Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Frank StantonFrank Stanton
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Session:         Page of 755

Q:

You don't remember who it was.

Stanton:

No. That was a very hectic period. I think our schedule was relatively clean, and some people thought I'd gone too far in making sure that it was clean in the future, but as long as I couldn't be sure I just didn't want to have people say, “Well, you can't trust CBS,” that's all.

I had one--and I'm not sure but what we talked about this before, but I was invited tosit on a committee that I think the White House put together to look at some program having to do with science. When I say “program,” I don't mean program in broadcasting. What do I mean? I mean a project rather than a program. But this was at the time in the Kennedy administration when there was concern about whether the scientists in this country were keeping up with the scientists behind the [Iron] Curtain and so forth, and there was a real effort made to increase the quality of our teaching in science and our research. Why I was roped in on that discussion I don't know. There must have been fifteen or twenty of us, people from universities and government. I guess I was there because at that time I was chairman of the board of the RAND Corporation and we were doing a lot of work in research.

But whatever the reason, in the course of the two days of meetings the question came up about involving television in telling the story of scientific developments and so forth. Oh, it was in Eisenhower's period. It wasn't Kennedy. It was in Eisenhower. One of the members, the science advisor to Eisenhower [George Kistiakowsky], said that they wouldn't allow television to get near certain classified experiments for security reasons. There are problems but no serious question about the desirability of exercising some judgment on how far you go in disclosing what you're doing for the security of the country.





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help