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Merriman Smith saw nothing like the 2016 presidential campaign

It’s hard to compare the 2016 presidential campaign with those Merriman Smith covered.

Smith reported on seven presidential campaigns as UPI’s chief White House reporter. He covered Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 re-election, Harry Truman’s surprise win in 1948, and Richard Nixon’s 1968 triumph. Every campaign he covered was a contest between men with deep experience in politics. Their rhetoric focused on policy and ideology. There was no talk of entertainers like Rosie O’Donnell, or revelations of beauty pageant winners’ weight problems.

1960-10-07-kennedy-nixon-debate-merriman-smith

Second Kennedy-Nixon debate, October 7, 1960. The questioners’ backs are to the camera. Al Spivak is the second questioner from the left. (UPI Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

The talking points of the 2016 campaign would be alien to Smith and his contemporaries. They worked in an era of sober Washington coverage and were more steeped in policy than show business.

But Smith would have understood one element of this year’s campaign. In September 1964, Smith took note of the presidential candidates’ mudslinging. “Sen. Barry M. Goldwater has called President Johnson a liar,” he wrote. “The Chief Executive in turn obviously regards his opponent as a ‘raving, ranting demagogue’ … [T]his sort of thing happens in every national political campaign. The unusual aspect this year is that it became so bitter so soon. Cries of liar and warmonger ordinarily are not heard from the principals until about mid-October.”

We’ve been hearing cries of liar and warmonger right along in 2016, though not necessarily from the campaign’s principals. But Smith was right about this: mid-October is about when presidential campaigns turn intense. That’s true this year. For the Donald Trump campaign, the intensity came a few days early. It began with the revelation October 7 of 11-year-old audio in which Trump brags of committing sexual assault. It continued the following days with women’s revelations of how Trump groped or harassed them. Around the same time, WikiLeaks began disclosing Hillary Clinton campaign internal emails.

Al Spivak, a former UPI reporter who covered the Kennedy White House with Smith and Helen Thomas, was a questioner in the second debate between Kennedy and Richard Nixon, held October 7, 1960. Spivak asked Nixon and Kennedy about civil rights and relations with the Soviet Union. Here are some of his recollections about the 1960 debates and how they compare to those between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

I was a panelist on the second of four Kennedy-Nixon debates. This followed by several weeks the first debate, which probably cost Nixon the election because of his wan appearance and Kennedy’s outwardly robust appearance. Recall that one or more polls showed that people who heard the debate on radio thought Nixon won, while those who viewed it on TV gave JFK the nod.

All four panelists on the first debate were broadcasters — understandable inasmuch as the networks were providing the time and facilities for the debates. However, the print press — newspapers and wire services — were still of far more importance in those days than now, and an outcry went up from them that they were unrepresented on the panel of interviewers. So the Kennedy and Nixon campaigns came together and selected by lot two print newsmen for the second debate, to be held in Washington in October. I was one of those selected and the late Hal Levy of Newsday was the other. There also were two broadcasters, Paul Niven of CBS and Edward P. Morgan of Mutual Broadcasting. There were two more debates, the third which also included two print people among the four panelists and the fourth on which all four panelists were broadcasters. There was no vice presidential debate.

The media buildup, as I recall it, was not as big — for those days, there were no 24/7 cable TV news networks, which in my mind are an atrocity.

Some other differences: in 1960 there were four presidential candidate debates, not three like today. There were NO televised primary campaign debates (such as those which this year were also atrocities). Each of the 1960 debates lasted one hour — not 90 minutes, which I feel is too long if only for the physical toll it takes on the candidates.

How did the debates work in 1960 compared with later ones? Certainly, the first of the JFK-RMN debates mattered, though I doubt the next three did. In later years, the Reagan-Mondale debate mattered [Reagan and Mondale debated twice in 1984], though I don’t know to what degree. So did the Bush-Gore one, when Gore’s sighs turned out to his detriment. [Gore sighed in the first of his three debates with George W. Bush in 2000.]

Oh yes, another important difference. The 1960 debates were held in TV studios with no audience present. Now the debates are held in arenas or theaters with big audiences that are admonished to be quiet — but as you probably observed, that is never the case. In the primaries, the formats as well as the participants were disgusting. Next step is for the networks to work out a deal with Italy to restore what’s left of the Coliseum from ancient Rome and hold the debates there, perhaps with some lions and gladiators to prod the candidates.

Merriman Smith covers the 1960 presidential debates

The media buildup to the 2016 presidential debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump far exceeds that of the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates.

The first 2016 presidential debate was expected to draw a Super Bowl-size TV audience. An Associated Press story called it a “must-see showdown,” and The New York Times billed it as “among the most highly anticipated presidential debates in American history.”

Kennedy and Nixon in their first debate at a CBS studio in Chicago. (National Archives/Richard M. Nixon Library)

Compare that to the curtain-raiser story Merriman Smith wrote with United Press International colleague William Theis before the first Kennedy-Nixon debate on September 26, 1960 — 56 years to the day before the first Clinton-Trump matchup.

The two reporters didn’t seem to think the Kennedy-Nixon debate, held in a Chicago TV studio, was as monumental as the Clinton-Trump meeting. They wrote that it would merely “add steam to the presidential campaign.”

Their story went on:

As far as open conflict is concerned, Kennedy and Nixon have been skirmishing lightly thus far in the campaign for the White House. There has been some sniping and counterfire over Nixon’s feeling that Kennedy should not discuss American shortcomings with Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev in the country, but this has been somewhat intermittent ….

Kennedy and Nixon regard the debates as a make-or-break factor in the campaign. But now, bolstered by large crowds on the campaign trail, Kennedy’s advisers feel the debates are somewhat less monumental.

Nixon advisors, by contrast, felt the debates could sway undecided voters, the story said. That seems in line with the thinking of the Trump and Clinton campaigns this year.

Smith followed up the candidates’ second debate in Washington on October 7, 1960 with a behind-the-scenes report.

He noted that the Washington TV studio was chilled to 64 degrees — “too cold for Kennedy; not cold enough to keep Nixon from perspiring.” Kennedy said the studio was so cold, “he might feel like having a sweater.”

Kennedy also complained that the studio lights facing him were brighter than those facing Nixon. On the other hand, Smith reported, someone told him that Nixon’s people really wanted more light.

Smith’s story, printed in newspapers on October 8, included bullet-pointed items about other aspects of the debate.

— Makeup. Kennedy wore none. His only concession was a late afternoon shave. Nixon, with a much heavier beard, wore what appeared to be full TV makeup. His staff called it “light” …

— Cut-away or reaction shots (a closeup of one man while the other one was talking). The Nixon people wanted no part of them. The Kennedy people liked the idea. There were a few.

— Drinking water. Secret Service agents checked the vice president’s water. Studio officials assumed a similar check would be made to protect Kennedy’s water, but the Secret Service said no thanks, the law assigns them only to the President and the vice president.

— Tally lights. This is pretty inside stuff … A tally light tells the performer when the camera is on. Kennedy’s little red bulb burned out 30 seconds before show time and his handlers thought that since the senator’s light was out, Nixon’s should be doused too. It wasn’t.

Kennedy and Nixon debated four times on TV. Over the 56 years since, there’s been a lot of talk about whether Nixon’s perspiration or beard hurt his election chances. Judging from the polls, it’s hard to say for sure. Gallup polls always showed the 1960 race as a lot tighter than the 2016 contest.

Robert F. Kennedy — Kennedy’s campaign manager — believed the debates helped put his brother in the White House, Smith reported. Without the debates, Robert Kennedy said, his brother “wouldn’t have been close” to beating back a late surge in Nixon support.

Mark Lane, leading JFK conspiracy theorist, dies at age 89

Mark Lane, the leading JFK assassination conspiracy theorist, died May 10 at age 89 — here is his obituary in The New York Times. Lane’s most notable JFK conspiracy book, Rush to Judgment, was a runaway bestseller in the 1960s.

The Times incorrectly reports that Lane coined the phrase “grassy knoll” to describe the place from where conspiracy theorists believe shots were fired at President Kennedy. [The grassy knoll appears in the picture at the top of the Bulletins from Dallas Facebook page.] In fact, UPI’s copy used the phrase “grassy knoll” 26 minutes after the assassination [16 minutes after the assassination, UPI called it a “grassy hill”]. Some people credit Merriman Smith with the first use of the phrase; his rewriter, Jack Fallon, may also deserve credit.

Bulletins from Dallas goes into detail about Smith’s reporting and views on the conspiracy theories. In a nutshell — Smith couldn’t bear them. He told people he was there, he heard three shots, and he believed the Warren Commission theory that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Lane, a lawyer, had an interesting career outside his advocacy of the idea that Kennedy’s death resulted from a conspiracy. In 1961 and 1962, he was a member of the New York State Assembly, elected from Brooklyn. Lane was prominent in the anti-Vietnam War movement. He also represented religious cultist Jim Jones. Lane was in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978 when Jones and 900 of his followers committed mass suicide. He escaped by fleeing into the jungle.

Gerald Posner, who debunked the JFK conspiracy theories in his book Case Closed, hired Lane in 2010 to represent him in a defamation case against a Miami newspaper that accused him of plagiarism. Posner opposed Lane’s conspiracy ideas, but he thought Lane was an excellent lawyer. “Although I’m convinced Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy, I’ve always believed that had Mark Lane represented Oswald, he would have won an acquittal. That’s why Mark Lane was the obvious choice as my own attorney,” Posner said.

Update, May 13: The Times corrected its story to reflect the idea that someone other than Lane coined the phrase “grassy knoll.”

Epically bad ad placement, JFK assassination edition

Merriman Smith probably got a got a laugh out of this. On October 1, 1964, the Syracuse (NY) Herald-Journal used one of his stories about President Kennedy’s death above a department store ad for the same type of rifle used by assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

A photocopy of the original page is among Smith’s personal papers. Oswald killed Kennedy with an Italian carbine. The copy notes that it was a “6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.”

Mistakes like this can be tough for newspaper editors to avoid, since they often design pages without knowing what’s in the ads. The Herald-Journal, an afternoon paper, went out of business in 2001.

Happy 100th, Smitty

Merriman Smith, the UPI White House reporter deemed by his colleagues to be the greatest wire service reporter ever, would have turned 100 years old on February 10, 2015.

The official records say Smitty was born on February 10, 1913. That’s the date etched on his gravestone at Arlington National Cemetery. But sometimes official records and gravestones are wrong.

Merriman Smith's headstone at Arlington National Cemetery. He shares the grave site with his wife and his son, who died in Vietnam in 1966.

Merriman Smith shares his grave site with his wife and his son, who died in Vietnam in 1966.

Smith’s family says that when he was in high school, a relative added two years to his age so he could get a summer job in a family business. The lie that he was born in 1913 stuck to the official record. It greatly bothered Smith’s mother, since the official record showed that Smith was born more than a year before she wed his father. She didn’t want anyone to wrongly think her only child was born out-of-wedlock.

Smith’s mom was still fussing about it in 1965, when her son turned 50. “Now really, Mother. Let’s let this one drop,” Smith wrote her. “I’m the one who should feel awful. I’ve reached that age.” Besides, he didn’t see anything to gain from the investigation that might arise when the Secret Service, the White House and who knows who else heard of this little falsehood.

By his family’s account, Smith was 26 years old when he began covering the White House in 1941, and 48 years old when he earned a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas. Smitty was just two years older than the slain president. He died in 1970 at age 55.

Smith loved new technology — especially gizmos like walkie-talkies, radiotelephones and anything else that could get his stories out quicker. No doubt he would have been a master of Twitter and other social media, and a prolific blogger. Smith also had reporting and writing skills and knowledge of a beat that many of today’s online, click-seeking journalists lack. He’s worth remembering in this era of declining investment in news.

The last hours of the New Frontier in Texas

The crowds in Dallas on November 22, 1963 were among the most enthusiastic John F. Kennedy and his wife had ever seen. People lined the highways and sidewalks hoping for a glimpse of their President and the glamorous First Lady. “I can’t believe there was ever a point in the life of the Kennedys, in a way, that was as high as that moment in Dallas,” said Robert J. Donovan, who covered the trip for the Los Angeles Times.

The story of those final hours was lost amid the breaking news coverage of the assassination. This 19-minute government film, from David Von Pein’s JFK Channel on YouTube, includes snippets of Kennedy’s speeches and appearances in Texas, and shows why Donovan was right to think that if the trip hadn’t ended so tragically, it would have been a high point in Kennedy’s political career.

President Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Johnson traveled to Texas in November 1963 on what the news media labeled a political trip aimed at healing a rift between two factions of Texas’ Democratic party. Sen. Ralph Yarborough, a member of the party’s liberal faction, was locked in a personal and political feud with Johnson and Gov. John Connally, who were of the party’s more conservative wing.

Some aspects of the dispute were petty. Kennedy put great effort into simply persuading Yarborough to ride in the same car with Johnson during the fateful motorcade in Dallas.

But a lot more went on in Texas besides political healing. Kennedy gave several speeches aimed at building his chances to win the state in the 1964 election. He also promoted his plan to put Americans on the moon – a push in which Texas military and aerospace contractors had a big part.

Speaking at an Air Force base in San Antonio, Kennedy pointed out that the military’s development of radar during World War II led to the development of transistors, which led to the development of computers. Also, Kennedy said, “Research in space medicine holds the promise of substantial benefits for those of us who are earthbound.”

“Our effort in space is not, as some have suggested, a competitor for national resources needed to improve our living standards. It is instead a working partner and co-producer of these resources … There will be pressures for our country to do less and temptations to do something else,” Kennedy said. “But this research must and will go on.”

Merriman Smith’s report of this speech noted that just before Kennedy left Washington, the Senate voted to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from his proposed NASA budget.

Throughout the trip, the President and First Lady got a rousing welcome, even from politically conservative Texas business people. Jacqueline Kennedy, who hated campaigning, shook hands and gave speeches like a political pro. Texans thrilled at the touch of glamour she brought to the trip. Reporters who were there say they’ll never forget the cheers she got by showing up at a breakfast of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce on the morning of November 22, hours before she and her husband flew to Dallas.

For more on the Texas trip, see this page on the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library’s website. Click on the tab that says “related records” for text and audio of the speeches he gave in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth.

Harry Truman, Merriman Smith and a darkened room

Merriman Smith wrote five books about presidents and the White House. After he died in 1970, his son, Tim Smith, put together a sixth book that was a compendium of Smith’s writings.

Look elsewhere for deep analysis of what was going on in the White House or in national politics. Smith’s books are breezy and anecdotal, and full of life. His second book, 1948’s A President Is Many Men, conveyed an insightful anecdote about President Harry Truman’s personality readers could not learn from official announcements. The anecdote also speaks to Smith’s sources and enterprise.

During a time of White House crisis in 1946, Smith wrote, Truman took a bit of time off to watch a short movie documentary about the presidency. The opening scene showed a young mother rolling a baby carriage past the White House. She stopped, gazed at the North Portico, and looked down at her infant son.

President Truman presides at one of his weekly press conferences in May 1950

President Truman presides at his weekly press conference in May 1950

“The narrator of the movie intoned, ‘Yes, she realizes that her child, like anybody in this great country, can become President!’”

“Mr. Truman, sitting in the dark, chuckled and nudged his wife who was beside him.

“ ‘I’m living proof of that,’” he said.”

The story says a lot about Truman’s personality, how he viewed himself and how he viewed his ascendance upon Franklin Roosevelt’s death to a job Smith was convinced he never wanted. But any reporter would want to know: Who told Smith what the President said to the First Lady in a darkened room? The book doesn’t say.

Smith never got used to Truman’s early-rising habits. In 1949, when Truman was vacationing in Key West, Fla., Smith showed up at a surprise morning news conference “in blue pajamas with burgundy spots,” the official transcript noted. “Have you ever seen anything like the dead still walking!” said someone not identified in the transcript. “I stayed up all night working on official papers,” Smitty explained.

Here’s a gem of a Truman quote, from an exit interview he gave to Smith in 1952, a few weeks before he left office:

“Mr. Truman, when asked whether he would need protection after he leaves the White House, snorted and said, ‘If any nut tries to shoot me, I’ll take the pistol away from him, ram it down his throat and pull the trigger.’”

Truman had a reputation for salty language. You have to figure Smith omitted a couple of colorful words from that quote.

It’s hard to imagine any reporter today getting such a quote out of any politician, let alone a sitting president. It’s one reason Smith was so good. It’s also hard to imagine any president other than Truman saying such a thing. President Obama sure wouldn’t, even amid the fuss over the Secret Service right now.

The legend of Merriman Smith and the wire car

So much news happened in November and December 1963 that it was several weeks before word got out of how Merriman Smith of United Press International beat the Associated Press in reporting the news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. 1963-12-18 Leonard Lyons column on Merriman Smith's scoop
Leonard Lyons, a columnist for the New York Post, was the first to tell the story in print. Lyons wrote an “item” column – it usually included several interesting newsy or gossipy items about celebrities and news events. He described Smith’s beat in his lead item on Dec. 18, 1963.

According to Lyons, Smith and one other reporter were riding in a radiotelephone-equipped car several car lengths behind President Kennedy’s open limousine in downtown Dallas. “When the assassin’s rifle shots rang out, Smith reached for the mobile telephone in front of him, phoned his Dallas office and started dictating the bulletin … The other pool reporter kept demanding the phone, and tried reaching over Smith’s shoulder to grab it. Smith held on … The other reporter started pawing and pummeling Smith – who ducked under the dashboard to avoid the blows.”

Actually, there were four reporters in the “wire car,” which got its name from the fact that it always carried reporters from the AP and UPI wire services. Smith’s Associated Press competitor that day was Jack Bell, who usually covered the U.S. Senate. The other reporters in the car were Robert Baskin of The Dallas Morning News and Bob Clark of ABC News.

Bell was the reporter who took swings at Smith. “They’re good friends, the two correspondents, but in the competition for getting the news first, friendships vanish,” Lyons wrote. Then he quoted Smith saying of Bell: “He’d have done what I did, and I’d have done what he did.”

Actually, Bell and Smith were not good friends – certainly not after November 22. Bell took his anger over this incident to his grave.

Lyons’ column was the first report of a story that became journalism legend. By hanging on to the phone in the car, Smith kept the AP from getting the story. He also helped UPI build up a lead of several minutes in reporting one of the biggest news stories of the 20^th century.

A story overlooked in JFK assassination literature

When I began looking into this topic late in 2013, I thought for sure it had been picked clean by other journalists. Hundreds of books have been written about John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and I doubted my chances of coming up with anything new.

But it turns out the story of how the media got the story in Dallas has not been fully told.

Plenty of reporters have written I-was-there books and articles. Anniversary stories in print and on TV or radio still bring out many journalists’ first-person accounts of what they saw and did over those horrible days. But their stories don’t match that of the real journalistic star in Dallas, Merriman Smith of United Press International.

Smith said little about the assassination in the years afterward. He died in 1970, and his role in getting the story out to the public is largely forgotten. Most people know that Walter Cronkite first read the news on TV. But they don’t know that Cronkite learned of the assassination from Smith’s first bulletin. Smith and his colleagues at UPI beat the AP on the story by five minutes — an eternity in the wire service war of seconds.

There’s a terrific untold story behind how Smith beat the AP not just on the shooting itself, but by being one of just three reporters to watch President Johnson take the oath of office later that afternoon. Smith’s life is also an interesting story. Even before Dallas, he attained a level of fame no print or text reporter today will ever match.

I’ll use this website to discuss some of what I’ve learned about Smith and what happened in Dallas. If you’ve got something to say about Smitty or the news reporting on the assassination, get in touch with me via the contact page.

Bill Sanderson