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NBC White Paper No. 8 (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Chet Huntley examines Khrushchev's moves and motives in exploiting the Berlin crisis.
Year-End News Roundup (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Reports by ABC newsmen around the world.
THEATER
On Broadway
A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt, might have taken its theme from a line of Shakespeare's: "Every subject's duty is the king's, but every subject's soul is his own." As the subject, Sir Thomas More, Actor Paul Scofield is flawless.
Gideon, by Paddy Chayefsky, enlarges on the Biblical tale with more humor than eloquence, more religious speculation than exaltation, but the acting of Fredric March and Douglas Campbell supplies the necessary power and glory.
The Complaisant Lover, by Graham Greene, amusingly argues that love and marriage do not mix, but that lovers and husbands can be good mixers.
Write Me a Murder, by Frederick Knott, gives its killer a pen with which to sign his own death warrant, and after some fancy scalp tingling, he does.
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is a bright, captivating spoof of corporate wheels and wiles. In a bravura display of officemanship, Robert Morse proves an irresistible comic wonder.
A Shot in the Dark, adapted by Harry Kurnitz from a Paris hit, puts a pinch of murder into a pot of sex. It is expertly stirred by Julie Harris and Walter Matthau.
The Caretaker, by Harold Pinter, holds a mirror up to two strange brothers and a verminous tramp and, in it, an audience can read humorous and heartbreaking truths about the human condition.
Off Broadway 2 by Saroyan mates Talking to You, a brief, touching, one-act parable of Good and Evil, with Across the Board on Tomorrow Morning, a full, hilarious, one-act serving of prime Time of Your Life Saroyantics. As a waiter in a zany café, Milt Kamen is enormous fun to be with.
Misalliance, by George Bernard Shaw. That old boulevardier of the intellect, G.B.S., loved to wear ideas like carnations. Unlike carnations, few of the ideas in this 1910 buttonhole have withered.
BOOKS
Best Reading
But Not in Shame, by John Toland. A historian's painstaking account of the first six disastrous months of the war in the Pacific makes a moving, suspenseful documentary.
The Letters of Beethoven, edited by Emily Anderson. For those who are forever trying to dissect genius, this is an instructive and humbling collection; the composer's letters show him to have been petty, sour, contentious and a hypochondriac, and give no hint at all of the spirit that soars in his music.
Lawrence of Arabia: The Man and the Motive, by Anthony Nutting. Britain's quirky compost of desert hero, scholar and aircraftman, who has provided plenty of controversial copy for novelists, playwrights, biographers and muckrakers, is dissected again in an absorbing analysis by Britain's onetime Minister of State for Foreign Affairs.
Assembly, by John O'Hara. The best ear in the business listens in on modern America with 26 short stories, some of which rank high among O'Hara's upper-middle classics.