Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [107]
But the station would not be able to handle a three-hour videotape session on Saturday afternoon because its facilities were already scheduled for other programs. I asked Nixon’s assistant if we could do it Friday night. But Nixon, it developed, could not possibly be available at any time on Friday. In desperation, I checked back with the studio, and after some complicated rescheduling, we found that we could tape a show on Saturday after all – but only if we started at eleven in the morning and ran over the normal lunch hour. I relayed this news immediately to Herb Klein, Nixon’s former press secretary and a good friend of mine, and then I waited while he worked desperately to straighten out the schedule at the other end. Finally Klein phoned back that 11:00 A.M. would be fine. We both started to breathe again.
But not for long: there was then the problem of assembling the other panelists at the new time. As it developed, only two of them could come at the new hour, Sun-Times Editor Milbum (“Pete”) Akers and Dr. Richard Snyder, of the Political Science Department of Northwestern University. All we could do was to plan the show in two sections, one to start at 11:00 A.M. and the other (without Nixon) at the previously arranged hour of 3:00 P.M.
And even this didn’t end the anxious moments! About 10:20 that Saturday, as I was at the station typing out some last-minute material, who should walk into my office but Richard Nixon. Despite his prominence and his busy schedule, there was no way to change the taping schedule again: he would just have to wait around for forty minutes. Apologetically, I tried to explain the situation.
“Don’t worry,” he said pleasantly. “I know I’m early. I’ll just go upstairs for a cup of coffee.”
Whereupon, the man who had almost been elected President of the United States borrowed a dime from a TV technician, and enjoyed a leisurely cup of coffee out of a paper cup from a vending machine in the WBBM-TV employees’ canteen.
When the time to tape the show arrived, I asked whether there was any subject which he would prefer not to discuss.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “Put anything to me that you want to. I’ll certainly try to answer.”
During the show, as we sat in the same studio in which candidates Nixon and Kennedy had engaged in the first of their “Great Debates,” he dodged nothing. In fact, I found him more forthright and natural in manner than in several of his campaign appearances.
“If he had been that sincere and direct when he was a candidate,” one viewer wrote me after the show, “I might have changed my mind and voted for him.”
Among his most interesting remarks, I thought, were those concerning his campaign. One comment, regarding the TV debates, was that, if he had attempted to avoid them, he would have had more to lose than to gain. Another was that, in the closing days of the campaign, he should have asked President Eisenhower to speak on his behalf in Illinois, rather than in New York. Ike’s appearance, he felt in retrospect, might have swung the extremely close Illinois race to him. Incidentally, according to Mr. Nixon, the rumor that General Eisenhower was never wholeheartedly in favor of him was completely unfounded – Ike did everything that he was asked to do during the campaign.
The Nixon show was a great one, when we finally got our schedules synchronized.
But don’t get the idea that all the tense moments on At Random occur before the show goes on. From experience, I have found that with a spontaneous program such as ours, it is impossible to predict anything that might happen while we are on the air.
Once, when singer-actress Eartha Kitt and Negro publisher John Johnson were on the same program, I noticed that there was a decided coolness between them. After a few pointed remarks had been made, I learned that they had been less than friendly for some time over a derogatory