Television: What Next from Planet Lyndon?

At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, the networks achieved the impossible. In their frenetic scramble to make the trivial significant and the significant momentous, they succeeded in making the convention seem even duller than dull reality. It was no wonder that, on the climactic night of the nominations, nearly half of all New York City viewers were glued to independent stations offering such attractions as a rerun of an Untouchables episode, a rerun of a Marilyn Monroe documentary, and a rerun of a movie space opera called The Brain from Planet Arous.

Admittedly, the speeches and commentary from Atlantic City often sounded like a rererun of something called What Next from Planet Lyndon? But Fred Friendly, president of CBS News, had a quiet alibi. “Conventions,” he said, “were designed for the William Jennings Bryan day. Some day, somebody is going to have to sit down and streamline them.”

Camera-Hoggers. Friendly had a more basic reason to be dissatisfied. After streamlining veteran Anchorman Walter Cronkite clear out of the picture in favor of Roger Mudd and Robert Trout, CBS was no better off in the ratings game than at the Republican Convention. Last week each network’s share of the total nighttime TV convention audience was just what it had been in San Francisco: NBC 51%, CBS 36%, ABC 13%. Most critics thought CBS’s new team did well enough — particularly Trout, despite many viewers’ first uneasy feeling that he had somehow lingered on from the commercial.

It would have taken a Will Rogers-Mark Twain partnership to turn the Democrats’ smoothly controlled convention into compelling TV fare. But even if the intellectual or emotional content had been higher, the networks’ tactics of rushing reporters hither and yon would have confused the viewer. The trouble, argues Cronkite, lies with the networks’ “efforts to stay competitive at the cost of telling a cohesive story.” Said he: “In many cases it’s difficult to understand what’s going on, because the entertainment and pictorial aspects of the story keep getting in the way.”

Martian Byplay. Actually, the sidelights occasionally proved more memorable than the speeches or the commentary from the pundits: the Iowa delegation, for example, proudly waving stalks of New Jersey corn; Mahalia Jackson’s off-Key version of The Star-Spangled Banner; Pennsylvania Nonagenarian Emma Guffey Miller and her peppery complaints about the hall’s crowded aisles. And then there was ABC’s great moment, after ABC Commentator Hubert H. Humphrey had. been nominated for Vice President, when Ed Morgan turned to Howard K. Smith to say, “Well, Howard, we may not be the top network, but one of our boys made it.”

What viewers did not get was a clear, running account of the convention itself. Desperate for laughs or hoked-up drama, networks focused interminably on the “men from Mars,” as Cronkite calls the antennaed Rover Boys who puffed from delegate to delegate accompanied by cameramen carrying 25-to-54-lb. packs of electronic gear. The floor reporters actually prolonged and inflated the squabbles over seating the Southern delegations. NBC and ABC got caught focusing only on Martian byplay at the moment of Lyndon Johnson’s nomination by acclamation.

A less forgettable moment came when NBC decided to ignore the podium during New York City Mayor Robert Wagner’s speech seconding L.B.J. Instead, the network turned breathlessly to Sander Vanocur as he buttonholed David Dubinsky, boss of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. At last came Vanocur’s question to Dubinsky: “Did you know that Mrs. Hubert Humphrey makes all her own clothes?” Over to Huntley-Brinkley.