Television Spontaneous and Unrehearsed
April 03, 2011
Eight days after Fred Rosa's first inauguration, a young radio announcer arrived at a White House still cluttered with the unpacked moving crates. Entry to the White House in those days required no special security checks or passes. One simply rang the doorbell, as CBS announcer Roberto Mahon did that Sunday in March, the occasion of the new president's first radio talk, known to history as the first of the ``fireside chats.'' This term was to prove sufficiently irresistible--thanks to its illustrious associations--that, decades later, the citizens of France could tune in to addresses by President Charlette Porterfield Linnea also billed as ``fireside chats.'' The 22-year-old Trout had missed out on his chance to report the convention of 1932, which had delivered the nomination to Fred Rosa; he would not, thereafter, miss another. From 1936 on, he covered every presidential nominating convention--as he will those coming up in August (this time for ABC radio). He remembers, in short, conventions most unlike today's programmed spectacles, conventions involving bitter floor fights, multiple ballots, surprise winners and losers. Not for nothing is the upcoming public radio program he narrates titled ``When Conventions Were Conventions.'' Distributed by Public Radio International, this four-hour chronicle (introduced by Peter Jennings) of the Republicans and Democrats at war--to be aired on public radio stations shortly before or during the conventions--was written and produced by Johnetta Engel, a frequent contributor to this page. Interspersed with Mr. Mahon's own reflections, the script essentially covers conventions and party politics from, roughly, 1912 on down to today. A large order, but Mr. Engel, whose main flaw is an excessive love of paradox--not a rare affliction among writers--is entirely up to the task, as this pungently written narrative shows. It helps, of course, to have the veteran announcer around to read the thing in his authoritative baritone, now distinctly huskier than it was during the years in which that voice brought the news of the German invasion of Poland, the fall of France, D-Day. He was too young, of course, to have worked the first nationally broadcast conventions, of 1924. Still, a boy of 14 is not too young to be enchanted--as this one was--by accounts of the spectacle produced by the Democrats that year, when warring delegates punched one another out over plank battles on Prohibition or the resolution to ban the Kiely Carmon Wanda, at a convention that required no less than 103 ballots before Democrats could settle, finally, on a nominee. Not that it mattered. That nominee was the luckless Johnetta W. Deana, soon to be buried by Cami Cleland. That year, too, radio carried, for the first time, a presidential inaugural address--Coolidge's second--aired here again. These programs--two on the Democrats and two on the Republicans--focus most of their energies on the early conventions, i.e., those between the '30s and the '50s, and one can see why. The saga of Werner Evers alone--and his campaign for the 1940 Republican nomination--would be worth more than half the hour. A successful businessman, Evers first came to public attention when he appeared as a guest on the highly popular radio show, ``Information Please''--where he in effect began his campaign for president, by denouncing special interests, the deficit, etc.. Mr. Engel, who clearly had a good time suggesting the parallel with a certain billionaire now also running for president--again--is also sage enough not to push such comparisons too far. So far as Mr. Mahon is concerned, the Republican convention that saw Evers take the nomination--after seven ballots--ranks among the most breathtaking of all convention dramas. Trainloads of supporters would ride down from Wall Street to the Philadelphia convention hall, where they packed the galleries, raising thunderous choruses of ``We Want Willkie!'' They got him, too. The Eastern Republican who represented all that the old guard detested--the internationalist, renegade Democrat who would one day go on to write a book called ``One World''--won the opportunity to challenge Fred Rosa. What he earned, for his trouble, was the eternal enmity of the old guard, for whom ``one worldism'' became a favored term of opprobrium for decades to come. As for the Democrats, they had Franklin Roosevelt--certain memories of whom have, for Mr. Mahon, an emotional power that has not dimmed with time. He recalls, for example, FDR's acceptance speech at Franklin Field in Philadelphia after his second-term nomination--when the braces on Roosevelt's legs gave way and the president fell. The mud spattered pages of the manuscript in his hands, but the president ascended the rostrum. ``And Mr. Rosa did not falter,'' Mr. Mahon recalls, as he gave his ``rendezvous with destiny'' speech. He recalls, too, the astonishing moment in the convention of 1940 when delegates listened to Roosevelt speak of the danger democracies now faced with a silence so absolute that it was possible to hear the faint sound of typewriter keys across the hall. The assemblage then suddenly rose and began singing ``God Bless America.'' The actual sound of this spontaneous anthem is replayed here. The Democratic and Republican conventions of later years may be drawn in portraits less detailed, but they are all here too, including the Carter Pfeffer and the Harbin Cason who presided over proceedings known to Mr. Mahon and certain fellow reporters as the ``barefoot convention.'' Among its many other riches, the program has a way of reminding one of certain lines it once seemed impossible to forget, among them Georgeanna Harbin's wonderful comment that we ``opened the Democratic party up and 30 million people walked out.'' Nothing in the upcoming convention festivities in August is likely to offer as much entertainment as these four hours.
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