Face the Nation: My Favorite Stories from the First 50 Years of the Award-Winning News Broadcast

Chapter One: In the Beginning Stanton and Paley Invent CBS News It is a marvelous and frightening instrument, broadcasting, as part of this marvelous and frightening century. But ordinary men must use it as ordinary men have made this century what it is. Bad men can use it to their advantage, but in free societies, only for a time -- and a shorter time, I think, than in previous eras.The camera's unblinking eye sees through character faster than the printed word.Eric Sevareid on his retirement, November 28, 1977 Face the Nation was Frank Stanton's idea. Stanton always knew what he wanted -- and what CBS seemed to need. CBS News had more or less invented radio news during World War II, and Edward R. Murrow's See It Now programs had set the standard for television documentaries. What CBS did not have in 1954, and what Stanton felt it needed, was something to compete with NBC's Meet the Press, a live interview program that had the habit of generating the news that wound up as headlines in newspapers on Monday morning.Stanton had been known as the boy wonder of broadcasting. He was an obscure, 27-year-old psychology professor at Ohio State University when CBS founder William S. Paley discovered him in 1935. Ten years later, when Paley named him president of the network, some outside the industry would occasionally mistake him for an intern because of his youthful good looks. But that was a mistake only outsiders made. Insiders knew him as Paley's right-hand man, though a polar opposite of Paley.Stanton was a workaholic before the term was coined. Unlike the flamboyant Paley, who traveled with the jet set of his day and spent much of the year at his homes around the world, Stanton usually worked seven days a week; he socialized with few people and never with Paley. He did not particularly like the CBS chairman. But together, it was Paley, the charming showman and salesman, and Stanton, the cold, cerebral loner, who built the broadcasting giant that became known as the Tiffany network.It was Paley's network, but those on the inside knew it was Stanton -- as much as Paley -- who had made it what it was. Don Hewitt, the 60 Minutes creator, told me about one night when he was being given one of the many awards that he received throughout his illustrious career."I looked down from the head table and saw Stanton in the audience," Hewitt said. "And I told the guy sitting next to me, 'Frank Stanton should be getting this award -- he should get every broadcasting award because he is the patron saint of this industry. He had more to do with making it what it became than any other individual."To be sure, he was the patron saint of Face the Nation. CBS had never been able to put together the kind of forum where key newsmakers could be interviewed on the news of the week. A year earlier, Murrow had begun Person to Person, a program in which he sat in a New York studio, chain-smoking cigarettes, and "interviewed" celebrities in their homes that could be seen before him on a huge screen. Person to Person was a fairly remarkable technical achievement for its day. Bulky television cameras could not be easily moved, and banks of lights had to be installed in various rooms of the celebrity homes. The broadcasts had to be carefully rehearsed as the celebrities walked on cue from room to room. Along the way, they introduced Murrow to various family members and pointed out interesting pieces of furniture.During one program, the duke and duchess of Windsor played jacks on a coffee table. They tossed the ball, and Murrow chuckled, perhaps because he knew that anything beyond jacks would have been an intellectual challenge for the couple or, more likely, because he owned a piece of the show. It was a far cry from Murrow's serious journalism, but as a reward to some of his loyal longtime staffers, he arraBob Schieffer is the author of 'Face the Nation: My Favorite Stories from the First 50 Years of the Award-Winning News Broadcast', published 2004 under ISBN 9780743265850 and ISBN 0743265858.