Season 30, Day 17 - "K. Pop Quiz"
It's Smith week, and today's quiz is inspired by Howard K. Smith.
Howard K. Smith
Howard K. Smith was a news anchor. He was one of the Murrow Boys, the WWII correspondents who worked for Edward R. Murrow at the CBS Radio Network. Despite being critical of Soviet policies, Smith was cited as a communist sympathizer in the 1950 Red Channels report, placing him on the Hollywood blacklist. From 1960 to 1961, he was the moderator of the CBS Sunday news show Face the Nation (currently hosted by Margaret Brennan). He was also the moderator of the opening debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960, the first ever televised U.S. presidential election debate. In 1961, Smith took a principled stand and refused when CBS President William Paley ordered him to remove an Edmund Burke quote (“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”) from the end of a civil rights segment. He was soon hired by ABC and in 1968 moderated a series of debates between the famous intellectuals Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr., which inspired the 2015 documentary Best of Enemies. Smith then co-anchored the ABC Evening News (first alongside Frank Reynolds, and later with Harry Reasoner). He was granted a rare hour-long, one-on-one interview with President Nixon in 1971 and later was the first national TV commentator to call for his resignation over Watergate. He often appeared in movies as himself; notable examples include Nashville, Network, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.