Return of the Creative

In a move that seemed par for the television course, one black Sunday afternoon last season, NBC's low-shooting Celebrity Golf played through, while Omnibus was still searching for a lost sponsor in the Madison Avenue rough. But this week, after an 18-month absence, TV's most consistently high-aiming, wide-ranging show was back where it belonged.

Brooking no interference from advertiser or broadcaster during its seven seasons, the first five subsidized by the Ford Foundation, Omnibus saw a shifting list of 16 blue-chip sponsors (including the current one, Aluminium, Ltd.) pay for an average of only 70% of its time, and the program jockeyed uncomfortably between the three networks. The years also saw some memorable shows: Peter Ustinov playing "The Life of Samuel Johnson," Leonard Bernstein describing "What Makes Opera Grand," Joseph Welch pondering "Capital Punishment." The program had lived up to the credo of its imaginative producer, Robert Saudek: "I don't believe in the principle of the high rating. My faith lies in the well-conceived idea, the well-written word, the well-spent dollar."

Saudek's first principles were again evident in the season's Omnibus curtain raiser, "He Shall Have Power," which explored the evolution of the U.S. presidency with a succession of evocative vignettes of its most forceful incumbents. George Washington, fussily acted by Larry Gates, fought with a Machiavellian Hamilton and a statesmanlike Jefferson over nonintervention in the French Revolution, establishing the principle of presidential supremacy in foreign affairs. A rasping, well-cast Jackson (J. D. Cannon) was seen raging against the National Bank. Webster and Clay replied in opposition and in kind, but Jackson torpedoed Biddle's "monster of corruption," firmly established the executive veto.

In these and other scenes, every line was taken from the speaker's actual addresses or writings, thus turning the sequences into stark, strident, sometimes awkward exchanges of punch lines rather than into coherent dialogues. But punchy they were, as when Clemenceau (Eric Berry) delivered his famous judgment on Wilson (Harry Townes): "God gave us his Ten Commandments; we broke them. Wilson gave us his Fourteen Points; we shall see." On the whole, the note of authenticity was worth the price of occasional stiltedness, particularly in the juxtaposition of a courageous Lincoln (Michael Tolan) with a monomaniac McClellan, a tough T. R. (boisterously acted by Larry Blyden) with a reactionary J. P. Morgan, who remarked magnificently, on hearing that Roosevelt had gone on a safari: "I hope the first lion who sees him does his duty."

Despite uneven acting styles and some amateurish makeup, which displayed wild, fake jungles of beard, the whole added up to an exciting show, with much credit going to the program's unobtrusive but incisive commentator, Harvard University's Dean of Arts and Sciences, McGeorge Bundy, making his TV debut. A cold, well-spoken orator of his own words, Bundy concluded: "The presidency is a superb instrument of action, and it takes a man to wield it . . . He shall have power--but only with our help."

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