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later the men could say these were all people who were friends of the candidate. I can't think of the name of the coach, but the guy did a very effective job. They would ask questions, not unlike what happened in that debate when they screened people -- They were screened on both sides, but the Nixon people --

The debate we're talking about is the current one. You're talking about just the past one --

Yes, when the woman from ABC [Carole Simpson] was the moderator, when they had forty or so people in the studio who were selected to ask questions. She didn't ask any questions, she just moderated. I thought it was a very effective --

I thought she was tremendously effective.

So, Nixon was on to that in '68, the technique of doing it. He was a prostitute in the way he used it, but certainly, if he wanted to buy time and use it that way, the law was we couldn't say anything about it. I wanted to do that kind of thing in the open, objectively, and not have any people specially picked. But, we never could bring it off because of Section #315.

Then, of course, the FCC realized -- This is my interpretation. I think the FCC, in the later campaigns, realized that that Section #315 was wrong, but the FCC didn't have the courage and the industry didn't have the whatever it needed to go to the Hill and get the law changed. What the FCC did was to sort of equivocate, and say that if you could get an outside group to put on the debates, the networks could cover them as news, which was as