Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 5:01 PM by Gene

Which gets us to this ode from a Bozellnik to The Superscript Man:

[W]hat we really must admit about history is that it sticks to an unforgiving big picture. Ask your twentysomething friends or your summer interns if they can identify these names: Chet Huntley, Douglas Edwards, John Chancellor, Howard K. Smith, Harry Reasoner, Frank Reynolds. Rather may be about as well-known as Drew Pearson or Lowell Thomas to the next generation....

Well we remember them enough to know the third on the list at one point insisted his name be pronounced Chancell-OR. But we do remember them, though we're not twentysomething or a summer intern. Chet Huntley said "Good night, David" and sang at a piano bar for American Airlines; Douglas Edwards droned into a radio mike for forty years; Howard K. Smith emceed a Kennedy-Nixon debate and acquired lots of leather-bound books he never read; Harry Reasoner was mildly sardonic and vaguely suggested Barney Rubble; Frank Reynolds died of several diseases so Peter Jennings could take his place; Drew Pearson pounded tables and "appeared as himself in the 1951 science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still"; and Lowell Thomas showed in tons of ads and emceed This is Cinerama. Why we should further remember them is beyond us, though we must confess they had a dignity, a dignity as vanished as their reporting.