Eyes on Little Rock

"But what's happening there right now?" demanded Army Secretary Wilber M. Brucker in the Pentagon last week as an officer passed along the latest message from the troops in Little Rock. Another officer had an idea: "Why not turn on the television set?" A set was wheeled up, flicked on, and promptly revealed members of the 101st Airborne Division stiffly at parade rest outside a peaceful Central High School. Brucker grunted with satisfaction. Chief of Staff Maxwell D. Taylor, onetime commander of the 101st, peered hard at the soldiers. "They look good, sharp," he said, then broke out unbelievingly: "Why, there's one man whose belt is undone!" After a harder look, Taylor decided that the man was off duty, resting for a moment behind a tree, and the general was soon admiring his old command again.

100 Million Viewers. It was the first time that a Secretary of the Army and a Chief of Staff had ever looked directly at troops in action over a field commander's shoulder 900 miles away. They shared the view with millions who, between the humdrum of quiz shows and soap operas, watched the paratroopers effect the historic entry of nine Negro students into the Little Rock school. Viewers also saw the troops double-timing to round up sullen riffraff, heard white students uttering words of hatred--and tolerance. TV news directors broke into network programs at will that day, eleven times on CBS, eight on NBC, for spots averaging four minutes each (and losing each network two commercials). ABC also aired an on-the-spot pickup late in the day.

Live coverage of the story's climax topped a week of news in which television scored heavily and figured intimately. President Eisenhower's special telecast on the evening of the paratrooper's flight into Little Rock carried his words to an audience that approached 100 million.

Arkansas Governor Faubus offered exclusivity to NBC and CBS, in turn, if they would give him time to speak, but they would let him appear only if he would also answer questions. ABC accepted Faubus' terms--its third exclusive Faubus telecast in three weeks--and promptly got itself dubbed "the Arkansas Broadcasting Company."

The Integrated Networks. By hanging right on to the coattails of the Eisenhower telecast with a 15-minute updating of the situation from Washington and Little Rock, NBC commanded higher ratings than the popular To Tell the Truth and Broken Arrow on the other networks. An hour later, CBS's news crew turned in the week's best TV roundup: a half-hour wrapping together of film clips of mob violence and barely dry shots of the arriving paratroopers and President Eisenhower's speech with a background summary by Walter Cronkite in Manhattan, on-the-spot interviewing by Howard K. Smith in Little Rock, and analysis by Eric Sevareid from Washington.

In its live coverage on the day the 101st Airborne took over at Central High, TV also scored a kind of integration feat-between the two major networks. For that morning, CBS's alert News Director John Day, an ex-managing editor (Dayton Daily News, Louisville Courier-Journal), had reserved the only circuit that can carry a telecast out of Little Rock. When NBC's News Director Bill McAndrew learned this, he telephoned Day and said hopefully: "This is bigger than both of us." Day agreed, and arranged to share CBS pickups with NBC. The CBS gesture proved to be bread cast on the waters. At the last moment before the special telecasts were to start, CBS's telephone line to its Little Rock mobile unit went dead. For the next few hours, to get advance information and send instructions, Day relayed everything through NBC's McAndrew, who was connected with his own mobile unit less than half a block away from the CBS crew.

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