Radio: Hail to the Chief

Television, which fumbled badly last November in reporting Truman’s unexpected election, made a good recovery last week in reporting his inaugural. The show was part travelogue, part carnival, and as American as a Fourth of July parade.

Kaffiyas & Cocked Hats. Cameras spotted strategically about town allowed TV to make panoramic sweeps of Washington’s long vistas, and then move in on the columned portico of the Capitol for dramatic close-ups of top-hatted diplomats and politicians, skull-capped Supreme Court Justices, Arabs in flowing kaffiyas, papal knights in plumed cocked hats. The camera eye glanced up at the lazy wandering of a Navy blimp, and around at the wide lawn jammed with humanity. Then it came back to the inaugural stand as the natty, smiling little man, in whose honor the multitude was assembled, stepped onto the rostrum.

Truman’s speech (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) was the slow movement in the spectacle. When he had finished, the carnival spirit returned in the roaring, foot-stamping applause from the bleachers, in the chimes from the Epiphany Church, in the ruffles and flourishes of the Marine Band. Just before the Inaugural Parade, the image flickered hysterically and there was a spell of “operating difficulties.”

Coffee & Flags. But with the cinder out of its eye, the camera picked up the impressive overhead flight of B-36 bombers, Flying Boxcars, jet-propelled fighters. Then came the parade with massed flags and flashing-legged columns of infantry, floats, Sousa rhythms of military bands, and, at the tail end, a circus calliope. The sunflash from the headlamps of the motorcycle escort made the TV image blur and throb. The hat-waving crowd cheered, torn paper drifted across the screen, and the cameras caught the 32nd President of the U.S. sipping coffee as the parade rolled by.

That night TV went to the Inaugural Ball, reported drama in the hush before the President’s entrance, when a sea of faces turned toward the presidential box and the only sound was the faint worrying of a guitar’s strings as the Marine Band waited to strike up Hail to the Chief.

The President proved the outstanding star of a good show. Time after time, TV showed Harry Truman in a folksy moment : as he got into his overcoat after the speech on Capitol Hill, when he sat in the wrong seat in the presidential box and, with unflustered stolidity, moved to the right one. The star* even managed to give his white tie and tails the informal look of a comfortable business suit.

At day’s end, despite some banal street interviews and the bumbling repetitions of some announcers, TV could boast that it had finally caught a moment of history just as it happened. Ten million televiewers from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi felt that they had truly been there with Washington’s cheering thousands.

*Lord Beaverbrook’s London Evening Standard was not impressed. Truman had “almost a Dewey mustache” and “his eyebrows came out thick and dark … his white collar looked dirty.” The Standard’s complacent conclusion: Britain’s TV is still the leader in quality.