Television: The Glass Curtain

Arthur Godfrey summoned newsmen to the presidential suite of San Francisco’s Sheraton-Palace Hotel last week and let them in on a few things. To keep CBS out of “jeopardy” over his strong views supporting manned bombers against guided missiles, said Godfrey, he has adopted a “self-imposed censorship” on his radio and TV shows. He admitted that his plans for the nation’s defense—which he got down on hands and knees to illustrate with a table knife on the carpet —have already queered Godfrey himself with the Administration.

“I haven’t been invited to the White House in two years,” he said, lifting the curtain a bit. “You know you can go to some people and say, ‘Look, I’m going to tell you this for your own good.’ You can’t do that with Ike any more. He gets irritated.” Godfrey also revealed that even his longtime friendship with ex-Defense Boss Charlie Wilson had deteriorated to just “polite phone calls on birthdays.”

But the tea-pushing defense strategist said that he had found a willing listener. It was after he flew to Texas and talked with Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, he explained, that Congress appropriated an extra billion dollars for the Air Force. Said Arthur: “The day Congress acted, Johnson phoned me and said, ‘Arthur, this is a billion-dollar phone call, and now you stay out of Texas. You’ve cost the taxpayers a billion dollars.’ I told him, ‘It will cost $4 billion a year to run this right, so you’ve done a 25% job.’ But you know what happened later; the President wiped it all out with a wave of his hand.”