What Was Going On

On that first awful morning last week, many Americans phoned relatives and friends; unable to speak the unspeakable, they just said, "Turn on the television." Thus began a four-day period in which TV and radio attempted to link a distraught country into a comprehending whole. They succeeded to a remarkable degree.

The network news staffs were already in Los Angeles in full force, winding up coverage of the California primary, and most staffers--about 500--were within walkie-talkie range of the Ambassador Hotel. ABC was just running sign-off credits for its election team at 12:17 a.m. when the shots cracked out. NBC's Los Angeles anchor desk, though broadcasting election news right along, did not report the shooting until 12:26. The CBS network had already signed off, and most of its affiliated stations were carrying late movies. At CBS New York headquarters, key staffers were relaxing across the street at their hangout bar; it was 21 minutes after the shots before the network returned to the air.

In Two Minutes. ABC thus was first on the screen--at 12:19--with wobbly video tape from the murder scene. CBS's Roger Mudd, in the ballroom during the shooting, was alerted by a man who tore wildly out of the kitchen corridor, put his finger up to his head like a pistol and yelled, "Bang, bang, bang!" "That turned my stomach," recalls Mudd. He and his crew then tore their camera off the tripod and plunged into the corridor. It was a standard film camera, and so was NBC's. By the time CBS and NBC got their film processed and the murder scene pictures on the air, nearly two hours had elapsed.

In the meantime, all three networks had video tapes of the agonizing ballroom scene: Kennedy supporters with cheers choking in their throats, panicky cries for doctors, hysterical sobs and terror. ABC showed George Plimpton wrestling the gun away from the suspect, and all three networks had views of the man as he was hauled off in the custody of a wall of policemen. NBC's Sander Vanocur, who had finished his primary coverage, rushed back to work and found eyewitnesses, whom he debriefed expertly one or two at a time.

"I Am Right Here." Two broadcasters were close enough to get dramatic personal reports. One was ABC's associate news director William Weisel, who had been following Senator Kennedy so closely that he himself was wounded. He delivered a dramatic personal report from his stretcher: "It was a shocking experience. There was a body on the floor, and I saw other bodies crumpled beside me . . ." The Mutual radio network's Andrew West, who was also in the passageway with his tape recorder during the shooting, came out with a report so gripping that the three TV networks and about 2,000 radio stations picked it up for rebroadcast. Excerpts:

"Senator Kennedy has been . . . Senator Kennedy has been shot! Is that possible? Is that possible? It is possible, ladies and gentlemen! It is possible! He has . . . Not only Senator Kennedy! Oh my God! . . . I am right here, and Rafer Johnson has hold of the man who apparently fired the shot! He still has the gun! The gun is pointed at me right this moment! Get the gun! Get the gun! Get the gun! Stay away from the guy! Get his thumb! Get his thumb! Break it if you have to! Get the gun, Rafer! Hold him! We don't want another Oswald! Hold him, Rafer . . . The Senator is on the ground! He's bleeding profusely . . . The ambulance has been called for, and this is a terrible thing! . . . Ethel Kennedy is standing by. She is calm, a woman with a tremendous amount of presence . . . The shock is so great my mouth is dry . . . We are shaking as is everyone else. I do not know if the Senator is dead or if he is alive . . ."

The newsmen and their producers seemed themselves too numbed to grasp full command of the story until several hours after the shooting. Huntley and Brinkley seemed uncommonly beside the point; the early reporting hours demanded more footwork and fast talk--and less punditry. NBC anchorman Frank McGee shared with Sander Vanocur the credit for the coolest and ablest reporting on any channel.

It was roughly three hours before the networks had the chronology, the facts and their film finally sorted out and began their morning cycle. The plan, as ABC Producer Daryl Griffin put it, was to "repeat the salient points every half-hour so that people everywhere, waking up at different times, would know what was going on."

Painful. Some 6,000,000 American TV households, most of them in the West and not yet asleep, got a chance to follow the beginning live reportage. The rest of the country awoke to recaps of the tragedy on radio and TV. Along with updating the story with each reprise, the networks were clearly in a race to be the first to interview the Senator's congressional colleagues and friends, witnesses, cabdrivers, National Rifle Association officials, men in the street, housewives, children.

In the days that followed, panel programs were thronged with psychiatrists who discussed violence and victims who discussed bullet wounds. Bernard Perlman of Mt. Sinai Hospital illustrated his talk for ABC with a plaster model of the brain; painstaking journalism can be painful to watch. So, too, was the appearance of Dr. Lawrence Pool of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, who had talked long-distance to a member of the Good Samaritan surgical team and who on CBS's Manhattan radio station--and later on NBC-TV--gave Americans the first warning that the brain damage was much more "ominous" than the first official bulletins had indicated.

Reaching. The networks kept laboring to find fresh perspectives--sometimes finding them and at other times simply reaching too far. NBC, via satellite hookup, carried a prayer of hope (in shaky English) from Pope Paul, and later interviewed Sirhan Sirhan's father in Jordan. All three networks, using a pool helicopter, followed the Kennedy cortege from Good Samaritan Hospital down the freeways to Los Angeles International Airport.

The three TV networks pre-empted all regular programming and commercials at first, and throughout the week all the channels kept returning to the story--at times briefly, at times for hours on end. On Saturday, the networks carried nothing else for some 15 hours except for bulletins on the arrest of the suspected assassin of Martin Luther King Jr. There was the hauntingly touching funeral, the solemn procession by car, train and car again to the deeply affecting burial rites at Arlington National Cemetery.

Admirable. As the last of the four days of mourning made clear, the coverage was more profound in emotion than in insight. To viewers of all four days of recaps and re-recaps, TV, with all its passionate impact, clearly had its problems and deficiencies. The scheduling decisions were difficult and hazardous. How much was too much? What silly and mindless programs were safe to use and which were not? What commercials seemed tasteful enough?

Opting for constant coverage was obviously not the answer. Through the week, NBC devoted 55 hours to the shooting and aftermath, ABC 43 and CBS 42. Some of it--especially after the first twelve hours or so--was redundant and repetitive. As NBC's Jack Perkins observed from the Los Angeles airport: "We seem to dwell a great deal on the smallest details, like which way the nose of the plane will be pointed. It may not be important news, but it may be a form of catharsis. The recital of all this minutiae may somehow help a person accept the unacceptable." NBC Executive Vice President Reuvan Frank offered the justification that "this is a serious and grievous time in American history, and we think what we are doing not only emphasizes this to the people in their homes but allows them to think about it in those terms."

In those terms, television performed admirably.

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