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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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Pastori to hold hearings on the lifting of Section 315, and was well on the way to getting the law changed. I still didn't have the House vote, but I certainly had the Senate Committee vote on that and --

Q:

Just for the sake of the record, will you define what the law was that prevented the debates, except for temporary resolution?

Stanton:

Well, Section 315 of the Communications Acts requires that if time is given to one candidate for an office, time has to be given to all other bona fide candidates for that office.

In the campaign of '52, when [Robert A.] Taft and Eisenhower were running for the Republican nomination, there was a man in, I think, St. Louis, whose name I've forgotten, although at the time it was engraved in my skull, who had declared that he was a candidate and we had given time to Taft and Eisenhower, and therefore he should have time. We turned him down. I participated in the decision. Although there was a grey area as to whether he was a bona fide candidate, we turned him down and he went to the FCC and demanded the opportunity to have equal time. In those days we carried things on radio and television, so he got both radio and television network time for a half hour. Nobody knew him and when the convention was held, he couldn't even get credentials to attend the convention. But he had put us in the awkward position of living under Section 315. The Commission was very strict about the application of it and in all local and national elections, if you gave time to one side, you had to be prepared to give it to the other side or sides. In that particular campaign, I think there were sixteen candidates for President. Vegetarian, Prohibition candidates -- You didn't have to have a big party behind you, you just had to declare you were a candidate. Some of them ran in New Hampshire and qualified that way,





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