National Affairs: The Eye of the Nation

A European is astonished to see nearly one thousand men prepare to transact the two most difficult pieces of business an assembly can undertake, the solemn consideration of their principles, and the selection of the person they wish to place at the head of the nation, in the sight and hearing of twelve or fourteen thousand other men and women . . .

—James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (1893)

In 1952, the solemn business was being transacted in the sight and hearing of some 50 million people who were watching the loud, gaudy—and deeply serious—scene through the electric eye of TV.

Fate of the World? Slowly, through Chicago’s hot, traffic-jammed streets, the herd of delegates converged on the convention hall, the International Amphitheater, which swam in the pungent smell from the surrounding stockyards. The delegates were a serious bunch. They seemed to realize that their party and their nation had come to a crossroads.

The convention hall itself seemed a touch less garish than usual. The gay red, white & blue was balanced by quiet greys and blues (which show up more sharply on TV). The face of Abraham Lincoln looked down earnestly on the delegates. An hour behind schedule, pudgy National Chairman Guy Gabrielson advanced to the rostrum, which jutted, like the bridge of an ocean liner, above the floor. “O.K., boys,” he said, and banged the gavel.

The delegates seemed impatient with the time-honored ritual—the prayer, the singing of the national anthem, the welcoming speeches, and the chair’s plea, repeated like an incantation, to clear the aisles. Gabrielson delivered his opening speech, his eyes glued to a gadget on the speaker’s stand known as the teleprompter (which spells out a prepared speech line for line on a moving band). Said he, in a political cliche with a hard core of truth: “The fate of the world is in the hands of these delegates . . .”

He ripped into the Democrats, and the delegates roared dutifully, but they clearly wanted to get down to business, i.e., the rules fight between the Taft and Eisenhower forces (see above), which brought the convention’s first tense hours of drama and caused the air-conditioned atmosphere to heat up fast.

The Hero. In their hotel rooms, before TV sets, the candidates watched the proceedings that determined their future. Up to the last minute, they had been shaking hands, making speeches, exuding confidence.

Ike’s trip across the country from Denver and his arrival in the convention city had been something of a triumph. At station after station, thousands of people gathered to catch a glimpse of him, hear him denounce Taft’s steamroller methods. For a while, after his arrival, Eisenhower forgot politics and attended the annual reunion of the veterans of the 82nd Airborne Division. Amid flickering candles and muffled drums for the dead, Eisenhower wept. He recalled how he had visited the 82nd on the eve of its drop into Normandy, how the men had smiled at him and told him in effect: “Don’t worry.” Now, at Chicago, the men of the 82nd cheered his words and, again, smiled..

That night, Taft arrived on the battlefield, welcomed by brass bands and crowds of loyal supporters. Television covered his entry, and the resulting fuss annoyed Bob Taft. “That,” snapped he, “is a good example of why we don’t have TV at national committee meetings.” But Eisenhower seemed to enjoy watching Taft’s arrival on TV.

The tumult & the shouting around the candidates in the ballrooms and lobbies and makeshift offices rose to fever pitch —only to become completely beside the point. For, with the knock of Gabrielson’s gavel, the candidates moved temporarily off the scene. This was the hour of Mr. Delegate. He was the hero (or victim?) of the occasion.

He was the fellow who showed up on the politicos’ charts as a number in a little square. But in the flesh, and on the TV screen, he was the fellow in shirtsleeves with a big badge on his chest and a little flag in his hand, the fellow who was being pushed around by ushers, having his back slapped until the sight of a lifted hand made him wince; he was being swept along in demonstrations, serenaded by brass bands, orators and other noisemakers; he was the fellow who listened, yelled, applauded, booed, groaned, laughed, looked bewildered and mopped his forehead, his handkerchief waving like a truce flag to plead for a letup in the relentless assault on his eyes, ears and vote.

“Get Him!” The assault had begun weeks before the convention, with urgent instructions from editorial writers, wives, golf partners, candidates and taxi drivers, but that was mild compared to what awaited him in Chicago. Before he was in the city an hour, he could imagine a cigar-gnawing pol bending over a radar screen in a smoke-filled backroom and crying with fiendish glee: “Here comes Jim Smith! Get him!”

No sooner had the Delegate scrambled off his train than volunteer railroad commandos descended on him with war whoops of “Taft” or “Ike.” Occasionally, a Taft welcomer would pounce on an Ike arrival, only to throw him back again into the maelstrom like a fisherman tossing back a fingerling.

In one of the 12,500 rooms reserved for the convention (varying in price from $5 to $110), the Delegate was besieged with phone calls, letters, telegrams. Senator Taft wanted him to drop by “Taft Town,” in the Hilton hotel, where refreshments, a TV screen, Taft literature and Sammy Kaye awaited him. General Eisenhower, on the other hand, wanted him to drop in at the Blackstone Theater for an Ike boosters’ rally.

He got nearly as much mail as Santa Claus at Christmas, and more lunch, dinner and cocktail invitations than Marilyn Monroe. Candidates’ headquarters showered him and Mrs. Delegate with gifts, ranging from jewelry and perfume to Bromo Seltzer. From Newark, N.Y., by daily courier a dedicated florist sent him an “Eisenhower Better Times Rose.”

Controlling the hoopla, like organists on the keyboard, throwing in an extra furioso here and an obbligato there, were the boys at headquarters. On the Hilton’s eleventh floor, the Eisenhower GHQ was somewhat disorganized but fervent.”Demonstration materials” went out by the truckload. As one load of 600 Eisenhower hats was sent to the front, Volunteer Worker George McMullen said: “Don’t worry, we’ll have the bodies to go under those hats. Bodies are our job. We know just where to call when we need, let’s say 150 bodies for a demonstration at the Hilton or to whoop it up at the Congress Hotel, where Taft is staying.”

Taft headquarters—calmer, more professional and (connoisseurs noted) staffed with the prettier girls—was also concerned with bodies. A Cleveland lawyer named Paul Walter, close friend of Bob Taft’s, proudly displayed a file of cards carrying the name of each delegate together with vital political statistics. Taft cards carried blue tabs while Ike cards wore pink, other candidates black. Behind curtains, Walter kept a huge board with colored thumbtacks representing each delegate.

Mr. Delegate could feel not only the prodding thumbs of rival politicians on his back: he could feel something far stranger, more novel and disconcerting. He could feel, literally, the eye of the nation upon him.

Eerie World. This was TV’s convention. The three major TV networks were spending $10 million on convention coverage (sponsors were expected to pay only $8,000,000 of the bill). They had more than 1,000 workers on hand, some 30 tons of equipment, enough wire to stretch to the Fiji Islands and back. They relayed the convention to 108 TV stations across the land. Cities beyond the coaxial cable (Birmingham, New Orleans and Memphis) arranged for special microwave relays to pick up the big show.

The International Amphitheater, chosen chiefly because it has more room for TV coverage than the otherwise more convenient Chicago Stadium, was one vast TV studio. Corridors and galleries were transformed into an eerie world where technicians manhandled reality, mixed sound and split sight. There were rooms with soundproof walls and rooms with glass windows, interview rooms and control rooms and silent, forbidding rooms of mysterious purpose.

The Peepie-Creepie. Most startling TV innovation was a portable camera known as the walkie-lookie, or peepie-creepie, with which the enterprising TV reporter could sneak up to Mr. Delegate and catch him yelling his head off or scratching his nose. Early in the convention, Guy Gabrielson spotted one of them on the floor and cried: “There’s a talkie-walkie. No talkie-walkie allowed on the floor—no sir!” Another innovation: the periscope camera, which technicians maneuvered to get shots above the heads of the crowd.

The networks had seven big-caliber cameras trained on the convention floor (their pictures were pooled), plus 70 cameras elsewhere in the hall and all over Chicago. Ten were self-contained mobile units with their own small power stations, marvels of the electronic age.

But it was a major miracle when any one man knew what the various cameras were doing at various times. In an attempt to keep the herd together, networks set up short-wave telephones, walkie-talkies, telephone switchboards, messenger squads—everything in the signal handbook except carrier pigeons and smoke signals.

The pre-convention campaign had tested several techniques of television political coverage. One of the most widely used is the panel discussion, which tends, unless rehearsed, to be a hash of unrelated statements. When it is rehearsed, it tends to be a cliche contest. The giant “press conference” is another waste of time in most cases, although occasionally (e.g., Ike’s first press conference at Abilene) it comes to life. One of the most successful TV techniques is the small press conference, with one public man and eight or ten really well-trained reporters.

That TV Feeling. The television coverage put a great new strain on campaigners. They were not allowed to look tired. They (or their speech writers) had to produce more ideas; the political speech, which once upon a time was good for 100 whistle stops across the country, is now used up in one TV appearance.

The TV reporters had their fears too, particularly the threat of charges of favoritism. Said one ABC man: “Why, if, for instance, one camera picked out a couple of delegates sleeping during a Taft speech, it would be a great temptation to show it. It is a beautiful picture. But you can’t show it—especially if while an Ike speech is being made a camera picks up a shot of people getting all excited.”

The TV feeling may have a healthy effect on politics, by bringing the country much closer to the words and actions of its politicians. In a negative sense, this was demonstrated by the national committee’s decision to exclude TV (and other “paraphernalia media,” including still photographers) from its hearings on the contested delegations. Millions of Americans, already considering it their right to be present at major news events through TV, resented having the committee shut them out. The committee’s action backfired in one case, when an enterprising radio reporter smuggled a microphone into the room (hiding the wire under the rug), recorded some anti-Taft testimony, which was later broadcast.* Outside, TV cameras caught the grim faces of three guards posted at the closed door.

TV saw the circus, but it also saw, here & there, the sober and bitterly earnest business of the convention. An American party convention (as James Bryce knew even in 1893) is a highly intricate and sensitive political assembly in which the pressures, deals and loyalties of months and years burst to light. It has always been far more serious than the paper hats and the noisemakers suggest, and, despite the most brazen political backroom coups, eventually subject to the will of the citizen. The presence of TV’s eye made it more so. “Jim,” the eye seemed to be saying to Mr. Delegate, “Jim, they’re watching you.”

*Another radioman dangled a microphone from a projection booth in the committee’s conference room, but conked a member on the head with it and was evicted.