Television: Face the Antagonist

In their week-to-week competition for big names to face their various batteries of newsmen, TV’s three big panel shows have kept invitations and entreaties flowing to the Kremlin. Once, CBS’s Face the Nation thought it had won the game, and got ready to televise Russia’s Vyacheslav Molotov. But Molotov suddenly reneged, agreed to go on only if questions were submitted in advance. NBC’s Meet the Press and ABC’s Press Conference ran into the same insistence on canned questions. All three persisted, and for one of them it paid off.

Fortnight ago, CBS got a surprise telephone call from the Soviet embassy in Washington. In response to a recent invitation, the biggest of all, Communist Party Chief Nikita Khrushchev, had agreed to face the cameras of Face the Nation. Still wary from its experience with Molotov, Face the Nation nevertheless last week sent a crew of six to Moscow to begin preparations for a filmed “free” exchange between Khrushchev and several U.S. correspondents in Moscow to be broadcast over 92 CBS TV stations and about 150 radio stations on Sunday, June 2. To avoid the loss of time in translation, Face the Nation’s smart and alert Producer Ted Ayers plans to make use of a simultaneous-translation technique like that of the U.N. If Communist Khrushchev does not invoke an eleventh-hour veto, CBS will have achieved a major beat and also one of those political rarities, a kept Kremlin agreement.