If medium and man were ever meant for each other, television and John F. Kennedy provided the classic case.
President Kennedy’s political birth came along when commercial television was moving out of the romper stage into long pants. And like Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s all-encompassing use of then-new radio more than two decades before. John Kennedy utilized television to project his image and views before the American public.
From the Great Debates where America first saw this young man to the TV close-up of a U.S. President telling the American people we were about to blockade Cuba and might go even further, he took radio and television off the second team and made them peers of the older print media.
Electronic journalism and its newsmen grew in stature by leaps and bounds: There was the exclusive TV show A Conversation with the President — the type of interview that had previously been accorded only to print reporters.
The medium needed no further assurance of its place in society than the President’s exclusive interviews with CBS’s Walter Cronkite and NBC’s Chet Huntley and David Brinkley for the expanded news shows of the respective networks.
Like an expert mechanic who learns what makes things work, President Kennedy knew what made the media tick.
On Sept. 26, 1961, political and TV history were made at WBBM-TV Chicago. There, in the first four Great Debates, Senator John F. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Vice President Richard M. Nixon (R) met in face-to-face public debate separated only by moderator-newsman Howard K. Smith.
A narrow victory in election… and the inauguration.
The live presidential news conference, which some newspaper people had considered ‘goofy’ and ‘hazardous,’ became a reality on Jan. 25, 1961. President Kennedy moved from the crowded cubbyhole President Eisenhower had used for delayed broadcast conferences into the spacious State Department Auditorium, and took the world along.
To the National Association of Broadcasters 1961 convention Mr. Kennedy brought the first U.S. space traveler, Commander Alan B. Shepard (far left shaking hands with NAB President Leroy Collins); also present were then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and Mrs. Shepard. At right, the President in December 1962 was interviewed by (l-r) George Herman, CBS; Sander Vanocur, NBC, and William L. Lawrence, ABC, in one hour program.
Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy began a renovation and refurbishing of the White House shortly after moving in. In February 1962, she and CBS newsman Charles Collingwood walked through the President’s mansion in ‘A Tour of the White House.’
On the steps of St. Matthew’s Cathedral, the late President received a final salute from his three-year-old son John Jr., standing by Mrs. Kennedy and daughter Caroline.
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