Fred Friendly

Fred Friendly will be missed greatly both as a broadcasting leader and a role model for those who care about an informed citizenry. His was a rare combination of passion and integrity.

One of the joys and privileges of being a young program officer at the Ford Foundation in the early 1970s was having an occasional lunch with the luminaries who ran it. Lunch with Friendly was always a learning experience of the very best kind: humor, wit and penetrating insight into the political process.

For example, one entire lunch was devoted to Fred’s explaining the “Fairness Doctrine” (balanced reporting for candidates, etc.) in broadcasting. It was spellbinding. The delivery was hilarious.

LAURA LAKE

Los Angeles

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Ed Murrow and Friendly performed a major service in airing the former’s famous TV attack on Sen. Joe McCarthy. However, your obit of Friendly (March 5) was mistaken in calling that “the first nationwide overt attack on McCarthy.” I did so a year earlier as an “unfriendly witness” whose testimony in Washington was carried live on national TV.

The issue is not who gets credit for what, but why certain individuals were made into icons and others “nonpersons.” Murrow supported the Cold War. I opposed it. He went on to head the Voice of America. I, who had had my own national byline as United Press (now UPI) expert on Russia, had been a fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford and whose books were in use in leading universities, had already been blacklisted out of any means of reaching the public.

WILLIAM M. MANDEL

Berkeley

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I must comment on one glaring bit of misinformation in your March 7 article on Friendly.

Friendly had nothing to do with the show “Person To Person.” That show was produced by Jesse Zousmer and John Aarons. My husband, Charles N. Hill, was one of the three directors on the show and I remember how Friendly hated the fact that Murrow would be involved in such a “frivolous program.” To suggest otherwise is to make a mockery of everything he stood for in his quest for unvarnished truth and honesty in broadcast journalism.

BETTY JONES

Century City