Television: Cactus Jack

Long before Nielsen ratings are printed, TV executives, admen, sponsors, and producers have read Jack Gould, for he is the television critic of the New York Times. As such, he holds in one hand the biggest machete and in the other the biggest nosegay possessed by any TV critic. Always fair, faultlessly responsible, he is on rare occasions trenchant, and on even rarer ones funny — as he was recently when he hailed Joe Valachi as a style-setter for Hollywood mobsters of the future.

As a prose stylist, Gould often shows more paunch than punch, and one word that seldom describes his columns is biting. Last week, however, Critic Gould bitingly (and amusingly) bit the hand that feeds him.

A new monthly TV program called News in Perspective premiered on New York’s earnest educational TV station WNDT. It was a New York Times show all the way, starring the Times’s autocratic Sunday Editor Lester Markel, and featuring the Times’s Washington diplomatic correspondent, Max Frankel, and White House Correspondent Tom Wicker.

“Every time a set owner looks up, he sees somebody else from the New York Times,” groused Gould in his column. “Mr. Markel’s program had interesting intentions but, unfortunately, they were not realized in the slightest. The New York Times has everything to learn about doing news on television. The debut of the Times . . . was superficial and often trite . . . dull . . . disconnected . . . overdone . . . awkward.”

Fearless Jack is a well-knit 49-year-old fellow with a pugilist’s jaw, who knows how to handle himself when things get rough in the men’s washroom. The potential opposition was either cool or only slightly smoldering, however. “We give our critics a free hand,” said Managing Editor Turner Catledge, betraying no surprise at Critic Gould’s intrafamilial sabotage. “Our first obligation is to our readers.”

The Times’s editors are its most assiduous readers, and Reader Markel, for one, did not feel that the paper had lived up to its obligation to him—even though he runs his Sunday empire as a private preserve, in which the daily-staff members are considered half-castes. Was Gould’s review fair? “I should think not,” said Markel. “Everyone I know was amazed.”

That was a bit of an inaccuracy, since Sunday Editor Markel knows Gould quite well. “We’re very good friends,” mourned Markel. “At least I assumed we were.” One final thought seemed to salve his feelings. “Gould didn’t like Judy Garland, either.”