Last night we watched the three-and-half hour Youtube video below of the CBS national coverage of the 1964 Election night picking up at 6:30 P.M. eastern and going to 2:00 A.M. (with breaks for local coverage, and also the late local news, so it does not cover all the clock time).
It was all in black and white of course. Wikipedia, citing what seem like authoritative references, tells me that the CBS Evening News made its first broadcast in color on Aug 19, 1965, and went permanently to color on Jan 31, 1966.
Anchoring the broadcast was Walter Cronkite (1916-2009) at his finest, and in his prime. At the beginning of the broadcast, he explains that this year will be a great advance in election reporting over last time, for several reasons.
One reason was the creation of the NES, the Network Election System, in which the broadcast networks pooled their resources in cooperation with state and local officials to create a unified system of election reporting.
The other reason was the introduction of the IBM Vote Projection Analysis (VPA) which CBS would use during the broadcast to make early projections of races before they are officially declared as won (presumably by local election officials).
The VPA would focus on key precincts to make an early forecast of the final percentages. There is a great shot of the IBM 7000-series mainframe computer in the election studio, running the brand new System/360, the landmark operating system which gave us the business boom of Sixties. The entire broadcast has the audio-feel of being inside a room with big old computers (a few seconds of the broadcast will tell you what I mean).
Just like today, the states of Indiana and Kentucky closed their polls early, and counted their votes quickly to be among the first states declared.
At the beginning of the broadcast, the VPA had already projected Johnson as the winner in Kentucky. For much of American history after the Civil War, Kentucky was the ultimate swing state, in the true sense of actually swinging back and forth between the two parties like a coin flip. It was the ultimate border state---Southern in geography and culture, but birthplace of the nationalist Whig Party, which evolved into the Republicans.
In 1960 Nixon had won Kentucky for the Republicans, so when Johnson won it back for the Democrats, it was not a fantastic sign for Goldwater, but as a coin-flip state, it didn't really matter.
But then the IBM VPA quickly projected Johnson as the winner in Indiana, which Nixon had carried handily, and which Goldwater was counting on heavily in his stragtegy (along with Texas, Ohio, and California).
Within a half hour the VPA projected Johnson carrying Ohio as well. It was over very quickly, but it took the rest of the evening to prove the early signs and projections of were true. Few anticipated the magnitude of the landslide.
Illinois put Johnson over the top well before midnight. Goldwater was a jerk and did not come out to give a concession speech at all that evening, even at 2 a.m. He was holed up in the Camelback Inn in Phoenix. He had his running mate Congressman Miller come out and give a short friendly speech saying that as VP candidate, he couldn't really say anything until Goldwater spoke. Miller was retiring from politics altogether after that night. Surrounded by his family, he clearly didn't care at all about having lost.
By midnight as well, CBS knew this election was not only a big victory for the Democrats, but that it was a realignment election.
Vermont went Democratic for the first time in its history. On the flip side, CBS reported Georgia went Republican for the first time in its history.
Cronkite was the anchor (assisted by back-up like Roger Mudd), but the grand old man of CBS back then was Eric Sevareid (1912-1992), the senior cBS correspondent who was allowed to talk about anything he wanted, as Cronkite himself joked, while introducing him. It was he who came out when the evening was ripening to declare that extremism had failed. The hate groups (he used that term) had been turned back.
Sevareid was the oldest on the set, but he was the only one who could have walked off that set and onto one of the major cable t.v. news networks today and been perfectly at home. I felt like I had just watched modern news broadcasting being born.
Sevareid announced that the we were int a new era primarily because of the creation of a new voting block. the first time such a true voting block had existed in the history of the country, where 99% of the people in the block voted the same way. In this case it was the Negroes, as they called them. It made Black Americans instantly into the most powerful voters in the country, because they all voted the same. We have lived in that political era since then.
Among other things, that evening was probably the first time that most Americans saw and heard the name George Bush, who was announced as the Republican vying to unseat U.S. Senator Ralph Yarborough from Texas. Bush was a Republican trying to buck the Johnson ticket Democratic tide in Johnson's home state of Texas. He lost andYarborough kept his seat. It was mentioned how Yarborough, in his victory speech, had taunted Bush as an out-of-stater who now ought to go back where he came from.
By covering their various speeches, CBS all but declared Michigan Governor George Romney and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller to be the (non-extremist) future of the Republican Party. Romney had just won re-election. He had spoken out against Goldwater at the convention in San Francisco. We looked for Mitt on stage but did not see him.
Rockefeller, who had all but denounced Goldwater at the convention, and who now seemed vindicated on all counts, spoke during the appearance of U.S. Senator Keating from New York, who lost his re-election bid as U.S. Senator from New York, pulled down in the anti-Republican tide in New York because the party had swung to the western extremists.
Rockefeller was at his prime that night too. It would have seemed obvious to anyone that he would be President at some point, or at least would be the Republican nominee. He was competent and telegenic, appearing completely in control even amidst the defeat his party and the incumbent Senator.
No one brought up Richard Nixon the entire night except in mentioning comparisons to the previous election in 1960. Nixon had been declared politically dead in 1962 when he lost his bid to be California Governor, following up his Presidential loss. By 1964, it seemed he had demoted himself right out of presidential politics.
Another highlight was Lyndon Johnson being interviewed from his headquarters in Austin while wearing a radio headset.. If you imagine Lyndon Johnson in that kind of get-up, you know how weird the image was. No president would do such a thing now. Johnson was very calm and matter of fact. He barely gave any emotion to the idea of apparently winning the election (it was still unofficial). He was a man for the crowd in a convention hall, not for that kind of setting. There was something charming in his lack of consciousness of how strange he looked on television wearing a radio headset.
The keynote of the evening was at the very end, just before 2 A.M. Eastern Time, in the victory speech by the person who had unhorsed Keating from the U.S. Senate---New York State's new Senator-elect Robert F. Kennedy (who had overcome charges of being a carpetbagger, having moved to New York State just to run for the Senate). He spoke from the ballroom of the Statler Hilton in New York.
As he always did, in that kind of intimate setting, Kennedy dominated the room. Johnson might have been elected president, getting a four-year term in his own right, but everyone assumed that Robert Kennedy was the real future of the Democratic Party.
Standing behind Kennedy on the crowded stage, his tall stature sticking above the others like a king on a chessboard, directing others around him with tight hand gestures, was a curious figure, a man of seventy-five with aged lined face and the weight of deep responsibility on him like a shadow.
Kennedy turns and thanks him very quickly into his speech as being essential to his victory, especially as Kennedy did not really live in New York, and had no political experience there (my word's not Kennedy's).
The man behind him that he thanked was the former N.Y. governor, Averell Harriman, whom Rockefeller had unseated from the governor's mansion six years earlier in 1958. Harriman was an heavyweight as it got. In his day, Harriman had stood behind Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at the Teheran Conference that had had organized the outlines of the world after World War II. Now he was standing behind Robert Kennedy.
Kennedy thanks him specifically for being the driving force behind the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The adoption of the Test Ban Treaty had been one of achievements of the Kennedy Administration that Johnson had played up his television commercials and speeches. It was a primal pitch appealing to mothers that from 1964 forward, their children could grow up free of radioactive contamination from the atmosphere. Harriman acknowledged Kennedy's thanks for this great achievement with a formulaic nod and then went about his business surveying the stage to make sure he an everyone else there was positioned correctly around Kennedy.
It must have been a nice little revenge for Harriman against Nelson Rockefeller, his longtime younger rival, to have orchestrated winning back that Senate seat for the Democrats. But it would have been a small satisfaction, only one item among many Harriman would have been orchestrating, at least in his mind, at that very moment. Electoral glory revenge was not the kind of thing that drove Harriman, except in the way all men want to win every contest. Everyone knew Harriman had deeper concerns on his mind (like making sure the world didn't destroy itself). Everyone knew he played the game on a higher level than anyone else who had appeared that evening, newscaster or politician, even Lyndon Johnson.
The IBM VPA did amazingly well, as it happened. Cronkite pointed out late in the broadcast that they had nailed the final percentage of the vote in Kentucky almost exactly.
Following up, there's about an hour left of CBS coverage from that evening to watch in a separate video, picking up at 3 a.m. Eastern. It includes Humphrey's VP victory speech. Might watch it tonight.
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