Eulogy: Fred Friendly

Fred Friendly was the star we all steered by. Not only was he a superb editor, he was a writer of uncommon talent who taught us that, with rare exceptions, when television journalism is good, the pictures take second place to the words. Nothing illustrated his love of words more than his and Ed Murrow’s I Can Hear It Now record albums. There were no pictures, but if you closed your eyes and listened, you could see the pictures–word pictures that came not from a camera but from Fred Friendly’s typewriter.

The most compelling word pictures Friendly drew captured his World War II time in the Pacific (“If you’ve ever been in the jungle at night, you know that when a howitzer screams, the jungle screams back.”) Perhaps he learned to draw like that from listening to the pictures his sidekick Murrow broadcast from London. It’s an art that, with limited exceptions, has disappeared with Friendly.

Like all men of talent, he wasn’t always the most reasonable of men; sometimes you had trouble figuring out just what in hell he wanted you to do. But the sure sign of what he didn’t want you to do was embodied in a cartoon in his office, showing a man and a scantily clad woman on a desert island. She is saying “Who’d know? I’d know!”

–Don Hewitt, executive producer, 60 Minutes