The Place to Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News Book

I enjoyed reading this book - covered a time that I largely remember (I graduated from high school in Arlington Virginia in the late 1960s) and I do favorably remember the emerging strength of network news at the time. There was nothing in this book that particularly surprised me.

The relationship with the Kennedys is particularly interesting. My sense is that Mudd is more in Bobby Kennedy's pocket than he would care to admit, although there are the concessions from him that RFK let Eugene McCarthy be a stalking horse for him, his stepping in once McCarthy was winning primaries certainly does seem opportunistic, and I thought so at the time. There is an interesting contrast between Mudd and his colleagues' perception of John F. Kennedy, and how they hear (and are surprised to find) that the rest of the country perceives
> him. At the top of page 132, he says he was "Astonished because many of us who covered the Congress had quite a different view of the Kennedy presidency, colored by the legislative lethargy of the Hill, the dug-in opposition of southern Democrats, and the snide comments of the Republicans …" A similar, less-than-enamored comment appears on page 115, "Kennedy's promise of a civil rights bill remained an empty promise until …(Bull Conner)".

There was some disjointedness. Earlier this seems to be Mudd's memoir, and later it is his researched record. I would have preferred if he had just told us his recollections, and then, perhaps in footnotes, cited what others recalled. The overall rambling, often redundant form works with a personal recollection, but is really awkward when one is reading what is purportedly a report that documents all participant views. I don't like the redundancy, and it does read like a series of magazine articles or taped recollections, that have been put together in the same book with no editing. For instance, Chapter 49, p 361, interrupts the exciting denouement of Rather getting the CBS anchor rather than Mudd, by telling us how important (or certainly glamorous) the White House beat was, then on page 363, para starting "More than any other…" essentially repeats the same exact information - background stuff, that at best should only have been presented once. (Plus, who decided that Chapter 49 should be there anyway?) In some cases there is run-on information that makes it hard to follow the action - for instance, on page 129 we get a jump from the motorcade in Dallas(where Kennedy was shot) to the funeral cortege, describing the riderless black horse.

There are some interesting forshadowings, some which may be more a reflection of remembering back from now than any perception at the time. There are a couple of references to the women's movement, for instance, which I find unlikely - page119 suggests that women were immediately the next group that would want attention (I do not think this was the perception in 1963) - the reference on page 125 to Utt being anti-women's lib may be accurate for 1968, but I doubt it. Other elements seem more in place, like Mudd quitting smoking (page 135) and the Surgeon General's office coming out with warnings. While the reference on page 185 to the presence of television in the House of Representatives is over the top ("Not until July 24, 1974, did the nation fully realize there was such a place as the House of Representatives."), I do recall that everyone on the Watergate Committee did show up the first day with blue shirts on, because they understood that blue showed up better on tv - clearly the Congress was not used to being interviewed on tv. The top of page 187 reflects the evolution of this - and of course now we have C-span junkies, which dates about from the mid-70s.

One major foreshadowing that deserves more attention (Roger, how could you have done it differently so that we did not have 8 second attention spans?) is the question of what gets covered on TV news. Pages 192 - 193 are revealing - the para at the bottom of 192 points out that the CBS office did not have the attention to really understand the intricacies of what was happening on the Hill, and in the middle of page 193, Mudd says "Because television could not easily handle the fine print of legislation, I gravitated toward learning about members' personalities and idiosyncrasies." The same thing comes out on page 221, re the interview with RFK: "Rereading my notes and the transcript of the program I was genuinely surprised at how little of the Hickory Hill interview we used and how barely we touched on Vietnam. It was more about the glamour, the atmospherics, the excitement, the burden, the adventure, of being a Kennedy, and the mass-production press operation … shuttling in an d out of his office as if on a conveyor belt."

I do see an ego here, partly deserved because Mudd and CBS did do some good groundbreaking work, but some of it is insufferable -the description of Mudd and Rather refusing to shake hands with Ike Pappas the newcomer (page 204) makes you wonder whatever else about them was so unacceptable. What a bunch of snobs. After reading the book and making notes I did go on line to see what reviews I could find, and was interested to find that the New York Observer also picked up on Mudd and Rather's snub.

As a language nazi, there were some uses of language that bothered me - I think there should have been an editor on this:
P 48 - Sylvia Westerman "… literally pitched her tent in the Fontainebleau Hotel bar…" - surely he means figuratively.
Page 139 - Dan Rather "… who was campaigning with President Johnson." - I expect he was covering Johnson's campaign, and certainly hope so.
P 289 - "the network's motorcycle boys - they were called couriers - …" - actually, CBS's unique term is "motorcycle boys", and "couriers" is generic.

Item of interest: P 175 - after the episode on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 7, "the legislation began moving at flank speed." I was not familiar with the term "flank speed" - Wikipedia defines it as follows: Flank speed is a nautical term referring to a ship's true maximum speed, beyond the speed that can be reached by steaming at full speed. Usually, flank speed is reserved for situations in which a ship finds itself in imminent danger, such as coming under attack by aircraft. Flank speed is very fuel-inefficient and often unsustainable because of engine overheating issues.