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That night, I talked to Leonard briefly. He had gone to Washington. The next night -- You weren't born at that time, but everything just fell apart. There were no programs except news and word of what was going on, and so forth. Leonard called me, I think around 10:30-11:00 that night, and I was in the office. The switchboard operator called me office and said, “The White House is calling, and wants you.” I said, “No, they don't want me, they want the newsroom,” because I had just been on the phone with -- This sounds strange, but I had just been on the phone with [Winston] Churchill, in London, because he wanted to come on the air and make some special tribute to Truman. Because of Ed Murrow, he was closer to CBS than NBC, and he wanted to talk to somebody at CBS. I was Lucky Pierre, in the sense that I was available to take the call. I figured the White House was calling as part of that, and I said, “They want the newsroom.” The operator came back and said, “I've checked, and they want you, specifically.”

So, I said okay, I took it, and it was Leonard. In a very formal way he said, “Can you arrange to be at the White House tomorrow morning at 7:30?” I said, “Leonard, there's no way I can get there. I'm holding the network together with my bare hands,” because my two strong associates in running the company, one lived way up in Connecticut, one lived down beyond Princeton, and there was no way to get them back and forth in time. I simply said, “It's going to be next to impossible.” Without dropping a beat, he said, he repeated the same question: “Can you be at the White House at 7:30 tomorrow morning?” I said, “Leonard, for Christ's sake, where are you?” He said, “I'm in the Oval Office with the President,” in sort of a whispered tone. He said, “It's very important that you be here.”

So, I called Ruth and said, “I'm going to Washington.” You couldn't fly, because you had to