TV Grapples With Historic Stories From Two Nations

As if reality weren’t dramatic enough.

During Wednesday’s edition of “The CBS Evening News” and Thursday’s morning news on CNN, a military trumpeter was heard playing baleful taps as a dignified Julie Nixon Eisenhower, finally surrendering to tears in the closing moments of her father’s poignant funeral, received a folded U.S. flag from a major general.

In real time, however, flags that had covered their father’s coffin were handed to the Nixon daughters some minutes after the playing of taps.

But Steven Spielberg wanna-bes at CBS News and CNN sought to wring even more emotion from the moment. So, as if their minds had also merged, each network combined the audio from one of the taped sequences with pictures from the other to give the impression that they were simultaneous.

In other words, the reality was found lacking, so they fixed it up in the editing room.

It was hardly a dirty trick, if you get the drift. It was a trick, nevertheless--a subtle sweetening, a moving of an ethical line, a glimpse of television news as calculated theater--and yet another of the ironies that threaded this day of epic history and rapprochement.

Healing reached a crescendo on two continents this week as both Richard Nixon and apartheid were given final resting places in the presence of television.

In no way does that equate decades of Nixon with decades of subjugation of non-whites in South Africa. Yet symbolically, the link between Yorba Linda and Johannesburg--marking the process of coming together in distant lands--was unmistakable.

It was only nine years ago that ABC’s “Nightline” aired a series of telecasts from South Africa creating historic public dialogue between apartheid foes and supporters, only four years ago that Ted Koppel returned to Johannesburg for a breakthrough, multiracial “town meeting” on TV just days after Nelson Mandela had been released from prison.

And now the even more unthinkable was happening.

In Yorba Linda, TV cameras captured thousands of mourners in a serpentine queue waiting to file past the coffin of the once-reviled Nixon. “He became not only an elder statesman, but to everyone’s surprise but his, he became a beloved elder statesman,” Nixon biographer Stephen Ambrose would observe later on ABC.

Meanwhile, network cameras in South Africa showed lines of voters--some dramatically silhouetted against darkening skies--waiting their turn at the ballot box.

ABC News supported its pictures with fine writing. “It is a powerful impression, whites in lines behind blacks,” noted Peter Jennings from somewhere in the country. After one middle-aged white said he had been waiting in line four hours, Jennings added in a pointed voice-over: “His servant has been waiting 40 years.”

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In this age of downsizing of network coverage, television is inevitably more attracted to big events than to the crumb trails that lead up to them. Give them a whiff of something spectacular, though, and news anchors pop up mostly like preening MacArthurs returning to the Philippines.

This week’s network anchor contingent in South Africa consisted of Jennings, Dan Rather of CBS and Bernard Shaw of CNN. In contrast with the determinedly low-profile Shaw’s interview with National Party incumbent Frederik W. de Klerk, there was Rather doing his usual double duty, first being interviewed by KCBS-TV Channel 2 anchors on the satellite, then himself interviewing ANC leader Mandela in a sit-down that gave the anchor as much camera time as the candidate.

An exception to this send-in-the-anchor, hit-and-run approach, though, has been Charlayne Hunter-Gault’s in-depth, on-the-scene South Africa coverage for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS and the human-rights series “Rights & Wrongs” on KCET-TV Channel 28. On “Rights & Wrongs” recently, she did a long interview with Judge Richard Goldstone, author of a controversial report allegedly linking government security forces to thousands of supposedly black-on-black murders in South Africa. And on “NewsHour,” there she was lengthily revisiting South Africans she had interviewed in 1985, one of them a black poet who this week found himself about to vote in the very church where years earlier his murdered brother was laid to rest.

The ballot box replacing the burial box.

Compared with that, KCAL-TV Channel 9 hasn’t gotten a lot this week from its shipping of anchor Pat Harvey to South Africa, where her Los Angeles-localized stories in the field have been routine, and where oftentimes her voice-overs have been grafted onto previously broadcast CNN footage.

Local TV coverage of Nixon’s funeral day (the ceremony was carried live by all major Los Angeles stations except KCOP-TV Channel 13) was also, well, spotty, with some anchors giving it the same chatty ambience as they would float-by-float commentary on the Rose Parade. The man-on-the-street-interview mentality prevailed, too, with someone on KNBC-TV Channel 4 even asking a flier expected to be in one of the F-16s scheduled to zoom over the funeral in a salute to Nixon: “Do the pilots, do they feel a certain emotion?”

Meanwhile, just about every VIP in attendance was tossed the perfunctory “Nixon legacy” question by sound bite-seeking reporters on the run in the way that Hollywood’s gussied-up celebrities are asked their Academy Award favorites outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Oscar night.

All in all, though, network coverage of the funeral itself was live television at its finest, so moving and memorable as pomp and spectacle, so interwoven with the threads of U.S. history and tradition, so astonishing in its implications, that it merited a second shot in prime time where everyone could see it. Someone should make it a video. Norman Rockwell would have painted it.

The operative adjective is astonishing.

“One needs to come in from the cold,” John le Carre’s spymaster Control tells his cynical operative Leamas in “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.” Whether it was Nixon or everyone else who came in from the cold Wednesday wasn’t clear. Almost as if history were being rewound, though, some of the President’s men and women--from Spiro T. Agnew to Rosemary Woods to G. Gordon Liddy--resurfaced at Nixon’s funeral like Watergate-era apparitions peeking their faces through the afternoon’s rain clouds.

And with four past Presidents in attendance, their rigid profiles frozen in granite close-ups as they listened intently to the eulogies, it seemed almost that Mt. Rushmore had come to Nixon’s white-frame birthplace in Yorba Linda.

Among those eulogies was what may have been President Clinton’s greatest speech--perhaps one flawed man’s tribute to another.

A visionary Afrikaner farmer reiterated to Hunter-Gault this week that what South Africa needed was “a revolution of the heart and the mind.” A powerful thought. Is that what was happening in Yorba Linda, too, a revolution of the heart and the mind?

“I think he achieved in death something that he never quite could achieve in life--that is, bring us together,” reborn Watergate figure Charles Colson told a TV interviewer about Nixon. It’s easy to get swept away by the moment. Just as this week will not make South Africa’s problems disappear, this national union--if that’s what it is--will not be lasting. Too many polarizing issues lie ahead, and grudges are hard to shake.

Yet in a week when whites and non-whites at last have come together in South Africa--however awkwardly and tenuously--it does seem fitting that at least some anti-Nixon hard-liners have found it in themselves to finally turn the other cheek.