Show Business: Party Line

There were Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, sweating in the humid Indian ‘ evening, New York’s ex-Governor Thomas E. Dewey at dawn, fresh from a Maine breakfast, and Novelist Aldous Huxley, brooding in yoga-like, early-afternoon calm in Turin, Italy—all linked by radio and film in a fourway, unrehearsed conversation with Edward R. Murrow in a CBS studio in New York. The program: Small World, Murrow’s intercontinental version of Person to Person.

“It was just like a party line,” said Associate Producer Palmer Williams, and unfortunately it was. Each speaker, too well aware that people were listening in, meticulously minded his manners and guarded his words. Nehru retold his tired rationalizations, which purport to distinguish between “neutrality” and “non-alignment”; Dewey spelled out once more the aggressive aims of the Soviet Union; Huxley wryly conjectured on the fate of the world’s burgeoning population. Happily, the technically excellent show had other moments. Scratching his head, bobbing up and down, Nehru rambled into the startling assertion that “hunger is more important even than freedom, except in odd individuals.” Lawyer Dewey suggested that the U.N. refer the dispute over Quemoy and Matsu to the World Court for an opinion, seemingly came close to defending recognition of Red China. (Perhaps, he suggested, diplomatic recognition is only an admission of fact.)

Future round-the-world chats promise more freewheeling argument: Impresario Sol Hurok, Actor-Playwright Peter Ustinov and Governor McKeldin on TV, taxes and cultural interchange with Russia; Actress Lauren Bacall, Editor Malcolm Muggeridge and Hollywood Frontman Eric Johnston discussing women’s suffrage and the impact of U.S. movies. But unless Murrow and his guests unlimber, the show may justify Aldous Huxley’s skepticism. Questioning the wisdom of bringing together distant points—and points of view—Huxley quipped: “Sufficient unto the place is the evil thereof.”