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This Just
In: What I Couldn’t Tell You on TV by Bob Schieffer Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Conversational It’s easy to imagine yourself sitting at
the dinner table with Bob Schieffer and listening to his stories, as you read
the pages of This Just
In. After I read the first few chapters, I switched to the audio version,
narrated by Schieffer, and found that sensation enhanced. Here’s an excerpt
from Chapter 18, Stumbling Along, pp. 233-5: Here's
the difference between covering the White House and the other Washington
beats. When you're the Pentagon correspondent, for example, and the secretary
of defense takes his vacation, you can take your own vacation. Or just go
home. When
you're the White House correspondent and the president goes on vacation, you
have to go with him. If that president was Jimmy Carter and he was taking a
few days off in Plains, Georgia, and he didn’t want you along anyway, that
could be fairly tedious, especially if it was over a holiday. If the
president was Jerry Ford, it wasn't a bad deal at all. Ford owned a condo in
the resort of Vail, Colorado, and for years, he and his family had been going
there over the Christmas holidays to ski. When the White House announced that
Ford intended to continue the traditional trip as president, and that the
press corps who traveled with him would be allowed to take our families along
on the press plane (we had to pay their way, of course), it seemed a great way to
celebrate Christmas
and ring in the New Year. Pat, and Susan, who had just turned five, and her
sister Sharon, who was three, joined me on the press plane, with families of
the other reporters. We rented a house on one of the Vail ski slopes from a
man who had made his fortune as Vail's first garbage hauler, and invited my
mother and brother and sister to come out from Fort Worth and join us. It
turned out to be a great vacation for them—and for Ford, who went skiing every
day. But
there is a difference between going on vacation and watching someone else
take a vacation, and even though Ford was doing little of consequence, the
holiday season is always a slow news period and the Evening News
broadcasts at all three networks wanted stories from us almost every night,
which meant we had to do a certain amount of work. Gathering
the news—and there wasn't much of it—wasn't the problem. Ford's new press
secretary, Ron Nessen, a former NBC reporter, would hold a briefing, and then
Ford would head to the ski slopes. We would trudge after him and get some
pictures as he came skiing by with his family and Secret Service agents. Everyone
who has ever skied knows that even the most adept skier occasionally takes a
fall, but when the president of the United States takes a fall, that's news,
and in a slow holiday news period, it was big news, and Ford took several
tumbles. The
coverage provoked considerable criticism, especially from some of Ford's
aides, but as John Chancellor of NBC said, "When the president of the
United States takes a header, what are you gonna do? Keep it a secret?"
And at first. Ford himself didn't seem to mind. Putting
together a story of the president falling on the ski slopes is not the
hardest kind of journalistic task. It boils down to saying "Watch
this!" and showing the pictures. The hard part was getting the story on
the air. To do that, the three networks chartered a huge Alouette helicopter,
which flew out from Denver each day and picked up one correspondent and one
producer from each network and then flew us back over the Rocky Mountains to
Denver, where we could develop our film at the local affiliate station and
transmit our stories over leased telephone lines back to CBS News
headquarters in New York. It was not an inexpensive proposition. In those days, it cost
about a dollar a mile to lease the line to transmit the story back to New
York, and when you added in the cost of the helicopter and other incidentals,
such as lodging and transportation costs for correspondents and producers,
the reports on Ford's ski accidents probably cost in the neighborhood of
$25,000 each. It
took something over an hour to get to Denver from Vail, and on clear days,
the helicopter ride was breathtaking. One minute, the ground would be only a
hundred feet below the chopper, then it would pass over a mountain peak and
the ground would suddenly be thousands of feet below. It
was not the view that took my breath away on the first flight. It was when
the pilot told us that the air was so thin at those altitudes that the
helicopter did not have enough power to get over the highest peaks. Not
to worry, he told us; the standard procedure was simply to wait until there
was an updraft, which would easily lift us as high as we needed to go. It
seemed to work. As we headed toward the highest peaks, he would simply fly
the helicopter in lazy circles as he waited for a draft to give us the lift we needed and, sure
enough, we would then be on our way. There
was one other breathtaker. The weather was not always clear. On one-flight,
we got caught in a white-out caused by blinding snow. I had been shot at on
the Ole Miss campus and flown dive-bombing missions in Vietnam, but flying around in
the mountains in a helicopter when the visibility was zero was not my idea of
fun. "This is great," I remember
telling producer Mark Harrington, who was with me that day. "We're going to be
killed trying to get a news story on the air about the president falling down
on his skis." When
we landed in Denver that day, I was fairly shaken, and when Harrington and I
called the Evening News in New York to tell the executive
producer, Paul Greenberg, what we had in mind for a story that night, I was
soon babbling about the harrowing flight. "I
understand," he said, "but I've got big problems here. I can't be
dealing with all that." Such
is the world of television on deadline. Filing
a story from Vail, in the Rocky Mountain time zone, meant that we were up
against an early deadline. The News aired at 6:30 P.M. back on the
East Coast, 4:30 in Denver, which meant we had to have the film developed and
the story edited and ready for transmission to New York by around 4 P.M.
Denver time. That meant that once we flew there from Vail, drove to the local
television station and got the film developed, we had about forty-five
minutes, never more than an hour, to get our story done. Since
the networks didn't want to pay for another helicopter to take us back to
Vail, we rented cars for the return trip, and since the mountain road between
Denver and Vail was only two lanes in those days, the trip usually took four
hours. That meant we were lucky to get back to Vail by 9 P.M. Except for a
couple of exceptions, we repeated the process daily for two weeks. Even with the daily travel, the Vail
encampment was not without its pleasures. Once we got into the routine, we
were up early and took ski lessons before we began the day's news-gathering.
On Christmas Eve, Ford put on a "news lid" for the evening and the
next day, promising no announcements of any kind unless some emergency arose. My
mother had brought out a big batch of tamales from Texas, and Tom Brokaw,
then the NBC White House correspondent, and I threw a party one night for the
press corps. Ford dropped by and, being the perfect hostess, Morn prepared
the president a plate of tamales, carefully removing the tamales' corn-husk
wrappings. It
was a move she would always regret. The next year when Ford had begun to
campaign for president, he went to Texas and, during a stop at the Alamo in
San Antonio, someone gave him a tamale. Ford took a big bite—corn husk and
all—and of course had to spit out the husk, to the delight of photographers. "The
poor man didn't know tamales had a husk," Morn lamented. "If I'd
just showed him how to unwrap them instead of removing those husks, he would
have known." Schieffer brings similar energy to all his
stories, and even his throw away lines are good. Pretend your listening to an
engaging conversation as you read (or listen to) Shieffer’s memoir, This Just
In. Steve Hopkins, June 21, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the July 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/This
Just In.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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