missing the point. The point was that it would be live.
“So indeed, I stood there,” Schorr recounted. “This is the wall, behind here is where East Germany is, and all. And then, because we were there with lights on, you would hear dogs barking. Dogs started to bark and ‘you would hear dogs barking sometimes chasing some poor East German who was trying to escape. I don’t know that that is happening right now’—a lot of crap! But it was live.”
CBS even talked a court in Germany that was trying an accused Nazi into holding a session after midnight so that it could be carried live rather than filming the normal day session and playing it that night. The age of live television news had begun.
According to U.S. military spokesmen, the second week of 1968, the week of the president’s State of the Union address, marked a wartime record for the number of enemy soldiers killed in one week: 2,968. The previous record week had been the one ending March 25, 1967, in which only 2,783 enemy had been killed. The week also ended with Secretary of State Dean Rusk defending his foreign policy before a genial dinner audience of 1,500 in San Francisco as the police used clubs against 400 antiwar demonstrators outside. Three more American servicemen asked Sweden for political asylum on Friday, January 12. The previous Tuesday, 4 sailors had deserted the aircraft carrier
Intrepid
and were granted Swedish resident visas.
Race issues were also becoming more difficult. The shifting mood, already labeled “white backlash,” was in part a reaction to rising crime and to the fact that young people and their counterculture stars openly used forbidden drugs, but it was mostly a reaction to black riots in northern cities. In one of his both bizarre and typical moments of self-discovery, Norman Mailer in his 1968 book
Miami and the Siege of Chicago—
one of three Mailer books published that year—described waiting for a Ralph Abernathy press conference for which the civil rights leader was forty minutes late. “The reporter became aware of a peculiar emotion in himself, for he had not ever felt it consciously before”—only slightly more modest than Charles de Gaulle, Mailer often referred to himself in third person singular—“It was a simple emotion and very unpleasant to him—he was getting tired of Negroes and their rights.” But a more important revelation followed: “If he felt even a hint this way, then what immeasurable tides of rage must be loose in America?”
Originally, as most southerners sensed correctly, the civil rights movement fit comfortably into the prejudice most of the rest of the country felt toward the South. The movement seemed heroic when heading south and taking on drawling Neanderthals with names like Bull Connor. But in 1965, Martin Luther King began to champion the issue of “open housing” in northern cities. To most of white America, this was something different. They were not just trying to go to school and ride buses in Alabama, they were trying to move into our neighborhoods.
King and other leaders had also started devoting an increasing amount of time to opposing the war in Vietnam. By 1967, when King became an outspoken Vietnam War critic, he was the last major civil rights figure to do so. Most of the Congress of Racial Equality, CORE, and SNCC had turned antiwar in 1965 and 1966. Many of King’s advisers in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were reluctant to attack the government in time of war. In 1967 the Mobe and its leader David Dellinger, a World War II draft resister, made an all-out effort to bring King into the antiwar movement. Dellinger had also had advisers telling him that the antiwar movement was getting too involved with black leaders and it was alienating potential supporters of the antiwar cause. Many whites saw the involvement of black leaders as stepping outside the legitimate turf of a civil rights leader. Never mind the fact that only 11 percent of the
“So indeed, I stood there,” Schorr recounted. “This is the wall, behind here is where East Germany is, and all. And then, because we were there with lights on, you would hear dogs barking. Dogs started to bark and ‘you would hear dogs barking sometimes chasing some poor East German who was trying to escape. I don’t know that that is happening right now’—a lot of crap! But it was live.”
CBS even talked a court in Germany that was trying an accused Nazi into holding a session after midnight so that it could be carried live rather than filming the normal day session and playing it that night. The age of live television news had begun.
According to U.S. military spokesmen, the second week of 1968, the week of the president’s State of the Union address, marked a wartime record for the number of enemy soldiers killed in one week: 2,968. The previous record week had been the one ending March 25, 1967, in which only 2,783 enemy had been killed. The week also ended with Secretary of State Dean Rusk defending his foreign policy before a genial dinner audience of 1,500 in San Francisco as the police used clubs against 400 antiwar demonstrators outside. Three more American servicemen asked Sweden for political asylum on Friday, January 12. The previous Tuesday, 4 sailors had deserted the aircraft carrier
Intrepid
and were granted Swedish resident visas.
Race issues were also becoming more difficult. The shifting mood, already labeled “white backlash,” was in part a reaction to rising crime and to the fact that young people and their counterculture stars openly used forbidden drugs, but it was mostly a reaction to black riots in northern cities. In one of his both bizarre and typical moments of self-discovery, Norman Mailer in his 1968 book
Miami and the Siege of Chicago—
one of three Mailer books published that year—described waiting for a Ralph Abernathy press conference for which the civil rights leader was forty minutes late. “The reporter became aware of a peculiar emotion in himself, for he had not ever felt it consciously before”—only slightly more modest than Charles de Gaulle, Mailer often referred to himself in third person singular—“It was a simple emotion and very unpleasant to him—he was getting tired of Negroes and their rights.” But a more important revelation followed: “If he felt even a hint this way, then what immeasurable tides of rage must be loose in America?”
Originally, as most southerners sensed correctly, the civil rights movement fit comfortably into the prejudice most of the rest of the country felt toward the South. The movement seemed heroic when heading south and taking on drawling Neanderthals with names like Bull Connor. But in 1965, Martin Luther King began to champion the issue of “open housing” in northern cities. To most of white America, this was something different. They were not just trying to go to school and ride buses in Alabama, they were trying to move into our neighborhoods.
King and other leaders had also started devoting an increasing amount of time to opposing the war in Vietnam. By 1967, when King became an outspoken Vietnam War critic, he was the last major civil rights figure to do so. Most of the Congress of Racial Equality, CORE, and SNCC had turned antiwar in 1965 and 1966. Many of King’s advisers in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were reluctant to attack the government in time of war. In 1967 the Mobe and its leader David Dellinger, a World War II draft resister, made an all-out effort to bring King into the antiwar movement. Dellinger had also had advisers telling him that the antiwar movement was getting too involved with black leaders and it was alienating potential supporters of the antiwar cause. Many whites saw the involvement of black leaders as stepping outside the legitimate turf of a civil rights leader. Never mind the fact that only 11 percent of the
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