By Dan Aznoff, Special to JTNews
Despite all the rhetoric surrounding affairs of state, the political landscape across America has really not changed a great deal over the past 44 years. At least that’s how Bill Shadel sees it.
Once again, the battle for the Democratic nomination for President boils down to a personality contest between the heroic senator from Massachusetts and a self-made millionaire politician from a Southern state — John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
Shadel is a former television anchorman and the last living moderator of the televised debates between Democrat John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon in 1960. He can still remember the torrent of colorful language Nixon unleashed on him after the third live presidential debate.
“Nixon was in our affiliate in Los Angeles and Kennedy was broadcasting from our studio in New York,” said Shadel. “That was pretty high-tech for the time. Everything worked according to plan, except Nixon thought that Kennedy was cheating because he kept looking down as if he were reading from notes. He also accused the crew in L.A. of giving Kennedy the questions ahead of time.”
It turned out that Kennedy was reading from notes, according to an earlier agreement approved by both candidates. The vice president had requested that notes not be used, but that detail was apparently never confirmed by his Democratic rival.
Shadel is now 95 years old and lives with his wife Julie at The Lodge at Eagle Ridge, in Renton. The old news-hound relies on his computer and the Internet to keep him in touch with the outside world while his wife of 56 years watches game shows in the next room.
Shadel gained fame during World War II as one of the (Edward R.) Murrow Boys who filed radio reports while embedded with Allied infantry troops in Europe. He was one of the few newsmen allowed aboard the Allied armada during the D-Day invasion at Normandy and accompanied American soldiers into four Nazi death camps, including Buchenwald on April 12, 1945. That was also the day that President Franklin D. Roosevelt died.
“I still remember the survivors at Buchenwald. They were so happy they tried to lift Murrow on their shoulders to celebrate their freedom,” said Shadel. “They tried, but they were all too thin and much too weak.”
After the war, Shadel returned to work for the CBS radio network in Washington D.C. The Murrow Boys looked down their nose at television, describing the new format as a “young man’s game.” When the local affiliate asked the network executives at CBS to send one of its radio reporters to read the news on television, The Murrow Boys decided to send the least experienced reporter to handle the television duties on WTOP.
“We were being paid $150 per show for three radio reports each day. That was $450 a day. The anchor job on TV only paid $25,” Shadel remembered with a smile. “That rookie apparently did a bang-up job.”
So began the career of Walter Cronkite.
An infamous photograph of Shadel sprinting from the press conference when President Dwight Eisenhower announced he would run for a second term as President earned the veteran radio newsman a reputation as a hustler among his colleagues in the media.
Shadel eventually left radio for the glamour of television in 1957 and an anchor chair with the upstart American Broadcasting Company. After some growing pains, the evening news broadcast received high marks from the critics, especially when Shadel began hosting a segment on politics leading up to the 1960 campaign.
Cramped for space, Shadel shared a dressing room in those early days at ABC with Howard Cosell.
“We both wore rugs, and his, Cossell’s, was an especially ugly one,” Shadel said, referring to his toupée. “He was as arrogant in the dressing room as he was on TV. He’d come in and just rip that damn thing off on his way out the door.”
Following the elections in the fall of 1960, the nation’s attention turned toward space, and Shadel was in the middle of the action for ABC during the marathon telecasts. For the broadcast of John Glenn’s three-orbit flight in January of 1962, Shadel signed onto the air at 6:30 in the morning and remained in the anchor chair until he signed off 12 hours later.
“That was an illustration of how long one man can go without going,” Shadel wrote in his autobiography An Uncharted Career.
The Michigan native was also responsible for pioneering late-night network news broadcasts. His “Late Night Final” was carried by only a handful of affiliates across the country — including KOMO in Seattle — but the news program set a standard that ABC later filled with “Nightline.”
Tiring of the daily pandemonium of journalism, Shadel eventually accepted an offer from the University of Washington as a professor in the school’s fledgling journalism department. The veteran newsman reshaped the curriculum at the university by teaching practical applications of his art in contrast to standard journalistic theory.
“I was a rebel,” said Shadel, “because I turned years of theoretical teaching from textbooks upside-down. Maybe I was a rebel, but I taught the only kind journalism I knew.”
Shadel proudly boasts of personal relationships with six American presidents, beginning with Roosevelt. Candidly, he admitted to an informal agreement between members of the press corps not to report on the extramarital affairs by residents of the White House. He quickly added that four of the six Presidents he knew saw other women during their terms with the full knowledge of the Secret Service.
“I applaud [Bob] Woodward and [Carl] Bernstein, who held Nixon accountable for actions regarding Watergate. No man—not even the President—is above the law,” said Shadel. “But I think the media [today are] more concerned about ratings and selling newspapers than the reputation of an innocent man.
“A man’s personal life should be personal. Even the President. And it should remain his own business unless it compromises the security of the nation.”
As far as Presidential politics in 2004 go, Shadel liked the image of John Edwards, but was quick to recommend a Democratic ticket of John Kerry and retired General Wesley Clark.
“A progressive senator from the New England and a Southern gentleman,” Shadel says. “It worked before.”