Gordon Manning
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John Gordon Manning Jr. (28 May 1917 — 6 September 2006) was a news executive at CBS and NBC and a former executive editor at Newsweek.
Manning is credited with arranging the first interview between Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev and an American correspondent and an exclusive interview with Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn shortly after Solzhenitsyn's exile from the Soviet Union in 1974.
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[edit] Biography
Manning was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where his parents worked in a watchmaking factory.
He graduated from Boston University in 1941. He served as editor of the student newspaper in college.
Manning joined the staff of United Press in Boston. During World War II he served in the Navy.
[edit] Journalism career
After the war, Manning worked in a series of menial editing jobs until he was assigned to write a feature article on New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra for Collier's magazine. The response to that feature resulted in Manning being hired as a managing editor at Collier's.
When Collier's ceased publication, Manning joined the staff of Newsweek.
Manning's coverage of the 1964 Alaska earthquake was noticed by Fred Friendly, then-president of CBS News, who was disappointed with the CBS staff's slow response to the disaster. Friendly hired Manning, and Manning was at CBS News until 1975, when a demotion resulting from internal politics caused him to jump to NBC News.
[edit] Accomplishments
While at CBS News, Manning helped direct coverage of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. He urged the network to air a two-part special report by Walter Cronkite on Watergate that brought national attention to what had been a Washington Post story.
When President Nixon attempted to normalize relations with mainland China, Manning tried to arrange an interview with the Chinese representative to the United Nations, Huang Hua. Huang rebuffed Manning. Manning bought all the first class seats on an Air France flight Huang was taking from Paris to New York. Manning instructed the flight attendants to serve unlimited champagne to Huang. When Manning, accompanied by Cronkite and a cameraman, approached Huang later in the flight, the ambassador provided CBS with an in-flight interview that contrasted sharply with the terse statement he made to the reporters upon arrival in New York.
Gordon Manning, 89, a TV News Executive, Dies Sign In to E-Mail This Print Reprints Save
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: September 9, 2006 WESTPORT, Conn., Sept. 8 (AP) — Gordon Manning, a television news executive for both NBC and CBS who helped guide the coverage of important news events, died on Wednesday in Norwalk, Conn. He was 89.
He died at Norwalk Hospital after suffering heart failure at his home in Westport, said his son Douglas Manning.
Gordon Manning arranged the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s first interview on American television for NBC in 1987.
Mr. Gorbachev’s one-hour exchange with the NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw was broadcast in November 1987, shortly before his summit meeting with President Ronald Reagan. Mr. Manning had visited Moscow regularly for two years, cultivating contacts in the Kremlin, in his effort to land the interview.
The interview and another major NBC project from 1987, “Changing China,” won Mr. Manning a George Polk Award in Journalism in 1988.
Earlier, as an executive at CBS, Mr. Manning led the news team that covered President Richard M. Nixon’s trip to China in 1972. Mr. Manning returned to China in 1989 to help direct NBC’s coverage of the student uprising in Tiananmen Square.
Also in 1972, Mr. Manning was a leading backer of the decision to run a detailed report on Watergate on the “CBS Evening News,” according to the book “The Powers That Be” by David Halberstam.
The 14-minute length of the first segment of Walter Cronkite’s report in fall 1972 helped ensure national attention to the emerging scandal.
Mr. Manning joined NBC in 1975 and directed its political coverage in 1976, leading it to become the first network to use the method of displaying a color-coded map to indicate candidates’ election victories state by state, his son said.
Mr. Manning started his journalism career in Boston as a reporter for United Press International. He later went on to jobs as managing editor of Collier’s magazine, executive editor of Newsweek and vice president of both CBS News and NBC News.
As his friend Art Buchwald, the humorist, sees it, Gordon Manning, a staff consultant to NBC News, is the man in the middle no one knows who arranges for things to happen.
By no one he means the public. Just about everybody in television -to say nothing of diplomats around the world - knows Gordon Manning, He's full of enthusiasm, unflagging energy, spouting ideas a mile a minute, said Sandford Socolow, a producer of 60 Minutes for CBS News. A lot are hairbrained and crazy and some are really brilliant.
Tonight at the Roosevelt Hotel, Mr. Manning will receive a George Polk Award for foreign television reporting. The prize cites Mr. Manning's role last year in bringing about a weeklong series of live broadcasts from China and Tom Brokaw's interview with the Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
He feels honored, he said, but not too keen about being in the limelight. I think you can work better behind the scenes, said Mr. Manning, who joined NBC as an executive producer in 1975 after 10 years with CBS News. Wearing Down Gorbachev
Speaking in his small office overlooking the skating rink at Rockefeller Plaza, he took pains to credit teammates. Affable, with a direct blue-eyed gaze, Mr. Manning, who looks younger than his 70 years, occasionally interviewed his interviewer. He glanced from time to time at television screens - tuned to the major networks and the Cable Television Network - for expected news on the Moscow summit meeting in May, whose coverage he is helping to plan.
At the Gorbachev interview, Mr. Brokaw said, he introduced Mr. Manning as the author of many memos to the Soviet leader, and Mr. Gorbachev replied that he had read them all and that he had finally declared: Enough! We'll do the interview!
Mr. Manning, who was vice president for editorial projects until last June, is famous for his memos -Gordograms, his colleagues call them - written on matchbook covers, NBC stationary, the back of throw-up bags from airplanes, whatever is handy, Mr. Brokaw reported.
Every day I get a blizzard, said Larry Grossman, president of NBC News. Some are typed by his indefatigable secretary and some by Gordon himself on his portable typewriter, which is no respecter of left hand margins. His ideas are all out of current news. Gordon is a voracious reader and tearer of news clips. A few of his ideas are extraordinary and many of them are not. He's persistent, stubborn and he gets annoyed when you don't respond to his memos, but you can't get mad at him; there's a charm, a lively innocence and enormous good will. Two Sides of the Coin
As Steve Friedman, former executive producer of the Today show sees it: We think people give in to him to get them off their back. He's an ebullient guy and people underestimate him. They think he's a hail fellow well met. But there's a lot of guile in that shiny, good old boy.
Accounts of his achievements abound, from maps that light up in color to show election results to his key roles in taking the Today show to Moscow for a week in 1984 and in a Peabody Award-winning series of live telecasts from Vietnam in 1985.
And there are stories of Gordograms rejected - although some lore is altered in the telling. For instance, Mr. Manning did not propose a musical variety show version of election coverage on NBC. Well, not exactly.
He suggested that coverage of off-year elections be interspersed with bits of a David Letterman program devoted to politics. Although off-year elections can be very important, he said, the results as they come in are not of nonstop interest.
So, he envisaged filling the gaps with Mr. Letterman's irreverent humor, music, interviews and whatever the late-night host might cook up. The goal was to eliminate boring stretches, he said, and tap an election-time spirit he thinks has all but disappeared.
When I was a boy, he said, people would go to the town square at election time and there would be bunting and flags and speeches. A lot of the fun, color, pageantry and patriotism have gone out of it.
[edit] Death
Manning died at Norwalk Hospital in Connecticut, aged 89. The cause of death was congestive heart failure.
