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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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of people standing by doing nothing until you got that thing properly organized.

Gitlin somehow didn't grab hold of the idea and this may be a simple manifestation of something referred to, I think, elsewhere in my conversation: it's awfully difficult to get somebody else to carry out an idea that comes to them from on high. The front office has to be very careful in how it asks any creative person to do something. You can tell a reporter to cover a story, that's one thing. But to have somebody do a particular series and superimpose your ideas on somebody else, it's tough, and it generally suffers for that reason. And that might have been the problem with Irv, I don't know. He wasn't a producer as much as he was the administrator but he had produced and this could have been part of the problem. At any rate, there came a time when I was disappointed that we hadn't gotten going and Ed was out from under “See It Now” because -- or not Ed, but Fred was out from under “See It Now”; Ed was on holiday or on his sabbatical -- so I turned to Fred Friendly and asked, would he take on the project. And he became the producer of “See It Now.”

Q:

“CBS Reports” you mean.

Stanton:

You're absolutely right. Thank you.

And he embraced it without any hesitation. And Ed Murrow sat in my office the night that I had the talk with Fred and Sig Mickelson about the assignment. In fact --

Q:

Sig was then president of News.

Stanton:

Who?





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