"Our
nation
mourns
the
death of Prime Minister
Lal
Bahadur
Shastri
of
India.
As the leader of the world's largest
democracy,
he had
already gained a special place in
American
tragic
loss,
discussions a
hearts. after at
grievous
This fruitful
Tashkent, blow
to
is the
hopes of mankind for peace and progress. "Prime
Minister
in only nineteen
Shastri, months
office, proved a fitting cessor
to Pandit
holding
aloft
Nehru
the
in sucby
highest
ideals of Indian democracy. His
modesty
in high office
did not conceal his strength and wisdom as the recognized leader of his people. "The place
world is a smaller without him and our
hearts go out to his family and to the people of India." -LYNDON
B.
JOHNSON
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
MOVIE STARS: TODAY AND TOMORROW by Richard Schickel
A FAMILY'S GLORY AND AGONY by Evan McLeod Wylie
WALTER BURLEY GRIFFIN: CITY PLANNER
ARCHITECT AND
by Dr. Mark L. Peisch
DESTINATION: THE MOON by William E. Howard
TELEVISION'S MIGHTY IMPACT by Sprague Vanier
THE ONE-TON PENCIL by Thomas Whiteside
TELEVISION FOR DELHI SCHOOLS by Amita Lall
FRONT COVER: Prime Minister Shastri's deep interest in rapid development of the country's resources took him to many new projects such as the thermal power station at Dhuvaran dedicated by him March 6, 1965. COVER: Paying a last, silent tribute to Prime Minister Shastri's memory, as they stand before the urns containing his ashes, are U.S. Ambassador Chester Bowles, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Mrs. Bowles.
BACK
WILLIAMD. MILLER,Publisher; DEAN BROWN,Editor; V. S. NANDA, Mg. Editor. EDITORIALSTAFF: Carmen Kagal, Avinash Pasriclla, Nirmal K. Sharma, K. G. Gabrani. ART STAFF:B. Roy Choudhury, Nand K. Katyal. Photographic Services: USIS Photo Laboratory. Production Manager: Awtar S. Marwaha. Assistant Production Manager: Mammen Philip. Published by the United States Information Service, BahawaJpur House, Sikandra Road, New Delhi-I, on behalf of The American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed by Arun K. Mehta at Vakil & Sons Pvt. Ltd., Narandas Building, Sprott Road, 18 Ballard Estate, Bombay-I.
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As the Prime Minister's body arrived in Delhi, U.S. delegation below, including Vice President Humphrey (left) and Secretary Rusk( centre) flew to India, was met by Food and Agriculture Minister C. Subramaniam (right).
THE WORLD IS A SMALLER PLACE "The death of Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri will be felt not only by the Indian people," U.S. Ambassador Chester Bowles said, "but by the people of the world." As people everywhere mourned, final rites for the leader of the world's largest democracy were held in New Delhi. Dignitaries came from around the world. Four distinguished Americans chosen as his personal representatives by President Johnson-Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and two former ambassadors to India, Senator John Sherman Cooper and Professor John Kenneth Galbraithbrought the condolences of the President and the sympathy of the American people.
"Our greatest sympathy is with you and the family," Secretary Rusk told Mrs. Lalita Shastri, widow of the Prime Minister. Earlier, Mr. Rusk had accompanied Vice President Humphrey, Ambassador Bowles and other members of the American delegation as they called on the Shastri family, below.
"I bring to this mourning nation the tears, the anguish and the grief of the American people to mingle and blend with your own. "Twice in two years it has been the sorrowful fate of the Indian people and the world of reason to lose a great man of peace. "We know intimately the depth of your sorrow. We know the pain and the sadness that visits the hearts of a people when the man they have chosen to lead them is taken from them in tragic and untimely death. We in America understand this special kind of grief, because it has come to us in our time."-from Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey's remarks at the condolence meeting for the late Prime Minister, January 12, 1966.
MOVIE STARS: TODAY AND TOMORROW A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Richard Schickel is author of The Stars and has written on the fine arts for LOOK and other U.S. magazines.
The current trend III American films IS away from the old breed of Hollywood hero. Analysing this trend in the following article, the author of The Stars also speculates about the future. OR SOME FORTY years the movie star has stood at the centre of the American motion picture industry. Hollywood movies have, to a considerable extent, been highly stylized attempts to illuminate the character and characteristics of certain star personalities, the most famous and successful of whom are in truth archetypal Americans, representatives of those virtues we most highly prize. The system which produced these archetypes was founded almost accidentally. When the American film business reached industry status, just before World War I, audiences began singling out anonymous actors in the little films they were becoming addicted to, demanding to see more of them. Within a few years, Hollywood was granting million-dollar contracts to people like Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charles Chaplin-all of whom had an almost mystic attraction for the great public. The history of Hollywood since, roughly, 1920, can be written largely as a continuing search for such personalities. Today, on every hand, America's movie critics report that the star system is on its way out. The deaths of stars like Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, and Humphrey Bogart and the failure of Hollywood to find replacements for them are offered as evidence. Many observers believe that an increasingly sophisticated public is now more interested in film content than in film personalities. It is a simple fact that there are fewer stars in Hollywood now because there is no longer any need for great numbers of them. The American motion picture industry is producing no more than a third to a half the number of films it made in the lush days before television,
P
and a host of other new amusements (including excellent films from abroad), captured close to one-half of its old domestic audience. In the old days a producer merely popped a new player into one of the dozens of pictures currently in production on his lot, then sat back to see which actors in which accidentally chosen roles the public would like. This star-making system (which was, of course, no system at all) worked as long as Hollywood was set up on a production-line basis, grinding out as many as 500 films a year. But the kind of exposure, the build-up, it offered a potential star is no longer available. The average actor today is lucky to get a single picture to do in a year. A more fundamental reason for Hollywood's failure to find replacements for the older generation of movie stars is less clear cut. It has to do with a change in the character of American life in the postwar era, and it is most obviously seen in the lack of new leading men cast in the heroic mould of the great stars of the 1930's and 1940's. Such full-scale heroism as the American screen continues to offer is almost exclusively the province of two groups of older players. The first of these are stars who came to prominence during the 1930's. .Among them are the incomparable Spencer Tracy, no longer a leading man, but still a great star, and the miraculously ageless Cary Grant, still, in effect, playing¡ debonair romantic roles at an age when he could well be a grandfather. Then there are such honest rustics as John Wayne, Henry Fonda and James Stewart who offer, for the most part, variations on the Western cowboy who found his quintessential incarnation in the work of the late Gary Cooper, and who
Always triumphantly himself, John Wayne's speciality is playing Western heroes, the most consistently admired of all American characters.
Remarkably handsome and quiet-spoken, Gregory Peck has scaled the heights of stardom in many sensitive and outstanding performances.
CONTINUED
Academy Award winner Sidney Poitier is a brilliant young American Negro actor with a style that is spontaneous, intense and sensitive. Restless bUlself-confident, Paul Newman, another young actor, has been co-starred with Elizabeth Taylor, called Hollywood's "love goddess."
is the most unchanging, most constantly admired of all American screen archetypes. Wayne is always triumphantly himself from first to last, a solid, almost indigestible hunk of male who, refusing to yield to the situation, forces it to yield to him. Henry Fonda has not sacrificed the simplicity and rock-ribbed integrity of his earlier characterizations, which include the title role in The Young Lincoln and the conscientious juror of Twelve Angry Men. But in recent years he has added, when the occasion demanded, an air of ease and sophistication which is most appealing and which better fits the mood of a country for which the rural environment is an increasingly remote memory. Thus in Advise and Consent he was the liberal, cultivated statesman proposed by the President to fill the office of Secretary of State. James Stewart started his career in movies as a gangling, easily bemused country boy who brought an innocent idealism with him when he ventured into the city. In his cowboy roles, however, he has acquired toughness and cynicism (e.g., Winchester 73), while as a crusading reporter in Northside 777 and a shrewd lawyer in Anatomy of a Murder he has shown an unsuspected worldliness. This, of course, by no means completes the catalogue of film players whose careers have extended over the past thirty years. James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson continue to be active, hard-talking, surprisingly bouncy, urban anti-heroes; while among the ladies, Bette Davis's incredibly nervous, slightly neurotic presence still dominates any film in which she appears, and Joan Crawford, Katherine Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman, all actresses of greater-than-usual emotional depth, remain intermittently before the public. There is no doubt, however, that the older stars who really dominate the American screen today are the leading men who came to prominence in the 1940's and early 1950's-the "middle generation." Gregory Peck, in his first film role as a priest in The Keys of the Kingdom, established his ability to play the thoughtful, troubled man of integrity. Quiet-spoken, sincere, remarkably handsome and remarkably strong in appearance, he has specialized in playing lawyers, writers, business-men-solid citizens suddenly placed under heavy moral pressure. Years of skilful portrayal of this type at long last won him an Academy Award in 1962 for his performance as an embattled lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird. Robert Mitchum, sleepily cynical, capable of portraying with chilling accuracy various sorts of violent psychotics (Cape Fear, The Night of the Hunter), weathered a good deal of criticism evoked by a rather wild young manhood and continues to assert his highly individual personality in a wide variety of roles. John Huston, the director, has said that he is the best screen actor now working in America. William Holden, who came to the screen as the prize-fighter Golden Boy before World War II, had a sputtery postwar career and was just another handsome profile until Sunset Boulevard, in 1950, gave him a chance to playa charming, weak confidence man. He won an Academy Award in 1953 for a stronger, more flippant portrayal of the type as a war prisoner in Stalag 17. Even when he is playing a straight hero, there is a bravado, a devil-may-care quality about his work that sets it apart from ordinary screen heroics. Starting as a popular singer, Frank Sinatra rescued a fading career with a brilliant performance, a decade ago, in From Here to Eternity, based on James Jones's powerful novel about the peacetime army in Hawaii just before the attack on Pearl Harbour. He won an Academy Award-as the best supporting actor of 1953-and a new, wider public, as the tough, cocky, warm-hearted Maggio, a character apparently very close to Sinatra's own personality. Sinatra has continued playing the role ever since-but with a verve, energy and appeal that are extraordinarily effective. The lesson is clear: Sinatra has been at pains to be himself, and a great many Americans obviously believe that that self sums up something of the spirit of his times. To Americans, the meaning of freedom includes room to manoeuvre, to get ahead on your own if you have the nerve
and energy to do so. Both in his screen characterizations and in his shrewdly managed comeback career, Sinatra has proved that this idea still has validity. These stars seem to this observer to be the most interesting of the "middle generation." There are others who are equally successful, and whose status with the great audience is high-Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Richard Widmark, Yul Brynner, Anthony Quinn. But all of these stars suffer from one of two defects. Some of themHolden, Lancaster, Douglas, Peck, for example-are a little too diffuse in their appeal. There is not quite enough quirkiness to their screen personalities, not quite enough of those little mannerisms which humanize the symbol. They are popular, and they will remain so, but it is hard to believe that they will ever be quite such transcendent stars as Gable, Bogart and Cooper. On the other hand, Quinn, Mitchum, Brynner and Widmark are a little too special in their appeals-too individual in their manner ever to cut across all the subdivisions of the great audience and be universally popular. Perhaps only Sinatra of the middle generation succeeds both as symbol and as human personality. There is a still younger group of stars-men in their thirtieswho despite Hollywood's decline have managed to carve out respectable careers for themselves. This group of players causes great unease. They seem to be popular, many have turned in excellent performances. And yet there is a wide range of objections to them. Charleton Heston, a remarkably granitic figure on the modern screen, is regarded mainly as just another handsome face, virtually indistinguishable from the expensive, expansive scenery of the superscreen epics (Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments) he normally inhabits. Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis are objected to because they have not the slightest pretence to artfulness. There is very little, I think, to be said in Heston's defence, but if one is willing to approach Hudson and Curtis without attitudes, as do the youngsters who form the nucleus of their audience, there are pleasures to be gained from their presence. Hudson's very slowness of wit, contrasted with his remarkable handsomeness, makes him an interestingly befuddled farceur, and he has lately found his metier in a series of frothy, innocently sexy comedies (Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back). Curtis is a tremendously energetic performer, capable of dominating a scene merely by entering it, a gift vouchsafed very few postwar stars. He has proved himself in dramatic roles (Sweet Smell of Success, The Defiant Ones) as well as comedies (The Great Imposter). But the newer male screen stars who have aroused most controversy are the "anti-heroes," descendants but not imitators of Bogart and the other surly types who arrived in the 1930's. They are brooding, inwardly troubled, seemingly inarticulate. They are absolutely incapable of that sunny openness, that simplicity of motivation and response which many Americans like to think of as most typical in the American personality. Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift were the great pioneers of this new style, but there were plenty to follow them-the late James Dean, Anthony Perkins, and, currently, a number of youthful newcomers. There are important similarities between Brando and Clift. Both began as more than usually serious stage actors. Both have been rather reluctant Hollywood stars, working only when the spirit moves them and when the part they are to play seems irresistible. Both have publicly declared that acting is among the least important human endeavours and both have said they would be glad to give up their careers as stars -Brando to direct, Clift perhaps merely to enjoy the pleasures of leisure. There are, however, important differences between them. Clift's apprenticeship, both as stage actor and movie star, was longer than Brando's. Brando leapt to the top of both fields on the basis of one performance-that of the brutish Stanley in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. Clift was a stage juvenile for many years. It took three films to establish him as a trend-setting movie star-
The Search, a moving little film about displaced children in Europe; Red River, a Western saga in which he and John Wayne (Wayne representing the old Hollywood and Clift the new) staged an epochal brawl; and finally The Heiress, in which he played an oddly sensitive fortune hunter. Brando and Clift have also taken differing routes towards their characterizations. The former has a crude, almost animal force-and the principal interest of his films lies in the process by which this force is controlled and civilized. Clift works from the opposite end of the emotional spectrum. His insecurity and shyness seem to stem from an excess of sensibility. The drama of his films lies in the manner in which he is forced from his shell and attains man's status. Among the younger actors of this breed, James Dean (in Rebel Without A Cause and East of Eden) was in the Brando tradition, while Anthony Perkins (in Psycho and The Trial) follows that established by Clift. Whatever the individual differences in the styles of these actors, there can be no question that their screen characters are radically different from those presented by previous heroes. Many adult moviegoers resent them. But the younger movie audience (an audience which has become the most important one) virtually demanded a representation on the screen of actors who reflected its own new needs and values. The reason for this demand seems clear enough. To Americans growing up since 1945, the areas where crude, direct action was a suitable form of self-assertion were increasingly few. The chief problem for youth was one of individual identity or self-knowledge and how to achieve it in an increasingly institutionalized world. This was the era of committees and group decisions, and there seemed to be precious few places where the individual could feel that he was truly in charge of his own destiny. It is the business of the new breed of stars to show us how we can CONTINUED
Montgomery Clift (left) has pioneered the new band of "anti-heroes." Frank Sinatra, once a popular singer, has achieved fame as an actor.
Hollywood has yet to discover rebellious, unconventional female stars, counterparts
still make things happen, even though it is no longer possible simply to strap on a gun and go out looking for the villain as the old-fashioned Western hero did. Each of them first shows us the process by which he determines what is right and what is wrong, not in general, but for him, the individual, in particular. Only when this agonizing process is finished can he proceed to the traditional business of the movie hero -which is the righting of wrongs. The traditional American hero communicated little of this experience of personal judgment. In an unambiguous world, right and wrong were given factors-established and agreed upon before the movie began. Now, it seems, we must deal with the process by which these truths are re-established for "the rebel without a cause," the young man who is vaguely dissatisfied with the world as he finds it, but has terrible trouble in being specific about what is wrong with it. Thus we have Brando painfully acquiring the knowledge that violence is wrong (as a defiant black-jacketed motorcycle rider in The Wild One), that racial prejudice is wrong (as an American officer in postwar Japan in Sayonara), that revenge is a debasing ambition (as a young outlaw betrayed by his comrade in One-Eyed Jacks), that brutality based on class distinctions is wrong (as an English naval officer in Mutiny on the Bounty). Older Americans are troubled by this. Why can't the young man know all this in his bones? Why must he take such pains to discover the obvious? Seeing him scowl, scratch and brood, they long for the solid strength of their old favourites. But they miss a vital point: that a society which questions everything is much healthier than one which questions nothing. These troubled young men have managed to make some remarkably strong statements against cant, hypocrisy and the conventional wisdom. Most important of all, when the agonizing is done they always end up on the side of personal freedom and personal dignity. They may begin their films as rebels without causes, but they inevitably and invariably end up as disciples of the best cause in the world-the right An energetic and able performer, Tony Curtis has the capacity to dominate a scene. Natalie Wood is impressive as a rebel against convention.
to anti-heroes.
of every man to decide important issues for himself. Curiously, Hollywood has discovered no feminine counterpart to the anti-heroes. It has always been true that the male movie stars have carried the heaviest mythic burden in American films. It has been the function of the female mainly to be decorative in one of two ways: as an innocent maiden or a more or less sophisticated "love goddess." These two main streams of femininity have continued to flow, with certain marked changes, in the postwar films. No actress, with the possible exception of Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause and Splendour in the Grass has given us a vision of youthful feminine rebellion against convention comparable to that of the men just discussed. In the postwar years, the innocent has found her most popular incarnation in the screen personality of the popular singer Doris Day. Cute, sweet, downright, she has provided an idealized vision of "the girl who lives next door," a character Americans continue to cherish with undiminished fervour. One may venture the generalization that the more innocent idealism there is in a screen star's public personality, and the less there is of overt sensuality, the greater the star's chance for a lengthy career. At any rate, Miss Day, after twenty years, is still a leading ingenue. Elizabeth Taylor made the rare transition from an innocent and beautiful child actress to a Jove goddess, perhaps the last of that genre. Her mature roles, like her crisis-filled life, were a curious compound of legend and unreality. Tn the title role of Cleopatra, she returned to the older image of the love goddess who is beyond the limits of common mortality. One need only look at the women who have reigned as America's "love goddesses" since the end of the war to see how quickly the sensualists have faded. Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Marilyn Monroe, all had short careers at the top. Most of the female stars who have risen to prominence in the 1950's have avoided depending on sheer erotic appeal for success. When Miss Monroe died in 1962, a European critic commented: "The American cinema is now left with only the smile of Audrey Hepburn." He exaggerated, but he did have a point. Miss Hepburn may be a limited performer, but there is no more delightful actress on the screen today. She is winsome, child-like, innocent, but eager for initiation into the rites of romance. Many of her films (Love in the Afternoon, Sabrina, Roman Holiday, even War and Peace, in which she played Natasha) tend to be fairy tales, dramatizing over and over again the process by which a child becomes a woman. They should be erotic, but they are, in fact, terribly pure, terribly charming. Another kind of blend of feminine purity and eroticism is the seemingly chilly, seemingly haughty woman whose defensive manner disguises a heart of surprising passion. Deborah Kerr and Grace Kelly, until she left the screen to reign over Monaco, have been the principal postwar delineators of this type. Miss Kerr came from English films to Hollywood where, in a series of movies like The Hucksters, an attack on the advertising profession, she played only the coldness of the high-born woman. But with From Here to Eternity, acting the role of an army officer's aloof wife, she ripped the mask off, exposing the fact that the coolness was the result of old wounds. She had been hurt by men, and this was her defence against further mistreatment. From there on, in such films as Tea and Sympathy, The Sundowners and Night of the Iguana, her screen personality took on a warmth and excitement which had been lacking before. Miss Kelly, the daughter of a wealthy family who began her career as a model and television actress, came to the screen offering not much more than an icy perfection of looks. But in The Country Girl, as the unhappy but loyal wife of an alcoholic actor, she too showed that coolness was only a mask to hide her hurts. This type of mature, complicated heroine represented a major step in the direction of honest realism and away from the exaggerated love goddesses and innocents of Hollywood's earlier days.
But what of the players who should become the stars of tomorrow? Hollywood has recruited many younger performers, a number of whom possess the old-fashioned excitement and energy which are the raw materials of stardom. Jack Lemmon, with his innocent boyish face and sure comic touch, stands on the brink of major stardom. In Mister Roberts, The Apartment and Days of Wine and Roses, he has shown rare ability to convert inner confusion and insecurity into a comic-pathetic comment on life as a low-echelon executive. Sidney Poi tier, the most brilliant young Negro actor on the American screen, has revealed in films like The Defiant Ones, Porgy and Bess, Raisin in the Sun and Lilies of the Field an increasingly spontaneous, intense and sensitive style. For his performance in the last-mentioned film he won the 1964 Academy Award for "best actor of the year." Paul Newman acts in the restless, belligerent tradition of Marlon Brando. But he adds a hard, smiling assurance, a commitment to his own instinctual feelings, in such films as The Hustler, Hud and The Long Hot Summer. The last based on a story by William Faulkner. George C. Scott, a first-rate villain in films like Anatomy of a Murder and The Hustler, has a kind of cold deadliness about him which moviegoers have not seen since Humphrey Bogart first appeared on the screen. Another young actor-who has gained most of his reputation on the stage-could develop into the man you love to hate: George Grizzard, a slicker, smoother presence than Scott. His good looks add a particular deliciousness to the implicit touch of evil he has brought to Advise and Consent and From the Terrace. Finally, Steve McQueen, a rugged, homespun type, has a rare ability to edge his casual heroics with a soupcon of self-depreciating humour, as in The Magnificent Seven, The War Lover and The Great Escape, the last based on a true-to-life, brilliantly planned escape from a Nazi war prisoner camp. Among the women, Shirley MacLaine has demonstrated in The Apartment, Some Came Running and Two For The Seesaw, a dimension of pathos that contrasts strikingly with her easy, direct, spontaneous manner. She does equally well in straight comedy, using her childlike, expressive face with natural humour. Paula Prentiss, a leggy, funny, pretty girl, has depths as a comedienne which are only hinted at in such comedies as Where the Boys Are and The Horizontal Lieutenant. Debbie Reynolds has emerged as a singer-dancer who can also convey mischievous comedy, as in The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Tuesday Weld has the potential of being a fine dramatic actress, as she has demonstrated on television. She is a pocket edition of Bette Davis, full of nervous energy and intelligence. Finally, Joanne Woodward is a remarkable, talented young actress. In films like The Three Faces of Eve she portrays with uncanny accuracy the neurotic character of a deeply disturbed woman. Yet she has played with equal authenticity a conventional suburban matron, a semi-literate backwoods girl, and the haughty daughter of a southern planter. There are few roles that are beyond the capacity of her mobile face, emotional responsiveness and high intelligence. In short, the new faces are there. And Hollywood needs them, needs personalities who will offer a new and very different generation of moviegoers the opportunity for identification, a chance to see its dreams, fears and secret thoughts writ large on the screen. The stars of tomorrow will be those who first reflect, then bring into focus the doubts and hopes of the rising generation. From all indications, they will be significantly different from the stars of the past, closer to the men and women one meets in ordinary life than to idealizing daydreams of innocence or passion. The new stars will be truer to reality, to the confusion of emotion that all human beings experience. But they will not be ordinary. They will rather have to an extraordinary degree that spark of uniqueness which illuminates our common humanity. END
An accomplished singer and actress, Shirley MacLaine has many successful performances to her credit and has figured in comic and tragic roles. Versatile George C. Scott, shown with Lee Remick, makes a first-rate villain. He has a deadly coldness, reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart.
A FAMILY'S
2, 1962, was a day that New Yorkers will never forget. As the sun shone brightly in a blue sky on a bitterly cold winter morning, the thunder and roar of excitement of four million people reverberated across the great city. Oceans of men, women and children flooded towards the heart of Manhattan, where there swirled a nearly impenetrable storm of coloured ticker tape and confetti. Tens of thousands of shouting, ecstatically happy and proud people swept past barriers and burst through police lines to surround the car in which Lt. Co\. John Glenn, Jr., the first American astronaut to orbit the earth, rode up Broadway to receive the greatest welcome ever awarded to a national hero. "It was," wrote one observer, "a perfect union of a man, an event and his time." To another, "a tremendous emotional moment in the life of a nation" and "an hour of triumph such as comes to few men in history." Yet, as John Glenn waved and flashed the jaunty grin which endeared him to so many, he already knew what was still unknown to most of the cheering throngs that saluted him: only an hour before, a huge airliner departing from New York for California had plunged earthwards. The worst single-plane crash in U.S. commercial aviation history had brought sudden death to ninety-five persons and spread tragedy into homes across the nation. A deeply religious man, Glenn had long been acutely conscious of the mysteriously interwoven patterns of man's hopes and man's fate. As a fighter pilot in World War II and in Korea, he had survived 159 combat missions. Only the day before, in Washington, he had soberly warned a joint session of Congress that there would be future American space flights from which no one would return. The morning after his triumphal New York procession he penned a note of appreciation to a New York newspaper editorial writer who, in commenting on the supreme irony of the two events, had quoted from Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament: To everything there is a season, And a time to every purpose under the heaven; A time to weep and a time to laugh; A time to mourn and a time to dance.... "It happened to be one of my favourite ARCH
Reprinted by permission from Good Housekeeping. Š 1965 by Hearst Corporation.
GLORY AND AGONY
passages in the Bible," Glenn says. "One of the most beautiful, most poignant and most eloquent. Often it seems to me to say all that is needed to be said about human life." Ahead for Glenn at that time there seemed to loom only greater triumphs. It was impossible to foretell that within two years he would be confronted with an illness that bitterly frustrated his strongest ambitions, plunged him into debt, and left him temporarily bedridden and threatened with lifelong disablement. The rest of 1962 was a whirlwind for John Glenn and his family. His own flight into space was followed by the successful orbits of fellow astronauts Scott Carpenter and Wally Schirra. As the most lionized peacetime heroes since the days of Charles A. Lindbergh, the astronauts were subjected to tremendous publicity and public adulation. It has been said of John Glenn that he portrayed the most consciously thought-out image of what an American astronaut should be and how he should behave-in public and private-of any of those chosen for the role. "Many factors," he says, "combined to create strong public interest in our families." From the start it was evident that some of the astronauts thought they should seek privacy and evade the public eye. But, says Glenn, "I felt there was no escaping our role as symbols-particularly for young people-of the nation's future. Instead of choosing to ignore the public interest, I thought we should try to use it for a constructive purpose. "I was proud of my family, my country and the space programme, and I wanted to share my experiences with other Americans. My wife, Annie, and our children, David and Lyn, had to cope with an awful lot of public attention, but I think they all came through it beautifully. "Our way of living was changed, in the things we did and the people we met, but not in how we lived as a family. Because we shared everything as a family, I think we strengthened the bonds between ourselves." He had tended to feel his family should know everything they cOllld about his work so that they would worry less about the dangers involved. At Cape Canaveral (now Cape Kennedy) he had taken as much trouble to explain the details of his spacecraft, Friendship 7, to his son, David, as he had
to President John F. Kennedy. Glenn's willingness to share his private life with the public was put to its wildest test during that summer, when the Russian cosmonaut Titov paid a brief visit to Washington, D.C. Although the Glenn family had been included in the official welcoming party that was guiding the Soviets around the city, Glenn was totally unprepared for the message a State Department aide whispered to him at a cocktail party: "Has anybody told you and Annie that the Russians have 'accepted' an invitation to have supper at your house tonight?" Rallying from the shock, Glenn quickly arranged with astronaut Alan Shepard to escort the Russians to the Glenn house in Arlington, Virginia, "via the scenic route (I think Al took them half way to Baltimore!)" while he and Annie rushed home to tidy up the house and see what they could throw together for supper. "We decided we'd give them an Americanstyle outdoor Sunday barbecue," Annie Glenn says. "We borrowed steaks from all our neighbours. When the Arlington motorcycle police arrived to 'guard the house,' we sent them speeding off to pick up some packages of frozen peas. "John got a charcoal fire going out on the porch behind the garage and threw the steaks on to broil, but, in his haste to get the fire red hot, he used two electric fans for blowers:' "The fat from the steaks began to burn," Glenn says, "and in a few seconds 1 had a fire back there that looked like the village blacksmith shop. Smoke poured out as if the house was on fire-and just then, up drove AI Shepard with Mr. and Mrs. Titov. All I could think to tell Titov was, 'If you expect to get anything to eat around here, you'll have to work for it: "Titov pulled off his coat and rolled up his sleeves and we got the steaks cooked. In the meantime Annie had shown Mrs. Titov around the house, and they wound up together out in our kitchen grinding peanuts for ice cream sundaes with fudge sauce. We had people inside the house, upstairs, downstairs and on the lawn, but it was some party and I really think the Russians enjoyed it. President Kennedy heard about it, and every time [ saw him after that he'd ask me if I'd been having any more good barbecues!" The U.S. announced it was moving its CONTINUED SPAN
February 1966 9
Manned Spacecraft Centre to Texas. Houston was to be the new home of the astronauts. That summer Annie Glenn and Rene Carpenter flew to Houston on a house-hunting expedition. They came back bubbling with excitement about some property they had found in a development called Timber Cove on the coastal prairies south of the city. Only a few miles from the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) centre, it was thickly wooded with tall pines and huge oaks draped with Spanish moss. In the backyards, grassy lawns sloped gently down to a boat canal that led into Taylor Lake and Galveston Bay. Surrounding the area were ranchlands dotted with grazing horses and cattle. "Rene and I fell in love with it the moment we saw it," Annie recalls. "Woods and water are two things we all are crazy about. After they heard us tell about it, John and Scott came down for a look. They liked it so much that we decided to build houses right next door to each other."
HE ARCHITECT'S original plans for our home called for a ranch-style home with a conventional floor plan: living room, family recreation room and dining room-all walled off from each other-bedrooms and other rooms. But our family is very informal and we liked the idea of a large open living room we could all relax in together. We began eliminating walls, aQd by the time we finished with the plan we had one huge room with a sixteenfoot-high vaulted ceiling. "The floor is all brick. One whole wall is brick with a big fireplace. And the rear wall that looks out over the patio and lawns and boat canal is all glass. There was so much open space that the builder had to add a steel girder to hold up the roof! The only separate unit in this part of the house is the kitchen, and that's got a big wide-open passway so that whoever is out there can keep up with the conversation, which in this family usually ranges from loud to horrendous. "Last New Year's Eve we had a teen-age open-house party here. During the evening somebody took a count and found there were 115 people, in here and out on the patio. We moved back the furniture, served chili, soft drinks and sandwiches and cookies, and the kids had a wonderful time." Says John Glenn, "I think this house comes closer to reflecting our feelings about living as a family than any place we've had in our marriage. In twenty-three years we've lived in twenty-four homes. After we were married, in 1943, Annie and I started housekeeping together in an apartment in Moorehead City, North Carolina, while I was completing my training in the Marine Corps. We went from there to hotels, houses and another apartment in California before I went overseas and
Annie went back to live with her folks in Ohio for the rest of World War II. "After the war we lived in North Carolina, Texas and Virginia, and in a Quonset hut on Guam where Annie put up with two typhoons, land crabs and spiders. We finally got back to the U.S. and, when I was assigned to test-pilot work at the Patuxent Naval Air Station in Maryland, we built a house in the woods on the Patuxent River, near Chesapeake Bay, which was wonderful for the children: pets, tree houses, water for swimming and boating and water skiing. We liked it there so much that, after I was reassigned to Washington, D.C., I commuted 105 kilometres each way every day so we could keep the place. "Then the kids were getting to the age for junior I\igh school, and we decided we'd better relocate near a good one. We got a map of the school district in Arlington, Virginia, drew a circle around the junior high we wanted and started looking. We discovered a lot for sale right across from the school. We bought it and built the house the family lived in during the early days of the Mercury programme. All . the excitement of the first flights focused on that house. We made friends there we hated to leave, and we often wondered if we'd be as lucky with another place." "But it's been fun adjusting to a new home," Annie Glenn says. "After we got the house built, we tackled the landscaping. Wherever we go I like to find out what flowers grow the best and see what I can do with them myself. "We planted the front yard Texas-style with cacti, mesquites and Mexican plants. Around the patio we put flowering plants that would attract hummingbirds. We can sit her~ on the sofa and watch them dart around outside all day long. The backyard is mostly just green grass, which is the best thing for all the kids that play out there and ride their horses and ponies through the yards on weekends. We get a kick out of seeing the expression on visitors' faces when they catch sight of a palomino horse on the patio. These days it's usually Kris Carpenter who's gone crazy over horses." The friendship between the Carpenter and Glenn families is perhaps the closest in the original astronaut group. Glenn and Scott Carpenter first knew each other, prior to the Mercury programme, as test pilots at Patuxent, Maryland. The ties tightened during the long preparations for the first orbital flight in which Scott Carpenter served as Glenn's back-up pilot. "In those days down at the Cape," Glenn says, "Scott and r lived together, ate together and bunked together in the same room. He took care of every detail in the readiness programme for me. When his flight came up, I was not assigned as his back-up pilot, but I joined up with him down at the Cape and stuck with him until his launch. We both felt
deeply about our roles in the space programme and we both enjoy the same kind of sports and outdoor living."
N THE spring of 1963, John Glenn' was stationed aboard the radar-tracking and communication ship Coastal Sentry Quebec, south of Japan, as astronaut Gordon Cooper climaxed the Mercury man-in-space programme with a flight that orbited the earth twenty-two times. In the last minutes of the flight, instrument failures in the spacecraft threatened a perilous re-entry that could cause Cooper to land in the Pacific Ocean far from the Navy's recovery forces. With information relayed from the Cape, Glenn and Cooper went through a tight second-by-second countdown for the firing of the retro-rockets that brought Cooper's spacecraft, Faith 7, safely down to earth only four miles from a Navy aircraft carrier. Disembarking in Japan, Glenn joined Annie, Dave and Lyn for a short vacation there. They toured the country as a family, and found the Japanese overflowing with curiosity and enthusiasm about the space programmes. After the banquets and ceremonial visits in the big cities, they went to see the country by themselves. "John," says Annie, "wanted us to see Japan as he had glimpsed it in his visits there during the Korean War. We stayed in the small country villages, ate Japanese food with chopsticks and slept in Japanese inns on tatamis with bean-bag pillows. We really had fun !" Within a few months after their return to America, however, Glenn found himself seriously concerned about what his continuing role in U.S. space programmes should be. "I had originally been the oldest astronaut in the Mercury programme," he says. "I was thirty-seven years old when I volunteered for astronaut training. I was forty when I made my orbital flight. "Now that Mercury was successfully completed, NASA had me assigned to the Apollo (moon) programme; but, going over the timetables with my boss, Bob Gilruth, we could see that before I'd get my first chance for a lunar flight rd be about fifty years old. "Theoretically it was possible that I would be picked for an early flight to the moon-by itself the age factor didn't rule me out-but. with the nine new and much younger astronauts that had been picked in 1962 and fourteen more that had just been selected to join the programme in 1963, the odds were definitely running against me. To be the oldest living astronaut in a permanent training status didn't seem to be ideal career planning, I began to wonder if I could perform a more active service for the United States in some other capacity." Speculation about Glenn's potential for a
political career had begun within a few days after his space flight. Columnists and commentators, noting the tremendous affection and respect with which he was regarded by the nation, saw him as a sure-fire vote catcher who would be an asset to either major party. Glenn himself dates his own interest in politics far earlier than the Mercury programme. "Some people," he told one acquaintance, "have the notion that I never cared about politics until I became exposed to Washington as an astronaut. Actually, when I was doing test-pilot work for the Navy at Patuxent. Annie and I used to drive up to Washington to sit in the Congressional galleries or attend Congressional committee hearings. After we moved to Washington, we did the same thing. "But my interest really goes further back, to boyhood in Ohio. In high school I had a wonderful civics teacher, Mr. Harford Steele, and I am sure he influenced me tremendously. My father is one of the most patriotic men I have ever known. He was in France in World War I with an ammunition train, and always told us many stories of how he felt and what this country means to him. Annie and I grew up in New Concord in a small-town atmosphere of holiday celebrations and patriotic activities that left a lasting impression on us both. Our story was a later-day, real-life Music Man.
"I've always followed national and State politics closely. I've deplored some of the things I've seen, and developed pretty strong ideas about what might be done about them."
F COURSE, there's no doubt that becoming involved in the country's space programmes and having the opportunity to talk to so many people in government and to know President Kennedy increased my interest. He had a wonderful vitality about him. He was the younger generation's President, wonderfully alive with warmth and humour. He certainly dramatized Washington, the Presidency, the space programmes and politics for all of us. "The day the President was shot in Dallas I was at the Ellington Air Force Base in Houston. ] went out and sat in the car in the rain, listening until the 'radio told he was dead. I drove home, and Annie and ] packed and flew to Washington to attend the funeral. "That first night one of the places we visited was the Lincoln Memorial. It has always been one of the places in Washington that have meant the most to us. In the evening it is a particularly beautiful place, with a grandeur all its own. We had stopped there many times in the past, and this time it just seemed like a good place to be in. It was bitterly cold as we stood there, looking across the city down towards the Capitol, where the crowds were filing past the President's coffin. We went . there too, to the Capitol Rotunda and just
watched for a while. It was an evening we'll never forget, along with many other people. "During December, Annie and I reached a decision to enter politics. There was no plan worked out with the Administration. In fact, when I talked to Robert Kennedy about it, he advised me against running in Ohio. He didn't think there was enough time before the primary for me to prepare a proper political organization, but I finally decided, 'If I don't have the guts to go ahead and try now, I'll regret it all my life.' " In January 1964, Glenn announced he was entering the Senatorial race in Ohio as a Democrat. Campaign headquarters were opened in Columbus. "We had an amateur organization," he admits. "We were making mistakes, but I think we were beginning ¡to move when I chose to fool with that medicine cabinet." It was a February morning in Columbus. Glenn, living in an apartment, had just finished shaving and was putting his razor back in the bathroom medicine cabinet when he noticed that the mirrored sliding doors were sticking. "There was some dirt in the grooves in which the mirror slipped back and forth, and l decided to clean them out. "To do so I had to lift out the mirror. I cleaned the track and started to replace the mirror. As I had it above my head it started to slip from my hands. I moved to grab it. Just as I did, the throw rug on the bathroom floor slipped sideways right out from under me. I went down sideways, still holding the mirror, and the left side of my head struck the sharp runner groove of the bathtub's shower doors. It wasn't a blunt blow; it was as if someone had whacked the side of my head with a steel weapon. "It stunned me for about five or ten seconds. When I came to, I found myself kneeling in a heap of broken glass and a pool of blood. And, when I turned my head, the whole world started spinning. Fortunately the other fellows in the apartment came running." Since his condition was not certain, the family flew to Ohio to be with him. Once he was declared out of danger, David and Lyn flew back to Texas to resume their school studies, while Annie, joined by Rene Carpenter, began barnstorming in Ohio to keep his race for the Senate alive until he could start campaigning himself. Then came the diagnosis that the blow Glenn had suffered had caused internal damage. His inner ear, which controls equilibrium, was affected. The slightest movement of his head caused waves of extreme dizziness and nausea. Early in March he¡was transferred to an Air Force hospital in San Antonio, Texas, where the records of the nation's astronauts are kept and where special treatment was available. "The doctors laid it on the line for me,"
Glenn explains. "They told me that without proper convalescence the condition could become worse and perhaps permanent." On March 30, one of the blackest days of his life, Glenn called reporters to his hospital room. They found him bedridden, pale, weak and bewildered. He told them he was withdrawing from the Senatorial race. It would be some time before there would be an.other opportunity for him to try again in Ohio. Rumours spread across the country that Glenn's condition or his fall was related to the weightless condition he had experienced during his space flight. "The plain matter of fact is," he says, "that I never had a moment's dizziness after my flight and I never felt better than I did on the morning I took the tumble. "After I got to San Antonio the doctors tried a number of treatments. "Actually no drugs or treatments did any good, and I finally wound up taking no medication. The doctors told me the area was still sensitive and only time could cure it."
N APRIL 1964, Glenn returned home to Houston. He was still weak and twenty pounds below his normal weight. Doctors were still not absolutely certain that his condition would ever return completely to normal. He was nearly $15,000 in debt from the Ohio political campaign. Forcing himself to be cheerful, he moved about the house by what the family called "wall-to-wall walking." With both arms outstretched so that his fingertips touched a wall, and with his head held rigidly motionless, he progressed from room to room at such a deliberate pace that it sometimes took him five to ten minutes to negotiate the corridor between the bedroom and living room. Once there he sat motionless for hours, gazing out at the lawns green with fresh spring grass and swarming with children. "If I told you I didn't suffer from anxiety and depression about the future, it would be far from the truth," he says. "I did plenty of wondering about the future and what I could do the rest of my life as a semi-invalid if my recovery went no further." "It may sound strange to say it," Annie Glenn says, "but even though he wasn't well I was glad \0 have him home. We'd had so many years of rushing from place to place, and there had been so much to share with so many other people, that it did me good as a wife to have him home." Aside from the¡momentous day of the flight of Friendship 7, there are only a few moments .in the astronaut era that Annie Glenn sometimes wishes she could re-experience. "One," she says, "was that day in Washington when John addressed Congress. I'd like to see that CONTINUED SPAN
February 1966 II
again because I missed all the people who were there. All I saw was my husband! "The other moment was the roar of the crowds that marvellous day in New York. There was such a wonderful sound of human happiness in it." Nearly everything else in the way of public attention-whether it's praise or criticismAnnie Glenn takes with a smile or laughter. "Hey, John," she will call across the room as she reads a newspaper article about her husband, "now hear this one!" The only story about their lives which upset her was a tale that on her wedding day¡ she was simmering because Glenn was late to the wedding. "John didn't think he was fifteen minutes late," she says. "And I wasn't mad at him at all! It was the happiest day of my life."
ROUBLES continued to pile up. Annie had been troubled during the spring with pains in her chest, but she had kept it to herself. Doctors now told her there was a danger of a malignant growth. She was going to have to enter the hospital for a series of operations. From Ohio came word of further ill fortune in the family. John's father was suffering from a lingering serious illness. Annie's father, Dr. H.W. Castor, underwent two major operations. "We needed something to keep our minds off our troubles," Glenn says. "And we got it by corresponding with' people all over America." Ever since his injury the mail had poured in at the rate of hundreds of letters a day. "We decided we had to answer as many of those letters as we could. I couldn't write, but I could dictate answers. We set up a couple of sawhorses and covered them with boards to make a huge worktable. Lyn and her school friends volunteered to come in after school and form an assembly-line addressing and stamping operation. As we read and sorted out the letters, we noticed they seemed to fall naturally into different categories. We got the idea that it might be fun to share them with other Americans in a book, and we had ourselves a project." "There is nothing," Glenn later observed in his book (P.S. I Listened to Your Heartbeat: Letters to John Glenn, published by the World Book Encyclopaedia Science Service in 1964), "that draws people more closely together than being fellow sufferers with the same ailment. And I can assure you that when those people wrote to me of their sympathy, their own symptoms and their experiences and treatments, I in turn could sympathize with them, for in many cases we did apparently have the same feelings." Some of the letters with medical advice, Glenn turned over to his doctors. Others were startling: "If I begin to hear ringing (in my ears),
I chew gum vigorously." One ex-Air Force man suggested that Glenn design a gyroscope wired for sound that could be fastened to his hip. It could be equipped with a turn-and-bank indicator which would sound a warning signal if he started to move his head. A housewife in Pennsylvania reflected Glenn's feelings perfectly when she wrote, "Don't you find that there are days when you wish you could very carefully lift your head right off your body and walk away, leaving it with the newspapers for the trashman to collect?" While most of the correspondence was extremely sympathetic, Glenn was jolted into laughter one morning by strong disapproval from an unexpected source. An ex-Marine wrote: "You must have the softest noggin in the history of the Marines. I have seen Marine heads hit with Wisky (sic) and beer bottles, rifle butts, chairs, tables, ISS's, grenades, 'rolling pins,' etc., and it made no impression, never mind depression Get off your duff and 'Move Marine!' Those Methodist milkshakes ruined you. Start drinking Wisky that all Marines do." As the summer wore on, Glenn finally found his condition taking a turn for the better. "The convalescence seemed to progress in a series of plateaus," he says. "I'd reach a new level and think, well, I'll learn to live with this much." By September he could manage a gentle nod. A few weeks later he had resumed one of his favourite methods of keeping fitjogging along back-country roads. Then came some trial spins on water skis on nearby Clear Lake and the return to the wheel of his automobile. "There was still one big hurdle to clear," he says, "the one that would really satisfy me that I was cured-flying. I wanted to get up in the cockpit of a very fast plane and see what happened." In November John Glenn was given a final green light by his doctors and reported for a jet refresher course at the Marine Corps' El Toro Air Base in California. After a week of flying with a co-pilot, he climbed alone into a silver-and-blue, swept-wing fighter jet and shot skywards. High above the desert regions of California and Arizona, he exultantly twisted, climbed and barrel-rolled in a 600-mph celebration. "Unless you have been flat on your back with an uncertain future," Glenn says, "you can't possibly imagine what this meant. You don't appreciate your health until you don't have it for a while. I'm just thankful every day that my recovery was complete. We had some drastic changes to make in 1964, but that is minor compared to health." "Thanksgiving meant a lot to us," says
Annie Glenn. "John's return to full health and flying seemed like a miracle. I was safely over my operations. Our son David was doing well in his first semester at Harvard, and our daughter Lyn was so happy with school and her cheerleading activities that she brought sunshine into the house every time she came home from school." "After I lost my chance to go to the Senate from Ohio," Glenn says, "Annie and I did a lot of talking and thinking about what I would do when and if I recovered. One consideration was to establish a business connection looking forward to a long-term future with a little more than we ever had before. I had received a lot of very inte~esting offers, but there were good reasons why I didn't accept any of them. "Since I wanted to continue my association with NASA and the United States space programmes, any job I took couldn't have anything to do with the aerospace industry. A great many of the other offers involved going to work at a plant as sort of an 'Exhibit A' in the public-relations field. This didn't interest me one bit." John Glenn accepted a position on the Board of Directors and with the overseas division of the Royal Crown Cola Company. "The Royal Crown offer not only provided an excellent business future but also had a special appeal to me because I hadn't been able to get the memories of our trip to Japan out of my mind."
HE TREMENDOUS interest the Japanese people had shown in America and the space programmes made me feel that perhaps if I had other opportunities to visit other countries I could learn a lot myself and also perhaps project some of the excitement that I feel about our country, space exploration and how much it's going to mean to the whole world. "So Annie and I feel we'll be working in three areas: learning the ropes in an international business, keeping abreast of what's going on with manned spacecraft programmes at NASA here at Houston, and still continuing with the public-service work in organizations such as the Boy Scouts, which also means a great deal to me. As I told Annie the other day, as soon as Lyn finishes school this spring, we're going to do some travelling! This past year has been such a jumble that we have had to replan our lives, but it looks as if a lot of opportunities have arisen out of that Ohio disaster." Once again Colonel John Glenn is voicing the same sense of optimism, love of life and faith in the future that he brought to Congress a few days after he had blazed the trail into space for other Americans to follow. Then he declared: "This is just a beginning .... " END
A NATION
AND ¡ITS PEOPLE
American think is characteristic of his fellow citizens and their way of life? Amateur and professional photographers answered this question with their cameras when they entered an international competition sponsored by the Eastman Kodak Company. From the many entries, the company selected 200 colour photographs to portray "A Nation and Its People-the United States Today" in an exhibit at the 1965 World's Fair in New York City. While some photographers turned to such old, favourite themes as children or landscapes, others caught a mood of creative activity or a moment of motion in the lives of active, vigorous people. But whether the photograph was of the Mall of Central Park in New York City, or of voluntary firemen's rapid response to an alarm, it reflected some aspect of the land's beauty or the day-to-day activity of the average citizen.
W
HAT DOES THE AVERAGE
"HOW WE LIVE, WHO WE ARE, WHAT WE DO .. " THE
in the Eastman contest were primarily judged on how well they illustrated the idea "how we live, who we are, what we do." Representative and symbolic of the land and its people, the winning pictures included glimpses of family life, informal portraits, well-loved landscapes, people at work and children at play. Roping and taming of wild horses by Wyoming cowboys impressed a chemist; a Minneapolis engineer was fascinated by a young girl's skill in using a potter's wheel-as artisans have done for generations-to shape a lump of clay. Among other pictures were those of a workman in a small foundry performing his daily routine of pouring a ladle of molten metal and a Vermont farmer proudly driving a team of horses to harvest his crop. PHOTOGRAPHS
FOR ALL TIME, A SINGLE
MOMENT .. To attentive eye,"
wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, "each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before and which shall never be seen again." The entries illustrated the ability of the camera to capture for all time a single, vital moment of the changing scene. This shifting scene might depict a new office building reaching skywards in Chicago. Or it might show the weird pattern made by smoke plumes as they rise in unison at dawn from Pennsylvania rooftops. These and many other entries were symbolic of the peaceful, if unspectacular, nature of everyday life in the U.S. THE
New building reaches sky wards, right. Plumes of smoke rise in unison from rooftops, below.
An architect ahead of his time, Griffin was an exponent of city planning when the concept was barely formulated.
WALTER BURLEY GRIFFIN: ARCHITECT AND CITY PLANNER Griffin built homes in Chicago, planned the Australian city of Canberra, designed the Pioneer Building and University Library in Lucknow-and left a legacy of his work on three continents.
o STUDENTS of the history and the development of town and city planning, the names of Griffin and Canberra will not be as familiar as those of Lutyens and New Delhi, or Le Corbusier and Chandigarh. Yet the career of Walter Burley Griffin (1876-1937)the American city planner and architect, trained in Chicago, and with his wife Marion an early member of Frank Lloyd Wright's famous architectural studio at Oak Park, Illinois-deserves more serious attention than it has received in the past. Of particular interest is the fact that Griffin's final months of professional activity were spent in India. Fortunately, at least two important projects were virtually completed before his death in Lucknow in 1937-the Pioneer Press Building and the University Library in Lucknow. These buildings-and the many striking renderings of other architectural projects for India, now in the archives of Columbia University's Avery Library in New York-constitute a monument to Griffin and his wife and a legacy to a country and its people which they felt privileged to know and serve. Griffin was born in 1876 and spent his early life and high school years in Maywood, a suburb of Chicago. While still a high school student he visited the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and was deeply impressed by this striking expression of classic revival architecture, situated on the shores of Lake Michigan. Students of American architectural history know that there was one important exception to the all-white classical motif of the Exposition buildings-the Transportation Building by Louis Sullivan (1856-1924). The Transportation Building, with its multi-coloured facade and rich naturalistic ornament, was a sharp departure from the surrounding structures. A life-long admirer of Louis Sullivan, Griffin was at this early stage deeply impressed by this example of Sullivan's courage and independence. It may be said that the Columbian Exposition of 1893 contained the seeds of Griffin's later career as an architect and city planner.
T
ABOUTTHEAUTHOR:Dr. Peisch is director of Low Memorial Library, Columbia University, New York. One of. his publications is The Chicago School of Architecture-Early Followers of Sullivan and Wright.
On the one hand was the example of Sullivan, who looked to nature rather than past historical styles for his artistic inspiration and was aware of the practical necessities of contemporary building and the possibilities of new materials and construction techniques. It was Sullivan who, in his writing and his architectural practice, sought to create an architecture as truly representative of America as the great railroad locomotives and grain elevators which were symbols of commercial and industrial importance. An equally important and different inspiration force was that, beyond its stylistic debt to the past, the Columbian Exposition was a notable experiment in city planning, an experiment coming at a time when the science and practice of city planning was still in its infancy. The World's Columbian Exposition received harsh criticism, particularly from Sullivan, for its damaging effect on the development of a truly American architectural expression. In retrospect, however, it can be said that the exposition had a positive effect on city planning both in the United States and abroad. Indeed, a listing of some of the innovations provided for this exposition have a modern ring today. At night the buildings were illuminated by a new type of floodlight made possible by the use of alternating current for the first time in the United States. An electrical railway carried visitors from Chicago to the Exposition grounds. Fair-goers were transported along the great piers that extended out into Lake Michigan by a moving sidewalk, a transporation means that has received attention recently as a possible solution to commuting problems in New York City. The first example of what is now popularly known as the Ferris Wheel, named for its inventor, George Washington Gale Ferris (1859-1896), was a particularly successful and exciting example of daring engineering design, an idea whose popularity caught on throughout Europe and the United States. A prominent sociologist of the day, Charles Zueblin (1866-1924), summed up the importance of the Fair as an example of civic planning when he said: "For the first time in American history a complete city, equipped with all the public utilities caring for a temporary population of thousands (on one day over three-quarters of a million), was built CoNTINUED SPAN
February /966
17
Working with Frank Lloyd Wright, Griffin formulated a permanent set of architectural principles.
as a unit on a single architectural scale. The Fair was the most socialistic achievement of history, the result of many minds inspired by a common aim working for the common good .... The individual was great but the collectivity was greater. ... More than that, the Chicago World's Fair was a miniature of the ideal city." Thus before he entered the University of Illinois to study architecture, Walter Burley Griffin had seen much of great interest. These early memories of the Fair, the example of Sullivan and later of Frank Lloyd Wright, combined to become a lasting part of Griffin's artistic and professional development. In 1895 Griffin entered the University of Illinois, and four years later graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in architecture. His architectural training at Illinois had included a number of practical courses such as "Surveying," "Heating and Ventilation," and "Stone, Brick, and Metal Construction." Design courses were only an incidental part of the curriculum, since in that day there was not yet an integration between design and the instruction in new engineering and construction techniques. In the field of town and city planning, so important a part of Griffin's later career, he studied only the related fields oflandscaping and horticulture. Following his graduation, Griffin returned to Chicago for the customary practical experience as a draughtsman in the office of an established architect. Working part-time for several members of what is now called the "Chicago School," Griffin came to know the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, who by 1900 had already established an important local reputation. From 1901 until 1906 Griffin was a member of Wright's suburban residence-office, the Oak Park Studio. Here began the second stage in Griffin's education, and in some respects the most important. The relationship between Wright and his professional colleagues was that of a master and pupil. That a genuine camaraderie or fellowship existed in Wright's studio cannot be doubted, but there also existed the tensions which might be expected between master and pupil, between an authentic genius and his professional assistants. During this period, Griffin worked on a number of Wright's early prairie houses, sometimes designing details and not infrequently supervising their construction. Among the members of the Oak Park Studio at this time was Marion Mahony, an architectural graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Wright's most gifted and talented draughtsman. It may be safely assumed that she was author of many of the handsome renderings of Wright's work published by Wasmuth in 1911-1912. Their publication attracted international attention to Frank Lloyd Wright's career. In 1911, Marion Mahony became Griffin's wife and life-long artistic collaborator. There is little recorded evidence of Griffin's professional relationship with Wright. It is known that he worked with Wright in the category of an assistant and was capable of taking on important assignments. This relationship, however, foundered in 1906 on a professional disagreement and the breach between the two men was never healed. Thus by 1906 Griffin had experienced both the frustrations and advantages of working with Wright, who had begun a tradition of building which was to shape future architectural developments in the United States and abroad. Establishing an independent architectural practice, Griffin enjoyed considerable success as a designer of domestic residences as well as a number of residential suburbs in the Chicago area and throughout the Middle West. By 1911, the date of the international competition for the design of Canberra, Australia's capital city, Griffin was an acknowledged member of the "Chicago School" of architects. It is said that Griffin submitted his plan for the Canberra competition purely as an effort to improve his knowledge and capability in the field of city planning. This young man, then thirty-six, was quite unprepared to be named
winner of this international competition in which the second place was won by the distinguished Eliel Saarinen of Finland. In simplest terms Griffin's plan was a coalescence of the academic concepts in the design of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, and the English "Garden City" concept of Ebenezer Howard and his followers. The separation of commercial, industrial, and residential areas, together with the emphasis on extensive landscaping, has made Canberra today truly a "Garden City." Harking back to the Columbian Exposition, where ornamental lakes and lagoons were such a spectacular part of the plan, the creation of Lake Burley Griffin, in 1963, has done much to enhance this national capital as Griffin originally conceived it. Griffin was not alone in designing a capital city for the British Empire. For in 1911 the capital of India had been officially moved from Calcutta to New Delhi, and the distinguished architect Sir Edwin Lutyens was given the important task of creating there a great governmental and administrative centre. Interestingly, both Griffin and Lutyens were philosophically committed to the "Garden City" ideal, particularly Lutyens, who had previously planned the garden suburbs of Knebworth and Swinton. But each man, wishing to reinforce the concept of dignity and order expected in a capital city, importantly modified his views and relied on a geometric plan of some formality. Griffin, noting a kinship between the democratic ideals of Australia and the United States, wished to make Canberra a symbol of that spirit. Lutyens, on the other hand, had no such intention. In 1913, in order to supervise the building of Canberra, Griffin and his wife went to Australia, a country which, with India, was to become the permanent field for their architectural endeavours. During the first Australian years from 1913 until 1918 Griffin waged a futile
Simple low-lying silhouette of Pioneer Press Building is broken by richness of window detail and gradual rise of structure at each end.
battle with the government authorities over the design of Canberra. When he resigned his tenuous authority in 1918, however, the basic outline of his design was secure and much had been accomplished despite the frustrations of bureaucratic interference and the interruptions and delays caused by the First World War. It is not the purpose of this article to describe Griffin's activities in Australia in detail. Let it be said, however, that his experience at Canberra and his private practice fulfilIed many of his early ambitions. Practising in Sydney and later in Melbourne, Griffin was to design an entire university residence facility, Newman ColIege, for the University of Melbourne, 1914-19l5. In 1918 he began work on the model residential suburb at Castlecrag outside Sydney. Castlecrag was Australia's first example of a unified planned community and today still exerts its influence on architects and planners of that country. These projects-and the list is by no means complete-together with the example of Griffin's stubborn devotion to the architectural principles of Sullivan, and to those of Wright as well, made him both a pioneer and a leader of the new architecture in Australia. In 1935, his reputation apparently growing, Griffin was asked to plan a new library building for the University of Lucknow. FolIowing the submission of preliminary plans, Griffin was asked in 1936 to come to Lucknow to supervise and carry plans for the library through to completion. In 1936, Griffin moved his architectural practice to Lucknow, and several months later Mrs. Griffin joined her husband for the few months of colIaboration which were left to them. A staff of local draughts men and assistants, largely trained by Mrs. Griffin, was assembled, and the Chicago architects embarked on a new career which gave every promise of rich fulfilment. Griffin and his wife were now at the peak of their professional careers. Deeply interested in the history of religion, the diversity of
Indian life and customs held great fascination for them. It is related that as a child Griffin lovingly touched the flowers in his parents' garden, preferring not to pick them. However sentimental the tale, it indicates the spirit of a man which was kindred to, and in sympathy with, the deep religious convictions of India. We know from Griffin's correspondence that he admired the principles of non-violence espoused by Mahatma Gandhi and he mentions at least once his admiration for the young Nehru. Once again, as in Australia, Griffin was stirred by the common interest in democratic principles which he shared with these leaders. The Lucknow Library was constructed, but from his correspondence it must be assumed that Griffin, no friend of committees and boards, felt that the spirit of the building as he had designed it had foundered on too many suggestions and changes by others. The building for the Pioneer Press, however, was more satisfactory. The Pioneer had numbered among its staff Rudyard Kipling in the 1880's and continues its career as a journalistic force in India today. In planning this building Griffin had to accommodate a printing plant in the main part of the structure, with editorial and administrative offices at each end. First, Griffin thoroughly acquainted himself with the daily problems of printing a newspaper. He wished to ensure what he termed "a fitness for function" and paid careful attention to the problems of noise and heat attendant to the operation of high-speed printing presses. This did not mean that he rejected the conventional solution of high ceilings or verandahs. The folIowing statement by Griffin concerning the problem of adapting this building in its plan and construction to the climatic needs of the region, at a time when airconditioning was unknown in India, are worth quoting at length: "The three distinct and contrasting seasons of India present some apparently contradictory requirements, in the United Provinces (now CONTINUED
When he died, Griffin had started work on a senes of buildings for a wealthy Indian clientele.
Uttar Pradesh) particularly, but these difficulties are no greater than elsewhere where the temperature range is far greater. Perhaps too exclusive attention has been paid to the most disagreeable season, for as a result buildings generally are so dark and cheerless in the cold season that artificial lights, as well as heat, are imposed upon the occupants when the sun is shining brightly and warmly out of doors. "Encircling verandahs, deemed desirable for keeping the sun off the walls, do not effectively reduce the heat absorption of the building proportionately with the effort, and in cases of one-storey buildings this absorption is mainly attributable to the roof. In characteristic internal rooms with clerestory windows the proportionate roof absorption can be easily seen to be as sixteen to one, taking account of the incidence of the sun's rays in this low latitude and the greater insulating resistance of the customary wall construction. Verandahs on the north should certainly be avoided for the sake of interior brightness and usefulness at all seasons. "On the remaining sides, so far as the utility of the rooms is concerned, the device of hollow wall construction, costing nothing, reduces the heat penetration one-third and the shadows of trees are more effective than verandahs in intercepting the horizontal rays of morning and afternoon. "The main culprit in construction which renders houses in the hot months so much like bake-ovens is the roof terrace, which accumulates the sun's rays for distribution during the night and succeeding days. Its advantage for outdoor refuge for sleeping is not an adequate compensation. Here again a vital one-third of the remedy is to be found in the structural boon of hollow or cellular slabs at no cost. ... "The flat roof is of the greatest advantage in subordinating buildings to their natural surroundings and in harmonizing the relations in groups and masses. Wider spans, facilitated by reinforced concrete, not only make practicable large rooms but encourage greater diversity in the planning of buildings than has been obtained with steel beams and jack arches of reinforced brickwork. "On the vital question of ceiling heights, there is no excuse for unnecessary loftiness. For when one considers how radiant heat is transmitted from the ceiling under a roof one can see that the effect of distance is almost negligible. What is of real importance is the An architect herself, Mrs. Griffin was an extremely gifted draughtsman who worked with her husband as a life-long artistic collaborator.
insulation above the radiant ceiling, whether of confined or connecting air spaces, evaporation, or insulative substances or reflecting whiteness or all of these." The Pioneer Press Building presents a simple, low-lying silhouette, its all-white exterior broken only by the richness of window details and the gradual rise of the storeys at each end. Still in use without any important modifications, the Pioneer Press Building is a fitting capstone to Griffin's short career in India. On December 16, 1936, the foundation stone for this building was laid; two months later on February 11, 1937, Griffin died of peritonitis and was buried in Lucknow. In addition to the Library and Press Building Griffin was also entrusted with a project that must have been particularly appealing to him for it stirred memories of his boyhood in Chicago. This was the United Provinces Industrial and Agricultural Exposition held in Lucknow in 1937. Situated on the banks of the Gomati River, the Exposition grounds covered more than 100 acres in order to accommodate exhibits from throughout India. The many projects executed include water gates, towers and triumphal arches-a virtual field day for someone brought up on exposition architecture. Unlike the simplicity of the Pioneer Press Building, Griffin attempted to capture some of the local colour by using rather bizarre geometric designs on the exterior of these temporary buildings. One may be certain that Mrs. Griffin's interest in decorative ornament carne to the fore here. To be sure many of the projected buildings are fanciful, if not fantastic, but this was the architect's intention. Throughout the renderings one can see a virtual fairyland of architectural shapes and effects which were intended to delight the eye and attract the interest of the Exposition visitors. Once again, however, the bugaboo of committees interfered disastrously and Griffin submitted his resignation. Had Griffin survived, one can be sure that a series of splendid buildings by him would have been constructed in India. We have at least a record of these projects from Mrs. Griffin's hand. Works of art in themselves, they are splendid demonstrations of architectural draughtsmanship by a talent which had been recognized much earlier by Frank Lloyd Wright, who in 1914 had referred to Mrs. Griffin as his "most talented draughtsman." Griffin's prospective clients included bankers, maharajahs, and wealthy merchants, a clientele which could have made possible a brilliant climax to an international career. The Zenana Palace would, had it been completed, have resulted in a building of striking appearance. In size it was much larger than any of Griffin's previous residences and shows unusual freedom of architectural form which was not found in any of his earlier work. One must also remember the influence of his wife, for in this very last stage of their joint career the merging of talents and abilities had become so close as to make individual attribution virtually impossible. The Jawala Bank demonstrates an effort to create an architectural ornament rich in its sculptured and incised forms-an effort, one may assume, to relieve the rather heavy and blocklike appearance of this building which was to be constructed in reinforced concrete. There is no mention of town planning in Griffin's correspondence but we know that he planned to establish an office in Calcutta. One may assume that town and even city planning would have been added to his Indian work had the opportunity presented itself. A house for a Dr. Jhansha of Calcutta is a less successful use of reinforced concrete and even the rendering seems to lack Mrs. Griffin's customary verve. Following her husband's death, Mrs. Griffin returned to Australia and ultimately to Chicago, where she died in 1962. In 1958 the writer had the pleasure of visiting Mrs. Griffin during her retirement, and although many years had intervened, she spoke fondly of the Lucknow days. It was clear that this experience had been memorable for the Griffins, and it may be hoped that their contribution to India will be an enduring one. END
In this bold new venture, we welcome the co-operation of other nations. There is room in space activity for nations to grow closer together through exchange of information and through sharing of experiences. It is my hope and expectation that the Space Age will be an age of maturity in man's relationships-an age of exploration, not exploitation.
DESTINATION:
THE MOON The exciting world of astronauts and space exploration was the theme of an art exhibit held at Washington's National Gallery of Art, in which leading American artists participated. Some of the entries in the exhibit illustrate the following article.
a giant metal tube, over five times as tall as a man, its diameter twice his height. One end of the tube tapers to a blunt cone. Attached to the tip of the cone is a bulbous vehicle with four outstretched pipestem legs that make it look like a large insect. That is how the United States' Apollo spaceship will appear just before landing two men on the pocked surface of the moon. Strange-looking perhaps, but it is being built that way to perform an extremely difficult and unusual mission. The landing sequence, which must be computer-timed to the split second,
V
ISUALIZE
CONTINUED SPAN
February
1966
21
Experts have planned
III
the fullest detail the 800,OOO-kilometre round-trip journey to the moon.
illustrates how difficult. Two of the three astronauts aboard the conical command centre or "mothership" climb through a hatch and into the small insect-like craft. This is called the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) and is nicknamed the "Bug." The men are encased in spacesuits; their little craft is packed with scientific instruments as they cast off, the space counterpart of a lifeboat leaving the side of an oceangoing steamship for an unfamiliar shore. The Bug drifts away and, at the proper moment, the astronauts aboard it briefly fire the craft's rocket engine, changing its orbit to swing them close to the surface of the moon. They circle the moon once or twice to make certain they are over the selected landing site and all conditions are right to put down. When they are ready, and helped in their calculations by the man in the mothership and by big computers and radar antennae tracking them from earth, they use small jets to point
the rocket in the bottom of the Bug in the direction they are moving, and then fire the rocket full force. Gradually, they slow down and, with the rocket still blasting to slow their descent, they settle on the landing site. Four spring-loaded steel legs which extend from the base of the Bug enable them to make a gentle touchdown. Such is the plan scientists and engineers running the Apollo programme have conceived and are presently executing to make possible America's conquest of the moon. Not only the landing itself, but every step of the long path to the moon-and back-has been plotted to the finest detail by the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Nothing is being left to chance, neither in the construction of the giant rocket which will lift the explorers off this planet, nor in the complex spacecraft which will enable them to carry out their perilous mission.
When the three explorers finally climb aboard their spaceship on top of the huge Saturn V rocket for the 800,000-kilometre round-trip journey to the moon, they will be confident of success. They will be highly skilled astronauts, veterans of many days of space travel in earth orbit and expert at handling their craft. They will be well aware of the millions of man-hours of thought and effort that are being expended to combat aU the known and potential hazards of the flight. For they, personally, are helping to create the spacecraft that will take them on this great adventure. And by the time Apollo takes off for the moon the astronauts will have logged approximately 2,000 hours of flight in orbits of the earth. All of spaceflight is attuned to one essential-rocket power. The weight-lifting ability, or thrust, of a rocket governs precisely how many kilograms may be placed into orbit around the CONTINUED
In LADDERS, left, Mitchell Jamieson compares the size of the mighty machine which will speed explorers on their journey, with the puny Q, below, expresses the terrific vibration astronauts experience in their spacecraft. builders, seen at base. Lamar Dodd in MAXIMUM
Space engineers studied three modes of carrying out mission. earth or sent towards the moon or one of the planets. When the late President Jolm F. Kennedy launched the Apollo lunar programme in 1961, only one large rocket was being tested in the United States, the Saturn J. It was quickly established that Saturn T, which can lift 10,125 kilograms into orbit around the earth, was insufficient for the Apollo task. Something much more powerful was needed. The answer was to cluster five of the F-l engines into what was later named Saturn V, providing 3,375,000 kilograms of thrust. Combined with a 450,000-kilogramthrust second stage and a 90,000-kilogramthrust third stage, this rocket could orbit 108,000 kilograms around the earth or hurl 40,500 kilograms to the moon. Assuming the Saturn V could be perfected, the NASA engineers asked themselves: how can the lunar mission be accomplished? Three modes were considered: (I) direct flight using an enormous rocket, called Nova, which would generate 5,400,000 to 6,750,000 kilograms of thrust; (2) a rendezvous in earth orbit which would require two Saturn V launches; and (3) rendezvous of spacecraft in a lunar orbit using one Saturn. Direct flight was quickly ruled out because of the tremendous size of the vehicle which it would require. The Nova concept could do the job, but it could not be completed until long after 1970. The second method envisioned sending a three-man Apollo into earth orbit still attached to the Saturn V third stage. A second Saturn V would then be launched carrying a supply of fuel in its nose. This "tanker" would rendezvous above earth with Apollo, refill the third stage and thus provide the propulsive power to land directly on the moon and take off again. The third approach was based upon the ideal that it was not necessary to land the heavy Apollo spaceship on the moon. Calculations showed that Saturn V could propel the spacecraft into orbit about the moon without refuelling near earth. Why not drop a small spacecraft containing two of the astronauts from the Apollo to the moon? The energy to descend and take off and rendezvous with the orbiting mothership would be much less than a direct Apollo landing. The more the experts looked at it the more attractive the third approach appeared. For one thing, it eliminated possible delays and dangers in attempting to rendezvous two relatively large objects above the earth. Transferring fuel under zero gravity conditions might be difficult. The liquid would not pour CoNTINUED
The dramatic moment when the astronaut returns to earth after landing on the moon is interpreted by Mitchell Jamieson in FIRST STEPS.
Robert McCall portrays alert rescue crew watching spaceship rocket above smoke and flame. FIRST LIGHT
by John W. McCoy II. The rocket in a glare of light is focal point of hopes and fears.
in space; it would have to be pumped. And since there is no way to ground a spaceship electrically, static electricity could cause an explosion if a spark struck the higWy volatile fuel. Moreover, the little Lunar Excursion Module, or "Bug," offered real safety features. It would be light enough to orbit within approximately sixteen kilometres of the lunar surface, giving the astronauts an opportunity to pick the proper site or return, if necessary, to the orbiting Apollo. And the Apollo mothership would be manoeuvrable, so that the astronaut left aboard could help in the crucial rendezvous with the Bug following the lunar landing. So it was decided after a million man-hours of study by hundreds of engineers that the Lunar Orbital Rendezvous (LOR) mode would be the best approach. Preparing for an expedition to the moon is
like getting ready to assault Mount Everest. The difference lies in the accessibility of the two targets. But the idea is much the same in first perfecting equipment and skills by tackling small mountains before making the big jumpoff for the top. The plan laid out for Apollo encompasses a series of flight missions, each successively more difficult, intended to prove out the equipment and train the astronauts. Project Mercury, in which single-seat spacecraft were employed, was the first step. In two ballistic flights and four orbital missions-the longest lasting thirty-four hoursMercury astronauts proved men could survive the rigours of a journey to and from space and also function alertly as pilots. In 1961, NASA initiated Project Gemini, using two-man spacecraft named after the
twin constellation, Castor and Pollux, of ancient astrological fame. Gemini was intended to extend the lessons learned in Mercury and prepare astronauts for the greatly advanced spaceflight skills demanded by Apollo. It became the second important step to the moon. At the or:set of manned spaceflights there was great concern among physicians whether the gravity-free state, or weightlessness, created as an orbiting craft's speed offsets the earth's gravity, would adversely affect a man's heart, blood vessels, kidneys and bones if endured for periods of many days and weeks. Flights of Gemini, beginning in 1965, soon dispelled these fears. Astronauts James A. McDivitt and Edward H. White completed a four-day mission aloft in Gemini IV in June 1965, with no ill effects. They kept their body systems functioning properly with periodic exercise, using a stretch CONTINUED
POWER
by Paul Calle. An inferno at count-down, a yellow-orange ball of fire erupts from base of boost(!r as the rocket rises from the pad.
•
llf1i'Mht Dong Kingman capsules history of man's conquest of air and space-from
balloon and early airplane to today's rockets and launching complexes.
cord to work their muscles. The technique would enable other astronauts to accomplish missions lasting as long as fourteen days, including the seven-day Apollo lunar round trip. During the flight of Gemini IV, astronaut White became the first American to exit from a spaceship and the first man to use a small propulsion unit to manoeuvre himself freely in space. White spent twenty minutes floating at the end of an eight-metre tether, which supplied him with oxygen and kept him attached to the Gemini capsule. This daring exploit opened the way to the repair of satellites in orbit and eventually the assembly of large craft, such as space stations and ships, that could venture to the planets. Even more significant and more full of promise for the success of the lunar mission was the world's first rendezvous in space achieved by astronauts Frank Borman and James Lovell in Gemini VII and astronauts Walter Schirra and Thomas Stafford in Gemini VI. The two spaceships, travelling at about 28,000 kilometres an hour, were skilfully manoeuvred so that the final distance between them was reduced to one foot. Gemini VII set up a new endurance record of fourteen days in space. Before the first man sets a foot gingerly
on the moon from the Bug, tests will be made by the astronauts to determine the amount of nearby radiation and whether meteoroids are showering the area. If it appears safe, the man will venture forth, wearing an oxygen-supplying biopack and carrying cameras and geological gear. One of the first things he will try to do, naturally, is answer the age-old question: what is the moon made of? This may not be easy at first glance. But a trained eye may be able to tell fairly certainly whether the great craters pocking the surface were caused by meteor hits, by volcanic eruptions, or both-something which has bothered astronomers for years. Total time on the moon will be about twenty-four hours. The explorers will take turns away from the craft in four-hour shifts. They will be making a selenogical survey, the counterpart of a geological survey. This includes sampling of rock and dust, mapping and photographing of the terrain, making casts of the untouched surface and implanting seismic radiation-counting and magnetic fieldrecording devices which will continue to radio back data after the astronauts leave. The astronauts may also string up wire on
the moon for a radio telescope that can be operated by remote control from earth after they depart. They plan to bring back to earth for laboratory analysis thirty-six kilograms of moon samples in a special, airtight container. In their moon roamings the astronauts must be extremely careful, always mindful of soft pockets and hidden caverns and crevices. Nor do they want to risk gashing their lifeprotecting spacesuits. Of particular interest will be whether they find any indications of water. Many scientists theorize that it is possible that water does exist as glacial ice beneath the surface of the moon and, perhaps, as a liquid a number of metres down. Water would be important to establish a future permanent moon base. Broken down into hydrogen and oxygen components, it could even be used to refuel spaceships for journeys to the p~anets. In all probability the astronauts will come. upon several scientific surprises-possibly even traces of some form of long extinct life dating from the time when the moon may have had an atmosphere, if such were the case. This is something that only actual exploration can reveal. END
Falling within TV's comprehensive purview are such events as John Glenn's orbital flight, left, and U.S. newsmen's interview with Nehru, below.
In the very act of telling stories, television is conveying to millions of people a point of view, an attitude, a set of standards.
TELEVISION'S MIGHTY IMPACT
W
HENEVERMANtells a story he reveals something of what he believes. Men have always passed their values along from generation to generation through the telling of stories. The stories of Aesop were frankly designed to teach. The world's great religious books have provided the very architecture of man's civilization as well as the sustenance of his spirit. America's frontier handbook of learning, The McGuffey Reader, has been credited with stamping a common set of popular values upon the population of the United States. At the very least, the common literary heritage of a people represents a common set of references which may be drawn upon in communicating a vast range of ideas by allusion. One says "sour grapes," and the entire tale of the frustrated fox is implied. In our time, television, almost without our noticing the phenomenon, is creating a set of common references for nearly every living soul in the United States and for an increasing number of people in the rest of the world. Television is telling more stories to more people more of the time than any other story source in all of human history. Just to put the scope of television's influence into statistical perspective, let us look at some figures. There are 51,300,000 homes in the United States with television-just about every dwelling with electricity. Outside of the United States there are another eighty-five or ninety million sets, including, in the Arab world, a number rapidly approaching the million mark. The world is adding television receivers at the rate of 15,000,000 per year. Although a significant portion of the world's television fare is purchased from American television and film companies, the growth of indigenous programming is impressive. Never before have so many of the earth's people been exposed to quite so pervasive a common experience. Neither books, nor radio, nor movies have the impact of television. And along with this common experience, the audience is receiving a point of view, an attitude and a set of standards.
In the very act of telling stories, television is conveying a set of values to the audience. In certain instances, the story would not and could not exist except for the cultural values implied in its telling. Example: a recent episode of "Twilight Zone," a popular television show now in world-wide distribution, was set in some imaginary future society ruled by a benevolent but tyrannical government. The story concerns a young woman who resists being made over into an "ideal person" (pretty as a cover girl, perfectly adjusted, mindlessly happy). When the young woman loses her battle, the audience understands that a crime has been committed: the destruction of one human being's divine individuality by society. Although the young woman apparently has been made more attractive and even happier, the power of society has been wrongly used, the story seems to say. Clearly, a set of values was at work, both on the men who made the programme and most of the audience for which it was made. In the absence of those values, the story could not have been given form by its creators nor could the audience have grasped its meaning. The point of view represented by this example may be characterized as "the American urban outlook." This outlook may be summarized in a series of popular attitudes which are basic to the orientation of most American city dwellers: Science is leading us to progress. A man's home is his castle. A man has a right to be left alone. But society is prepared and able to come to the rescue of the human being in distress. No man is beyond redemption. Policemen must be even-handed, calm, incorruptible, strong, brave and understanding. Judges are sober and fair-minded. Lawyers are smart. Everyone has a right to speak his mind. Hospitals are well equipped. Everyone is entitled to the best education of which he is capable. The able and diligent will, with a little luck, do well in the world. People should be kind to animals and children. Everyone is created equal. Most American network television programmes are designed with CONTINUED SPAN
February 1966 29
the city dweller in mind, and this set of folk standards constitutes the only set of standards acceptable to him for the telling of stories. The city dweller may not always behave as if these were his standards, and he is sure to find out that some of his fellow citizens don't either; but if he were asked to check each of those statements as "true" or "false," he would mark nearly all of them "true," that is to say, things he believes should be true. Most of the hugely successful television programmes, which may reach as many as twenty million American homes in one night, are dramas. Each reflects some aspect of "the American urban outlook." "The Defenders": No matter who you are, you are entitled to justice, and lawyers, acting in good faith, are able to obtain that justice. "Mr. Novak": The teaching of the young is a noble calling. Many of our problems may be solved through the efforts and understanding of good teachers. There is not much in the human condition which is not amenable to improvement through education. "Doctor Kildare" and "Ben Casey": Doctors are dedicated to the healing of the sick and all of the forces of modern science and medicine will be applied to relieve human suffering regardless of cost. And here is still more of the common currency of folk philosophy, as reflected in television: Publicity-public knowledge of events, personalities, etc.-is good for everyone-a notion zealously fostered in the popular interview shows, "Tonight" and "Today" on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC); the new Les Crane Show on the American Broadcasting Company (ABC); and programmes such as "CBS Reports," devoted to the serious side of national reportage. We must strive to be well liked, to please others, to win the acceptance of the community-this theme frequently forms the basis of the comic element in popular "situation comedies," such as "I Love Lucy," "Dobie Gillis," "My Little Margie," even "Gomer Pyle." Frequently such stories involve the antics of characters who have difficulty in meeting community standards. The "rules" which appear to underlie the making of the popular television show are not written down anywhere, although occasional attempts to codify them have been made from time to time and expressed in such documents as the Television Code, adopted by major broadcasters and television producers. These fornlal codes, however, address themselves primarily to taboos rather than to the positive values conveyed in popular story telling. Nothing in such codes indicates, for example, that battle-toughened soldiers must show a tender concern for children and for women in distress-as the hardbitten sergeant in the war series "Combat" so often does. But one value is made explicit in the industry codes: a "rule" which says, essentially, that any form of improper, unethical, or criminal conduct-any violation of the folk standards applying to such conduct, in other words-must eventually be punished in the telling of a story. The ultimate triumph of these standards, then, the struggle to realize them, to make them come true in the face of odds, is a recurring theme in popular television. In the actual experience of many Americans, and of many people of other lands, life varies greatly from these standards. Some judges are, in fact, corrupt, some police brutal, hospitals inadequate, public officials inept, lawyers incompetent, soldiers callous, teachers ignorant, parents irresponsible, criminals successful, jurors prejudiced, law officers cowardly, and scientists narrow-minded. And indeed so they are frequently portrayed on popular television-except that it may never appear that such a state of affairs will be allowed to continue. In the world of popular television unlike the less perfect world of actuality, our sixes and sevens must be evened up before the end of the last act. Doctors in the television drama always struggle against prejudice and ignorance to save the lives of the hopelessly ill. In western dramas, the law officer always fights to win a fair trial for his prisoner in the face of the demands of a lynch mob or similar crisis-as "The
TV hero Dr. Ben Casey, examining young patient, creates a convincing picture of a modern, painstaking doctor, dedicated to his calling.
Rifleman" has done on more than one occasion. All of the foregoing examples illustrate various ways in which folk values underlie what at first may appear to be the simplest kind of entertainment. The serious import of this is that by exemplifying these folk values, television also establishes them in the viewer's mind as legitimate expectations or, at very least, realistic ideals. And when life fails to match what he has learned to expect from television fiction, he may often judge that it is life itself that is in error. If the parable of the "fair trial" and the expectation of justice before the law are emphasized again and again in an endless stream of television stories, is it not reasonable to expect that the viewer will begin to adopt these standards as his own? A traveller through the Mississippi River valley is struck by the universality of the television antenna on every Negro sharecropper's shack. Here are people, hitherto isolated from the mainstream of American ideals, many of them illiterate, exposed now on an unprecedented scale to the standards of the northern urban society. It may be that the leaders in the civil rights movement would never have been able to communicate with the rank-and-file of the Negro population except that now, through television, the isolated and underprivileged are learning to understand what the leaders are talking about. Who knows where this may lead? Real doctors may be expected by their patients to be as selfless, as humanitarian, as uncompromising with pain and death as are the television doctors. Real policemen may be judged by the conduct of Ben Gazarra in "Arrest and Trial." Real attorneys may be called upon to be as intolerant of injustice as is Perry Mason. And, odd as it sounds, the professionals in these fields may themselves tend to absorb these standards more deeply. There is, of course, danger in the power of television. Americans believe that an instrument of such great influence on the minds of whole populations is best trusted to an "open society," in which the individual may freely examine reality and measure it against fiction. Professionals in television have learned both to respect and
fear the immense powers of this greatest of mass media. Radio provided at least one example of the sudden manipulation of the popular mind when Orson Welles, apparently inadvertently, touched off mass hysteria. Broadcasting a seemingly real "War of the Worlds," he drove a frightened population into the streets to face anticipated destruction by men from Mars. Father Coughlin, as a radio personality, won thousands of Americans to a distorted view of reality during the 1930's. The best defence against either mass hysteria or mass seduction of minds lies, in this writer's belief, in conveying the truth by way of television. Every responsible American broadcaster believes that a healthy slice of reality is an essential balance to the world of television fiction. On a national scale, the three television networks and their great documentarians cover reality with consummate dramatic skill. Their reports of reality hold audiences with nearly the same force as do the fictional dramas. Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly, as examples, were able to measure the American standard of "equal opportunity" against the reality of life among the itinerant agricultural workers in their documentary "Harvest of Shame." It is interesting to note that, at first, this documentary was banned from general export, but eventually it was released for world distribution. The NBC documentarians, David Brinkley and Chet Huntley, have told the story of the "Negro Revolt," of life on the Mississippi, including disheartening as well as hopeful signs in the deep south, of the widespread civil rights activities in southern cities. Millions of Americans were given the chance to measure these realities against their own standards of fair play and justice. America's educational network, NET, toured some of the distressed neighbourhoods of San Francisco, a city with a glamorous image of beauty, excitement and luxury, while author James Baldwin offered a critical commentary. On the auspicious side of the national scene, David Brinkley one Sunday night took the story of America's strides in higher education into millions of homes, and the people were able to measure this reality for themselves against popular notions of progress through CONTINUED
TV reveals the significance of current events, liberates millions from their isolated worlds.
Among notable examples of TV's ability to place big events in true perspective were the civil rights march in Washington, above, and President John F. Kennedy's tragic death and funeral, below.
education and individual achievement. Network cameras search out public officials wherever they may be and seek an accounting of official stewardship of public affairs. Television journalists frequently demand of cabinet officers, of industrial leaders, of elected officials and even influential artists, an explanation of their public conduct. Minute details of the national conventions and of the political campaigns are exposed to the American public via television. Nearly every local station calls upon its community leaders, its doctors, its lawyers, its public officials to face the public. Real doctors answer real questions about medicine, hold up their professional standards to public scrutiny-Doctor Kildare notwithstanding. Real judges explain the law, and real lawyers discuss their philosophy. When public school officials in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, were accused of pursuing a policy of de facto racial segregation, the charges, the explanations for and proposed resolution of the conflict were aired on all three major local television stations. The most telling example of television's ability to put the world into true perspective comes out of the tragic death of President Kennedy. At the time of the assassination, a European friend of mine told me, "If this happened in my country, there would be bloody riots in the streets. The government itself would tremble and probably fall. How can you Americans take it all so calmly?" The answer was that we did not take it calmly but that we, as a people, had a means of sharing the national shock and grief which was also a source of reliable information and reassurance. The astonishing speed and accuracy with which television reported the story provided prompt relief from wild rumours, public confusion and mass hysteria. The reporting of reality, as far as it could be determined and grasped at the time, stabillzed the entire nation. The American people could see the principle of "continuity of government" functioning as the new President took office, as great leaders closed ranks and pledged support to the new President. They could see members of the Cabinet returning to their posts from abroad, ready to meet the emergency. They could see the forces of law trying to meet the crisis. They could even see, and lament, the imperfections in that attempt. This matching of reality against folk standards in America is a continuing process. Viewers from tots to oldsters learn to know their national leaders by sight and to measure the words and deeds of those leaders. Through television, too, these tens of millions are liberated from the isolation of their own provincial worlds. They have travelled down the length of the Nile. They have explored London and Hong Kong. They have watched Olympic events in Italy and in Japan via Telstar. Their hunger today to know about other peoples and other places is reflected in a new wave of popularity for travel shows conducted by professional adventurers. Perhaps forty million television viewers joined Sophia Loren when she toured Rome via TV camera with them in November 1964, and another thirty-five million or so toured the Louvre Museum of Paris the same month. As Americans hone their "folk standards" by enshrining them in fiction, they will strengthen some of these standards, change some and perhaps discard others. As the popularity and availability of television around the globe increases, it will undoubtedly play a similar role in other countries and other areas with common heritage and objectives. Modern, urban, fast-moving American society demands a powerful and fast medium of reaching a consensus both on political matters and more basic social and moral questions. Perhaps television will some day play this role on a world scale. Already the flow of television programmes around the world and the reportage of international events are impressive as a means of understanding the lives and objectives of others. Is it not reasonable to think that as the trend to international programming continues, all of us may share more vividly in each other's lives-and social and spiritual objectives? The possibility of television demagoguery will always exist, for there are never guarantees of safe passage in this world. But so long as people can measure opinion and fiction against reality and truth, this writer believes they will always be able to shape the world closer to the heart's desire. END
GANGES: SOUL OF INDIA Jawaharlal Nehru called the Ganges "the soul of India" because, in some intangible manner, the river seems to nourish not only the land but the human spirit as well. This is superbly brought out in an hour-long television documentary produced in colour by the National Broadcasting Company and seen recently in some thirty million homes throughout the United States. The film traces the river's course from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal, portraying cities that lie along its banks. For millions of Americans, the programme provided some understanding of the reverence of Indians for the great river. Produced by Lou Hazam, the film's sensitive script is written by Peter Jeffries and narrated by British actor Michael Rennie. The following stills capture some of the haunting beauty of the TV programme.
Midway down the river at Allahabad, the rising sun burnishes the water. When the early morning mist has l(fted, the waiting boats will carry pilgrims out to the confluence, where the waters of the Ganges mingle with the Jamuna.
Monkeys rest contentedly against the cool stone pillars of a Banaras shrine. In the city, there are hundreds of temples, rising tier upon tier from the river's edge.
On the crowded ghats of Banaras, saint and sinner, prince and pauper bathe side by sideunited in the belief that the waters that cleanse the body also purify the soul.
"The story of the Ganges ... from old times to new, is the story of India's civilization and culture, of the rise and fall of empires, of great and proud cities." -NEHRU
An aura of peace surrounds this Buddhist temple at Sarnath in its idyllic setting. Here, 2,500 years ago, Buddha delivered his first sermon, preaching the golden mean between the extremes of life.
For many a weary pilgrim, travelling by boat or over land, arrival at Banaraswhere the bathing ghats are one vast outdoor temple-is the end of a life-long spiritual odyssey.
"The Ganges ...
IS
the river of India, beloved of her people, round
which are intertwined her hopes and fears ... victories and defeats."
Elephants wait olltside ~ the historic Turkish Gate in Lucknow, Oll the banks of the River Gomati, which later merges and loses its identity in Mother Ganges.
The same water that blesses the new-born and the newly-wed also enriches the fields of India. This method of irrigation was ancient even when Alexander the Great invaded India many centuries ago.
THE ,ONE-TON PENCIL Mr. Whiteside's article has been updated and condensed by permission of The New Yorker. Š 1962, The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.
THE many false faces of life that television casts upon the home screen, it is a medium that has a peculiar capacity for conveying glimpses of the real world, and sometimes, when its cameras and microphones are used for the purpose of dealing with actualities rather than of passing along the canned daydreams that make up most programmes, the results can prove absorbing even to people who normaUy don't bother with the medium. The bulk of the networks' journalistic activities consists in covering the day-to-day news and such big special events as the political conventions and the national elections. Beyond this area, however, the broadcasters have lately been increasingly active in the production of live or filmed documentary programmes that survey aspects of contemporary affairs not necessarily in the immediate news. Ordinarily, a documentary is presented not as an isolated production but as a part of a series of factual programmes bearing some proprietary title-for example, "NBC White Paper," "CBS Reports," or the American Broadcasting Company's "Close-Up!" The contents of documentary programmes are extremely diverse. Within the past year or so, a viewer could have encountered on the network of the National Broadcasting Company a programme on the problems of the declining American railroad industry, or one on the Peace Corps. If he had chanced to turn to the Columbia Broadcasting System, he could have spent an hour learning about the imminent world water shortage, or about the state of our civil defence. And on ABC (American Broadcasting Company) he could have come across an exposition of the intricacies of automation, or of the problem of student drop-out in the public schools. Documentaries are nothing new to network television, but the current profusion of them is. Five years ago, the documentaries on the air were so few as to be hardly noticeable, but since then the networks have been expanding their journalistic operations, and right now the production of television documentaries is flourishing as it has never flourished before. • OTWITHSTANDING
In fact, putting together such programmes seems to have grown into a journalistic profession in itself-a clamorously active occupation, distinct from ordinary newscasting, from the show-business end of television, and from printed-word reporting-which has been developing its own forms of expression, its own stylistic techniques, and its own breed of journalist. Of all the people who have been responsible over the past few years for developing the television documentary, none is more active, or better known in the industry, than Fred W. Friendly, head' of the news department of Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS); Friendly has been working with the televisiondocumentary form for as long as the networks have been sending their programmes across the continent. For seven years, beginning in 1951, he was co-producer, with the late Edward R. Murrow, of "See It Now," a CBS series that was probably most memorable for a study of Senator Joseph McCarthy (1954) and for an interview with Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer (1955). .
Since 1959, Friendly has been the executive producer of "CBS Reports," a series of documentaries, most of them an hour long, presented, on a variable schedule, approximately three times a month, under titles that have' included "The Population Explosion," "Biography of a Missile," "Censorship and the Movies," "Eisenhower on the Presidency," "Can We Disarm ?," "Storm Over the Supreme Court," "East Germany: The Land Beyond the Wall," "Birth Control and the Law," "An Hour with the Secretary of State [Rusk]," "Crisis of Presidential Succession," and "The Ku Klux Klan." Most of these titles are award-winning programmes. Based on his work during the )962-63 season, Friendly was named Producer of the Year in 1963. As the man responsible for "CBS Reports," Friendly controls the biggest single documentary operation in television and he supervises the activities of ten subordinate producers
and a score of assistants, who make up a semiautonomous unit within the CBS news department. These production people put together, under Friendly's direction, some twenty-five programmes in a single season-a formidable task in the face of difficulties that include months of filming on location for many of the documentaries, and extraordinary exertions to produce others under emergencydeadline conditions. In the process of getting this task accomplished, Friendly, a big, loose-limbed man of forty-nine, tackles his highly variegated duties with a hustling energy and enthusiasm unusual even in the television business. He has a sense of mission that he tends to apply full blast to any project that he undertakes, and since he is always involved in as many as a dozen widely scattered projects he exists in a state of compound excitement that seems incapable of diminution. Most of the time, Friendly's energies emanate either from his office, on the seventeenth floor of the CBS Building, on Madison Avenue, or from a CBS screening room, on Ninth Avenue, where he views nearly all the film that his camera crews turn out; however, he also spends a considerable amount of time out of town, overseeing filming on location, and on these missions, too, his hustling qualities quickly make themselves apparent. "Fred Friendly always looks as though he had just got off a foam-flecked horse," Carl Sandburg once wrote in Variety after a few meetings with Friendly on location in North Carolina.
Friendly's get-it-done quality was much in evidence when he flew down to Huntsville, Alabama, in the process of making a "CBS Reports" documentary entitled "Why Man in Space?" There, at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's George C. Marshall Space Flight Centre, he ordered his camera crew into a building where technicians were assembling a Saturn rocket booster. Inside, to the sound of rivetting guns and so forth, the rocket people ~ere swarming all CONTINUED
over the recumbent rocket, the high priority rating of the project impelling them to maximum effort, but within a few minutes after Friendly got into action, striding here and there and ordering his cameramen about ("Get those engines! I want all eight of them in the shot! And I want a pan shot right along here. I want the works !"), the CBS producer and his crew looked to be by far the busiest men in the place. Friendly's talent for pouring out energy is an invaluable one in a profession where the problem of just getting from one place to another is so much more complicated than it is for people who work in printed journalism. As a rule, when a reporter for a newspaper or magazine goes out on the job, the basic tools he needs for describing what he sees and hears-assuming that he wants to make notes on the spot---can easily be carried in his pocket; if the assignment takes him t.o another city, he may take a portable typewriter along. But when a man who is making a television documentary goes out to record a scene or an interview, a typewriter, if he brings one at all, is the least of his burdens. His business requires him to be accompanied by a tremendous clutter of equipment-one or two thousand pounds of motion-picture cameras, extra lenses, big lights and reflectors, power converters, great coils of cable, bulky boxes of film, microphone hookups, and soundrecording equipment. And he must also be accompanied by the people who operate all these devices, at the very least a cameraman, an assistant cameraman, a sound man, and an electrician. Since the making of each documentary programme involves the filming of dozens or scores of scenes, at spots that may be far apart-and are sometimes continents apart-the sheer logistic work necessary to keep half a dozen documentaries in active production at one time is something like the job of keeping a small but perpetual Berlin airlift going. Friendly regards such arduous exercises as a natural and unavoidable part of his everyday existence. "We work with a one-ton pencil," he says of his brand of journalism. The amount and unwieldiness of the equipment that Friendly finds necessary in the production of documentaries inevitably affect their form and, to a certain extent, the programmes' content. The - television documentary, to begin with, is not a particularly flexible form of expression, since its scope tends to be limited by the very thing that gives television its unique power; namely, visual directness. Then, because of the nature of the medium, every word spoken on it ordinarily has to be accompanied by some sort of image, whether it is the image of the man who is doing the speaking or an image
connected with what he is speaking about, and this situation makes for difficulties in the verbal presentation of ideas that can't readily be matched to pictures on the screen. It is difficult to attempt to make, and almost impossible to succeed in making, any detailed reconstruction of events that have not already been extensively recorded on film.
The producer who is concerned with performing a contemporary journalistic function, as distinct from a historical one, cannot command anything like the flexibility of form that is possible with the printed word. He doesn't have the same liberty to fuse subjective observations and objectively described action. He doesn't have the same freedom to summarize what he sees, for he can't compress the film he shoots, as a writer can compress his observations; he can only slice the film up into smaller pieces and reconnect some of them, possibly using some narrative material as a kind of verbal cement. He has the means of quoting a subject with undeniable accuracyall too undeniable, sometimes, for the tastes of some politicians-but he can't paraphrase what his subject is saying except through some such rather awkward device as background narration. And since for most practical purposes he can't readily move back and forth through time as an observer, the tense in which he expresses himself-if the television image can be said to have tenses-is pretty much limited to the present. Nor is this all, for while the maker of television documentaries has the means of recording with great precision what appears in front of his cameras, the very equipment that enables him to do this also encumbers him in his attempt to depict every situation truly. A conventional journalist can go into a room, get interviews with some of the people present, and then depart without having noticeably intruded upon the proceedings. The arrival of a network television camera crew, however, is an event in itself, and for many people in a room may overshadow in importance anything else that is taking place there. People stop what they're doing; they're going to be on TV. The place, packed with lights, cables, cameras, recording equipment, and camera crew, is transformed from a room into a motion-picture set, and into the middle of this- set, when all is ready, the interviewees, one by one, are finally led, a lapel microphone hung around each man's neck like a noose, to be questioned under the stare of the lenses and hot lights. Holding the mirror up to nature under such circumstances is not easy, and this is particularly so in Friendly's case, because most of
his documentaries consist in large measure of interviews. Friendly is well aware of this inherent difficulty, and he uses a number of counter-measures for minimizing it':"'-and, he believes, in many cases overcoming it. The principal counter-measure is his method of selecting people who are going to appear and talk on the screen. Because he realizes only too well that the paraphernalia of television filmmaking have an intimidating effect on many subjects-some people are simply floored by the experience of being faced by all the lights, the lenses, and the microphones-he does his best to choose people who feel so strongly about what they have to say that their sense of conviction will override their natural uneasiness in the face of the mass of equipment pointed at them. Friendly is assisted, of course, by the subject matter of his documentaries, which frequently involve issues that invite firm expressions of opinion. However, he must be constantly on the lookout for the sort of personal forcefulness that will not dissolve--or, better yet, is even capable of blooming-under lights that total three thousand watts, no matter what the subject matter may be. "We want to deal with people who are involved" is one of Friendly's several ways of describing the kind of person he tries to get on camera. Among his other ways of putting it are that the subject must be "able to communicate," or must "come through," or that he should be "a man with fire in his belly." Not everybody who is "involved" necessarily has the ability to "come through," however. The fire that is in a man's belly may not necessarily flare up on the screen. Some people who meet Friendly's specifications for strong involvement falter under the lights----one of them has described the business of being interviewed amid all the gear of a Friendly production as "a shattering experience"and they fail to project themselves any farther than a scrapfilm bin in the cutting room. A series of such near-misses on the part of people interviewed for a particular programme can cause Friendly to drop the project in question altogether.
When Friendly believes he has found a person in whom the qualities of involvement and communicativeness are present to a sufficient degree, he demonstrates a rema'rkable ability to get that person stirred up about television. Friendly moves in with such energy and enthusiasm that resisting his overtures can become a very difficult matter. Among those who have initially held out against Friendly's suggestions that they appear on his programmes and have later surrendered
was Walter Lippmann, the distinguished newspaper columnist and political commentator. Through most of his career Lippmann made a point of avoiding personal public appearances. For years he spurned all sorts of attempts by television networks to get him to make an appearance on the screen. In the fall of 1960, Friendly went after him, and after a struggle Lippmann, as Friendly puts it, "was dragged in kicking and screaming" to be interviewed for an hour-long programme. Lippmann himself puts it this way: "Friendly came to lunch with me in Washington and began to draw me out about appearing on a filmed programme. He pushed-he's a tremendous salesman, this fellow. Finally I said, 'I'll think about it, but if I do it I want to have control over what comes out.' He said, 'I'll give you an agreement and if you don't like the result we'll burn the film.' That was a challenge." The result was a programme entitled "Walter Lippmann on Leadership," in which Lippmann, interviewed by Howard K. Smith, talked for an hour on the eight years of the Eisenhower Administration and on other matters. The programme was so successfulthat Lippmann made another hourlong appearance on "CBS Reports" and a half-hour appearance six months later. Such successes on Friendly's part are due not only to his energy and persuasiveness but also to his production techniques. What Friendly. sets out to do with people who become subjects of his documentarieswhether, like former President Eisenhower, Lippmann, or Carl Sandburg, the poet and Lincoln biographer, they are on the¡ screen for a whole hour at a time, or whether, like a number of Negro and white Southerners on a programme called "Who Speaks for the South ?," they appear only briefly-is to make the best use of television's unusual ability to emphasize essential personal qualities. Anybody who has watched a man being interviewed for a Friendly production and has then seen the same interview on television cannot help being struck by the contrast between the relatively ordinary, everyday quality of the man's voice and demeanour when he is observed from just behind the semicircle of paraphernalia during the interview and the active, engaged, responsive air the same subject seems to acquire when he is seen in a closeup on the television screen. In the flesh, a man's face is, after all, only part of him, but in a closeup it becomes, suddenly, all of him. Every facial movement or gesture is heightened in effect, and every accompanying vocal inflection is correspondingly stressed, with the result that the whole personality of the man is peculiarly concentrated and revealed.
Essentially, Friendly's art consists in selecting and juxtaposing various filmed sequences taken from the enormous mass of such material that is gathered on whatever subject he tackles. His method is such that he does not attempt to put words in the mouth of anyone who is interviewed, nor does he really attempt to control a man's demeanour before the camera. But before a single shot is made he does devote a great deal of care to the manner in which the subject of an interview will be questioned by the interviewer, to the manner in which the subject will be photographed while he talks, and to the physical arrangement of the apparatus. As things are arranged in a Friendly production, the equipment can be operated with so little waste motion that its obtrusiveness is reduced to a minimum; on the other hand, its presence can, if necessary, be used as a psychological means of prodding the man being interviewed into greater communicativeness. While Friendly has no control over what a subject may say on camera, he does have complete control over the selection of the interviewer, and interviewers who know his working methods are able to give him a great deal of help in getting his subject to talk freely. Such an interviewer knows, for example, that he must avoid anything like a rehearsal with the subject, because an interviewee will never answer a question the second time with the conviction he displays in answering it the first time. The interviewer also understands why Friendly, for all his attempts to make his subjects feel at home under the lights, believes there are occasions when the very presence of all the apparatus is useful in making a subject more vocal. This principle is demonstrated when a subject, in replying to a question, says something that the interviewer suspects can be said more succinctly or interestingly; in this case, the interviewer, instead of going on to the next question, pauses, deliberately saying nothing, and sits and waits long enough for the subject to become aware of the television equipment around him and of his own silence. As likely as not, the interviewee will be sufficiently goaded by his own momentary self-consciousness and by the whirring of the cameras to come out with something like "What I mean is-" and then go on to make his point more cogently. Friendly says, "You wait three secon4s and then the pure gold starts to come." THE INTER VIEWER IS A SHADOWY BUT VITAL FIGURE The role of people Friendly uses as interviewers on "CBS Reports" is always carefully subordinated to those of the people being
interviewed. This concept of the interviewer's job differs from that in evidence on some other documentary series, where the interviewer is often shown standing side by side with his subject, carrying on a conversation in a domineering manner. In Friendly's programmes, the interviewer is ordinarily a relatively shadowy figure; his back is partly turned to the camera, and he is well to one side of the person he is interviewing. However shadowy the interviewer may seem, his presence is nevertheless a vital factor when someone is talking before the "CBS Reports" cameras, because Friendly believes the subject should be shown responding to a particular human being rather than to a load of equipment. "We are not in the watch-the-birdie business," he says. "We don't want to have people making speeches to the camera. You can't turn them into actors. Anyway, making a speech is never a natural thing to do. It was designed as a way of reaching several hundred or several thousand people at a time. Nowadays, with television, what a man says can reach four or fourteen or forty million people at a time, and the way he can do that best is not by making a speech to everybody but by talking to one man." When someone is in the process of talking to one of Friendly's interviewers, surrounded by the full complement of two cameras and the customary lights and recording equipment, part of the technique that Friendly uses to bring the subject's essential qualities to the screen is evident from the movement of the cameramen. As the subject talks, these men silently go about their business; while one camera focuses on the subject's face and shoulders, the other, taking what Friendly's people call "grab shots," from time to time goes after supporting detail-a closeup of a gesture of the subject's hand, for example, or even of his shoes, if there is something interesting about them. The grab camera will also pick up, with one or another of the several lenses mounted on its lens turret, a series of extrem~ closeup shots or a series of medium shots of the subject, of the subject and the interviewer together, and, occasionally, of the interviewer alone. The cameramen thus provide Friendly with the material he needs not only for compiling the basic record of the interview but for imparting visual emphasis to things that strike him as significant and for making a transition from one section of the interview to another. Perhaps eight or ten times as much film may be shot in the course of an interview as Friendly can conceivably use in the finished programme, but his policy is to shoot, shoot, and continue shooting until he feels that his subjects have expressed themselves to his CONTINUED SPAN
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satisfaction, at which point he is ready to begin editing his ma'terial into its much shorter, finished form-a process that involves long and tedious sessions in the cutting room. Here his job is, in essence, to telescope a long talk by selecting a series of verbatim passages and joining them together. By Friendly's process of editing, a comparatively static scene of a man talking at length to an interviewer will become a series of vignettes in which the audience sees the subject from a variety of aspects. At one moment he will be seen from a few yards away, and at another in closeup, first from the right and then from the left; at other moments, the subject's voice will be carried in simultaneous juxtaposition with shots of his hands gesticulating or of the interviewer listening. Moreover, the whole succession of shots is manipulated so as to give emphasis to particularly meaningful words and gestures, and at the same time a certain rhythmic pattern is created by a system of visual and aural punctuation, in which a smile, a frown, a gesture of the hand, or an ironic laugh may be used in the manner of a comma, a semicolon, or a period, a marker at which a shot can be ended and set off from the one that follows. Friendly relies on the technique of juxtaposition not only in depicting the subjects of interviews but also in relating what they say or do to the action shots with which, on most of his programmes, the interviews are interspersed. His use of this technique is seen at its most effective when he is dealing with a dramatic subject, like the countdown at the launching of a rocket. In "Biography of a Missile," for example, a 1959 programme in which Friendly and Murrow followed step by step the making and launching of a Juno II, an exciting sequence juxtaposed shots of the tense faces of the engineers in the firing blockhouse with shots of the actual launching. Similarly, in "The Year of the Polaris," the audience was able to see not only the first launching of a Polaris missile from an atomicpowered submarine as it appeared from the surface of the ocean but also, intermittently, the scene in the launch-control area within the submarine-a scene memorable for a splendidly juxtaposed closeup shot of Admiral W. F. Raborn, the man in charge of the launching, carefully crossing two fingers of his right hand as the countdown approached zero. TREATMENT
OF CONTROVERSIAL TOPICS
Still another way in which Friendly makes strong use of juxtaposition is in his treatment of controversial topics. Out of a series of interviews in which various people express differing views on a given issue, he may extract
shots in which sharply conflicting attitudes are expressed and present them one against the other, as a means of indicating the range of opinion on the issue involved-for example, in "Who Speaks for the South ?," shots of Negroes and whites commenting on segregation in the public schools of Georgia; in "The Keeper of the Rules: Congressman Smith and the New Frontier," shots of Republican and Democratic Congressmen delivering their conflicting opinions on the political tactics of Howard W. Smith, the chairman of the House Rules Committee; and in "The Population Explosion," a documentary filmed largely in India, shots of laymen, physicians, . and Roman Catholic clergymen presenting their views on birth control. With its ability to juxtapose individual shots in dramatic contrast, and also to convey the intensity of people's convictions, television is extraordinarily well suited to dealing with controversial matters, and Friendly has never hesitated to use the medium for this purpose. Indeed, Friendly's 'fondness for using controversial subject matter in "CBS Reports" has caused some of the programmes themselves to become subjects of public controversy, bringing him and his producers under attack by various powerful interests. Thus, the American Farm Bureau Federation denounced "Harvest of Shame" as a "rigged documentary" and a "highly coloured propaganda job" through which, the Federation claimed, "the public relations of farmers were irreparably damaged." "The Business of Health" prompted the Board of Trustees of the American Medical Association to issue a statement asserting that the programme was filled with "misrepresentations, bias and distortions," constituting a "caricature of medicine and its aims." "Who Speaks for Birmingham?" so nettled several powerful white citizens of that city, including the chief of police, that they brought suit against CBS for damages of $1,500,000, on the ground that the programme had defamed them. (The case is still pending.) Friendly regards such criticisms as an inevitable by-product of any television journalism that attempts to come to grips with current issues. If in "CBS Reports" programmes dealing with political matters the right wing doesn't usually show up too well, this is not, Friendly maintains, because of any built-in political bias on his part. "We have to be sixty-five per cent against both the Democrats and Republicans," he likes to say, and he is also fond of saying that while there has never been any intention on the part of his organization to injure anybody's reputation, some people have contrived to injure their own reputations by expressing their views on his programmes.
Friendly does admit, however, that some of his programmes have what he calls "a point of view," and since his own social outlook is marked by a general attachment to the cause of the underdog and by strong feelings about poverty and oppression in the world, it is not surprising that a "CBS Reports" programme dealing with racial segregation should possess a sharpness that rattles some Southern whites, or that one on migratory labour should cause the farm lobby to react violently. But if Friendly's work reveals him to be something of a moralist, he seems to stop short of salvationism, and it appears to be a matter of professional pride with him that he feels he can resist, in the editing process, the temptation to emphasize on screen those portions of interviews that tend to harmonize with his own personal attitudes. In making preparations for interviews and for "CBS Reports" programmes in general, Friendly does not draw up any detailed plan. There is no basic script to be followed but only a general idea of what the programme is to be about; the actual course of its development is determined by the nature of whatever raw material Friendly's producers, interviewers, and cameramen turn up. The documentary that reaches the screen is primarily a product not of a script-writer but of a producer, who has compiled it by picking and choosing slices of film and piecing them together. In the opinion of quite a few of the documentary producers for other networks, who are used to working from comparatively tight outlines drawn up before they start filming their programmes, Friendly's habit of shooting on and on at everything in sight until he gets what satisfies him is a grossly inefficient one, even if it does enable him sometimes to achieve striking results. They also consider him rather rigid in his methods, and particularly in his insistence on using heavy thirtyfive-millimetre cameras, for while these obtain shots of high technical quality, they deprive him of the freedom of movement that light, highly portable sixteen-millimetre cameras afford their crews. FRIENDLY'S CRITICS IN THE PROFESSION One of Friendly's critics in the business has called his television "big-head TV"a world bounded, in Friendly's endless closeups of people, by the chin and the eyebrow-a form of representation in which the camera is accepted as a great, clumsy machine, into whose glassy visual range the subject has to be taken, rather than being made a truly flexible and mobile instrument that can reach out to the subject and readily travel with him. They seem to feel that while
Friendly may be a highly talented documentary producer, he is slightly old-fashioned. For his part, Friendly firmly maintains that he is willing to sacrifice whatever extra mobility he might obtain by using sixteen-millimetre equipment for the sake of the high technical quality of the film he gets by working with thirty-five-millimetre cameras and what he considers proper lighting. Clear photography, clear sound, and effective lighting are universally conceded to be among the hallmarks of the Friendly documentary. Beyond these purely technical considerations, Friendly's work is also recognized as noteworthy for the quality of its reporting, for editing that gives it a characteristic crispness and pace, and for the authenticity of its content. Some network documentary producers are not above the use of occasional hanky-panky to achieve continuity or dramatic effect. Sometimes when the viewer thinks he is seeing a continuous sequence of real events, he may actually be seeing some genuine material onto which has been grafted a set of old stock shots liftedfrom some film library. Or the sound that the audience hears while viewing, say, the scene of a street riot, may have nothing to do with that particular riot but may have been merelythrown in from a sound-effects library, the film itself having been shot without sound. Whatever the intent of the producer may be in such cases, the effect is to mislead the viewer. Friendly does his best to avoid this sort of thing, and the one or two instances in which, over the years, he feels that he hasn't played altogether fair with the viewer in the matter of a stock shot have caused him to indulge in considerable self-reproach. Aside from such past exceptions, and from the practice-in itself perhaps harmless, though it is not difficult to see how it could become harmful-of presenting as part of a continuously filmed interview shots actually made after it of reporters repeating certain questions, Friendly insists quite strictly on authenticity. "If we show, as we did during the Korean War, a view of a hundred-and-five-millimetre howitzer in action, we make sure that the sound accompanying the shot is the sound of that howitzer," Friendly says. "We try to give the viewer grounds for telling himself as he sees the show, 'This is as it really happened.' If you don't work that way, you don't know where you will wind up." In conformity with his striving for authenticity, Friendly, unlike a number of his confreres, does not allow the use of background music as a means of heightening an effect on the screen; he considers such music a theatrical device that has no proper place in journalism, and except for a regular introductory musical theme-a few bars from
Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring"that accompanies the display of the "CBS Reports" title, he permits music only when it hapPens to be part of the sound of whatever scene his people are shooting. In getting out an edition of "CBS Reports" on schedule two or three times a month during the viewing season, and at the same time attempting to maintain his production standards, Friendly works in an atmosphere of unremitting crisis, amid sounds of impending high-level long-distance telephone calls ("Dr. Jerome Wiesner holding on Six, Mr. Friendly. General Eisenhower on Nine! Walter Lippmann on Seven!"), of orders to his producers ("What do you mean, the government won't let us go in there ?"), and of the special talk of the screening room ("Next reel." "What lens is this on?" "There's a rackover in here so we'll need to get a cutaway shot"). On rush programmes, Friendly spends a backbreaking number of hours of work in the cutting room; sometimes he will enter it on a Friday afternoon and, sustained by sandwiches, coffee, and middle-of-the-night cat naps between the splicing of reels, stay there until Sunday night. Then, after a good night's sleep at home (or even without it), he starts in all over again, as energetic and as talkative as ever, vigorously prodding his producers with new ideas for programmes, throwing himself into long-distance phone calls all over the place. (He says, "The tragedy of Friendly is that I can't think by myself.")
With his producers, Friendly is particularly garrulous. When he gets really worked up on a subject, his ideas come streaming in from all directions, borne on long subordinate clauses; Friendly, who gestures a good deal in the course of conversation, and with whom gesticulation tends to precede amplification of an idea, keeps order among the crowding thoughts in the manner of a traffic cop, holding some up at the corner with a warning hand and letting others advance with a directing wave. He arouses his men to tremendous enthusiasm for whatever project he assigns to them; he excoriates them when they fail to follow through as he desires; and he praises them lavishly for a good performance. His tantrums are fairly frequent, and sometimes they are spectacular; once, after viewing a reel of film that he considered unsatisfactory because of some negligence on the part of the producer assigned to the job, he went up to the screen and kicked a hole through the plywood panel below it. Ordinarily, however, his expressions of dissatisfaction are only verbal. His prevailing
demeanour has been described by one of his critics as "controlled manic." His friends see it as something that might be described as supernormal-merely unusually energy-laden, optimistic, outgoing, and communicative. "I'm brainwashed about Friendly," one of his young producers says admiringly, and, among the subjects of "CBS Reports" interviews, as judicious a figure as Walter Lippmann has observed, "Friendly is what a friend of mine has called a life-enhancing man." "CBS Reports" is a more or less direct outgrowth of "See It Now," which Friendly began producing jointly with Edward R. Murrow on a half-hour, once-a-week basis in 1951. "See It Now" began as a sort of weekly television news review. Although in the early days its production methods were crude by Friendly's present standards, it was the first television documentary series of any consequence that attempted to deal with current affairs. Friendly's association with Murrow began in 1948, when, after they had been brought together by an agent named J. G. Gude, they collaborated on the production of a record album, called "I Can Hear It Now," which was a collection of excerpts from recordings of the voices of famous people, done in the general spirit of Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday. "I Can Hear It Now" quickly became a best-seller, and Friendly and Murrow followed it up with three more similar albums and then with a comparatively short-lived radio news programme called "Hear It Now." With the rise of television, the idea of a weekly "See It Now" programme developed naturally. "See It Now" went on the air on November 18, 1951, with Murrow as its narrator, and on that first programme the producers, to celebrate the recent linking by microwave of the East and West Coasts, displayed simultaneously, by a split-screen technique, live shots of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In the seven years of the programme's existence, Friendly, who had already formed the habit of, as Murrow put it, "taking off without warming his motors," charged all over the world with his one-ton pencil in pursuit of reality: to Ann Arbor, Michigan, on the day the discovery of polio vaccine was announced, for an interview with Dr. Jonas Salk; to the waters of Israel, where he ordered his men to light up the Sea of Galilee by night in order to photograph nocturnal fishermen at work; to Berlin; to Suez; to a meeting hall in Pine, Colorado, where voters were assembled for a school-bond election; to Stagg Field, in Chicago, for a gathering of nuclear scientists; and to any other spot he could think of where some sort of social or technological upheaval was going on. CONTINUED
SPAN February
1966 41
His cameras took notes on interviews with all sorts of leading figures in the world: with Nehru, in New Delhi; with Nasser, in Cairo ("There's a good picture somewhere of me lecturing Nasser," Friendly says); with BenGurion, in Israel; with Chou En-lai, in Rangoon; with Macmillan, in London; and with Truman, in Islamorada, Florida. His cameraman went up in an Air Force plane and flew into an atomic cloud over Yucca Flat, Nevada, to give viewers an idea of what radioactive fallout looked like from the inside. They went overseas on goodwill tours that included a tour of India by Marian Anderson, a tour of North Africa, Turkey, and Israel by Danny Kaye, and a tour of West Africa by Louis Armstrong. In domestic waters, Murrow and Friendly ("Murrow on the bridge; Friendly running the engine room-that's the working relationship they had," a CBS man recalls) sailed into the area of political controversy-an area that television up to then had timorously avoided -by taking up matters having to do with civil liberties. In 1953, for example, they espoused the cause of Milo Radulovich, a U.S. Air Force Reserve lieutenant who, although nobody questioned his personal loyalty, had been officially designated as a security risk, suspended from the Air Force Reserve, and recommended for dismissal, because of politi.cal activities that his sister had engaged in, and because his father had subscribed to a pro-Tito Serbian-language newspaper. In a half-hour programme, Murrow, as narrator, presented the entire history of the affair and sketched the dilemma of a man faced with a particularly egregious charge of guilt by association. As a result of the programme, which caused a considerable stir in the press, the Air Force reversed its findings on Lieutenant Radulovich a few weeks later, and restored him to active duty. In 1954, during the heyday of McCarthyism, Murrow and Friendly struck a further blow for civil liberties with their acidulous study of the methods used by McCarthy in his rise to power-a study highlighted by a shot of the Senator from Wisconsin making a 1952 campaign speech against Adlai Stevenson. "I perform this unpleasant task," the shot caught McCarthy saying, "because the American people are entitled to have the coldly documented history of this man who says he wants to be your President. But strangely, Alger-" Here the Senator paused, and the crowd roared. (Alger Hiss, a State Department official, was accused of passing secret documents to Communist spies.) "I mean, Adlai-" The crowd laughed again, briefly;
then, in the ensuing quiet, McCarthy became seized by wave after wave of hysterical giggles, which Murrow and Friendly coolly held on screen until the last, painful spasm died away. McCarthy struck back a couple of weeks later, in air time that the network made available to him, but there is little doubt that the first programme rubbed some of the varnish from the shield of McCarthyism. "CBS Reports" is a great showpiece for the CBS management. Because the series has no regular sponsor, and attracts comparatively few sponsors for its individual programmes in the course of a season, it has been bringing in only about half a million advertising dollars, while its production costs come to about two million dollars, and it occupies air time worth about twice that sum. (Last summer, however, International Business Machines agreed to sponsor fifteen of these hourlong documentary programmes at a cost of about $5 million.) Such losses are not matters of excessive concern to the network, whose income from the presentation of such shows as "Gunsmoke," "Have Gun, Will Travel," "The Twilight Zone," "The Garry Moore Show," "Perry Mason," "Rawhide," and "The Defenders" helped to raise the net profits before taxes of CBS, Inc., from $9,555,000 in 1950 to $87,000,000 in 1963. RESISTANCE TO PRESSURE FROM ADVERTISERS What with its audience rating, contemptible by the standards of the big commercial programmes, and its habit of dealing with controversial subject matter-or, as Friendly has put it, of "saying upstream things"-"CBS Reports" has had chronic sponsor trouble. Friendly doesn't quite understand the attitude of the big corporations towards sponsoring documentaries. "One of these advertisers will come in and say he can't sponsor a show that deals with the problems of segregation, or a show on the crisis in Algeria, or a show on radioactive fallout, because he can't risk having his corporate image hurt by controversial subject matter. Then he'll turn around and sponsor a dramatic series that has nothing but bloodletting and eye-gouging in it," he says with some puzzlement. Because of the paucity of sponsors, Friendly is under considerable pressure to make compromises in dealing with potential ones, the most frequent demand being that he agree to let them see programmes before they go on the air. With other, and more marketable, kinds of programme, this is, of course, not only a normal procedure but a mandatory one, yet it is one that Friendly stubbornly holds out against, on the ground that it might
tempt advertisers to suggest editorial revisions as a condition of their sponsorship. "We've lost some pretty good sponsors because we wouldn't say we'd let them see shows ahead of time," he says. "A magazine editor would probably kick any advertiser right out of his office who wanted an advance look at the articles he was running before he decided to place an ad. The trouble with TV is that there's no tradition of independence. It isn't easy to say no and hear the guy from the sales department say, 'O.K., Fred, but your integrity is going to cost us two hundred thousand.' Just the same, I think we have to say no, until it gets to be a habit that everybody accepts." Such pressures for compromise do not all come from advertisers; they also come from within the network, which has its own commercial position to maintain, and its relations with its affiliated stations to think of, and which, finally, must meet the tricky requirements of the Federal Communications Commission concerning the provision of equal time for presentation of opposing points of view on the airwaves. It was not a particularly new experience for Friendly when before putting "Who Speaks for Birmingham?" on the air, he had to attend a series of angry meetings of network brass and defend the programme against the charges of one vice president that it presented the Birmingham Negroes in a better light than the whites and it might possibly mean the loss of some station affiliations in the Deep South. Friendly even had to defend Howard K. Smith's inclusion at the end of the programme of a line from Edmund Burke that Smith had felt applied to the majority of whites in Birmingham: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." The CBS brass felt that the line was prejudicial, uncalled for, and presumably anti-good men, and ordered it struck out. As a result of this and other subsequent difficulties, Smith-who has said that he had been unhappy with CBS policy ever since the time of the quiz scandals, when he was forbidden to deliver a strong commentary on the responsibilities of networks-resigned from CBS and went over to ABC as a news commentator. In spite of these pressures from within and without, Friendly is confident that television will come into its own as a journalistic profession. So far, there seems little doubt that his own biggest contribution towards this end, apart from his talent as a producer, has been his effort to establish some sort of reasonable ethical and artistic standards in a business that has generally managed to get along without them. "This is a whole new tradition we're concerned with," he says. END
TV: EDUCATION'S Educational TV's small but important audience constitutes the largest classroom in the world.
DUCATIONAL TELEVISION is something of a paradox. Part of the greatest sales medium ever developed, it sells nothing .... Part of a highly expensive medium which needs the support of more than $1,000 million of advertising money annually, educational television gets no advertising support and exists on Spartan budgets and a rickety financial structure of gifts and school funds. Part of a great entertainment medium, it invites its audience to view, not for entertainment, but rather for work. It invites them, not to relax, but rather to stretch their minds in order to capture new ideas and information." This passage, the opening paragraph of a recent research report, throws into glaring relief some of the contrasts between commercial television and non-commercial educational television in the United States. The report states that part of the paradox is in the nature of television itself, which is not only a great entertainment device but also a great educational medium. But it is the entertainment side that draws audiences and support. There were already 200 commercial stations, supported by advertising and specializing in entertainment, before the first non-commercial educational station went on the air. The authors of this study, The People Look at Educational Television, Wilbur Schramm, Jack Lyle and Ithiel Sola Pool (Stanford University Press, 1963), had in mind only one segment of American educational television: that which is broadcast from non-commercial educational television stations. The authors point out that while non-commercial educational television is usually referred to simply as ETV, it should properly carry the prefix "non-commercial." There is some magnificent education material on commercial stations. For instance, a national political convention is an educational experience as well as an absorbing, entertaining spectacle. The best of the documentary programmes and press conferences on commercial television stretch their viewers' minds. An occasional fine music or dramatic programme on commercial television is presented witli skill and talent hardly equalled elsewhere. All these, assert the authors, are educational television. And some commercial stations even broadcast formal education. An interesting example is that of "Continental Classroom," which was able to get half a million listeners out of bed at 6 A.M. to hear lectures on mathematics, physics, chemistry and political science. The authors of the report have, however, the following pertinent observation to make: "No informed person would ever imply that there is no education in commercial television, but merely that it is a very small part of commercial television. We are concerned not with this small segment of commercial television, but with the stations which are devoted wholly to educational purposes, which are not permitted to accept advertising or operate commercially, and which are licensed to nonprofit educational or civic organizations in order to serve the educational needs of their communities." The first non-commercial educational television station in the United States went on the air on May 12,1953. Today, there are ninetyfivenon-commercial educational television stations in the country. This first non-commercial ETV station, owned and operated CONTINUED
E
Experts feel that the impact of educational TV has been solid and significant but not spectacular.
by the University of Houston, was used to teach some of the university's large classes, to extend the teaching function of the university and to offer public service programmes to Houston and its environs. In 1954, eight new ETV stations began to broadcast. Four were university-owned and four were licensed to community groups. New stations went on the air in increasing numbers in the years that followed, until the present total of ninety-five was reached. Of these, thirty-six operate over UHF (Ultra High Frequency) channels, and fifty-nine over VHF (Very High Frequency) channels. Several of the country's largest and most influential cities are restricted to UHF channels: Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, and the nation's capital, Washington, D.C. The adjective "restricted" is used advisedly. The thirty-six ETV stations with UHF outlets operate at a distinct disadvantage. Signals of the same power do not carry as far on UHF as on VHF, and UHF signals are more easily interrupted by obstacles such as hills, trees and buildings. And since the majority of commercial stations operate on VHF, manufacturers of television sets gear their production to this type of reception.
In engineering class at technological institute, lecturer on TV screen is supplemented by professor at blackboard. Below, young mother watches lecture on sculpture while keeping eye on daughter.
However, the U.S. Government has acted to strengthen the position of UHF stations. A law that went into effect on May 1, 1964, stipulates that all television sets manufactured after that date must be equipped to receive programmes on all eighty-two channels allocated to television, many of those in the UHF category being reserved for ETV. While this legislation led to an increase in the price of new sets, it is expected to build up a large potential audience for educational television. Although ETV stations on UHF channels currently labour under special handicaps, the way of the ETV station fortunate enough to be broadcasting on VHF is not always easy either. Commenting recently on the near-bankruptcy of television station WNDT and the financial crisis facing American educational television stations generally, The New York Times stated that if no way could be found to get more private financial support for noncommercial stations, the possibility of government subsidy deserved exploration. This of course raises delicate problems in a society that properly wants maximum independence from government control for its communication media. In the paper's view, it would be more desirable to have increased backing for educational television by corporations. labour unions and community organizations. In November 1961, an Educational Media Study Panel made a list of recommendations Jooking towards the creation of a national policy for educational television. One recommendation called for financial support for ETV "provided from both public and private funds at the local, State and national level. ... " In 1954 the expanding number of ETV stations organized the National Educational Television (NET) Network. This organization has developed over a period of twelve years and established itself as a major broadcasting entity. A private, independent, non-profit corporation, it receives most of its financial support from the Ford Foundation. It also draws aid from other foundations, private corporations and government agencies for specific programmes. The tiny cluster of five stations that broadcast the first NET programmes in May 1954 has today become a network of more than ninety independent non-commercial ETV stations. Most of its offerings, distributed on videotape or film, are broadcast during prime evening hours. Each affiliated station may broadcast a programme more than once on its first run, and each station can draw upon NET's large reservoir of programme material for re-broadcast. There is also an impressive non-broadcast use of these programmes through NET's film service. To enhance and extend the educational impact of what might otherwise be a fleeting television experience, NET also prepares for many of its programme series supplemental printed materials such as books, pamphlets, and study guides. These materials and the television series are frequently used by community groups as the basis for organized study and discussion programmes. In the final chapter of The People Look at Educational Television, the authors conclude that non-commercial ETV had made an impact on the American scene. "Not so great an impact, perhaps, as its founders had dreamed of, but still a solid and significant one." They found that "educational television has won a beachhead. It has seventy-five stations [1963], a central programme service which operates like a network by mail, a small but loyal and important audience, and enough good programming to whet the appetites of the viewers. This is a significant accomplishment. Now, does it rest with this, or does it go ahead? If it rests, the chances are that it will become increasingly a channel for school broadcasts rather than for community broadcasts. If it goes ahead, then it must have more and better programming, and to have more and better programming it must have more adequate financing." Richard B. Hull, director of telecommunications at Ohio State University and a member of the Advisory Panel of the U.S. Office of Education, points out that the growth in educational television and broadcast networks was matched by an even more rapid but less
costly development in closed-circuit television installations. Cable and microwave systems were widely employed for special laboratory applications, the observation of university lectures and demonstrations (notably in medical schools), and for theformalinstruction of regularly enrolled students on all levels. Mr. Hull cites some examples. In Anaheim, California, an entire city school system was linked together; in Washington County, Maryland, the entire county school systcm; at Ohio State University, the entire campus; and in central Texas, a cluster of institutions with the University of Texas at Austin as the central point. Closed-circuit television, with its emphasis on instruction, is sometimes called broadcast television's "little brother." While broadcast television beams its message through the air from a station to any receiver in the station's coverage pattern, closed-circuit television sends its signal to a limited audience. Only those sets connected to the transmitter by wire, cable or point-to-point relay are capable of tuning in the closed-circuit signal. A telecast may originate from a studio, a classroom, an auditorium or any location where adequate equipment facilities can be provided. Systems vary from a single camera and a receiver used in a classroom for demonstration purposes to a State-wide network such as that in operation in the State of South Carolina-a network connecting 200 classroom reception points in sixty-seven schools to a central origination point in the capital city of Columbia. The closed-circuit system used since 1956 in Maryland's Washington County uses 200 kilometres of coaxial cable to connect forty-five elementary and secondary schools with studio facilities where lessons are prepared and transmitted. By 1958 the circuit reached the county's most remote classroom; today the system brings instruction to approximately 20,600 pupils. With no previous experience in television instruction, the teachers of Washington County trained themselves. In a six-week workshop session in the summer of 1956, they worked out methods and procedures by means of mutual criticism, discussion and trial and error. Closed-circuit TV programmes comprise sixteen broad subject areas. Science programmes lead in both elementary and secondary levels. Fine arts, foreign languages and language arts follow in that order in programmes designed for elementary schools; social studies; language arts and industrial arts in secondary school programmes. Language arts, social studies, mathematics, psychology, industrial arts and engineering are the leading programmes in higher education. Medical schools employ closed-circuit systems to telecast opera-
lions. These telecasts have been found more effective than the traditional system of student observation of operations in an amphitheatre. In order to maintain classroom atmosphere and allow for direct student participation, two-way audio systems are incorporated into some closed-circuit installations. This makes possible question-andanswer exchanges between students and studio instructors, which may be heard by other classes on the same closed-circuit network. Closed-circuit television is ideally suited to the special or local needs of a given school district, obviating the necessity of strict dependence on programmes produced at the State, regional or national level. Special training of studio and classroom teachers for closedcircuit television programmes is provided by on-the-job experience or by attending workshops conducted by various colleges and universities. The third segment of educational television in the United States, commercial television, has made two particularly outstanding contributions to formal education programmes: "Sunrise Semester" and "Continental Classroom." The first telecast of "Sunrise Semester" was in September 1957. The programme is a co-operative, non-profit venture undertaken jointly by WCBS-TV, the New York City home station of the Columbia Broadcasting System, a privately owned nation-wide radio and television network, and New York University. Sam Cook Digges, WCBS station manager, conceived the idea. He implemented it by offering New York University's College of Arts and Science thirty minutes daily of free, early-morning television time in return for a college-credit course conducted by one of New York University's professors. The first offering of "Sunrise Semester" was "Comparative Literature 10," a sixteen-week course on the development of the novel from Stendhal to Hemingway. By noon of the day of the first telecast all doubts-both at the television station and at the university about the reception the programme would receive-had evaporated. The station's telephone switchboard was jammed with calls. Within a matter of hours, the book discussed, Stendhal's novel, The Red and the Black, had been sold out by New York bookstores. The main branch of the New York City Public Library, which had 105 copies of the book when it opened at 9 A.M., was without a single copy. A publishing house, which rushed through a special printing of the book, sold 5,000 copies in nine days. An estimated 120,000 viewers took the course. Each of the novels discussed in the remaining fifteen "classes" of the course became a bookstore and library "best seller." Of the 700 persons who applied for enrolment in the course, New York University accepted 177. All CONTINUED SPAN
February 1966 45
Air-borne television has the advantage of a much wider range than that of land-based signals.
but a handful of these college-credit students took the final examination, given by the university the following January. Their ages ranged from seventeen to seventy-five, and women outnumbered men. Ninety per cent passed the examination. Subsequent courses of "Sunrise Semester" have included history, physical science, sociology, the U.S. political system, biology and ethics. Beginning in February 1964 two courses, "The Legacy of Greece and Rome" and "A History of Art," were offered on alternate days, Monday through Saturday. During the academic year 1964-65, there was a two-semester course on "Russian Literature in Translation," and two one-semester courses, "Mathematics in Western Culture" and "Tragic Dramas of Greece and Rome." "Sunrise Semester" was recently telecast, with Rutgers University instead of New York University as the co-operating partner. Two courses were offered: "The Politics of Peace, a course in international organization;" and "A New Birth of Freedom: Civil Rights and Civil Liberties." WCBS-TV transmits each programme via television tape from New York to stations all over the country for re-broadcasting at various early-morning hours. The total daily audience watching these programmes is estimated to be approximately a half million people. The other formal programme, "Continental Classroom," went on the air in October 1958. A few months later, the winter 1958-59 issue of Electronic Age featured an article titled "World's Largest Classroom," with the subtitle, "TV's Newest¡ Star is Dr. Harvey White, Professor of Physics, with 270,000 students." "Continental Classroom's" offering in 1961-62, "The Structure and Functions of American Government," was a distinct departure from the courses available over the first three years, all of which were in the field of the physical sciences. Taught by one of the outstanding U.S. political scientists, Dr. Peter Odegard, professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley, the course met with enthusiastic response from educators, administrators and the general public all over the United States. The audience was estimated at well over 500,000 persons daily. Of the more than 200 colleges and universities that offered the American Government course for credit, each had an average of twenty-five credit students enrolled, more than half of them teachers. More than half the nation's secondary school social studies teachers also viewed the daily presentations. Several educational organizations cosponsored the programme with the National Broadcasting Company: the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, the Doing the work of about fourteen land-based stations, speciallyequipped plane covers 365,OOO-square-kilometre area in six States.
American Political Science Association and the National Council for Social Studies. The American Textbook Publishers Institute alerted its membership to the course and distributed materials about "Continental Classroom" to promote interest in the programme. "Continental Classroom" was discontinued at the end of the 1962-63 school year. The National Broadcasting Company felt that the mission of this pioneering experiment in mass educational television had been accomplished: to serve as a stimulus to the teaching of science in U.S. schools and colleges. At the time of "Continental Classroom's" first offering, a course in atomic-age physics, there had been considerable public concern over the apparent lag in scientific teaching in the United States. A unique experiment recently completed four school years of operation-airborne instructional TV. For five hours each school day, a specially-equipped airplane broadcasts formal instructional programmes to elementary and secondary schools within a 670-kilometre-diameter circle comprising parts of six midwestern States. During the past school year (1964-65), some 1,800 public, private and parochial schools with a total of 759,700 pupils benefited from these sky-borne lessons. Known as the Midwest Programme on Airborne Television (MPATI), the "flying television station" is not a stunt. The greatly increased range of sky-borne over land-based signals gives the concept its value. The two transmitters aboard the four-engine airplane, telecasting on two channels at 7,000 metres, do the work of about fourteen land-based stations. The "flying television station" transmits to schools in a 365,000-square-kilometre area which includes nearly all of Indiana and Ohio, sizable portions of Illinois, Michigan and Kentucky, and a corner of Wisconsin. "This is the largest area in the world served by a single television facility," an MPATI official says. Although production costs run high-about 1,750 a lesson-this expenditure is offset by the great number of pupils among whom the lesson is shared. As an MPATI official points out: "When these costs are shared by hundreds of schools in many States, all can benefit from the quality that results at little cost. That is MPATI's raison d'etre." After the 1966-67 school year, MPATI expects to derive its total income from fees paid by the schools and fees paid for lesson tapes by educational TV stations outside MPATI's transmission area. Up to the present time, the non-profit service organization has been supported mainly by the Ford Foundation. Purdue University at Lafayette,Indiana, offered the organization office space and use of its television facilities and airport. A staff of seventy-five operates the Lafayette offices. Westinghouse Electric Corporation, one of whose engineers, Charles E. Nobles, conceived the idea of airborne TV in 1944, stated in a report to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission that an airborne system of thirty-three aircraft could provide classroom lessons for approximately forty-four million students, or about 99.5 per cent of the nation's total. The report also affirmed that airborne TV costs less money for capital investment and operating expenses than either ground-based educational television or closed-circuit "in-school" television, both of which are in wide use. The first airborne instructional programme of MPATI in September 1961 anticipated the recommendations made by the Educational Media Study Panel to the U.S. Office of Education in November of the same year. The relevant passage in the Panel's report read: "The needs of America for television cannot be met by the present commercial and education television systems. Nor can the massive new problems of education await solution by traditional methods which utilize only existing facilities. . . . We recommend public as well as private support of a new, vigorous and co-ordinated national effort on the part of American schools, colleges, communities, government agencies and other interested groups to encourage the production of more and better education~1 television progratllines addressed to the needs of our time." END
TELEVISION FOR DELHI SCHOOLS SIX years of experimentation, television in India took a step forward on August 15, 1965. Following the installation of additional equipment obtained from West Germany, the Delhi general programme was extended to an hour daily and more time was allotted to school broadcasts. Assisted by a UNESCO grant for studies in the use of TV as a medium of education and community development, the experimental television service opened in September 1959 in a small studio in Akashvani Bhavan, New Delhi. Its first offering to Delhi citizens was a series of twenty programmes on the theme of "Responsibilities of Citizenship." Organization of school broadcasts received attention at an early stage of planning. The Ford Foundation sponsored a team of American educational television specialists who came to India to assist with the setting up of teaching programmes for Delhi schools. The aim of the project was to improve the standard of teaching. The Director General of All India Radio and other officials of AIR and the Delhi State Education Department also visited the United States and Europe and studied the operation of educational programmes at the university and school level. These preliminary studies were followed by teachers' workshops. Some 650 teachers from Delhi schools attended and had an insight into television techniques as a necessary preparation for the projected programmes. The first school telecasts, comprising eight lessons a week in physics, chemistry, Hindi and English, started in October 1961. Originally meant for students of Class IX in higher secondary schools, the programme was later
A
FTER
expanded to include students of Class X. , At this time, Dr. Paul Neurath, Professor of Statistics and Sociology at Queen's College, City University of New York, was invited to India to evaluate the direct teaching project. His report was instrumental in shaping the current school programme which takes elevenand-a-half hours per week and is viewed daily by classes VI-XI in 243 schools. After a summer of detailed scrutiny of the project, Dr. Neurath made a report embodying his suggestions for a more efficient operation. Basically, he found the project sound and felt that it offered every prospect of a major contribution towards improvement of teaching standards in Delhi schools. But he had certain observations to make with a view to improving the effectiveness of the programme so that it could be of maximum benefit to students. An important observation was that there was insufficient contact between classroom teachers and the organizers of the television project. Following Dr. Neurath's recommendations, there has been an increase in meetings where teachers can voice their difficulties and offer criticism freely, exchange ideas and share experiences. At his suggestion, too, a monthly TV Newsletter containing articles on educational television in Delhi and guidelines for teachers is now circulated to all classroom teachers. Model television lessons are also prepared for the benefit of teachers. "TV in India was not intended to replace the teacher and it never will," says Dr. Narayana Menon, Director General of All India Radio. But educational television in Delhi has undoubtedly supplemented teaching facilities and stimulated pupil interest.
It has brought laboratory facilities to schools which lack them, and the entire programme is now benefiting some 224,000 students. There is undoubtedly room for further expansion and improvement. To achieve this, however, not only trained technical and other staff is needed but also larger and better equipped studios. A major difficulty is the lack of local talent. Mrs. Mohini Vaswani, Education Assistant (TV) at the British Council and an organizer of the Delhi programme, is one of the few local people with the requisite training in such work. Her interest in TV started when she was in Washington with her diplomat husband. Inga (of "Inga's Angle" show on NBC) approached her for a TV interview. "This excited my curiosity and I wanted to learn more," Mrs. Vaswani explained. She went back to her friend at NBC after the interview and asked how she could learn television production techniques. "You should go to a university," her friend told her, "but the best way to learn is to be on the job." And that is exactly what Mrs. Vaswani, mother of two teen-age daughters, did. "I learned script writing, interviewing and the million and one things involved in setting up a television programme." It was not long before she got over the nervousness of first appearances on the TV screen. She worked at the NBC studios for a year and then acquired additional experience in educational television. Being an experienced and qualified teacher, she had little difficulty in finding a suitable position as an educational television organizer on her return to India. If the Indian programme is to develop, more organizers of this kind are needed and more assistance from countries with TV experience would be welcome. At present the British Council trains some teachers in script writing and presentation, and also arranges to send some for training to the Centre for Educational Television Overseas in London. Dr. Kenneth Christiansen, a Ford Foundation consultant, has visited India several times to assist with the project. He works with the staff at the Indian TV Unit, notes their difficulties and makes suggestions for additional essential equipment or other needed improvements. While opinions regarding the quality of the General Service Programme now televised an hour daily from the Delhi station may differ, it is generally agreed that ETV has made a useful impact on local teaching standards. At present there are six transmissions with a thirty-two-kilometre range. When villages within this radius receive electric power, it is hoped that television will also reach the villager. Still in the embryonic stage in India, television has great potentialities as a medium of instruction and social uplift. President Radhakrishnan has expressed the hope that it will be employed "for the good purpose of improving the quality of our men and women." END
Before joining funeral procession, External Affairs Minister Swaran Singh (left) greeted American delegation. An estimated ten lakhs of persons viewed the procession. right, lakhs more attended cremation.
"We
remember
your
leader
brought to us a new inspiration, ourselves. poverty,
His despair
education,
only
enemies
as one who a new faith
were
and want. His
understanding,
ignorance,
weapons were.
tolerance
and
To him, those of the world who prefer rather than destroy great obligation.
in
owe a great
love.
to build
debt and a
"He knew that to win the peace required courage and perseverance. is the highest
goal
He knew that peace
of civilized
man. "-Vice
dedication
to the rapid
President Humphrey. "By his complete improvement
of the Indian people
tireless devotion
to the cause of peace
world, he has won for a lasting place
and by his
himself
in the hearts
people. "-Ambassador
and for
in the India
of the American
Bowles.
Above, as priests chant mantras, flames from funeral pyre mount skyward. Among the vast multitude leaving the cremation grounds, below, are, from left: Mrs. Bowles, Ambassador Bowles, former Ambassadors Galbraith and Cooper, Vice President Humphrey and Secretary Rusk.
"Lal Bahadur Shastri's soft speech and gentle manner concealed the strong will, high intelligence and intense dedication of a man brilliantly suited to lead the world's largest democracy through many of the severest trials since independence."-Ambassador Bowles. "Let us hereby resolve to do justice to his memory by the faithful pursuit of the noble goals which he sought. Let us here today resolve to continue the war on ignorance, poverty, despair and want-the world over-the only war that mankind should ever wage. "Let us build therefore a world of which Lal Bahadur Shastri would have been proud. Let us make this world our living memorial to him. Jai Hind."-Vice President Humphrey.
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"We had watched with admiration how Mr. Shastri had calmly and courageously shouldered the heavy burdens of the high office he inherited under similar tragic circumstances not long ago. His steadfast devotion to the highest humanitarian ideals and to the improvement of the lot of his fellow man was unequalled. "We mourn his death as if he were one of our own. We express our deepest sympathy and assurances of our steadfast support in this moment of grief." -Excerpt from President Johnson's condolence letter to President Radhakrishnan.