Time for another installment of our series presenting historic television broadcasts as they originally aired, with commercials, station IDs and the like. As always, we’ll put the full video up top if you want to take a gander, and below that will be select screen shots and historic type commentary.
It’s January 31, 1968. The anchors of the WRC-TV Washington, DC local news sign off with a reminder to stay tuned for an NBC News report on the Vietnam war.
Before hitting the network there are some locally airing commercials…
In this same commercial break there is a spot for a Washington furniture store. It consists of two color slides with an announcer doing a live read. (In the video you can hear the “snap” of the mic turning on. The same announcer says “Full color 4” while the station ID slide flashes.
And heeeeeeeeeeere’s Johnny, looking incredibly morose. He’s got two reasons to forego his usual cheerful manner. For one, Johnny is informing viewers that “because of the critical war situation in Vietnam, especially around Saigon, NBC for the next 15 minutes is going to bring you a special news program via satellite.”
Here’s the other reason Johnny might not be feeling so chipper: His lone guest on that evening’s “Tonight Show” was New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who had an alternate view of the events and persons involved in the Kennedy assassination. There’s a YouTube link below if you want to hear the interview…it was exceedingly rare in the run of Johnny’s Tonight Show to have a serious interview of this type. But Carson was himself curious about the assassination, and booked Garrison on the show. Carson spent a lot of the evening clarifying that Garrison’s thoughts and beliefs were his alone.
“The Tonight Show”, even in those days, was pre-recorded in the late afternoon. Judging by Johnny’s weary appearance, I’d say he taped his brief disclaimer after taping the show with Garrison.
The NBC News report is announced by Fred Facey. Facey was an NBC staff announcer who became one of the primary voices of NBC News, announcing the opens for “The Today Show”, “NBC Nightly News”, “Meet The Press” and election coverage through 2003.
Anchor Frank McGee: “The Viet Cong are reported to be in complete control of a militant Buddhist headquarters less than a mile from the center of town, and there are reports that the National Liberation Front has formed a revolutionary council to run Saigon…it all amounts to the most ambitious series of Communist attacks yet mounted, spreading violence into at least ten provincial capitals–plus American air bases and civilian installations stretching the entire length of the country.”
NBC field correspondents captured what was happening around them using 16mm film cameras. The footage, once developed and edited, was transmitted via satellite to NBC News headquarters in New York. This was state-of-the-art for 1968. Eventually small, portable videotape cameras were put into use…but many local stations continued to shoot news stories on film well into the 1970s.
This is Jack Perkins. In 1968 he was an NBC News correspondent. By the 1990s he was known as one of the frequent hosts of A&E’s “Biography.”
Perkins became so identified with “Biography” that the creative team of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” created a slightly demented Perkins-like character to emcee the daily “Mystery Science Theater Hour” series.
The Vietnam War was one of a series of incidents in the 1960s that forced television news to up its game, with new technology, a higher level of investigative journalism and a wider reach.