Colleagues Eulogize TV Pioneer Friendly

On a springlike Friday, in a synagogue that somehow seemed too small for the hurricane of a man who was Fred W. Friendly, colleagues praised the late television pioneer as the conscience and moral compass for generations of journalists.

“He set the standard for journalistic excellence on television that stands today,” CBS-TV news anchor Dan Rather told mourners attending Friendly’s funeral. “ . . . He became the voice of integrity in broadcast journalism. Boy, his voice was loud!”

Friendly, 82, who died Tuesday after a series of strokes, “was not a subtle man,” said Martha Elliott, who worked with Friendly during his later years at Columbia University.

He was “impossible, opinionated, stubborn,” she told the mourners, a Who’s Who of broadcast journalism that included not only Rather but Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace. “He was bold enough to give a copy of the Constitution to a Supreme Court justice.”

Friendly loved the Constitution so much, his coffin contained two copies of the document.

At the same time, “If you were sick or needed a job, Fred was the one there for you,” Elliott added.

Like many who crowded the Riverdale Temple near the George Washington Bridge in upper Manhattan, Gordon Goldstein--who was an elementary school student of Friendly’s wife, Ruth--talked about his memories after the service.

“I still recall in the fifth grade sitting on his sofa in his house in Riverdale and being grilled by Fred. ‘Gordon, pretend you’re the editor of the New York Times and you know during a time of war of a risky military operation involving U.S. troops, do you print it?’

“It was a helluva question for a fifth grader--but that was Fred,” Goldstein said.

Friendly, working with Edward R. Murrow, produced on Nov. 18, 1951, the first broadcast of “See It Now,” widely regarded as the beginning of modern television journalism. Later, they teamed again on “Person to Person.”

Person to person, in the synagogue, a private portrait of Friendly evolved. His children and grandchildren described a perfectionist who could search a week for just the right word. He liked the word “yeasty” a lot. He never forgot the frail sounds of emaciated hands clapping when he was among the World War II troops liberating a Nazi concentration camp.

He also could be a devastating critic. Rather remembered being sent back by Friendly to ask tougher questions--a task punctuated by Friendly slamming down the phone “hard enough to shake my fillings loose.” Rather said for a while, he thought he had been renamed “Dammit Rather.”

Friendly’s standards were so high that faint praise was cherished like a bouquet of roses.

One speaker at the funeral recalled him saying: “ ‘That’s pretty good. Pretty good.’ That’s as large a gift you could receive.”