Green Shoot

After months of rumor, FCC Chairman Newton Minow resigned last week. He is leaving his job to go back to Chicago as the executive vice president and general counsel of Encyclopaedia Britannica. To replace him, President Kennedy picked E. William Henry, 34, FCC commissioner only since October and now the youngest chairman in the history of the commission.

Henry's knowledge of broadcasting is still in its developmental stages. Before October, he was an attorney in Memphis doing general trial work. But he took to his new role as commissioner readily and soon made a speech in which he coiled rattled, and suggested a new federal l requiring TV stations to include a certain number of sponsorless programs each day How did he get the job? Well, he happened to meet Bobby Kennedy at a bar association function in 1960, and accepted Bobby's invitation to work in the Kennedy campaign. Henry and the future Attorney General became friends. Henry's six-year-old daughter, eldest of his three children, is now one of Caroline Kennedy's classmates in the White House kindergarten.

Many people think that as FCC chairman, Henry will have an even louder bark than Minow. He speaks dourly of the "discouraging degree of sameness" in network programming and of the "lack of expression of varying tastes, ideas and opinions." And he speaks with the air of someone who intends to try to do something about it. As for Minow's accomplishments, Henry says, "I think there are some green shoots in the wasteland." It might also be said that there is one as chairman of the FCC.

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