Swing (Jan-Dec 1953)

The Cream of Crosby Eighteen times a month, the New York Herald-Tribune' s radio and television critic erupts pungent little essays on life — life as seen on TV screens, heard on the radio. Swing cannot print all of them in our brief pages . . . but here are a jew you'll enjoy! By JOHN CROSBY The Little Picture of History WE IN the United States are rather short on panoply, our public functions running to boiled shirts and hom' burgs rather than to powdered wigs and scarlet robes. But what the inaugural lacked in pageantry (by, let us say, comparison with the upcoming British coronation), it more than made up for in the sheer weight and grandeur of tradition which, I thought, the four television networks conveyed magnificently to an audience estimated at 75,000,000. When you consider that the inaugural is — considering its importance — a very simple and brief ceremony, I had the feeling that the huge roster of cameras and commentators and technicians sent to Washington by the TV networks wouldn't have much to record. It didn't work out that way. What came across most clearly was — not the parade with its bands and marching troops which television always does well — but the faces of the outgoing and incoming leaders of our country. There was nothing more impressive than the procession to the inaugural stand of Senators, of Governors, of Supreme Court Justices and Cabinet members and Joint Chiefs. For these were not just names of celebrated people, they were the people themselves — a smiling, assured Tom Dewey, an impassive General Marshall, an expressionless Dean Acheson remote as the moon. There was Herbert Hoover, ar