TV & Radio: Review

In the networks’ highly competitive efforts to bag big names for TV portraits, CBS gets most of the major beats, e.g., Ed Murrow’s interviews with Tito and Chou Enlai, Face the Nation’s with Khrushchev. Last week NBC was in hot pursuit of its rival’s lead. Hardly before the 121-gun salute to its liberator had stopped reverberating in Tunisia, NBC Commentator Chet Huntley had set up his lights and cameras in the tiled office of popular President Habib (“Beloved”) Bourguiba. Wearing a dark Western business suit and a TV-blue shirt, greying, rock-jawed Bourguiba doughtily faced seven merciless hours of grilling in the TV glare. For U.S. consumption, Newsman Huntley stretched Outlook’s normal half hour to a full 60 minutes, during which he also trekked through the ruins of Carthage, briefed viewers on Tunisia’s tortuous history, and relayed some of the excitement attending Bourguiba’s 54th birthday celebration. Poking around the minarets and parapets of old Tunis, the NBC cameras caught some absorbing glimpses: the crowds chanting “Hi Yah Bourguiba” in the teeming souks and streets, the veiled Bedouin women greeting their first President with eerie, unearthly noises made, explained Huntley, by “bending their tongues back over their soft palates and screaming—making the tongues vibrate.” The interview with Bourguiba was boiled down to 35 minutes, and the result was a candid, firsthand look at a handsome, vigorous personality who spent 27 years, half of them in jail or exile, freeing his country. After a warmup detailing his early, near-bloodless fight against the French and the ruling dynasty, Bourguiba said that French troops in Tunisia were “embarrassing” to him and “endangering the public order, acting as if they were at war with us or with the Algerian refugees in Tunisia.” Although his answers in French were often cryptic in translation (by his 34-year-old son), his delivery was spirited, his hands always expressive. “Was he aiding the Algerians?” “Yes,” said Bourguiba, his steely eyes flashing, “I help them . . . They are proving that they mean what they say when they say they prefer to be exterminated rather than live under the old regime.”