Reed Irvine - Editor
CBS may have finally killed off the docudrama by airing in rapid succession two productions that were widely condemned for falsifying the events they were supposed to portray: "Robert Kennedy and his Times" in the last week of January and "The Atlanta Child Murders" in the second week of February. Both productions were badly flawed. Both pretended to be a representation of events that had actually taken place, but under enormous pressure from authorities and community leaders in Atlanta. CBS did agree to run a disclaimer together with "The Atlanta Child Murders" acknowledging that some of the characters and events had been fictionalized. Both were productions of the entertainment, not the news division of CBS, but both were inspired by more than the desire to entertain.
"Robert Kennedy and his Times" was an unabashed glorification of Robert Kennedy and the political views that have come to be associated with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. "The Atlanta Child Murders" was described by the author of the screenplay, Abby Mann, as "a crusade." Mann's purpose, which was embraced by CBS, was to show that Wayne Williams, the convicted murderer of two of the 29 black children whose deaths so shocked the nation in the first half of 1981, was innocent. The Mann-CBS thesis is that Williams was railroaded by the police and prosecutors in Atlanta because they needed a scapegoat to end the bad publicity the city was getting.
Both productions had to gravely distort the record by falsification and omission to achieve the desired results. Both have given CBS another black eye.
THE CANONIZATION OF BOBBY KENNEDY
It would take too much space to list all the errors and distortions in the Robert Kennedy miniseries that consumed seven hours of prime time on CBS beginning January 26. Although it glorified Bobby Kennedy, its reckless disregard of the truth offended even his good friends. One of them, John Seigenthaler, editorial director of USA Today and publisher of the Nashville Tennesseean, described the Kennedy movie as "mostly fiction." Writing in USA Today, he said the danger was that many of those who viewed it might take it as factual.
Seigenthaler was an aide to Kennedy when he was attorney general. His list of the distortions and errors ranged from the portrayal of President John F. Kennedy as a wimp who was helping his younger brother run the government to falsification of the way Ethel and Bobby Kennedy met and courted.
Seigenthaler was portrayed in the movie. He found words were put in his mouth that were contradictory to his actual thoughts, and words spoken by another Kennedy aide, John Doar, were attributed to him. He was bothered by the misrepresentation of the relationship between Robert Kennedy and Senator Joseph McCarthy and by a ridiculous and out-of- character account of Attorney General Kennedy's first meeting with J. Edgar Hoover, The director of the FBI.
In the CBS movie, the viewer learns early on that the Kennedys regard J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI as the bad guys. It doesn't go as far as the 1983 NBC miniseries on John F. Kennedy, in which Joseph Kennedy is shown warning his son, the president-elect, to watch out for Hoover. In that movie, Joseph Kennedy called Hoover a "fag" and a "crook." He told John F. Kennedy that Hoover would "try to wreck everything." That was an obvious fabrication, since Hoover and the elder Kennedy were great friends. The FBI director even displayed on his office wall a letter from Joseph Kennedy saying it would be "a most wonderful thing for the United States" if Hoover would run for president.
The CBS movie is a little more subtle. It has Bobby Kennedy, when he was a member of the staff of the committee Senator McCarthy chaired, complaining that the FBI had lied to him. His older brother, Jack, explains to him that Hoover likes Joe McCarthy and his aide, Roy Cohn. He says: "They call him 'Edgar.' There's not many people in this country that can do that. You know what it means to have important friends. So watch out. because J. Edgar Hoover can be an important enemy.'
The stage is set to portray Hoover as a bad guy, an enemy of Bobby Kennedy. When JFK tells Bobby that he has decided to make him attorney general, he comments that he would like to see Hoover's face when he learns that Bobby is to be his boss. When the new attorney general summons Hoover to his office for their first meeting, his dog growls at Hoover as he enters the office, a sure sign that Hoover is an enemy. Bobby then proceeds to plop his feet on top of his desk as he advises Hoover that he wants the FBI to return to its original concept, to be subordinate to the Department of Justice. He then gets up and throws darts at a dartboard as he tells the FBI director that he wants the bureau to spend more time fighting organized crime and investigating civil rights and labor violations. After telling him to clear all FBI press releases and all communications with the White House through his office and ordering the installation of a phone line that will give him direct access to Hoover without going through a secretary, Bobby offers the cowed 66-year old director the darts.
John F. Kennedy had announced that Hoover remain director of the FBI even before naming his brother attorney general. In his book, FBI, Sanford Ungar says this did more to confirm Hoover's primacy and importance than any president had done in yeas. Ungar says that Bobby Kennedy, before taking the attorney general post, "went to pay court to the director, an old friend from the younger Kennedy's days on the staff of senator Joseph McCarthy's investigating committee." In his biography, J. Edgar Hoover, Ralph de Toledano states that Hoover had from the earliest days of the Kennedy administration repulsed Bobby Kennedy's more ambitious efforts to control the bureau by threatening to retire. Since Hoover was enormously popular with both Congress and the public, as well as with Joseph Kennedy, the President retrained his brother. There was tension between Hoover and Bobby Kennedy, and their relationship turned bitter after JFK's assassination, but the portrayal of Hoover as a long- time foe of the Kennedy's who cowered before the young attorney general is false.
The movie gives an idea of what Bobby Kennedy didn't like about Hoover and the FBI, but it says nothing about the things that Kennedy did that Hoover found objectionable. According to de Toledano these included leaking derogatory stories about Hoover and the FBI to the press, by-passing Hoover and dealing directly with his subordinates, bringing his dog to the office and sending it out to be walked by Justice Department secretaries on government time, trying to intervene in FBI hiring practices, and diverting FBI agents from important investigations to carrying water for the Kennedy administration. For example, when the steel companies raised their prices in the face of strong White House pressure not to do so, Kennedy read in the press charge that U.S. Steel had pressured the other steel companies to go along with its price increase.
The attorney general thought this smelled of a violation of anti-trust laws and ordered the FBI to interview the reporters who had written those stories immediately. Hoover took the order literally and had his agents roust the reporters out of bed early in the morning to question them about their stories. That didn't go over well with the press. De Toledano also claims that Bobby Kennedy far exceeded the requests made by Hoover for authorizing the use of bugging devices.
This kind of negative material was simply omitted from the CBS docudrama.
Since the name of Joe McCarthy has become a dirty word, it necessary for CBS to distort the facts about Bobby Kennedy's relationship with the Wisconsin Senator. The CBS movie creates the impression that Bobby was pressured by his father to take a job on the McCarthy committee staff but never did so. It shows McCarthy being impressed with North Korea on the part of our allies during the Korean War. When McCarthy offers him a staff position, Bobby tells him that he has accepted a position as minority counsel, working for the Democrats. After he has left the room, McCarthy is shown ordering his aide, Roy Cohn, to check with the FBI and "see what they have on Bobby Kennedy."
That was not the way it was. Joseph Kennedy, who was a great friend of McCarthy's, had asked the Senator to make Bobby the chief counsel of his Subcommittee on Investigations. That position was already filled by Roy Cohn, who had helped convict Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of espionage. Cohn was a year and a half younger than Bobby Kennedy. Bobby had to take a subordinate position. His first assignment was to investigate homosexuals in the State Department. He next tackled the trade our allies were carrying on with Communist China during the Korean War. According to Peter Collier and David Horowitz in their new book, The Kennedy's, Bobby drafted a strong letter to President Eisenhower condemning this trade. Vice President Nixon persuaded McCarthy to call back the letter, arguing that it would backfire on the administration and help the Democrats.
Growing increasingly resentful of Roy Cohn, Kennedy resigned from McCarthy's staff in July 1953. Five months later he took the job of minority counsel on the same subcommittee.
Repeating the Annie Lee Moss Lie
In the Kennedy movie, CBS repeated an old lie, the claim that the McCarthy subcommittee in 1954 had wrongly accused Annie Lee Moss, a Pentagon employee discharged as a security risk, of having been a member of the Communist Party. Mrs. Moss, who had been employed as a clerk in the Pentagon code room, had been identified as a Communist Party member by a confidential FBI informant named Mary Markward. The subcommittee, investigating how a person of Mrs. Moss's background could have obtained a sensitive position of the Pentagon, called her to testify. Appearing to be barely literate even though she had passed a civil service examination, Mrs. Moss denied ever having been a party member, denied knowing who Karl Marx was, and denied knowing that the Daily Worker was a Communist paper, even though she had subscribed to it. Mrs. Moss said there were two other Annie Lee Mosses in the District of Columbia, and she gave the impression that she was a victim of mistaken identity. Some of the senators at the hearing displayed sympathy for the witness, one describing the evidence against her as "hearsay."
Shortly after this, Edward R. Murrow of CBS News made the Annie Lee Moss case an important part of his famous televised attack on McCarthy. With misleading editing of the transcript of the hearing, Murrow gave the impression that the charges against Mrs. Moss were groundless and that it was a case of mistaken identity. That was refuted in 1959, when the Subversive Activities Control Board produced in court undisputed Communist Party records showing that Annie Lee Moss of 72 R St., S.W., Washington, D.C. had been a party member in the mid-1940s. That had been the address of the Moss summoned by the McCarthy committee.
In 1979, to mark the 25th anniversary of Murrow's attack on McCarthy. "60 Minutes" televised the Annie Lee Moss segment of the original Murrow broadcast. It failed to mention that the basic premise that the Moss case was one of mistaken identity had been disproven in 1939. Accuracy in Media pointed this out to CBS and demanded that the record be corrected, but CBS did not take corrective action.
Now, six years later, in the Kennedy miniseries, CBS dramatized the Annie Lee Moss appearance before the subcommittee, rearranging the testimony, fictionalizing it to create the impression that Annie Lee Moss had been falsely accused. In this version, Bobby Kennedy plays the crucial role in demolishing the case against her. Bobby's brilliant intervention palpably affects the audience in the hearing room. It is followed by a senator denouncing the proceeding and receiving prolonged applause.
Following this, Bobby Kennedy tells his brother Jack that the FBI had lied about the evidence it had made available to McCarthy. He said, "There is no evidence. I want this woman cleared. If she's not guilty, she should have her job back. What is it to Hoover anyway?" The evidence the FBI had was the testimony of Mary Markward, who had penetrated the Communist Party for the FBI and those undisputed party records showing Annie Lee Moss as a party member. This information had all been made available to CBS by Accuracy in Media in 1979. The error then was by the news division. This time the entertainment division was responsible. The top management of CBS, Inc. is responsible for the actions of both divisions.
Bobby Kennedy's feelings about Joe McCarthy after the Annie Lee Moss case had been made into a cause celebre by Murrow were expressed in 1953. He stalked out of a ceremony honoring him as one of the Ten Outstanding Young Men of the Year because Murrow was to be one of the speakers. This was a protest against Murrow's recently aired attack on McCarthy. That incident was not included in the CBS movie.
"Fact-based drama not only defrauds the news but assaults it, hit and run." That was the comment of The New York Times on the CBS docudrama, "The Atlanta Child Murders." The Times concluded an unusually strong editorial published February 10 with this question: "Does no one in charge of television care enough about either news or fiction to halt this corruption?"
The answer to that question lies in the size of the audience these programs attract and in the support they get from advertisers. The Robert Kennedy miniseries was a bust as far as the ratings were concerned, not because it was so inaccurate, but because it was so dull and badly acted. "The Atlanta Child Murders" did much better because it is more like standard television entertainment fare and because it has received a great deal of publicity, albeit mostly negative.
The program was strongly condemned by a wide variety of officials and individuals knowledgeable about the case of Wayne Williams, the black youth who was convicted of two of the murders and linked to 21 others. Atlanta's Mayor, Andrew Young, the former ambassador to the United Nations. appeared on the CBS Morning News on February 6, 1985, with a strong denunciation of the CBS movie. The mayor didn't think that any useful purpose was served by forcing people to relive the horror at this time, but apart from that, he was highly critical of CBS for airing a program that selected evidence favorable to the defendant, Wayne Williams, and omitting or downplaying much of the evidence that convinced the jury that Williams was guilty of the crimes for which he was indicted.
The most gratifying piece of evidence pointing to the guilt of Wayne Williams is the simple fact that the type of child murders that terrified Atlanta for two years until Williams was arrested in May 1981 have ceased. Many of the murders were by asphyxiation, which is relatively rare. Mayor Young said on CBS that there have not been similar deaths since Williams was sent to jail.
In the movie this was mentioned in the prosecutor's summation, but questioned by the defense. It was not included in the disclaimer that CBS agreed to run. The disclaimer says only: "The following presentation is not a documentary but a drama based on certain facts surrounding the murder and disappearance of children in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981. Some of the events and characters are fictionalized for dramatic purposes. Certain scenes may be disturbing to young viewers. Parental discretion is advised."
Community leaders in Atlanta had presented CBS with over 100 errors and omissions which they claim badly flaw the movie. They succeeded in getting only one change in the script. Abby Mann, the author of the screenplay, insists that the movie is "very accurate." He also says that he regards this work as a crusade. He says that he has opened up a Pandora's box, and he is glad of it. He thinks that Williams' guilt was not proven. The thesis of his film is that Williams was a convenient scapegoat who was railroaded by police and prosecutors who were desperate to close the case and remove the embarrassing glare of publicity that had focused on Atlanta in the first five months of 1981, when the nation became aware of the unusual number of child murders and disappearances that had been occurring there.
Mann's critics include the Atlanta and Georgia authorities, the police, prosecutors, jurors in the case. and reporters who covered the Williams trial. Here is a list of criticisms of the movie that have been published or broadcast.
1. Fails to acknowledge the importance of the fact that the child murders ceased with Williams' arrest.
2. Omits the fact that when Williams was stopped near a bridge after a loud splash had been heard in the water below, he blurted out: "This is about those boys, isn't it?" In the movie the police are shown first raising the murders with him.
3. Omits the fact that bloodstains were found on the seat of Williams car and they matched the blood types of some of the victims.
4. Omits the fact that fur-lined gloves were found on the seat of Williams' car even though the temperature was around 90 degrees that day.
5. Omits the fact that a 24-inch length of nylon rope was found in the car when Williams was first detained.
6. Downplays the evidence of the fibers found on the victims that linked them to Williams. The presentation of this evidence took ten days and over 600 pages in the transcript of the trial. Over 700 carpet fibers from the bodies were found to match those taken from carpets in the Williams house and in his car.
The critics point out that the jury that convicted Williams, a black, was overwhelmingly black. Mayor Young said that "nobody in Atlanta wanted to believe that there was a black murderer of black children." but after listening to the evidence for 9 1/2 weeks they came to the decision that Wayne Williams was the murderer in just two days. The conviction has been appealed up to the Supreme Court of Georgia and the appeals have been denied. Williams was defended by good lawyers.
While Mann contends that the Atlanta authorities were culpable because they simply wanted to dispose of the case as fast as possible, critics make the point that there was a very large task force working on this case that was composed of law enforcement officers from 11 local jurisdictions, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the FBI. Altogether, there were 102 Georgia law enforcement personnel working full time on the case plus 30 FBI agents. There was no way, they contend, that this case could have been closed out in the way Mann contends for the reasons his drama offers.
Critics also point out that Mann spent very little time talking to the prosecution in the case. Joe Rollet, the assistant prosecuting attorney, said that Mann had shown up in Atlanta only for the last few days of the trial, hearing some of Wayne Williams' testimony. He had met with the district attorney for two hours, but they had not discussed this case. He said he may have met briefly with some of the laboratory personnel and one of the attorneys, but he had certainly not made much effort to test his ideas out on the prosecutors.
Like the Westmoreland Treatment
While "The Atlanta Child Murders" was a production of the CBS entertainment division, it has a similarity to "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception." the 90- minute documentary that accused Gen. William C. Westmoreland of fudging intelligence figures in Vietnam. Mayor Andrew Young said: "If you want to rewrite history and you have $2 million and four hours of television time, you can retry any case and find them either innocent or guilty."
In this docudrama and in the Westmoreland documentary, the evidence that was presented to the television audience was carefully selected to achieve a particular result. In the Atlanta case, Vern Smith, a Newsweek correspondent who covered the trial, said the CBS selection of evidence struck him as being done with the goal of influencing the thinking of viewers, not just to make it fit the time available. That was the procedure in the Westmoreland documentary also.
It isn't only the docudramas that CBS needs to look at.
You can help end the "doculies" on the networks by just writing two or more letters. 1. Write to Thomas H. Wyman, Chairman, CBS, Inc., 51 West 52nd St., New York, N.Y. 10019. Tell him that since CBS has proven itself incapable of producing reasonably accurate dramatic re-creation of real events he should ban the docudrama. 2. We will list many of the companies that advertised on these two programs in the Notes from the Editor's Cuff. Write to at least one of these advertisers, more if you can, protesting their advertising on such inaccurate, unfair programs. Your letters will make a difference!
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NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF By Reed Irvine
CBS HAS COME IN FOR VERY HEAVY CRITICISM FOR ITS DOCUDRAMA, "THE ATLANTA CHILD Murders." The New York Times ran an editorial denouncing it and suggesting that the time had come to retire this particular art form. John Corry, the TV critic for The Times, and Tom Shales, the TV critic for The Washington Post, both blasted "Child Murders." Corry in his February 10 review said that the docudrama was a "trial by TV." CBS had undertaken to sort out the contentions of the prosecution and the defense in the Wayne Williams case and render a verdict. "There is great arrogance in this," said Corry. Noting that the author of the screenplay, Abby Mann, had described his work as "a crusade," Corry observed that the TV production was claiming journalism' prerogatives without observing its strictures.
CORRY POINTED OUT THAT WHEN "REPUTABLE JOURNALISM GOES ON A CRUSADE, IT INTRODUCES new evidence." The CBS movie, Corry said, "does not introduce new evidence; it only rearranges the old evidence as it pleases." It is conceivable that someone, some day might do a docudrama that did not do violence to the facts and hence mislead the viewers. Offhand, I can't think of any that succeeded in doing this.
IN 1976, ABC AIRED A DOCUDRAMA CALLED "COLLISION COURSE." IT WAS ABOUT THE CONFLICT between President Harry Truman and Gen. Douglas MacArthur. It falsified the record. One example was the portrayal of MacArthur delaying his landing on Wake Is- land until after the president had landed, with Truman finally ordering MacArthur to land. This was to show MacArthur's vanity and insubordination. It was totally false. MacArthur was on the ground when Truman landed and greeted the president as he debarked from his plane. In 1975, NBC aired "Guilty or Innocent: The Sam Shepard Murder Case." The Cleveland Plain Dealer denounced it for impugning the integrity of the judge in the case, saying it was completely unfair to the State of Ohio and the memory of Marilyn Shepard. The Cleveland Press said: "Spare us more of those 'factually based dramas.' It is apparently impossible to draw drama from truth on IV, and what comes out is a vicious lie, like the Sam Shepard movie." The same year, CBS came out with "Fear on Trial," a dramatization of John Henry Faulk's libel suit against Aware, a publication that had linked radio personality Faulk to a number of Communist-front groups. It failed to tell the truth about the case, totally ignoring published evidence that showed Faulk in an entirely different light than the way he was portrayed in the movie.
IN THIS ISSUE WE CITE ANOTHER FLAWED CBS DOCUDRAMA, "ROBERT KENNEDY AND HIS TIMES," which was aired just weeks before "Child murders." Among other things, we note that this repeated a lie that we had called to the attention of CBS in 1979. We have previously criticized these docudramas and urged companies that advertise on TV to examine them carefully for accuracy and fairness before associating their good name with them in the form of commercials. I urge you to join with us in this effort once again.
LISTED BELOW ARE 34 COMPANIES THAT ADVERTISED ON EITHER "CHILD MURDERS" OR "KENNEDY" or both. I know you can't write to all, and so here is what I suggest. Note that we have arranged the advertisers in four groups. Let's have the letter-writers divide up into four groups. If your last name begins with A to Emerson, write to Group 1. Emery through K, write to Group 2; L through Robertson, write to Group 3. Everyone else, write to Group 4. Most of you could not write to everyone in your group of advertisers, and so all I ask is that you write to at least two--one for each movie. Write to more if you can. And try to write to Tom Wyman, the CBS chairman, also.
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