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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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thing out for them and checked it out so they knew what I was up to. In that sense, yes, I did do -- but I never went forward with it, because I didn't have “Hamlet” you know; when Eisenhower wouldn't perform, I couldn't do anything about it.

I think that might have been an occasion when I might have taken the bit in my teeth and run with it, because I thought it was so right in terms of the politics, the public information -- Everything was right about it. Now, of course, it's taken for granted. I know I had sort of an off-the -- No, they called it a “brown bag” lunch up at Harvard, with people in the School of Politics and Communication, and one of the kids asked me something about this year's debate (this thing took place not too long ago, but before the election), and I was talking about the fact that we had to go on our hands and knees to beg Congress to let us have the right to do the debates. They didn't know a thing about it, and this is something that happened in the fifties. Here was a school of press and politics and communications, one of the best, presumably, in the country, and these kids didn't know a damn thing about the Section Number 315 regulation that kept the debates off the air. They just assumed that we always had debates. They couldn't understand what the talk was about. Well, that's how the world has changed.

And, the Smothers Brothers, in their “Comedy Hour,” tried to break a lot of ground on pornography and things. I had my troubles with them. I think they were the worst, in their determination to break with the code. It was Tommy Smothers who came in to see me one day, who said he was going to use “the” four-letter word in prime time, he was going to be the first to do it on the network, and he was going to do it on his show. I had a long talk with him, but then he didn't do it -- or, if he did it, I never knew it, and if he did it, he did it in such an obscure way that no one in the public heard it either, because it would have been a





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