Word: sevareid
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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President Richard Nixon may have been normally cool and purposeful in handling Howard K. Smith on ABC last week, but he is a chronic fumbler compared with the British Prime Minister, Lord North, fielding Eric Sevareid on CBS next week. Prime Minister who? Frederick Lord North, the chap who presided over the loss of the American colonies and who is re-embodied by Actor Peter Ustinov in a new CBS documentary project. The series, titled The American Revolution: 1770-1783, will include perhaps a dozen such "interviews" by the time of the nation's 1976 bicentennial. In the premiere...
...preparing himself, Ustinov boned up on the period and North. In preparing viewers to accept a unique approach to a potentially tedious subject, the producers show Ustinov getting his beard shaved and putting on a powdered wig and 18th century rig over his own prime ministerial paunch. Sevareid also read up on the subject for a month, but wore his usual mid-20th century suit for the filming, which took place in Wroxton Abbey, North's ancestral home, near Stratford-on-Avon...
Fairness Doctrine. At one break in the filming, Sevareid says, "I found my gorge rising a little." He told Executive Producer Perry Wolff: "We can't let Lord North get away with this. Someone must speak for the colonies!" Sevareid did, in fact, occasionally play American plenipotentiary rather than detached journalist and helped make the program more illuminating...
Serious Alternatives The black comedy no longer seemed quite so funny, though CBS's Eric Sevareid wryly suggested that, in the manner of O. Henry's famed story The Ransom of Red Chief, Kissinger would argue any antiwar kidnapers to a standstill and they would eventually pay Nixon to take him back. Kissinger was equal to the occasion, and reported that his overworked staff "has written a letter to the President stating that under no conditions am I to be ransomed." He had heard, he quipped, that "it was three sex-starved nuns" who were after him. Kissinger also complained...
Give and Take. Both the medium and the format impose limitations. The "conversation" label implies give-and-take among equals, an obvious impossibility in this case. "A quick-minded President," admits Sevareid, "is pretty well in the driver's seat during these transactions, no matter how they're arranged. He can give about as much as he wants to give, and take about as much as he wants to take. There is no magical method or question that will get President Nixon to say something he does not want...