Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (109 page)

Now, how will these principles be applied? Clearly, at the heart of the FCC’s authority lies its power to license, to renew or fail to renew, or to revoke a license. As you know, when your license comes up for renewal, your performance is compared with your promises. I understand that many people feel that in the past licenses were often renewed pro forma. I say to you now, Renewal will not be pro forma in the future. There is nothing permanent or sacred about a broadcast license.

But simply matching promises and performance is not enough. I intend to do more. I intend to find out whether the people care. I intend to find out whether the community which each broadcaster serves believes he has been serving the public interest. When a renewal is set down for hearing, I intend—wherever possible—to hold a well-advertised public hearing, right in the community you have promised to serve. I want the people who own the air and the homes that television enters to tell you and the FCC what’s been going on. I want the people—if they are truly interested in the service you give them—to make notes, document cases, tell us the facts. For those few of you who really believe that the public interest is merely what interests the public—I hope that these hearings will arouse no little interest.

The FCC has a fine reserve of monitors—almost 180 million Americans gathered around 56 million sets. If you want those monitors to be your friends at court—it’s up to you.

Some of you may say, “Yes, but I still do not know where the line is between a grant of a renewal and the hearing you just spoke of.” My answer is, Why should you want to know how close you can come to the edge of the cliff? What the commission asks of you is to make a conscientious good-faith effort to serve the public interest. Every one of you
serves a community in which the people would benefit by educational, religious, instructive, or other public service programming. Every one of you serves an area, which has local needs—as to local elections, controversial issues, local news, local talent. Make a serious, genuine effort to put on that programming. When you do, you will not be playing brinkmanship with the public interest….

Another, and perhaps the most important, frontier: television will rapidly join the parade into space. International television will be with us soon. No one knows how long it will be until a broadcast from a studio in New York will be viewed in India as well as in Indiana, will be seen in the Congo as it is seen in Chicago. But as surely as we are meeting here today, that day will come—and once again our world will shrink.

What will the people of other countries think of us when they see our western badmen and good men punching each other in the jaw in between the shooting? What will the Latin American or African child learn of America from our great communications industry? We cannot permit television in its present form to be our voice overseas.

There is your challenge to leadership. You must reexamine some fundamentals of your industry. You must open your minds and open your hearts to the limitless horizons of tomorrow.

I can suggest some words that should serve to guide you:

These words are not mine. They are yours. They are taken literally from your own Television Code. They reflect the leadership and aspirations of your own great industry. I urge you to respect them as I do. And I urge you to respect the intelligent and farsighted leadership of Governor LeRoy Collins and to make this meeting a creative act. I urge
you at this meeting and, after you leave, back home, at your stations and your networks, to strive ceaselessly to improve your product and to better serve your viewers, the American people.

I hope that we at the FCC will not allow ourselves to become so bogged down in the mountain of papers, hearings, memoranda, orders, and the daily routine that we close our eyes to the wider view of the public interest. And I hope that you broadcasters will not permit yourselves to become so absorbed in the chase for ratings, sales, and profits that you lose this wider view. Now more than ever before in broadcasting’s history, the times demand the best of all of us.

We need imagination in programming, not sterility; creativity, not imitation; experimentation, not conformity; excellence, not mediocrity. Television is filled with creative, imaginative people. You must strive to set them free.

Television in its young life has had many hours of greatness—its “Victory at Sea,” its Army-McCarthy hearings, its “Peter Pan,” its “Kraft Theater,” its “See It Now,” its “Project 20,” the World Series, its political conventions and campaigns, the Great Debates—and it has had its endless hours of mediocrity and its moments of public disgrace. There are estimates that today the average viewer spends about two hundred minutes daily with television, while the average reader spends thirty-eight minutes with magazines and forty minutes with newspapers. Television has grown faster than a teenager, and now it is time to grow up.

What you gentlemen broadcast through the people’s air affects the people’s taste, their knowledge, their opinions, their understanding of themselves and of their world. And their future.

The power of instantaneous sight and sound is without precedent in mankind’s history. This is an awesome power. It has limitless capabilities for good—and for evil. And it carries with it awesome responsibilities—responsibilities which you and I cannot escape.

In his stirring inaugural address, our president said, “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”

Ladies and gentlemen:

Ask not what broadcasting can do for you—ask what you can do for broadcasting.

I urge you to put the people’s airwaves to the service of the people and the cause of freedom. You must help prepare a generation for great decisions. You must help a great nation fulfill its future.

Do this, and I pledge you our help.

When the Republican presidential nominee Richard M. Nixon chose Governor Spiro T. Agnew of Maryland, a moderate Republican, to be his running mate in 1968, he had in mind a steady politician who could deliver a fair speech and not cause too much controversy. That was not how it worked out.

During the campaign, “Spiro Who?” was laughed at by reporters for his gaffes (“You’ve seen one slum and you’ve seen ’em all”) and reviled for ethnic insensitivity (“How’s the ‘Fat Jap’?”), causing him to counter with “I’m a Greek—excuse me, I’m Grecian.” The vice-presidential nominee developed a burning dislike for most members of what he called “the elite press.”

So did Patrick J. Buchanan, a young Nixon speechwriter who supervised the daily news summary and bridled at the barbs aimed at the administration. He was especially angered at the “instant analysis” after the president’s November 3, 1969, “silent majority” speech, and drafted a speech for delivery by the vice-president at a Republican gathering in Des Moines, Iowa. When Mr. Nixon reviewed the draft, he made a couple of minor emendations and said to Buchanan, “This really flicks the scab off, doesn’t it?”

It really did. The political target became the huntsman; Mr. Agnew read the speech—all the more biting because of its reasoned tone—with relish. Suddenly speechmaking became an event again; network news executives, to show fairness, felt constrained to cover Mr. Agnew’s criticism of themselves, and the Buchanan-Agnew antimedia message—soon followed up with a blast at “an effete corps of impudent snobs” at our nation’s most prestigious schools—struck a chord of resentment in much of the public.

The following year, Ted Agnew became the Nixon “point man” in the midterm political campaign, flaying “radic-libs” (a not too subtle play on “comsymps”) across the country. Most 1970 Republican candidates welcomed
the “red meat” in the Agnew speeches, which were written by Buchanan, Bryce Harlow, and me; one who did not was George Bush, running for the Senate in Texas as a moderate. He spurned the Agnew right-wing rhetoric and lost to Lloyd Bentsen.

I contributed the “nattering nabobs of negativism” alliteration to an Agnew speech in San Diego, a dig at pessimists that was inspired by Adlai Stevenson’s “prophets of gloom and doom.” But none of the carefully crafted, sociopolitical speeches of Agnew matched the impact of the Des Moines speech; for at least a generation, he killed “instant analysis.”

In 1973, with the presidency all but in his grasp as the Watergate scandal began to unfold, Agnew pleaded no contest to corruption charges and copped a plea by resigning his vice-presidency. His disgrace as a pol on the take cast a cloud over his message for years, but some of the themes in his speeches (anti-drug culture, anti-elitism, resentment toward Washington establishments, all clothed in unabashed or strident patriotism) were later taken up by political speakers in both parties.

***

TONIGHT I WANT
to discuss the importance of the television news medium to the American people. No nation depends more on the intelligent judgment of its citizens. No medium has a more profound influence over public opinion. Nowhere in our system are there fewer checks on vast power. So nowhere should there be more conscientious responsibility exercised than by the news media. The question is, Are we demanding enough of our television news presentations? And, are the men of this medium demanding enough of themselves?

Monday night, a week ago, President Nixon delivered the most important address of his administration, one of the most important of our decade. His subject was Vietnam. His hope was to rally the American people to see the conflict through to a lasting and just peace in the Pacific. For thirty-two minutes, he reasoned with a nation that has suffered almost a third of a million casualties in the longest war in its history.

When the president completed his address—an address that he spent weeks in preparing—his words and policies were subjected to instant analysis and querulous criticism. The audience of seventy million Americans—gathered to hear the president of the United States—was inherited by a small band of network commentators and self-appointed analysts, the
majority
of whom expressed, in one way or another, their hostility to what he had to say.

It was obvious that their minds were made up in advance. Those who recall the fumbling and groping that followed President Johnson’s dramatic disclosure of his intention not to seek reelection have seen these men in a genuine state of nonpreparedness. This was not it.

One commentator twice contradicted the president’s statement about the exchange of correspondence with Ho Chi Minh. Another challenged the president’s abilities as a politician. A third asserted that the president was now “following the Pentagon line.” Others, by the expressions on their faces, the tone of their questions. and the sarcasm of their responses, made clear their sharp disapproval….

Every American has a right to disagree with the president of the United States, and to express publicly that disagreement.

But the president of the United States has a right to communicate directly with the people who elected him, and the people of this country have the right to make up their own minds and form their own opinions about a presidential address without having the president’s words and thoughts characterized through the prejudices of hostile critics before they can even be digested. When Winston Churchill rallied public opinion to stay the course against Hitler’s Germany, he did not have to contend with a gaggle of commentators raising doubts about whether he was reading public opinion right, or whether Britain had the stamina to see the war through. When President Kennedy rallied the nation in the Cuban missile crisis, his address to the people was not chewed over by a roundtable of critics who disparaged the course of action he had asked America to follow.

The purpose of my remarks tonight is to focus your attention on this little group of men who not only enjoy a right of instant rebuttal to every presidential address but, more importantly, wield a free hand in selecting, presenting, and interpreting the great issues of our nation.

First, let us define that power. At least forty million Americans each night, it is estimated, watch the network news. Seven million of them view ABC; the remainder being divided between NBC and CBS. According to Harris polls and other studies, for millions of Americans the networks are the sole source of national and world news.

In Will Rogers’s observation, what you knew was what you read in the newspaper. Today, for growing millions of Americans, it is what they see and hear on their television sets.

How is this network news determined? A small group of men, numbering perhaps no more than a dozen “anchormen,” commentators, and executive producers, settle upon the 20 minutes or so of film and commentary that is to reach the public. This selection is made from the 90 to
180 minutes that may be available. Their powers of choice are broad. They decide what forty to fifty million Americans will learn of the day’s events in the nation and the world.

We cannot measure this power and influence by traditional democratic standards, for these men can create national issues overnight. They can make or break—by their coverage and commentary—a moratorium on the war. They can elevate men from local obscurity to national prominence within a week. They can reward some politicians with national exposure and ignore others. For millions of Americans, the network reporter who covers a continuing issue, like ABM or civil rights, becomes, in effect, the presiding judge in a national trial by jury.