_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [100]
Howard Benedict needed to cry.
Next door, inside the United Press International wire-service trailer, aerospace writer Bill Harwood was madly typing copy into his computer terminal. Harwood was fast and he was good, and his copy was speeding over his worldwide wire as quickly as possible when he suddenly stopped, fighting back tears. They’re dead, he thought soberly; they’re all dead.
In the press site’s broadcast studios, ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC were all on the air live.
Tom Brokaw, just possibly the greatest of the network anchors, was in the nation’s Capitol, and he raced to our NBC Washington studios to anchor Challenger’s coverage.
I was on the phone with news editor Jim Wilson, and before we went on the air I told him to give me a couple of seconds. I pulled the phone down by my side and focused on the destruction in the sky above me. I kept looking for Challenger. I kept hoping it would reappear out of that growing fireball—hoping, just possibly, it could escape and make a pancake landing on the Atlantic. No Challenger. No miracle. They were gone…
I bit my lip, wiped the wetness from my face, and told Jim, “Let’s go…”
Wilson sprung into action. He had never been better. He called the normally, unflappable Cameron Swayzee into the studio to anchor the hotline bulletin.
A nervous, out-of-breath Swayzee took his cue: “This is an NBC News Hotline Report. This is correspondent Cameron Swayzee at NBC News Headquarters in New York.
“There has been a major malfunction problem with the Space Shuttle Challenger which moments ago lifted off from Cape Canaveral. Details are not certain yet, but let’s go to Cape Canaveral and try to bring in correspondent Jay Barbree, who’s standing by.
“Jay, are you there, and what can you tell us?”
“Cameron, we’re looking at a disaster in the blue skies above this spaceport—a major disaster. The Space Shuttle Challenger, only a minute or so after liftoff, exploded. We have nothing but fire and debris above us…”
It was obvious the astronauts were dead but in journalism, in reporting death, you wait. You must wait.
The disaster was only minutes old as thousands of journalists were seen running for planes, headed for the Cape, and NBC News was no exception. We were moving troops in from our Miami Bureau as well as New York City, and in the New York newsroom they were madly searching for material, new information, any kind of facts about what had burned in the Cape Canaveral sky, but NASA had simply slammed their information door shut, not one syllable of official information coming from anywhere.
All videotapes, film, and pictures of the disaster were being gathered on news chief Hugh Harris’s orders, and as the bucket of information ran lower and lower, NBC-TV decided they needed me on the air with Tom Brokaw. They needed to reach back into the history of the space program, and I could take them there; more important, I had the sources that could reach through NASA’s closed information door and tell NBC’s viewers why Challenger was lost. This was the time when solid reporting counted; not capped teeth, good looks, slick vowels and consonants.
The out-of-breath television producer in the next studio, Kelly Rickenbacher, came bursting into the radio booth. “They want you on television,” he said.
I stared back at him. “I’m on radio, Kelly, I can’t leave my assignment.”
The television producer could not believe what he was hearing. “But they want you on television,” he shouted, his tone implying television was obviously more important than radio.
“Let me check with the radio desk,” I said, turning to pick up the open line with New York.
“Hell, no, you can’t leave radio for television,” Jim Farley screamed the words down the line. “You’re our man. We need you there.”
Jim Farley was vice president of Radio Network News, and he went on to tell me he would take the heat for his decision. I explained this to Kelly, and the television producer left madder than a rained-on setting hen only to return two