Operation Crossroads

From his flagship, westward bound for the Marshall Islands, the commander of the Bikini atom-bomb test broadcast to the U.S.: "Another Operation Crossroads is about to be executed by the Columbia Broadcasting System in ... the Library of Congress. . . . Representative Americans . . . have gathered to consider with you the great crossroads to which the splitting of the atom has brought mankind. ... I think it will be of great importance. . . ." Thus Vice Admiral William H. P. Blandy last week introduced one of radio's greatest public-service programs.

Around the red-carpeted stage in the Library's Coolidge auditorium, experts and plain people spoke their hopes and fears, their doubts and convictions.* There were no sound effects, no musical bridge between speakers, no corny gags. CBS thought the question of the age demanded straight answers. The program's success was due in large part to that approach--and also to one of the most painstaking preparations ever made for a single broadcast.

CBS Boss Bill Paley and his two new vice presidents, Edward R. Murrow and Davidson Taylor, conceived Operation Crossroads while chinning about their European wartime experiences. They assigned the project to a 32-year-old producer, Robert Lewis Shayon (rhymes with play-on). To find what the nation was thinking, CBS began a public-opinion survey last December. Shayon talked with scientists, military experts, Government leaders. Then he sponged up everything he could about atomic energy.

Upper-Level Lowdown. He found a lot of confused, ignorant thinking about the bomb. "The facts were circulating freely in the upper intellectual level," he recalls, "but not getting through to the people." He set out to find a program formula that would get the facts through.

First he listed the questions most generally asked: Is there a defense? Should we keep the secret? Should we destroy all our bombs? Is it as deadly as we have been led to believe? What about Russia? CBS station managers throughout the U.S. suggested candidates for his panel. Shayon traveled some 10,000 miles to interview them. By letting them speak in their own way, Shayon produced more eloquence than a Corwin drama. Every mispronounced word and stumbling inflection underlined the program's honesty.

A Washington fireman asked: "Why don't we find a defense against the atomic bomb?" He got his answer from Air Forces General George C. Kenney: "There just isn't any adequate defense against atomic attack."

Mrs. Howard J. Hollister of Minneapolis, who lost three sons in the war, thought the best defense was keeping the atom bomb secret. Said Nobel Prizewinning Scientist Dr. Harold Urey: "There is no secret that we can keep for more than a few years. ... All we have exclusively now are merely . . . manufacturing processes."

Toolmaker & Poet. A college senior, a Chicago toolmaker named Edwin Dzingle, the tail gunner of the B-29 that dropped the first bomb, a Texas farmer with a drawl as wide as the Panhandle, discussed the problem earnestly with Albert Einstein, Henry Wallace, Harold E. Stassen, Congressman Jerry Voorhis, Senator Brien McMahon, Harold Ickes, Archibald MacLeish, and Joseph E. Davies, onetime U.S. Ambassador to the U.S.S.R. Citizen Dzingle sounded every inch a toolmaker; Einstein plowed shyly and awkwardly through his lines. Only one of the 21-man panel was unconcerned. Said 85-year-old Samuel Gould: "I've seen every thing there is to see. ... If an atomic bomb were to fall right now and WHOOSH -- wipe out the whole world, it would leave me completely indifferent."

*For other opinions on the atomic bomb, see INTERNATIONAL; for action, NATIONAL AFFAIRS.

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