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RICHARD HEFFNER ’46
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY RICHARD HEFFNER ’46
nearly struck when an engineer accidentally wiped the tape but
Heffner was able to sit down with her again, this time at the Park
Central Hotel in Manhattan. “Instead of hearing the chimes of the
clock in the background and the fireplace, you heard cars going
from first gear into second and then third, 17 stories below.”
Street noise notwithstanding, the effort went over well and
WMCA gave Heffner a syndicated weekly half-hour program, History
in the News. Even before the show had finished its run though,
toward the end of 1954, Heffner was looking ahead. Through California
Gov. Earl Warren — the father of one of his students at Berkeley
— he met Edward R. Murrow, whose signature sign-off, “Good
night and good luck,” Heffner still uses to conclude Open Mind.
“Murrow liked me. He immediately called Stuart Novins, the
head of CBS radio news. Novins offered me a job as a producer at
CBS News. And I said — here is the ham in me — ‘Can I be on the
air, also?’ And he said no. And I said, ‘Thanks, but I want to be on
the air.’ Maybe it was stupid. Maybe I would be president of CBS
News today.”
In the end, he got his way. WRCA-TV, the predecessor to NBC,
gave him Man of the Year, a public affairs show, in 1955. That led to
All About Men-All About Women and Of Men and Ideas, as well as radio
stints with Listen, Listen, Listen and Collector’s Item. But The Open
Mind, which originally aired on WRCA, remains the sine qua non of
Heffner’s broadcast life, the product of a fundamental realization.
“We’re talking about 1956,” Heffner says. “America had real
problems. But they were laid over with cash and comfort of the
wonderful suburban ’50s. I had the feeling that there were comparatively
few places where Americans were confronted with
important exchanges about important challenges that faced us,
and that’s what I wanted to be doing.”
Soon enough, Open Mind was delving into such hot-button areas
as alcoholism, integration, homosexuality, anti-Semitism and blacklisting
— so much so that a 1956 Newsday column was headlined
“Open Mind Moderator Denies Show Seeks Sensational Topics.”
But if the subjects were controversial, the guests were stellar.
In the decades that followed, they have included Margaret Mead
’23 Barnard, ’29 GSAS; Joseph Heller; Martin Luther King Jr.; Max
Frankel ’52, ’ 53 GSAS; Robert Redford; Max Lerner; Isaac Asimov
’39, ’41 GSAS; Gloria Steinem; Rod Serling; Norman Cousins ’37
TC; Eli Wallach; Ruth Westheimer ’70 TC; and Malcolm X.
In 1959, CBS chairman William S. Paley appointed Heffner
secretary of the network’s editorial board, “whipping the
owned-and-operated CBS television and radio stations into
doing editorials on a local level,” as Heffner says. Though his
power to set guidelines and write the editorials made him “very,
very unpopular” among station managers, he did not suffer their
displeasure for long. Within a year he became a special consultant
to the National Educational Television and Radio Center, which
led to his being named general manager of New York’s first public
television station, WNDT, the forerunner of today’s WNET.
For NETRC, the easy part about organizing the nascent station
was raising the necessary $6.2 million in seed money. Rather
more difficult was actually getting on the air. At the time, all seven
coveted VHF stations in the New York area were already in use.
So with the approval of the Federal Communications Commission,
NETRC purchased station WNTA, Channel 13, in Newark
— much to the consternation of New Jersey Gov. Robert Meyner,
who sued in federal court to block the takeover.
“Meyner was a strange man,” Heffner recalls. “He said, ‘You
are raping the sovereign state of New Jersey. You are taking its only
VHF station.’ And it was perfectly true. But it was a bankrupt station.
It was a distress sale, because it owed so much money.”
Once the sale cleared, and the purchasers incorporated as the
Educational Broadcasting Corp. (EBC), Heffner began a “pretty
goddamned busy, pretty goddamned exciting” phase of his life
as WNDT went on the air on September 16, 1962. Often working
from 6 a.m. until midnight, Heffner dealt with staff issues,
logistics, budgets, programming and the occasional emergency
— like when hordes of parents howled after he canceled a festival
of previously unaired Charlie Chaplin films in favor of coverage
of the Cuban missile crisis.
Not surprisingly, he was shattered when EBC fired him the
following April amid conflicts over policy and the very nature of
what was then called “educational television.” Heffner favored a
wide range of programming, especially expensive cultural fare;
EBC, led by president Sam Gould, envisioned WNDT as a cheaper
classroom of the air, specializing in instructional programs. The
New York Times covered the developing drama on its front page;
some 50 non-union WNDT staff members offered to take a 10
percent pay cut to retain their boss.
“I’m a teacher. I’m a talker. I’m a speaker.
I’m a preacher. That’s who I am.”
As WNET prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary this fall,
the memory still stings. “As you can imagine, having spent those
years in making a reality of something that had been a dream of
mine. … How did I feel when suddenly the ground was pulled
out from under me? Godawful.”
But the morning after he was sacked, Rutgers president Mason
Gross called and offered him a tenured faculty position; today,
he is the University Professor of Communications and Public
Policy. A few days later, pollster Elmo Roper provided him with a
secretary, an office and an appointment with AT&T.
“He said, ‘You have lunch with them, respond to their questions,
and be yourself.’ I went down, had a very nice — though
institutional — lunch and gave them some advice on communications
matters they thought terribly pressing. I came back, went
into Elmo’s office and said, ‘OK, Elmo, what do I do now?’ And
Elmo said, ‘Send them an invoice for $10,000.’”
It was the beginning of the consulting firm Richard Heffner Associates,
whose clients came to include Time, American Airlines
and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Heffner often quotes John Milton’s Areopagitica: “Who
ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open
encounter?” But having spent decades in the trenches,
Heffner also knows how the world works. A good
example occurred in 1987, when Judge Wachtler asked him to
chair a commission to determine whether cameras should be permitted
in New York state courtrooms. Years before the spectacle
of Court TV and the O.J. Simpson trial, Heffner said no, concluding
that networks would simply pluck juicy bits out of context.
“They were eager to put on the air attractive, sensational materials
from trials. They were not eager to teach lessons.”
In 1974, he got an even more bracing lesson
in media reality, when he was named
chairman of the Classification and Ratings
Administration (CARA) of the Motion Picture
Association of America at the personal
request of its president, Jack Valenti. Before
long, he had become what the Los Angeles
Times called “the least known, most powerful
man in Hollywood.” As such, he was
at the center of major ratings controversies
over the violence in such movies as Cruising
and Scarface (directed by Brian De Palma
’62); at one point he clashed with United
Artists chairman Arthur Krim ’30, ’32L
about Rollerball. Heffner felt it should be rated
“X,” prompting Krim to thunder, “This
man’s predecessor was a fanatic about sex;
this man is a fanatic about violence!”
Heffner enjoyed many aspects of the
job, though. As he told film critic Charles
Champlin in an exhaustive series of interviews
for the Columbia Center for Oral History,
“There were times when the picture
was over and I would say to my colleagues,
‘You know, this really makes it all worthwhile.’
And I meant it.”
But there was also endless wrangling with Valenti and industry
professionals who often cajoled, persuaded or pressured Heffner
and his board to assign a family-friendly “PG,” rather than an “R”
or a dreaded “X.” Almost weekly, Heffner commuted to and from
California to screen movies and meet with the board, refusing to
move there because he feared that constant socializing with actors
and directors would corrupt his integrity.
Not long after he was appointed, Heffner began to suggest
to Valenti — “always with the utmost politeness” — ways of
improving the system. He especially wanted to provide better
ratings explanations and more fully fleshed out guidelines to
distinguish between younger and older teenagers. At one point,
he pushed for an “RR” category between “R” and “X,” signaling
that the content was, as he put it, “really rough.” In the end, “PG-
13” was added in 1984 and “NC-17” supplanted “X” in 1990.
By the time he stepped down in 1994, Heffner had grave
doubts about the effectiveness of the self-imposed system. Immediately
upon leaving CARA, he became a senior fellow at the
Freedom Forum, at that time located on campus at the Journalism
School. In the year that followed, Heffner attempted to sort
out and put on paper the lessons he had learned in Hollywood
(or, as he put it, “in GaGaLand”). He remains conflicted about
voluntary ratings for films and, by extension, for TV shows, recordings
and video games.
But he is convinced of one thing at least, probably much to
the distress of his friend Abrams: “In a society so largely based
upon free speech and free thought, and in a society that is as
much based upon the almighty dollar as ours is, a larger degree
of regulation is necessary.”
Every Saturday at noon — except during pledge weeks
— viewers can tune to Channel 13 and be greeted by the
sight of two simple, intersecting human profiles with
brain-shaped holes cut in them, slowly revolving amid
the eerie strains of World Without Time by the Sauter [as in Edward
Sauter ’36]-Finegan Orchestra. Although graphic designer
Heffner studies his notes in preparation for a taping of The Open Mind.
PHOTO: RANDY MONCEAUX
Lee Moss designed Open Mind’s iconic logo, it was Heffner who
chose the accompanying theme, which he describes as “mental
health music.”
How much longer will it continue? At 87, Heffner is hardly
unaware of his mortality; he has even spoken with Alexander, his
grandson, about taking over the program. Open Mind, however,
is not just another venue for talking heads; its roster of guests and
topics, its low-key, probing, intellectual give-and-take, constitutes
a personal expression of the host himself.
Indeed, from 1959–67, when Heffner was busy with various
ventures and put the Princeton historian Eric Goldman in the moderator’s
chair in his stead, he was unhappy with the result. He felt
that Goldman, a cultural adviser to the White House, was pushing
a political agenda with the show. “He used his invitations to
feather the nest of the Johnson administration. As far as I was concerned,
they weren’t The Open Mind. That’s why, now, I’m much
more honest about it. I call it Richard Heffner’s Open Mind. It’s not
anyone else’s.
“How long I’ll be able to keep doing it, or how long my voice
or my mind will last — who knows?” he says, lounging in the
book-crammed study in his Riverside Drive apartment, his dog
Cassie resting on the couch. “Would I like to continue? Yes. I’d
like to continue to the point at which I know I’m no longer doing
what I did and others also feel that way. Then I hope I have the
good grace to say, ‘Good night and good luck’ a final time.
“Sure, maybe somebody can do Bill Moyers’ Open Mind, or Alexander
Heffner’s Open Mind, or whatever. But nobody’s going to
do what I did. I am who I am. And that’s all that I am. I’m Popeye
the sailor man.”
He smiles and looks semi-serious. “Remember that.”
Former Columbia College Today acting editor Thomas Vinciguerra
’85, ’86J, ’90 GSAS is executive editor of This Week From Indian
Country Today, a regular contributor to The New York Times and
the editor of Backward Ran Sentences: The Best of Wolcott Gibbs
from The New Yorker.
FALL 2012
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FALL 2012
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