Prime Show, Prime Time

Why Berlin? The question agitates the free world, and last week an NBC news team headed by Commentator Chet Huntley addressed itself to the difficult task of supplying an answer. Their reply, presented in prime evening time (8 o'clock, E.S.T.), was television journalism at its best--the sights and sounds and sad, bitter memories of a divided city, caught by an accident of history far on the wrong side of the Communist border.

Skillfully edited film clips (all shot by NBCameramen) took the TV audience into the dangerous neighborhood of the East Berlin anti-Red riots of 1953, called back the high, droning traffic of the airlift of 1948-49. Then there were the refugees of today, a steady, hopeful stream, explaining their flight on their first afternoon of freedom. And there was Willy Brandt, the mayor, spelling out his startling theory that there may have been too many refugees, that Moscow might flood East Germany with Russians and Poles: this in .turn would make it harder than ever to achieve a free, united Germany.

All the shots of the city dramatized Brandt's argument. Stalinallee. where in 1953 tough kids stood up to Russian tanks with nothing but stones, looked deserted now. Only a tired old man walked the street, pushing his two-wheeled cart. The Kurfurstendamm of the West zone was alive with traffic, its sidewalk cafes thick with prosperous citizens enjoying their coffee with whipped cream. But in the end it was a refugee, a single, haunted man, looking nervously over his shoulder as he scuttled down a long subway corridor toward freedom, who pointed up Huntley's point: "It seems to me wrong to trade [Berlin] off, whatever is at stake, while escape is possible for even one man.''

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