Mike Wallace looks back at his long career

WALLACE: In your column on October twenty-seventh, you wrote that Senator Kennedy’s — and I quote — “millionaire McCarthyite father, crusty old Joseph P. Kennedy, is spending a fortune on a publicity machine to make Jack’s name well known. No candidate in history has ever had so much money spent on a public relations advance buildup.” Unquote. What significance do you see in this, aside from the fact that Joe Kennedy would like to see Jack Kennedy president of the United States?

PEARSON: I don’t know what significance other than the fact that I don’t think we should have a synthetic public relations buildup for any job of that kind. Now, Jack Kennedy’s a fine young man, a very personable fellow. But he isn’t as good as the public relations campaign makes him out to be. He’s the only man in history that I know who won a Pulitzer Prize for a book that was ghostwritten for him, which indicates the kind of a public relations buildup he has had.
WALLACE: Who wrote the book for him?
PEARSON: I don’t recall at the present moment.
WALLACE: You know for a fact, Drew?
PEARSON: Yes, I do.
WALLACE: That the book “Profiles in Courage” was written for Senator Kennedy?
PEARSON: I do.
WALLACE: By somebody else?
PEARSON: I do.
WALLACE: And he, Kennedy, accepted a Pulitzer Prize for it?
PEARSON: He did.
WALLACE: And he has never acknowledged the fact?
PEARSON: No, he has not.

Kennedy’s office called the next day and asked for a copy of the transcript. A day or so later, a meeting — to which I was not invited — was held in the executive suite of my boss, Oliver Treyz, the president of ABC Television. Among those present were Bobby Kennedy and the esteemed Washington lawyer Clark Clifford, whose honor roll of prestigious clients included the Kennedy family. Their purpose in setting up the meeting with Treyz was to get an on-air apology from Pearson and/or me for what had been said in our broadcast about the authorship of “Profiles in Courage.”

In the meantime, I’d urged Pearson to specify who had ghostwritten the book. After checking with his sources, he called to tell me it was written by a member of the senator’s staff, a young man named Ted Sorensen. A few years later, Sorensen would acquire a certain derivative glory as one of President Kennedy’s top advisers and his primary speechwriter, but in 1957 he was unknown to the general public. In the preface to “Profiles in Courage,” Kennedy credited Sorensen for “his invaluable assistance in the assembly and preparation” of the material on which the book was based, and that was the extent of his acknowledgment. Pearson refused to make the desired apology and so did I, but the network brass failed to back us up. Faced with the threat of a libel suit, Treyz chose to deliver the apology himself, and to make the capitulation complete, he agreed to let Clifford write it for him. So, prior to our next broadcast, the president of the ABC television network appeared on-camera and read the mea culpa composed by Kennedy’s lawyer. Among other things, Treyz said, “We deeply regret this error and feel that it does a grave injustice to a distinguished public servant and author.”

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