Tricky Dick Nixon, Walter Cronkite, and CBS Television 9
Unlike the demonized Nixon, McGovern was regarded as a statesman of
high principles, according to Williams and his friend Gore Vidal, plus actors
such as Warren Beatty (who starred in The Roman Spring o f Mrs. Stone) and
Paul Newman (who won acclaim in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird o f
Youth). In fact, Newman made Nixon’s “enemies list” for his fiery denunciation
of Tricky Dick’s conduct in office (Nichols). Williams professed his admiration
for McGovern in a 1973 Playboy interview with C. Robert Jennings: “I think a
politician should say only what he believes and not equivocate, as McGovern
tried to do” (qtd. in Devlin, Conversations 248). In Williams’s eyes, Nixon
waffled on ending the Vietnam War, which Williams publically spoke out
against, while McGovern unequivocally promised to end it. In addition to
articulating Williams’s political preferences, his letter to CBS reveals a keen
eyed artist-painter who understood the power of the camera in creating personal
illusions/personae and in determining elections. Certainly, a tired-looking
McGovern shown on CBS TV was politically vulnerable, just as the unshaven,
dark, and overwrought Nixon was in the Kennedy-Nixon debates, an image of
Tricky Dick responsible, in part, for his defeat in 1959. Finally, Williams
intimates that America’s most respected anchor at the time, Walter Cronkite,
was culpable in CBS’s attempt to sabotage McGovern’s campaign. The last few
lines of Williams’s letter drip with accusatory disappointment over Cronkite,
who thereby joined the ranks of other deceiving Big Daddys/bullies in
Williams’s life and canon (Kullman).
Williams’s vitriolic letter to CBS about distorting the truth to empower a
corrupt politician recalls a similar tactic used by Boss Finley in Williams’s
Sweet Bird o f Youth (1957). Demanding that his daughter Heavenly appear in
virginal white on camera with him at a political rally instead of running off to a
convent, Boss Finley is determined to cover up the fact that he forced her to
have an abortion (carrying her lover Chance Wayne’s baby) and had instructed
his cronies to tell the press that she was in the hospital for an appendectomy. But
this excuse is not flying in St. Cloud, the Boss’s hometown, as a heckler in the
crowd shouts, “Did [Heavenly] put on black in mourning for her appendix?”
(53). The Boss’s real reason for the cover up is to present his daughter as a
model of unsullied femininity to build further momentum in his hate campaign
against blacks, whom he attacks as a threat to “white women’s chastity.” But
when Heavenly mocks her father, “Papa you have got an illusion of power,” the
“false leader” Finley bluntly responds, “I have power, which is not an illusion”
(53). Rebuking Heavenly, he explains the power television has to create an
illusion to justify his “malignant duplicities”:
Now, tonight, I’m addressing the Youth for Tom Finley clubs
in the ballroom of the Royal Palms Hotel. My speech is going
out over a national TV network, and Missy, you’re going to
march in the ballroom on my arm. You’re going to be wearing
the stainless white of a virgin, with a Youth for Tom Finley
button on one shoulder and a corsage of lilies on the other.