Morality Play

"That Bob Kennedy is a doll," wrote a Washington housewife last week as the Du Mont-televised labor rackets hearings came to a close (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). Since the Senate's modern 18-day morality play began, Du Mont Broadcasting Corp. has been bombarded with 10,000 such letters and thousands of phone calls. Three people twitted Du Mont because Liberace had been shoved aside by Johnny Dio and Jimmy Hoffa; but in most bars across the Eastern Seaboard, tipplers clamored for the racket-busters over baseball. Even though she was seated a few yards behind the witness chair in the packed Senate caucus room, pert, brunette Ethel Kennedy, wife of Bob, was glued to a portable monitor set. "You can check out the witnesses so much better this way," said Ethel. "You see their very souls on TV." Ethel Kennedy echoes what many viewers had learned during the Army-McCarthy hearings: TV can make the viewer a perceptive reporter.

Though the hearings cost Du Mont almost $80,000 (almost twice as much as the original estimate), the pulse-takers indicated that in New York alone, Du Mont had quadrupled its daytime audience, even before the star witnesses appeared. Du Mont's ability to function as a public servant was the envy of the networks, but it was the kind of service the big chains, with their high preemption costs and complex affiliate commitments, could ill afford (estimated network carrying cost: more than $3,000,000).

There were, of course, threatening calls charging Du Mont with being "anti-union." The Transport Workers' brogue-nurturing Boss Mike Quill, appearing on Wendy Barrie's show over Du Mont's Manhattan WABD, took the opportunity to lambast Du Mont because "they showed unions in an unfavorable light." Indeed, the three inquisitive cameras played so deftly and pitilessly across the faces of real-life labor hoodlums that many of them looked as if they must have stepped out of Central Casting. Director Ed Schearer of Washington's Du Mont station WTTG ranged two cameras along one wall, strategically placed a third behind the committee to pick up documents exchanged across the table and Senator McClellan's fancy doodlings. TV-savvy committee members often delayed proceedings by delivering politics-loaded orations geared to home-state audiences, but even this, wrote one viewer, "was better than soap opera." The committeemen were also TV-wise enough to save the top witnesses until last, sprang the taped phone conversations at precisely the proper dramatic moment, drowning out racy epithets with an electronic beeper signal. Said Schearer: "The Army-McCarthy hearings had its 'Point of Order' slogan. All we've been able to come up with in this one is 'Son of a beep.' "

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