lunch break with co-workers at a nearby dress factory, hoping to catch a glimpse of the visiting president in Dealey Plaza. She hadn’t used her camera before, and she had no idea how much, if any, of the tragedy she’d captured on film.
Reinhardt possessed a particular talent for haggling. Calmly, he explained that he could pay Miss Muchmore a thousand bucks now and assume the risk there wasn’t anything usable in her footage. Or, he could get the film processed first and see if she’d captured the brutal act, in which case he would pay much more.
Devastated by what she had witnessed and feeling guilty about cashing in on the tragedy, the amateur filmmaker accepted the immediate offer. But by the time the transaction was complete and the film had been processed, it didn’t matter that her footage unmistakably showed the president slumping in the car after the gunfire. By now, the story had taken another startling turn. Live, on television, before a riveted nation, a man named Jack Ruby had shot and killed Kennedy’s alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. (Viewers of CBS missed this drama. The network had briefly cut away from Dallas for a tribute to the president read by newsman Harry Reasoner.) The Muchmore film could have been earth-shattering. Now, it seemed not just tasteless but old. It ran on only one station.3
The fatal shooting of the leader of the free world was one kind of monumental. The ability to watch each distressing moment of the aftermath on television was another. From the comfort of their living rooms, Americans witnessed, alongside distant newscasters, the ultimate unscripted drama as it continued to unfold: The parade of world leaders following the First Lady as she walked behind her husband’s caisson; the sea of mourners; daughter, Caroline, bowing to kiss the coffin; the president’s namesake son, barely four years old, and his poignant salute.
November 22, 1963, had coincidentally been predetermined as the maiden voyage of the very first satellite hookup with Japan. This grand communications exchange was to have kicked off with a taped message from the president. Instead, the first televised pictures transmitted to the Pacific conveyed his senseless assassination.
A million people lined the streets of the nation’s capital to participate in the funeral procession on that cold, clear Monday. But a better view could be had from one’s own living room. More than fifty cameras positioned around the city allowed an audience that spanned more than twenty-three nations to witness the somber procession in exquisite detail more clearly than had they been on the scene, while basking in the warmth and comfort of home. Except for the instant the casket was lowered into the grave. The man in charge of Arlington National Cemetery cut off power to the cameras then. He felt it disrespectful to broadcast such a sacred image.
* * *
It wasn’t fair, Reese believed, that the networks dominated broadcast journalism. For them, news was just a sideline—a by-product of their immensely lucrative mainstay operations, which he dismissed as “mindless entertainment.” Detractors had begun to eye the hundreds of millions each network earned using the airwaves, fretting about the social impact of violent programs, creeping commercialism—particularly on children—and what would become of a passive, screen-addicted citizenry.
To mint goodwill and stave off the critics, the networks allowed their staffs of journalists to experiment with documentaries, news specials, and talk shows, funding them with lavish budgets that demonstrated their investment in the public welfare. Executives continued to sputter over how more serious fare should be presented. When a live, two-hour morning show on NBC called Today proved to be a dud, a chimpanzee was enlisted as co-host, and ratings soared. (The program’s newsreader, a serious journalist, quit in disgust.) Ed Murrow knew in 1955 that his well-regarded, issue-oriented, prime-time magazine show, See It Now, was not long for the airwaves the minute he laid eyes on the first episode of the quiz show The $64,000 Question. There was little doubt in his mind that America would prefer this more populist fare—which, unlike his program, would surely rake in abundant commercial dollars for the network.
Reese loved and respected news so much, he felt it deserved a place at center stage. But how? And where? UPI’s filmed news service—any news service—could never possibly compete with the resources and audience of the powerful triopoly.
In 1966, a new competitor emerged in the person of Daniel Overmyer, who’d made his fortune in the unglamorous but lucrative fields of shipping and warehousing. Now, he had designs on the media. After purchasing a weekly newspaper in his native Toledo, Ohio, he’d also picked up a UHF station there, along with the rights to operate four others around the country, each to be assigned call letters reflecting the initials of his wife and children. With these and several dozen other independents he’d signed up as affiliates, he planned to start a fourth network. Through his rose-tinted glasses, he overlooked the experience of a man named DuMont, an early pioneer who’d been more focused on making technology and TV sets than on programming. His attempt at creating a network had failed, in large part, because it couldn’t keep up with those AT&T transmission costs.
With an evangelist’s zeal, Overmyer pledged to infuse $10 million to make this new network a success. Television critic Lawrence Laurent of the Washington Post syndicate observed that while the sum might seem lofty to the average Joe, it was, in reality, “but one blue chip in the poker game played by the TV networks.”
“The time has come for independent television,” Overmyer declared as he announced the creation of a fourth network, O.N. To bolster this claim, he cited several crucial developments:
One: The Federal Communications Commission had passed the All-Channel Receiver Bill, meaning new
television sets had to be equipped to receive UHF channels high on the dial.
Two: Color television was booming, meaning people were likely to upgrade to new sets soon.
Three: Technological improvements were allowing independent signals to beam more powerfully, meaning another boost of potential audience.
The flagship of the O.N. was to be a nightly two-hour variety show transmitted live from different Las Vegas casinos—ambitiously programmed against NBC’s blockbuster The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Well-known comedians Bob Newhart, Alan King, and Bob Crane had been signed to rotate as hosts.
Another slice of Overmyer’s cash was earmarked for United Press Newsfilm, enlisted to create a two-hour daily package of news materials. The would-be media mogul was tired of the “Casper Milquetoast news reporters” who proliferated on television. The opportunity to distribute UPI Newsfilm’s stories each day to the thirty-five Overmyer Network affiliates meant even more exposure for their work—even if the audience could never match that of the networks.
Optimistic though the would-be mogul might be, the majority of the nation was still reliant on television provided by the three networks, with a hundred million people a night tuned in to primetime. Three-quarters of the viewing public still couldn’t catch a UHF signal. Despite Overmyer’s ambition and investment, his stab at penetrating the holy trinity of broadcasting went belly-up after just a month. What ultimately squelched Overmyer’s grand intentions wasn’t the cost of talent, or paying for news, or the lack of audience and advertisers. It was the $6 million transmission bill from the phone company.
* * *
By June 1974, United Press Newsfilm had succumbed to defeat, too—and its assets, including Reese, were absorbed by another rich, wildly idealistic would-be media mogul, Joseph Coors, the Denver-based heir to a beer fortune and his generically named news service, Television News, or TVN. Seventy-two stations had signed up in the United States and Canada to receive an hour-long package of daily reports late each afternoon. Coors was rich enough that paying the exorbitant phone company transmission costs wouldn’t be an issue. Though the service was losing money, Coors optimistically hoped to expand what was now the only non-network source of national news film into an all-news channel.
