Fifties (111 page)

Among those who had been there and caught all of it—the virulence of the white mob, its rage and madness mounting as it closed in, the lone young black girl who seemed to be bearing herself with amazing calm and dignity—was John Chancellor, a young reporter with NBC. He had watched Elizabeth Eckford’s perilous journey with growing fear: one child, alone, entrapped by this mob. He was not sure she was going to make it out alive. He had wanted a story, a good story, but this was something beyond a good story, a potential tragedy so terrible that he had hoped it wasn’t really happening. He was terribly frightened for her, frightened for himself, and frightened about what this told him about his country. He could not believe that someone had so carelessly allowed this child to come to school alone, with no escort. The mob gathered there in the street was uglier than anything he had ever seen before in his life. It was a mob of fellow Americans, people who under other conditions might be perfectly decent people, but there they were completely out of control. Chancellor wondered briefly where this young girl found her strength. It was almost as if he was praying:
Please, stop all of this; please, there’s got to be a better way.
He watched in agony and captured it all for NBC.

Chancellor was a relatively junior reporter for NBC in the summer of 1957. He was thirty years old and based in Chicago. After working for the
Chicago Sun Times,
he had been hired by the local NBC station in Chicago in 1950, ostensibly as a news writer; but the real reason was that his superiors thought he could cover so-called street stories—fires and accidents. On the early
Camel News Caravan
with John Cameron Swayze, he would go out in the field with a cameraman and a sound man. He doubled as film editor, for the show’s producer had asked him what he knew about editing film. Nothing at all, he answered. Well, buy a book, and read and find out about it, the producer had said, which Chancellor did. As a result he had become surprisingly expert in editing film, which in those days
was 35mm and, in the vernacular of the trade, went through the gate at ninety feet a minute. He became in the process something of a film nut, and he came to understand, as few others of his generation did, the journalistic power of images. Years later he thought his tour as reporter-film editor taught him how to write for film, a process he might otherwise not have understood.

Most of the big-name journalists at the networks were still doing radio reporting when he had joined NBC. Some of the early television figures, such as John Cameron Swayze, the NBC anchorman (“Let’s hopscotch the world for headlines,” he would say every night), held their positions because they had been sufficiently low down in the radio pecking order that they had nothing to lose by going over to this new medium. Many others, like Chancellor, had roots in print and were learning television the hard way, since the rules were still being set every day as they worked.

On that Labor Day weekend in 1957, Chancellor had been poised to go to Nashville to report on school integration in the South, but his superior in New York, Reuven Frank, told him that according to the AP wire, Orval Faubus was going to call out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent court-ordered integration. That sounded like a bigger story than Nashville, so without stopping to pack, Chancellor raced to catch the last plane to Little Rock. He was relatively new to what was now becoming known as the Southern, or race, beat. His introduction to it had come back in 1955 with the Emmett Till case, still primarily a print story. But there had been a brief harbinger of the future the day after the acquittal of the two men accused of murdering Till. Chancellor happened to be in Memphis at the time and he was sent down to Sumner to do a radio report for
Monitor,
the lively NBC radio show of that period. Chancellor grabbed a primitive early-model tape recorder and drove over in the company of a man from the Jackson radio station. From the instant he arrived, Sumner had scared him: He had an eerie feeling that something terrible was going to happen as he walked up the street, interviewing blacks and whites alike on their opinion of the trial. Suddenly, a sixth sense told him that he was in trouble and he slowly turned to look behind him. There coming directly at him was a phalanx of eight or nine men in overalls and work shirts. Rage was etched in their faces. His car was ten feet away, and the Jackson radio man was in it, honking the horn. Chancellor was terrified, for he knew the men wanted to hurt him. For a split second he thought of running to the car, but the men were too close. He did the only thing he could think of. He took the microphone and pointed it at the first
white man. “Okay,” he said, “you can do what you want with me, but the whole world is going to hear about it and see it.” The men stopped, he later speculated, because they had mistaken his tape recorder for a camera. It had been, he decided, like holding up a talisman to some primitive tribal chief, but it worked. With that, he walked to the car and drove away.

If print reporters and still photographers had been witnesses to their stories, then television correspondents, armed as they were with cameras and crews, were something more: They were not merely witnesses, but something more, a part of the story. Television reporters, far more than their print predecessors, contributed to the speeding up of social change in America. Little Rock became the prime example of that, the first all-out confrontation between the force of the law and the force of the mob, played out with television cameras whirring away in black and white for a nation that was by now largely wired.

Reuven Frank, the most powerful and cerebral figure in the NBC newsroom at the time, who more than anyone else created the standards of that network’s journalism, understood immediately that the world of television was different. The cameramen he had inherited had a newsreel vision of shooting film—their ideal was two heads of state meeting and shaking hands. Frank wanted something different, something more subtle and more real. He believed if you were creative enough, you could create a mosaic of the country—its humanity, its diversity, and its tension points. He had a supple sense of the medium, and Chancellor remembered his own pleasure when Frank called to tell him after one report that his piece had “a lovely Mozartian unity to it.” Frank emphasized constantly to his reporters that their role was to be, in some ways, minimal. Film was so powerful that a reporter was well advised to get out of the way and let the pictures do the talking. Certainly, that was true in Little Rock. The images were so forceful that they told their own truths and needed virtually no narration. It was hard for people watching at home not to take sides: There they were, sitting in their living rooms in front of their own television sets watching orderly black children behaving with great dignity, trying to obtain nothing more than a decent education, the most elemental of American birthrights, yet being assaulted by a vicious mob of poor whites. What was happening now in the country was politically potent: The legal power of the United States Supreme Court had now been cast in moral terms for the American conscience, and that was driven as much as anything else by the footage from the networks from Little Rock. The President,
uneasy with the course of events, had failed to give any kind of moral leadership, and he had deliberately refused to define the issue in moral terms; now, almost unconsciously, the media was doing it instead, for the ugliness and the cruelty of it all, the white mob encouraged by a local governor tormenting young children, carried its own indictment. The nation watched, hypnotized, from its living rooms every night, what, in the words of television reporter Dan Schorr, was “a national evening seance.” Every clip of film diminished the room to maneuver of each of the major players. With television every bit of action, Chancellor decided, seemed larger, more immediate; the action seemed to be moving at an ever faster rate.

On his arrival there, Chancellor thought, Little Rock had seemed a sleepy town, as yet unconnected to the ever greater bustle of modern American life. The pace of living seemed almost languid. Chancellor remembered a vivid symbol of the older America that still existed when he arrived. The bellboy who took him to his room at the old Sam Peck Hotel brought him a pitcher of iced water and then suggested that if he wanted any female companionship later in the evening, he need only call. One night, early in October, after the 101st had momentarily stabilized the situation, Chancellor had gone out to dinner with Harry Ashmore at Hank’s Doghouse in North Little Rock. It happened to be the night that
Sputnik
went up, and the two of them had watched the news reports of this most remarkable achievement in the new space age. “Can you believe this?” Chancellor had said. “This means that men are really going to go to the moon.” “Yes,” said Ashmore. “And here we are in Little Rock fighting the Civil War again.” It seemed to symbolize the time warp they were in.

At the beginning of the story, Chancellor could not broadcast live because there was still no AT&T equipment available. He had to race to the airport each afternoon for a chartered plane to take him to Oklahoma City, where he could do his broadcast live. The NBC show was on for fifteen minutes, which meant it contained twelve minutes of news. Network news was just coming of age. The previous fall, Swayze had been replaced by a new team of anchors: Chet Huntley, sturdy and steadfast, his reliability vouched for by his strong face, was electronically married to David Brinkley, mischievous and waspish, a perfect foil for the overpowering immediacy of television. It, along with the other two network shows, was creating a new electronic media grid binding the nation.

Chancellor now became their first star in the field. Every night NBC led with his story, in part, Chancellor suspected, because Reuven Frank understood what was happening—not only on the
streets of Little Rock, but in the American psyche. It was perhaps the first time a television reporter rather than a print reporter had put his signature on so critical a running story. Chancellor not only worked hard but, to his credit, he never thought himself a star. An anchorman, he liked to say years later, was someone who ran the last leg of a relay race; and some fifteen years later, when he did in fact become the anchorman of the
NBC Nightly News,
he took the additional title not of managing editor, but of principal reporter.

Little Rock made him famous, and the unique aspect to television fame was that his face became his byline. People came to associate him with the story he was covering, and they began to feel they already knew him. Because of this, they were quicker to confide in him than in print reporters. Being a television reporter, he realized, meant instant access and instant connection, and in no small part because of his electronic fame, he soon obtained a secret mole inside the school. His mole, Chancellor discovered later, was a sixteen-year-old Little Rock boy named Ira Lipman, just starting his senior year. Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock nine, had been a locker-room attendant at the Jewish country club in Little Rock, where Lipman’s parents had a membership. On a number of occasions Lipman had ended up driving Ernest Green home after work, and the two had struck up a friendship. Lipman thought Ernest Green pleasant and intelligent, with a rare gentleness about him. Their relationship had in his mind underlined the madness of segregation, the fact that the two of them could not have a normal friendship and that he had only managed to know him through a club where his parents were privileged members and Ernest Green was an attendant.

Lipman worked a few nights a week at the
Arkansas Gazette
and had once met another NBC reporter, Frank McGee. Now he decided to help Chancellor, because he felt he had a connection to NBC and also because he had seen Chancellor on television and thought him decent and fair-minded, a man who was trying to tell the truth about a difficult situation. He would gather information and then call Chancellor anonymously from a pay phone just outside the school. The first of his calls took place at the very beginning of the crisis. Chancellor did not have time to check out the information before he filed that day, but late that night, upon his return from Oklahoma City, he found the information to be accurate.

The next day Chancellor’s youthful anonymous source called to chide him: “I’m very disappointed in you,” he said. “I have all this terrific information and you didn’t use it.” Chancellor apologized, but promised to take the information more seriously in the future.
Not knowing his source’s name, Chancellor comprehended in some way the background and the motivation of this young boy. Lipman always had to whisper lest another student discover what he was doing and tell someone. The boy was placing himself in great danger. But having this source gave Chancellor a terrific edge on the story, and he was able to move ahead of his print rivals.

Wallace Westfeldt, a reporter for the
Nashville Tennessean,
was amused by the spectacle of this reporter from the upstart institution of television news, who was gaining every day the grudging admiration of his older print colleagues. Westfeldt’s own sources were excellent, since he had visited Little Rock several times before the crisis. Each night he would file his own story for the early edition of his paper and then sit in the Little Rock press club having a sandwich and a drink with the other reporters. As he ate, the
NBC Nightly News
would come on, and Chancellor would often have something that few, if any, of the print reporters had. Westfeldt could see them cursing under their breath, and when the news show was over, there would be a quiet exodus from the press club as reporters went to the phones to call their offices and update their own stories. Television, Westfeldt thought, was quickly catching up with print: If anything, in this story the new medium might have exceeded the old for the first time.

As Little Rock developed, the national media force focusing on civil rights crystallized. It had its own pecking order and rules. Johnny Popham, and soon his successor Claude Sitton, of the
Times
set the tone. There were also the legendary Homer Bigart, also of the
Times,
Bob Bird of the
Tribune,
Bob Baker of
The Washington Post,
and soon Karl Fleming of
Newsweek.
The older men in this brigade had often been war correspondents in World War Two and Korea, which helped—because the situation was not unlike a war on native soil; the younger men, by and large, were Southerners, because a Southern accent was considered helpful.