Television: The Electronic Olympics

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NBC's newsmen produced one ten-pound peccadillo, and it came in the twelve-minute interlude between Senator Goldwater's acceptance speech and the formal end of the convention. Huntley said: "Senator Keating of New York seems to be leading the entire New York delegation in departing from the convention hall." CBS, at the same time, was accurately reporting the uneventful and orderly breakup of the crowd. Back on NBC, David Brinkley went on: "Three-fourths of the New York delegation has walked out." Outside the hall, Sander Vanocur then explained that Keating may have been miffed by Goldwater's line about " 'excess being no vice' "—misquoting Goldwater and misrepresenting Keating. Keating's press secretary later reported that the Senator was "stunned" at all this. He merely left when the speech was over, hoping to beat most of the crowd, which he did.

Character Sketches. Despite the ratings, the qualitative difference between NBC and CBS was actually quite slight. The convention, after all, was fully and exhaustively visible on all three networks. In the anchor booth, CBS tried a new vertical arrangement in contrast to the horizontal give-and-take of Huntley and Brinkley. CBS's congenial Walter Cronkite carried all the burden of coordinating CBS's coverage, while Eric Sevareid would appear every so often as a kind of deus ex machina and deliver auroral analyses uninhibited by routine details, or a shaft of wit, as when he recalled H. L. Mencken's description of a convention orator as coming from "a home for extinct volcanoes."

CBS was also best in coming up with offbeat sidebars, finding good material in unobvious quarters. Cartoonist Bill Mauldin, for example, put in some fine moments on CBS sketching the faces of Goldwater and Scranton, making comments on the characters of each as he felt them coming up through his pencil. He showed how Goldwater's glasses make him look better, whereas glasses on Scranton "kill him dead, make him look like an English teacher." CBS also scored what amounted to a news beat when Cronkite was the first to get Governor Scranton to say that he had not read his catastrophic letter before it was sent to Goldwater.

By Turtle. ABC announced the same revelation an hour later, and that fairly well suggests the quality of ABC's coverage of the convention. Viewers who stayed with ABC long enough would sooner or later find out all that was important, but the breaking news apparently was sent by box turtle to ABC Anchor Men Howard Smith and Edward Morgan. Yet ABC is attempting for the first time to compete at par with the other two networks, is spending $7,000,000 on its election coverage, including $50,000 for the services of Dwight D. Eisenhower as an exclusive ABC commentator.

Ike should never have accepted. He was too much a figure in the convention—at least a potential one—to be a paid hand of a TV network. ABC got little for its $50,000, as Ike put in his duty time saying nothing and saying it gently, in conversation with his exPress Secretary James Hagerty, who is now an ABC vice president.