Call to Sacrifice

U.S. radio and TV networks have fought boldly for the right to editorialize --and timidly let it go virtually unused. Last week, for the second time in network history,* CBS exercised its right. In an editorial prepared by the network's little-known editorial board--headed by Chairman William S. Paley and President Frank Stanton--Washington Newsman Howard K. Smith charged that Americans are "overcomplacent, overaddicted to comfort, and indifferent to good government." He urged changes in the Pentagon to eliminate interservice chauvinism, called for readiness to negotiate for disarmament, warned: "We must be prepared to make sacrifices, to pay higher taxes, to face controls if necessary to achieve our goals."

Punches. The editorial, which the network had sent out in advance to about 160 affiliates, came as the climax of Where We Stand, a special 90-minute report comparing U.S. and Soviet strength. The show was the idea of President Stanton, and its content took added weight from his role as one of the shapers of the open-secret Gaither Report. To strike the "complete balance sheet" that Stanton ordered, the network news staff labored for three months over documents, interviews and film.

The result was impressive. On-screen popped perhaps too many models of globes and satellites, a blinding melange of maps, diagrams and statistics that have already been hammered out by the press. But there were thrilling shots of an Atlas test failure, of the Titan ("the most sophisticated long-range missile") resting ominously on its pad. And CBS gave viewers the kind of peek inside bustling missile plants that newspapers do not provide. In matter-of-fact interviews, U.S. scientists and generals pulled no punches. Warned Air Force Missileman General Bernard Schriever: "It's safe to say the Russians have IRBMs now in operational units. We do not."

Intangibles. As accumulated by CBS, the balance sheet seemed to show that in the material things and the means of making them the U.S. still leads the Soviet Union; in actual strength it may be lagging, and in the crucial intangibles of intent and will power it may already be dangerously behind.

Although viewers learned that civil defense is virtually nonexistent in Russia, the U.S. lag came into dramatic focus when a woman in Morris Plains, N.J. was asked what she would do in a nuclear attack. Said she: "Put all the food out on the porch"--"The last place," noted Smith, "to put food when there's danger of radiation." And Chief Reporter Alex Kendrick indicted in pictures the nation's educational deficiencies when he visited Alhambra (Calif.) High School and found students taking a snap course called "coed-cooking." Asked Kendrick of one coed-cook, a boy who hoped to become an engineer: "How are you going to apply this to a career as a scientist?" Said the would-be American technician of the Space Age: "Say in three years or so, I will be out on my own and I will want to cook something on my own. I mean, I will know how to cook it. I mean. I will know all the measurements and that kind of stuff."

* The first: CBS's 1954 plea for TV's right of access to public hearings.

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