1968
Page 6
Dubek had thought the Dresden meeting would be an economic conference. Suddenly he felt on trial. One by one the other leaders, the Poles, the East Germans, accused him of failing to be in control of the Czechoslovakian situation. Dubek looked to his one ally, János Kádár of Hungary. The Nationalists back in Bratislava could have laughed at the spectacle of a Slovak turning for help to their old oppressor. Even Kádár attacked him. What seemed to most trouble everyone, and especially Brezhnev, was that the press was running wild, writing about whatever they wanted, completely out of the control of government. What the Soviet Union demanded of its satellite country leaders was first and foremost that they be in control. The press had actually played a role in Novotny´’s dismissal from the presidency and was still demanding he be expelled from the Central Committee and even the Party.
They were right. Even after Dresden, when Dubek first realized the extent to which he was upsetting the Soviet bloc, he was unable to rein in the press. Freedom for their own press as well as access to Western media was to the Czechoslovakian people of primary importance. There was no subject on which there was less room for compromise.
But there was no turning back. Czechoslovakia could no longer live in isolation. Suddenly Prague was watched, talked about, even seen on television in many lands, and what the Czechs and the Slovaks were doing in the beginning of 1968 sent shock waves through the entire communist world and attracted the attention of young people throughout the West. Suddenly a Prague student who had never seen the rest of the world, bearded and in Texasski jeans too stiff and too blue, felt part of a liberating world youth movement.
CHAPTER 3
A DREAD UNFURLING OF
THE BUSHY EYEBROW
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
—MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND QUENTIN FIORE,
The Medium Is the Massage, 1967
LIKE AN UNNOTICED TREE falling in the forest, if there is a march or a sit-in and it is not covered by the press, did it happen? From Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lewis to Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, there was wide disagreement on tactics within the civil rights movement, but they all agreed that an event needed to attract the news media. And it became obvious to the violent and nonviolent alike that violence and the rhetoric of violence were the most effective way to get coverage.
Mohandas K. Gandhi himself, the master of nonviolence who had inspired the movement, had understood this very well. He went to great trouble to try to get Indian, British, and American coverage of every event he organized, and he often spoke of the value of British violence in order to entice the media. It is the paradox of nonviolence. The protesters can be nonviolent, but they must evoke a violent reaction. If both sides are nonviolent, there is no story. Martin Luther King used to complain about this, but after he met a man named Laurie Pritchett, he understood that it was a reality.
Pritchett was the police chief in Albany, Georgia, in 1962 when Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference had singled out the town for a campaign of nonviolent resistance. The area in rural southwestern Georgia was infamous for segregation and had been the object of one of the first federal suits for voting rights under the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Little Albany, with seventy-five thousand people, about a third of whom were black, was the biggest population center in the area, and SNCC, with the encouragement of local blacks, decided to launch a voter registration drive there. The registration drive expanded to desegregation of public buildings, including the bus station, and Martin Luther King was brought in.
There were numerous encounters between the protesters and the law over several months, with mass arrests, including of King, but at no point did the polite, well-spoken sheriff use violence. Pritchett had been able to anticipate the protesters’ every move because he had informants from the Albany black community. Because there was no violence, King and the other leaders were never able to get Robert Kennedy and the Justice Department to intervene as they had in other places. Federal intervention makes a bigger story. Worse, reporters liked Pritchett. He was folksy and pleasant. He told them that he had studied Martin Luther King’s use of nonviolence and that he had adopted nonviolent law enforcement. King responded to criticism from civil rights activists who said he always remained safely removed from the action, by letting himself be arrested in Albany. But this forced him to cancel a valuable television appearance on Meet the Press, only to be personally released from jail by Pritchett himself, who said that “an unidentified Negro man” had paid bail and related fines. Many assumed that King’s father, a distinguished Atlanta figure sometimes called Daddy King, had gotten his son out. King could go to jail because his daddy would get him out. In truth, the wily Pritchett had simply released him.
The entire Albany campaign was a disaster. After Albany, the civil rights leaders learned to avoid the Pritchetts and target towns that had hotheaded police chiefs and angry, volatile mayors. “The movement had a really gut sense of what it took to get in the news and stay in the news,” said Gene Roberts, a North Carolina native who covered civil rights for The New York Times. During the 1965 march in Selma, Alabama, Martin Luther King noticed that a Life magazine photographer, Flip Schulke, had put down his cameras to help someone being beaten by police. Later King sought out the photographer and told him that they needed him not to help demonstrators, but to photograph them. He said, “Your role is to photograph what is happening to us.”
In 1965 in Selma, a heavy, middle-aged woman named Annie Lee Cooper hit the sheriff full force with a punch. This got the attention of photographers, who started clicking off pictures as three sheriffs took hold of the woman. She then dared the sheriff to hit her, and he swung his billy club around and struck her so hard on the head that reporters noted the sound. They also got the picture—Sheriff Clark swinging his billy club at a helpless woman. It ran on the front page of newspapers throughout the country. SNCC’s Mary King said, “The skillful use of the news media for public education is the modern equivalent of the ‘pen,’ and the pen is still mightier than the sword.”
As the civil rights movement became more media conscious, Martin Luther King became its star. He was the first civil rights leader to become a media star and consequently was far more famous and had far more immediate impact than his predecessors or contemporaries. Ralph Abernathy said, “We knew that we had developed into symbols.” King was often accused by people in the movement of stealing the spotlight, taking all the credit by taking all the bows. In truth, that was how the movement used him. He was seldom the innovator. But he was the eloquent speaker, the charismatic presence that made events work on television. He was a reluctant star, more at home in a church than at a demonstration or a press conference. He once said, “I am conscious of two Martin Luther Kings. I am a wonder to myself. . . . I am mystified by my own career. The Martin Luther King that the people talk about seems to me somebody foreign to me.”
After Albany, television became an integral part of every campaign strategy. Within King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Andrew Young served as the chief adviser on media, or at least on white-controlled media. He understood that to get on television every day, they had to provide daily messages that were short and dramatic, what are now called sound bites, and that these had to be accompanied by what television called “a good visual.” Young emphasized and King quickly grasped that the daily Martin Luther King statement should be no more than sixty seconds. Many SNCC activists thought King had gone too far, that he and his organization overused media. They believed that he was creating short-term news events, whereas they wanted to work more within southern society to create fundamental changes—a slow, off-camera process.
But the reality was that by 1968, the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, the antiwar movement, even Congress and conventional politics had become deeply involved with the question of how to get a televi
sion cameraman, in the words of then CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr, “to push the button.”
Two innovations in television technology completely changed broadcast news—videotape and direct satellite transmission. Both were developed in the 1960s, and though neither one came into full use until the 1970s, by 1968 they had already begun to change the way broadcast journalists thought. Videotape is inexpensive, can be reused, and does not have to be processed before broadcasting. In 1968 most television news was still shooting sixteen-millimeter black-and-white film, usually from cameras mounted on tripods, though there were also handheld cameras. Because the film was expensive and time-consuming to process, it could not be shot indiscriminately. The cameraman would set up and then wait for a signal from the correspondent. When the correspondent judged that the scene was becoming interesting—sometimes the cameraman would make the decision himself—he would give a signal, and the cameraman would push the button and start filming. “You could shoot ten minutes to get one minute,” said Schorr, “but you couldn’t shoot two hours.”
What became apparent to Schorr was that it was “a matter of decibels. . . . As soon as somebody raised his voice and said, ‘But how can you sit there and say so and so’—I would press the button, because television likes drama, television likes conflict, and anything that indicates conflict was a candidate for something that might get on the air—on the Cronkite show that evening, which was what we were all trying to do.”
The presence of cameras started to have a noticeable impact on civility in debates. Schorr recalled in covering the Senate, “They frequently raised their voice for no reason at all, just because they knew that it would get our attention by doing that.” But it was not only politicians in chambers that turned strident to get the button pushed. Abbie Hoffman understood how this worked, Stokely Carmichael understood it, and so did Martin Luther King. In 1968, after a decade of working with news media, King realized that he was losing the television competition. He complained to Schorr that television was encouraging black leaders to say the most violent and inflammatory things and had very little interest in his nonviolence. “When Negroes are incited to violence, will you think of your responsibility in helping to produce it?” King asked Schorr.
“Did I go on seeking menacing sound bites as my passport to the evening news?” Schorr asked himself in a moment of soul-searching. “I’m afraid I did.”
The other invention that was changing television was live satellite transmission. The first transmission from a satellite was the tape-recorded voice of President Dwight Eisenhower giving Christmas greetings on December 18, 1958. Early satellites, such as the “Early Bird,” were not geostationary—they did not maintain their position relative to the earth—and so could receive from any point on earth only at certain hours of the day. The satellite transmission of a major story required so many lucky coincidences that they rarely happened in the first few years. In those days, stories from Europe usually aired the next day in the States, after film could be flown in. The first story from Europe to be aired the same day on American television was not a satellite transmission. In 1961, when the Berlin Wall was first erected, the construction started so early in the day that with the time zone advantage, CBS was able to fly film to New York City in time for the evening news. President Kennedy complained that the half day it took to break the story on television had not allowed him enough time to formulate his response.
Fred Friendly, the head of CBS news, understood that satellites, with instant transmissions, would eventually become accessible from most places in the world at any time of day and that this awkward invention would one day change the nature not only of television news, but of news itself. In 1965, he wanted a live satellite broadcast from somewhere in the world on the Cronkite evening news, which came on at 7:00 P.M. New York City time. Looking for a place in the world that could send to Early Bird at seven New York City time, he found Berlin, which had been a major story for several years. Schorr was placed at the Berlin Wall, always a good visual, and it was—live! Schorr’s entreaties that nothing was happening at the Wall in the middle of the night were useless. He was missing the point. The point was that it would be live.
“So indeed, I stood there,” Schorr recounted. “This is the wall, behind here is where East Germany is, and all. And then, because we were there with lights on, you would hear dogs barking. Dogs started to bark and ‘you would hear dogs barking sometimes chasing some poor East German who was trying to escape. I don’t know that that is happening right now’—a lot of crap! But it was live.”
CBS even talked a court in Germany that was trying an accused Nazi into holding a session after midnight so that it could be carried live rather than filming the normal day session and playing it that night. The age of live television news had begun.
According to U.S. military spokesmen, the second week of 1968, the week of the president’s State of the Union address, marked a wartime record for the number of enemy soldiers killed in one week: 2,968. The previous record week had been the one ending March 25, 1967, in which only 2,783 enemy had been killed. The week also ended with Secretary of State Dean Rusk defending his foreign policy before a genial dinner audience of 1,500 in San Francisco as the police used clubs against 400 antiwar demonstrators outside. Three more American servicemen asked Sweden for political asylum on Friday, January 12. The previous Tuesday, 4 sailors had deserted the aircraft carrier Intrepid and were granted Swedish resident visas.
Race issues were also becoming more difficult. The shifting mood, already labeled “white backlash,” was in part a reaction to rising crime and to the fact that young people and their counterculture stars openly used forbidden drugs, but it was mostly a reaction to black riots in northern cities. In one of his both bizarre and typical moments of self-discovery, Norman Mailer in his 1968 book Miami and the Siege of Chicago—one of three Mailer books published that year—described waiting for a Ralph Abernathy press conference for which the civil rights leader was forty minutes late. “The reporter became aware of a peculiar emotion in himself, for he had not ever felt it consciously before”—only slightly more modest than Charles de Gaulle, Mailer often referred to himself in third person singular—“It was a simple emotion and very unpleasant to him—he was getting tired of Negroes and their rights.” But a more important revelation followed: “If he felt even a hint this way, then what immeasurable tides of rage must be loose in America?”
Originally, as most southerners sensed correctly, the civil rights movement fit comfortably into the prejudice most of the rest of the country felt toward the South. The movement seemed heroic when heading south and taking on drawling Neanderthals with names like Bull Connor. But in 1965, Martin Luther King began to champion the issue of “open housing” in northern cities. To most of white America, this was something different. They were not just trying to go to school and ride buses in Alabama, they were trying to move into our neighborhoods.
King and other leaders had also started devoting an increasing amount of time to opposing the war in Vietnam. By 1967, when King became an outspoken Vietnam War critic, he was the last major civil rights figure to do so. Most of the Congress of Racial Equality, CORE, and SNCC had turned antiwar in 1965 and 1966. Many of King’s advisers in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were reluctant to attack the government in time of war. In 1967 the Mobe and its leader David Dellinger, a World War II draft resister, made an all-out effort to bring King into the antiwar movement. Dellinger had also had advisers telling him that the antiwar movement was getting too involved with black leaders and it was alienating potential supporters of the antiwar cause. Many whites saw the involvement of black leaders as stepping outside the legitimate turf of a civil rights leader. Never mind the fact that only 11 percent of the population was black while 23 percent of the combat soldiers in Vietnam were. Blacks were now trying to dictate foreign policy. Heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, perhaps the one black figure who was even better than King at using
the media, had refused the draft, saying, “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong.” He was convicted of draft evasion, and a week after Johnson’s State of the Union speech, Ali’s appeal was rejected.
Ali had changed his name from Cassius Clay, which he said was a “slave name,” when he became a Black Muslim, in 1963. The Black Muslims, Black Power, and especially the increasingly visible Black Panthers, who advocated violence, robberies, and shoot-outs with the police, were frightening to white people. The flames in black ghettos the summer before had for many been the final blow. King said that Black Power advocates such as Stokely Carmichael provided white people with the excuse they needed. “Stokely is not the problem,” King said. “The problem is white people and their attitude.”
For the ruling Democrats, the response to urban violence was a growing threat. An aide to Vice President Hubert Humphrey told Time magazine, “Another summer of riots could really sink us next fall.” King opposed Johnson and had no loyalty to the Democrats, but he had more far-reaching fears of this so-called backlash. “We cannot stand two more summers like last summer without leading inevitably to a right-wing takeover and a fascist state,” King said.
On January 12, President Johnson gave his State of the Union address. Never before in history had the annual address received so much television coverage. Not only did all three networks and the new National Educational Television station, the forerunner of PBS, carry the speech, but all four set aside time after the address to have guests come on and discuss what had just been heard. CBS canceled Green Acres, He and She, and The Jonathan Winters Show for its unprecedented two and one half hours of coverage. NBC sacrificed a Kraft Music Hall special starring Alan King and Run for Your Life to give two hours of coverage. ABC postponed its drama Laura developed by Truman Capote as a star vehicle for Jackie Kennedy’s sister, Lee Bouvier Radziwell. For the analysis that preempted Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor, CBS had Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen. But the most extensive analysis was by NET, which had started the new trend by devoting more than three hours to the 1967 State of the Union address. For the 1968 speech, they put no time limit on their coverage, a concept unheard of in commercial television, and lined up such stars as Daniel Patrick Moynihan; Carl Stokes, the black mayor of Cleveland; and economist Milton Friedman.