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the Army and the Navy both had to clear things. “Well,” he said, “we took the soundtrack and sent that,” I believe, “to Jacksonville for clearance and we took the pictures and sent them someplace else for clearance, and nobody knew. You just saw the thing taking off. There was no voice of CBS on it or anything else, and the sound was just the sounds of a missile. Then we brought them back in New York and put them together and we had the picture.” Well, technically he was within the limits. Scared the hell out of me.

Oh, I left out one important point. The newsman would have been in the block house until just before lift-off, and when it was coming up, when the countdown began, he got out of the blockhouse, got in a motorcycle and got the hell out. The camera was allowed to continue to run. That was the way the thing was handled. So we observed the restriction of not being there, but it didn't deny us the opportunity of showing the picture on the air, and I wanted to be sure that the White House understood that it was Ed Murrow, that Ed Murrow wasn't really in the block house, that his voice was the voice-over from outside, it wasn't from being inside. Well, that's a very tricky, close line to draw, and you can see the problems you get in to when you begin to put rules in to effect about what you can and can't do.

So did you make the call to the White House?

No, I did not. I thought about it many times, that weekend. I believe the broadcast was on Sunday, but I'm not sure anymore. But I reasoned that it was such a small part of the hour- long documentary on putting a missile together that when they finally came to the point of lift-off that it probably wouldn't be--you know, we didn't publicize the fact that you're going to see something from inside that you couldn't see. It was just part of the broadcast, so I just took a chance on the fact that no one would raise any question about it and no one did.