...Out of town on a rail
Posted: Tuesday, November 06, 2007 5:01 PM by Sam Singal
Filed Under:
Brian Williams
By Brian Williams, Anchor and managing editor
I am writing this while subsidizing Amtrak. I'm enroute back from Washington DC, where I interviewed former New York Mayor and Republican presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani. I took a morning train, and was in Washington exactly 94 minutes before heading back to New York.
I greeted Rudy Giuliani in the hallway of the Capitol Hill Club in Washington. Right in front of some gathered onlookers, he walked up to me and enthusiastically blurted out, "You were GREAT!" After hesitating for a bit, I asked, "At WHAT?" And then he smiled and it dawned on me: our interview today was more than the usual reporter/newsmaker interrogation. It was a meeting of former hosts of Saturday Night Live. (Giuliani's turn came on November 22, 1997). Had we bothered to walk the half-mile or so to the Capitol, we could have found Senator McCain (October 19, 2002) and made it a trio.
We'll run highlights of our interview with Giuliani tonight, and of course we've posted the entire conversation on the website.
We're watching oil prices, Iraq, Pakistan and more. Also tonight, we continue our great series of reports on recipients of the Medal of Honor. Tonight's segment brings together two great Americans: Tom Brokaw profiles Bud Day -- a Medal recipient with an entire book written about him already. He is a great American hero.
I ran into Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn on the return train this afternoon. Ben, forever true to his longtime shop, was just finishing (and raving about) Jon Meacham's Newsweek cover story on New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Thank you, by the way, to all of you who continue to write about SNL. I'm flattered that so many of you watched, and thrilled that you enjoyed it.
A Tip of the Hat
Andy Franklin reminds me that today marks a major milestone for us here at NBC News. 60 Years go today, on November 6, 1947, Meet the Press was broadcast on television for the very first time. It has long since become the longest-running television program of any kind in American history. The moderator of Meet the Press these days of course is our friend and colleague Tim Russert; he’s had that job since 1992. Tim’s predecessors over the years have included Garrick Utley, Chris Wallace, Roger Mudd, Marvin Kalb, and Bill Monroe (not the father of Bluegrass music; the other Bill Monroe). The actual founders and creators of Meet the Press were Martha Rountree and Lawrence Spivak. Rountree was the program’s first moderator; Spivak held that job later. They debuted the show on the Mutual radio network in 1945, and then brought it to NBC two years later, just as television was starting to take off in post-war America.
That very first telecast was not even seen in Washington DC, where Meet the Press has originated for the past 60 years. In fact, the only station to carry it was WNBT, which was then the name of NBC’s station in New York City. Back then, radio was still dominant, and television’s entire broadcast day was limited to just a few hours in the evening. Reproduced below are the actual television listings in their entirety for Thursday, November 6, 1947 -- including Meet the Press -- as they appeared in the New York Times.
The New York Times, November 6, 1947
You may be wondering about that guest. Who was James A. Farley, other than being the very first guest on America’s longest-running television show? Well, the truth is that by 1947, Farley was something of a has-been, but in the 1920’s and 30’s he played a major role in the political career of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Farley was a New York politician, and as head of the state Democratic Party he helped organize FDR’s successful run for governor in 1928.
Four years later, Farley’s political skills were instrumental in getting Roosevelt elected president, and a grateful Roosevelt made him Postmaster General -- and national chairman of the Democratic Party.
Farley was a force to be reckoned with in the Roosevelt administration, but he split with the president in 1940 and briefly sought the Democratic nomination himself. That effort went nowhere. His political career over, Farley went to work for the Coca Cola Company. He later wrote a behind-the-scenes memoir that was somewhat critical of FDR. That book came out in 1948, but excerpts were published in Collier’s -- a popular national magazine of the time -- in the summer of 1947. And that’s what may have caught the attention of Spivak and Rountree, leading to Farley’s booking on that very first Meet the Press.
There have been thousands of broadcasts -- and guests -- since that first one, and we have no doubt that there will be thousands more in the years to come. Tim Russert is right when he calls Meet the Press “a national treasure,” and we send him and his team congratulations on a job well done -- and on a truly singular achievement in broadcasting history.
We look forward to having you join us for the Tuesday edition of Nightly News.
