The Sight & the Sound

In its coverage of the train of events that began in Dallas, the television industry fulfilled what was widely regarded as its finest and most responsible role. Not until the Tuesday after the assassination did the three major TV networks return to normal programing, having devoted some 200 uninterrupted hours to the running story. Even by the most conservative estimate, the cost was impressive--and irretrievable: $4,000,000 each for CBS and NBC, about $2,500,000 for ABC.

Nor were the sight and sound of the slain President likely to vanish in the months or the years to come. The assassination's aftermath continued to dominate network news coverage. Even now, three weeks after the event, NBC was giving an hour a day--about one-third of its daily news programing time--to reporting the effect of Kennedy's death on the nation and the world.

At ABC, the network was finishing a 90-minute adaptation of Theodore White's book, The Making of a President 1960, which was based on Kennedy's victorious election campaign.

This program, conceived 15 months ago, will be put on the air Dec. 29. From its files, CBS assembled an hour-long program in which the late President and former Presidents Eisenhower and Truman separately discussed the highest office in the land. This week on CBS, four members of Kennedy's Cabinet--Secretary of State Rusk, Secretary of Defense MacNamara, Secretary of the Treasury Dillon and Secretary of Labor Wirtz--will measure Kennedy's legacy to his country in terms of the past and the future.

The nation's record industry was readying a wide variety of Kennedy tributes. Decca is offering the full sound track of a special memorial TV show produced in Britain, and half a dozen other record companies are coming out with their versions of a song taken from that program. Anthologies of Kennedy speeches are already on sale in record form.

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