The United States went to war again in June 1950—this time in a “police action” on behalf of the United Nations—in Korea, and once again I was asked to serve the government. I was the most reluctant draftee imaginable at the beginning and then found my job fascinating and absorbing. It took most of my time, with very little left over for CBS.
Stuart Symington, who was later to become U.S. senator from Missouri, was a neighbor of mine in Manhasset and a frequent golfing companion. I thought nothing of it when he remarked that there was great concern in Washington over actual and potential deficiencies in the material resources of the country. Since the United States had recently entered the war in Korea, there were fears that some natural resources—minerals, metals, oil—might be or become in critical short supply. Symington, at the time, was serving as chairman of the National Security Resources Board. He told me President Truman was thinking of setting up a presidential commission to study the entire problem of the future resources of the United States. But he surprised me when he asked if I would be interested in heading such a commission.
I laughed at the idea. “My goodness,” I told him, “I wouldn’t do that for anything in the world.” That was his first approach. Then one night in Washington a short while later, he and I dropped in at Lyndon Johnson’s house to see the senator, who at the time was a close friend of Symington’s. I thought it was a casual visit until I thought about it later. Again Symington brought up the subject, this time with Johnson. “I’m trying to get Bill here to do this materials job,” he said. Johnson backed him up, giving me one of his Texas pep talks and concluding, “You must take this job . . . it’s a wonderful job.” Then he turned and put the question to his Texas cohort, Sam Rayburn, the Speaker and most influential member of the House of Representatives. Rayburn, who had been sitting there quietly watching a wrestling match on television, looked up at me and said simply, “I agree.”
To each of them I kept repeating, “Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t know anything about minerals and metals. There’s nothing for me to do in that field.” That was his second approach and I never could be sure he had not set up that meeting with Johnson and Rayburn to pressure me. The subject came up a number of times again over a two- or three-month period, but I was then so heavily involved in the critical transition from radio to television at CBS that I really did not seriously consider Symington’s proposal.
But he was persistent. On one of my social visits to Washington, he ever so casually said, “Oh, by the way, we have an appointment. Just follow me.” The next thing I knew, I was in the Oval Office, standing in front of Harry Truman. The President was very intent, very serious. In that even-toned, flat voice, he told me that a full survey of our mineral and energy resources was essential for the nation. The government needed to look ahead and see what the future demands on our natural resources were going to be, what shortages could be expected, and finally, what the government should do about it. It was an important job and he wanted me to take it.
“Well, Mr. President,” I replied, somewhat flustered, “I am highly flattered, but I think you are making a very serious mistake. I’ve never been near a mine. I don’t know one metal from another. I’m not an economist. In fact, I’m the last person in the world with the capabilities to do the kind of job you are now describing.”
The President did not bat an eye. If he had any doubts before, he said, they had now been wiped out. He wanted somebody who had no preconceived ideas, one who would come in from scratch, one who could understand what was going on and make his own judgments based on just good sense and good evaluations. I was the man for the job, he declared.
I had no intention of saying “Yes” to anyone about taking on this job when I walked in, but how does one say “No” to the President of the United States when the country is at war and he is putting the pressure on with a direct request? I hardly knew where to begin, so I tried to find out what he had in mind.
“How large a commission do you want?” I asked.
“That’s up to you,” he replied quickly.
“Whom would you like to have serve?”
“It’s up to you.”
“How long do you think it will take?”
“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “I imagine you could do it in six months.”
“How much will it cost?”
“That’s up to you.”
“What kind of cooperation will I get?”
“I’ll give you a letter to the cabinet officer of every department in the government, telling them to give you anything you want. We’ll give you all the cooperation you want. You can have all the money you need. So, get started!”
The next thing I knew I was standing outside the White House in a daze, gripped by a feeling of fear that bordered on hysteria. That presidential interview had taken about twenty minutes. Now I was on my own, having promised to set up and conduct a presidential commission on a subject I knew nothing about, without guidelines or instructions, without help, without any experience whatsoever. I returned to New York to tell my wife and Frank Stanton and some others at CBS what I had done. I estimated six months for the task, but could not foretell how I would divide my time between Washington with the commission and New York with CBS.
Lyndon Johnson telephoned to congratulate me. He recommended one man, a Texan, for the commission: George Rufus Brown, of Brown & Root, said to be one of the largest contracting firms in the world. I drew up a list of possible commissioners from among the many people I had met or heard of during my own career and narrowed the list down to three other men with different fields of expertise. I had already decided on a small commission of no more than five. Then I telephoned around, checking on the experience and reputation of these men and, satisfied with what I learned, called them personally. Not only did I catch each one by telephone on the first call, each one of them accepted. I had my President’s Materials Policy Commission. It had taken no more than one hour.
For a commissioner knowledgeable about mining and materials, I had George Rufus Brown; for a mining and minerals expert, I had Arthur H. Bunker, president of Climax Molybdenum Company, a former investment banker at Lehman Brothers and former director of CBS; as an outstanding, highly respected economist, I had Edward S. Mason, dean of the Graduate School of Public Administration at Harvard University. I also wanted a good writer on the commission and was delighted at the acceptance of Eric Hodgins, a former managing editor of Fortune and of the Technology Review at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. What particularly attracted me to him was his background in the subject, his graceful style, and at times his great sense of humor, which he demonstrated in his best-selling novel Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.
Staffing a governmental-study commission was and always is much more difficult than finding the actual commissioners. It is also equally, if not more, important. The research and legwork necessary for sound recommendations depend more upon the staff than the men who head the commission. I was most fortunate in filling the key staff position of executive director with Philip Coombs, a former professor of economics at Amherst College. I had met him not long before, while he was economic adviser to Chester Bowles, then governor of Connecticut. Coombs and I went to Washington together for our first view of our new quarters in the Executive Office Building, a marvelous old structure with high ceilings and large, old-fashioned rooms. On that first day there, Coombs and I mulled over our primary and perhaps most important organizational problem: How could we attract a high caliber of civil servants to staff the Materials Policy Commission when the commission had such a short (six months) life span and there was no evident crisis involved to attract the best brains to us in Washington?
After a good deal of discussion, we decided to begin by using the President’s letter ordering full cooperation of all departments. This we believed would bring a number of people who would be available to us. But, I told Coombs, we would reject as many of them as necessary, particularly among the first to arrive, until we had settled on three or four of the very top people. Word would get about Washington that we were accepting only a first-class team, that there must be something very special about this commission, and the top people we did accept would attract others. And that is just the way it worked out. When we had hired our first five or six staffers, all outstanding men and women, there was a deluge of applicants for the jobs available. At the height of our work, the commission employed around a hundred and forty full-time men and women on the staff, aided by several hundred consultants working on special projects.
We had an enormous subject to cover, mountains of material to read, hundreds of experts to take testimony from, and it was all fascinating to me. The task before us was to make a comprehensive survey of the essential natural resources of the United States—minerals, metals, oil, gas, energy, timber, and water—to estimate the rate of their use in 1950 and then project the needs of the country in natural resources twenty-five years ahead to 1975, and finally, to project for the President what shortages could be expected and what policies should be instituted to deal with expected problems. At the start the full commission met every three or four weeks, but as chairman I worked with the staff four or five days a week. Babe and I moved to Washington, renting a house in Georgetown, and returned to New York only on weekends or sometimes on a Friday which I then spent at CBS.
At the end of about four months, I realized the commission could not possibly produce a meaningful report in six or even nine months. I wrote to President Truman, saying we could put together a respectable but rather superficial report in six months but that if he wanted a really good report, we would need an additional year beyond the six months and that it would cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars. What were his wishes?
The very next morning I received his reply in a letter which, in effect, said: I want the best report you can put together. I don’t care how long it takes. Money is no object. Very truly yours, Harry Truman.
So, fully enticed and involved in the subject of natural resources, I plunged back into work. Eric Hodgins, whom I had persuaded to spend full time with the commission, became in effect a member of the staff and its chief writer. Because we did not have the time to listen to everyone in our formal hearings, we sent out questionnaires far and wide; we farmed out special studies to research companies; we consulted specialists throughout the country. We became a veritable “think tank.”
The extension of the life of the commission meant that I would have to devote all of 1951 and well into 1952 to the project, but I thought the scope, breadth, and significance of our work was well worth the time and effort. Besides, I was receiving a broad education in economics, world trade, and the fundamentals of our country’s national power, which resided in our access to natural resources.
I kept in constant touch with events at CBS through daily phone calls to Frank Stanton and the key men in the various divisions, particularly programming. I was on the telephone every night to New York and the West Coast. On some Saturdays and more Fridays, I put in a full day in meetings and conferences at CBS. During the week, I worked daily at the commission and read material late into the night, sometimes to three o’clock in the morning. That year and a half I believe I worked harder than I ever had before. I was leading two lives.
• • •
The battle with RCA over color television continued unabated throughout that year. Late the previous year, the FCC had approved our system as the standard for color broadcasting, but RCA then began a seven-month court battle to have the order rescinded. Victory came on May 28, 1951, when the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously upheld the FCC ruling and, in effect, CBS color television. The next month, on June 25, 1951, CBS broadcast the first commercial color network program in history. It was a gala one-hour show called Premiere, with Arthur Godfrey, Ed Sullivan, Faye Emerson, and other stars, and a brief appearance by Stanton, Chairman Wayne Coy of the FCC, and myself. I do not believe, however, many people saw that show. There were some ten million television sets in existence at the time but only about twenty-five of them were capable of receiving CBS color. Nevertheless, true to our commitment to our own color system, we announced plans to broadcast twenty hours of color programs each week by October 15. We also made plans for marketing color television sets using the CBS system. But then we were suddenly stopped again. Charles Wilson, Director of Defense Mobilization, that October requested that the manufacture of color sets be suspended in order to conserve certain critical materials for the duration of the Korean War. The next month the National Production Authority issued an order prohibiting the manufacture of color sets. That put a halt to our color telecasts as well as to color TV sets.
However, the biggest decision and policy commitment we made at CBS that year was to go into the business of manufacturing television sets. It had been a long time in coming. When I returned from the war, I had had some vague plans in mind to diversify the business interests of CBS so that the well-being of the corporation would not be so dependent upon the government-regulated broadcasting business. In late 1947, we went so far as to make inquiries about television set-manufacturing companies which might be for sale and worth buying. The rapidly expanding consumer market for television sets was clearly apparent. Nothing came of those early explorations, but my associates and I continued to think of the possibility of going into the manufacturing end of the business. It seemed like a natural. CBS was one of the best-known trade names in the country and, encouraged by our success with Columbia Records, we thought “Columbia” television sets, backed up by our resources and reputation, would be a likely financial success in the market place.
Late in 1950, we again began looking at set-manufacturing companies as candidates for acquisition. We did not consider it practical to start from scratch in a business in which we had no direct experience. We wanted to buy a company with a management highly skilled in the technology, research, and development of television receivers. Goldmark gave high marks to the Hytron Radio and Electronics Corporation of Salem, Massachusetts, one of the oldest manufacturers in the country of radio and television tubes of all kinds and the fourth largest in sales. This was most important to us in making our decision. On June 15, 1951, we bought it through an exchange of approximately $18 million of CBS stock. The purchases included Hytron’s subsidiary, Air King Products Company, of Brooklyn, New York, which made the other parts of radio and television receivers. The two principal owners of Hytron, Bruce A. Coffin and Lloyd H. Coffin (who were brothers), were elected to the CBS board of directors. For the first time in CBS history, we were in the business of manufacturing “hardware.”
A month after the merger with Hytron, we once again reorganized the internal structure of CBS. Only a year before we had worked hard to integrate the functions of our television and radio departments. Now, in July 1951, we realized that could not work out well in the long run. Television was growing too fast. We separated radio and television into autonomous divisions, each with its own departments for programs, sales, promotion, station services, operations, and the like.
It was at this point that William Golden, creative director of CBS, designed a new logo to symbolize the distinct new identity of CBS Television. He came up with the superb “CBS eye,” a design so simple, strong and effective that we have never changed it. Bill Golden, hired by Paul Kesten back in 1937, became one of the most acknowledged art directors in the country, a winner of an extraordinary number of awards. He insisted upon excellence in visual quality for everything associated with CBS and he not only built our reputation in graphics and advertising but also attracted the best people in the field to do work for CBS, including such fine artists as Ben Shahn and René Bouché. He died in 1959 at the age of forty-eight and was succeeded by Lou Dorfsman, who has been carrying on to this day Golden’s tradition of good design with “a classic quality” at CBS.
With the separation of the management of television and radio in 1951, CBS was restructured into six separate and distinct operating units, each with its own president: CBS Radio, CBS Television, CBS Laboratories, Columbia Records, Hytron Radio and Electronics, and CBS-Columbia.
Frank Stanton, one of the most highly organized, structured, and meticulous men I have ever met, imposed, or at least tried to impose, his personality and way of doing things upon the day-today operations of CBS. He systematized various company procedures, chains of command, even office decor and the way CBS secretaries typed business letters. Some of the “creative” minds at CBS resented what they took to be a loss of some of their freedom and liberties, but most of what Frank instituted was necessary and gave a special quality to a growing company. About once a week, Frank would come to Washington so that we could confer on company affairs.
• • •
The President’s Materials Policy Commission report took a full sixteen months to complete. The basic information on the nation’s existing natural and material resources and the projections of what our resources and our needs would be twenty-five years hence were all collected and collated for the first time in five thick volumes of text, charts, graphs, and footnotes. We made more than eighty specific recommendations for government and private industry to act upon in order to alleviate the shortages in energy and raw materials we envisioned.
Our basic thrust was to warn that the United States even then was not self-sufficient in raw materials and that it would face both shortages and especially mounting costs of raw materials in the next twenty-five years. We warned that there was no such thing as a purely domestic policy toward materials that all the world needed; there were only world policies that have domestic aspects. We were thinking of oil supplies as well as more esoteric materials such as bauxite, magnesium, and fluorspar (which was used for refrigerants and plastics). We stressed the interdependence of nations in raw materials and we recommended stockpiling of critical materials, an interchange of information on supplies and demands, various methods to help eliminate wasteful practices, a study of international pooling arrangements, and generally an open world-trade policy.
Having survived the following quarter of a century, I had the opportunity in 1975 of reviewing our report and checking our projections and predictions. The most striking impression upon looking back was just how prescient we really were. With remarkable accuracy we predicted the trends and the directions of those twenty-five years. We did underestimate the growth of the country in population and the amount of the rise in consumer demands for automobiles, telephones, television sets, air conditioners, and the like. We were absolutely on target in predicting “the energy problem” of the 1970s and in advocating the development of alternate sources of energy.
The report was well received by American industry, foreign governments, and the press; indeed, in these quarters it was a fantastic success. People in industry would tell me they looked upon it as “the bible.” Strangers upon hearing my name would ask me wide-eyed if I was the Paley of “The Paley Report.” When I visited Europe, people there wanted to talk to me about The Report. Industry here and abroad acted on it. A Life magazine editorial hailed it as comparable in potential influence to Alexander Hamilton’s great Report on Manufactures in 1791. It became a prime source of information for writers of articles and books. CBS made a very good documentary out of it, narrated by Ed Murrow, which brought knowledge of it to a wide audience.
In 1974, on the eve of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the base year of the report (1950), a new wave of articles about it appeared in the press. Senator Mike Mansfield entered into the Congressional Record this observation: “The Paley Report is just as good today as it was 22 years ago. In my opinion it is must reading for the administration and the Congress. If we will do today what Mr. Paley recommended in 1952 we will still be able to understand and to solve our problems in this new economic age.”
At the time, however, there was some ideological criticism of the report from those who worried that government action to insure the nation’s needs in material resources would lead to excessive planning and controls.
Some of our recommendations were acted upon, notably the development and opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway as an all-year route to the sea. This was put into effect in 1959, serving fifty-six inland ports. But in the perversity of politics, the report was largely ignored by future administrations.
After the election of 1952, I went to see Arthur F. Burns, the head of President Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers and asked whether I should see Eisenhower about the report or leave it with him. He said to leave it with him. As far as I can make out, not much happened.
After the materials report was issued, I formed an organization—just an office, really—called Resources for the Future to answer questions from the public about the report. Later the Ford Foundation decided to create an organization to continue the study of the nation’s raw materials. I turned over to the foundation the organization and the name “Resources for the Future,” which I had set up, and the foundation then expanded the organization and became its prime mover. Later I served for some years as its chairman.
Perhaps if I had gone into government, I might have been better able to push the report. Eisenhower asked me to serve as Secretary to his Cabinet, a sort of cabinet co-ordinator, but I was so deeply involved in other projects, I had to decline.
In the final months of preparing the commission report, I came awfully close to giving up CBS in order to devote myself to other things. While the report was being written, and the commission began to prepare to wind up its affairs, I myself began dividing my time more or less evenly between New York and Washington. I came to a remarkable discovery. At CBS I was so bored and sleepy that I could hardly keep my eyes open. In fact, at one board meeting, I had to prop open my eyelids with my fingers, lest I fall asleep in front of the directors of the company. But in Washington I was never sleepy or bored. I was alert, interested, and involved in the work. We entertained at our Georgetown house, were frequently invited out to restaurants and to other homes, I worked late into the night, and I thrived on it.
At first I was puzzled and then worried. I explained the whole situation to my doctor. My daily routine was the same in both Washington and New York. Each morning upon rising I would take the B-12 vitamin he recommended, have breakfast, read the newspapers, and then be driven to work. In Washington, I would be fine; in New York when we got to my office building I would feel so tired that I could hardly get out of the car. Sometimes I would tell my driver to drive around Central Park for a half hour so that I could continue my nap. Could I dread my work at CBS that much? My doctor gave me a thorough examination and concluded that there was nothing physically wrong with me. It must be my mental attitude toward CBS, I thought; nothing else was different between my life in New York and in Washington.
I came to a profound and melancholy conclusion and told Babe, “You know, I think this tiredness I feel must be because of my business. I think broadcasting is getting me down or I’m bored with it. I don’t know what the hell to do.”
It was an awful thought with deep implications for my life. For a long month I thought about changing my career.
One Friday evening at Kiluna, when we had a house full of weekend guests, I thought I might have trouble sleeping that night. Wanting to be alert and in good shape the next morning, I placed a bottle of sleeping pills next to my bed, just in case I needed one. The next morning the butler brought in my breakfast and went to the bathroom in search of something. Evidently it was not there because he came to my night table and picked up the bottle of sleeping pills. He took out one pill and put it on a small glass plate and put the plate on my breakfast tray.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m giving you your morning pill, sir,” he said.
“I’m supposed to be taking a vitamin. That’s not a vitamin; that’s a sleeping pill.”
“Oh no, sir. It’s vitamin B-12. I give it to you every morning.”
“Oh, my God, I don’t believe it!”
He was a new man and the two kinds of pills did look very much alike. Unknowingly I had been taking a grain and a half of Seconal with breakfast every morning. My doctor was highly amused. My melancholy decision to change my life disappeared and I went back to my office that summer full time and fully aware. Never had broadcasting seemed more interesting and exciting.