First Person - February 24, 1999
"Now I'll never finish my thesis"
A twice-missed opportunity, or the career not taken
by Michael W. Klein '87
I never finished my thesis. Oh, sure, I handed in two copies of it to the history department right at the deadline in 1987, and one copy remains entombed in Mudd Library, along with yours. But after all these years, one unfinished piece of research kept jab, jab, jabbing at me: an interview with CBS News producer Fred Friendly. I was hoping finally to meet Friendly last year at Columbia University's School of Journalism, where he was a professor emeritus and where I had applied for a master's degree.
I was accepted into the journalism school on April 1. But Friendly had died on March 4.
I became fascinated with Friendly and his longtime partner, Edward R. Murrow, while researching my senior opus on the politics of programming decisions at CBS during the network's early years. The original thesis of my thesis was that Murrow and Friendly's famous See It Now programs on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, in 1954, helped convince the Senate to censure the junior senator from Wisconsin. Turns out I was wrong (the movement to censure McCarthy was already under way by the time the FriendlyMurrow programs aired), and I was left with all this research and nothing to prove. "Why not write about why CBS was willing to expose McCarthy, but none of the other networks were?" my adviser asked.
A thesis was born.
While my classmates conducted their research by splitting cells, composing computer code, and sifting through the stacks in Firestone, I watched TV. Ten total hours of it, to be precise, as a visiting scholar at the Museum of Broadcasting (now the Museum of Television and Radio), in New York. I watched episodes of I Love Lucy, Gunsmoke, and The $64,000 Question. But I kept going back to the MurrowFriendly programs: a profile of J. Robert Oppenheimer on See It Now; an exposé of the conditions of migrant workers in the documentary Harvest of Shame; an interview with Marilyn Monroe on Person to Person.
Murrow and Friendly were a team unlike any other in television news. With the permission of network executives, they ran their program like a newspaper column. Their film crews were separate from the CBS News staff. And See It Now's corporate sponsor, Alcoa, did not meddle in the program's affairs, as sponsors of other programs often did at the time. This freedom allowed Murrow and Friendly to tackle the controversial issues of the 1950s, such as the diplomatic recognition of Communist China, segregation in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, and McCarthyism. Interviewing Friendly about his days at CBS would have been a natural. Murrow died in 1965, but Friendly was alive and well when I was a senior. On the book jacket of Friendly's memoir, Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control, I learned that he was teaching at Columbia. That meant he was only an hourlong train ride away. But I was too shy to call him. "He'll never want to talk to a measly college student," I thought. So I contented myself with mostly researching the secondary sources on Firestone's shelves while the primary source of all time was sitting in Morningside Heights.
Good historians can't be shy, I learned. In her comments on my thesis, my adviser wrote, "Klein did a firstrate job with secondary sources, but he could have investigated more primary materials than he did." That hurt.
A SECOND CHANCE AT JOURNALISM
Ten years and one unsatisfying law career later, I finally started my primarysource pilgrimage toward Fred Friendly when I applied to Columbia's journalism school in the fall of 1997. After I received the admissions bulletin, the first thing I did was check the list of faculty members. Sure enough, there on page 39 was Fred Friendly, the Edward R. Murrow Professor Emeritus of Journalism.
I visited the campus in November and went there again in January to take the journalism school's admission test, but neither time did I try to see Friendly. Over 10 years later, my shyness still ran deep.
While waiting for the journalism school's decision, I pretended to be a newsman by reading the AP newswire every day. On March 4, I saw the report about Friendly's death at the age of 82 after a series of strokes. I let out a groan, but not over the passing of one of the pioneers of television. I had a more selfish thought: "Now I'll never finish my thesis."
News from Columbia came four weeks later: I got in. In May, I attended a twoday open house that unwittingly rubbed salt in my throbbing thesis wound. Remembrances of Friendly filled campus magazines and newsletters, providing yet more secondarysource material. And Steve Kroft, coeditor of 60 Minutes, accepted an alumni award and showed what my shyness really cost me when he recounted the influence of his mentor, Fred Friendly.
While serving in Vietnam as a correspondent for Pacific Stars & Stripes, Kroft read Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control and decided to go to Columbia to study under Friendly. He described Friendly as a tough old guy who constantly said of Kroft's work, "You can do better than this." But Friendly took a liking to Kroft and helped start him on the road to CBS.
Several other Columbia alumni remembered that Friendly would tell his students, "My job is to make the agony of decisionmaking so intense that you can escape only by thinking." I thought hard that weekend, and after much agonizing, I decided not to accept Columbia's offer but to remain a lawyer.
Not interviewing Fred Friendly still jab, jab, jabs at me. Would he have given me great material for my thesis that would have impressed my adviser? Would he have convinced me to go to journalism school instead of law school? Would he have started me on a broadcast career like Steve Kroft? I'll never know.
But I do know Friendly would have looked at my thesis and said, "You could have done better than this." And he would have been right.
Michael W. Klein '87 lives in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, and is the deputy director of legislative affairs for the N.J. Department of the Treasury.
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