Proceed with Caution

"Why not let the people see?" trumpeted Senator Charles Tobey in the first flush of satisfaction over the televised Kefauver hearings. With equal enthusiasm, Manhattan's Congressman Jacob Javits wanted TV to sit in on major congressional debates just as it does on U.N. sessions, argued that it would be essentially no different from "expanding the size of the gallery of the House." Representative Edwin Hall (N.Y.) urged that all sessions of Congress be televised.

But, by last week, the hosannas were being drowned in a chorus of pleas for caution. The nation's pundits, from Walter Lippmann to Max Lerner and on down to Westbrook Pegler, urged the U.S. to go slow on televising public affairs. Judge Samuel Leibowitz feared that, without safeguards, TV might become "a sinister weapon of slander."

Washington quivered with indecision. Illinois' usually forthright Senator Paul Douglas said he couldn't make up his mind about TV's "technical difficulties" and "distractions." Ohio's Senator Taft complained that, on TV, "the Senators are talking to the people rather than to each other." Washington's Senator Harry Cain was so touched by the plight of some witnesses cited for contempt that he felt they might just have been frightened "by all those lights and apparatus."

Even Wisconsin's Senator Alexander Wiley, a member of the Kefauver committee, who has introduced a resolution to consider the problems of televising Congress, saw some insurmountable obstacles ahead. Some of them: "Which parts of a congressional debate should be televised? Who would be assigned to speak during the TV period? For how long? Could any man be entrusted with the power of determining who would be seen and heard by possibly 40 million voters?" Without the most delicate handling of the whole television question, Wiley warned, "televised hearings will degenerate into three-ring circuses, fourth-rate stage productions or unjust inquisitions under klieg lights."

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