Then along came Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal – which is largely unknown to our young adult population but which had the entire nation riveted to the television for weeks in the middle of the summer, with the Senate Watergate Hearings. We learned what has and had oft been said: politicians (among others) lie and cheat and steal and even do a few other things that the citizens would not condone. It was the first time in the history of the nation that the President had to resign from office – or face an impeachment trial.
After Richard Nixon resigned, he granted an on-camera interview to David Frost who was known for his trenchant questioning of his guests. This was a big “get” for Frost (and Nixon was handsomely compensated) since the “disgraced President” as he was often referred to in the media, had become reclusive.
The appearance turned out to be a good move for Mr. Nixon, not unlike the way one can let some fresh air into a room by opening the doors and windows. He was still as compelling a national political figure, as he had been since his early days in Congress.
Frost finally asked him “what” he (Nixon) thought caused “Watergate.” It’s important to know that by then (a year or more after Nixon resigned), Watergate was now being referred to in the media as “a second rate burglary.”
So, what did Mr. Nixon think was the “cause” of the Watergate scandal (and the man’s personal political tragedy)? Without skipping a beat, the former President responded “Viet Nam.”
Viet Nam changed not only Richard Nixon’s life but it changed the news. We don’t see carnage anymore on network news. Which is fine with me. Although, ironically, we see more and more and more of it in film and television entertainment for the mass audience. Even the news for many has become an entertainment or a kind of reality show. And we don’t learn anything that the Powers That Be, whoever they are, be they corporate or politics, don’t want us to know.
Al Jazeera evidently is not that. I know several people – none of them left-wing or hardliners about anything political – who only watch Al-Jazeera for news. And why: “it’s the only television news that really tells you what’s going on and doesn’t soft-pedal it.”
In other words, it’s ambitiously competitive. The old fashioned way.
![]() | ![]() | | The young columnist Jack O'Brian, circa 1950, at the Stork Club. | ![]() | | His daughter Kate O'Brian, who is the new president of Al Jazeera America, which debuts on August 20. | ![]() |
When I saw the news that Ms. O’Brian had been appointed, I suddenly thought of Jack O’Brian, a columnist and journalist for the Hearst papers and later a radio talk show host on WOR for decades. O’Brian was in the thick of his career in New York from the 1960s through the 1980s. I happened to meet him when I first came to New York because he was a close friend of the stepfather of a girl who was a friend of mine.
Hearing about Kate O’Brian’s new position, I could only wonder if there were a connection with Jack O’Brian I knew. I recalled once visiting him and his wife Von with my friend at the O’Brians. They lived on the Upper East Side with their two very young daughters. One was named Kate. After that initial meeting, I never knew what happened to either of the girls.
So I Googled Kate O’Brian on Monday and got this picture. She doesn’t look like her father if you compare the photograph we have of him in his thirties, but she sure looked like she could be his daughter. A chip off the old block maybe.
Now that was interesting. Because there was a clear resemblance. The “old block” was a hardnosed newsman and columnist. And with legendary ambition. He started out as a cub reporter working for the local paper in his hometown of Buffalo. When he got to New York by the late 1930s, he somehow fell in with, insinuated himself with, Walter Winchell -- the one-and-only-and-never again. Talk about competitive.
Winchell wrote a daily Broadway column that was read daily by 30 million people. In the world of New York and Broadway and politics, no one had such power that Winchell had over public opinion. No one, in print or on camera ever topped his readership number – and the population of the country then was less than half what it is now. Farmers out in Iowa read his “gossip” every day.
![]() | ![]() | | J. Edgar Hoover and Walter Winchell. | ![]() |
Winchell could make or break. He was a big booster of FDR. He was palsy with J. Edgar Hoover, the most feared man in America. He was a lot of things, including a reporter who trolled the clubs, the New York nightlife which was a thousand times what it is today, and regularly cruised around New York nightly with the cops responding to calls.
The story “Sweet Smell of Success,” written by Ernest Lehman for the old Cosmopolitan Magazine (Hearst) was a kind of roman a clef of Winchell and his ways published in 1950. Years later the man who bought the story for the magazine, then story editor David Brown, brought it to 20th Century-Fox and Burt Lancaster played the brutally tough Winchell character and Tony Curtis played his brutally tough/stop-at-nothing cohort. That character was said to have been based on two of Winchell’s henchmen, a press agent named Irving Hoffman, and Jack O’Brian.
When I came to New York just out of college, Jack O’Brian was television critic for the Journal-American. Television was new, and it was growing fast and changing content quickly. Jack O’Brian could be brutal in his assessments of what he was watching. He had his favorites – people like Cronkite, Bert Lahr (the Cowardly Lion from “The Wizard of Oz” and Perry Como). But he dismissed others by the busloads, often with a single jolt of a quip. Once, when it was announced that actor Franco Nero was taking on the role Robert Goulet created in the original Broadway cast of “Camelot,” Nero’s press agents were flacking that the part would do for Nero’s career what it did for Goulet. O’Brian asked in his column: “What? Turn him to stone?”
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