The Press: A Week of Grievances

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The response of most newsmen was to strike back by giving the Chicago police—and in many cases the city and the Democratic Convention as well—a verbal thrashing. CBS took almost grim delight in replaying in slow motion the decking of Dan Rather, somewhat as if he were Sonny Listen going down for the count. Several TV reporters protested that they were being shadowed by security forces, and NBC's Sander Vanocur at one point told his anchor booth and all America: "We can't work with these gumshoes over our shoulders." Before long, TV men were taking considerable time on the air just venting their grievances, coloring the whole proceedings with a tinge of anger. Disgusted by the whole spectacle, CBS's Eric Sevareid went so far as to call the session of the presidential balloting "the most disgraceful night in American political history."

Same Sail maker. Despite the harassment and the understandable pique, however, the stamina of the TV newsmen was impressive. NBC's John Chancellor and Edwin Newman, in particular, demonstrated a mastery of the art of extracting information from wary sources in the midst of bedlam. But if doggedness and improvisation were the newsmen's virtues, they sometimes became their vices too. In the inexhaustible air time to be filled, TV reporters kited and killed rumors with seeming abandon. If word got out that a Massachusetts alternate knew a fellow back home who used the same sailmaker as Ted Kennedy, the man would immediately be interviewed by men from every network. The networks often left the podium during a speech because a floor reporter had managed to collar a delegation chairman whose views might be more interesting than the speaker's (at times, they simply were not). NBC delayed showing Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes' seconding speech for Hubert Humphrey to show a video-taped riot scene that had taken place more than an hour before.

While the press contended with convention restrictions and police, an equally contentious scene took place on ABC which continued its practice of running a 90-min. summary except for the last two days. Commentators William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal made Mayor Daley and his cohorts look like amateurs in invective. To Vidal's accusation that he was "a crypto-Nazi," Buckley replied: "Listen you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in your goddam face and you'll stay plastered. Let the author of Myra Breckinridge go back to his pornography and stop making any allusions of Nazism to somebody who was infantry in the last war." Vidal: "You were not in the infantry."

Smart Rap. In all the week's fracas, some part-time journalists not usually noted for their diffidence managed to stay inconspicuous. David Merrick was on hand to record some acerbic impressions for the Washington Post. Candice Bergen was getting the swinging woman's point of view for Cosmopolitan. Elia Kazan quietly rounded up information for New York Magazine. The one journalist-celebrity who did get in trouble with the fuzz would seem to be the least likely to do so, if only because he rarely ventures forth into the outside world: Playboy Editor-Publisher Hugh Hefner.