(2 of 2)
What had happened? NBC had pulled the rug out from under its competitors by secretly switching the rules for its Election Night victory calls. While ABC and CBS analysts cautiously awaited voting results from their 7,000 sample precincts, NBC executives decided to use their exit polls as a basis for calling many states rather than wait for any real vote counts. NBC'S reasoning: in a landslide, there is no place for punctilio.
Walter Cronkite soon made up for lost time by scoring a remarkable coup: a three-way interview with former President Gerald Ford at the anchor desk with him in New York and President-elect Reagan in Los Angeles. Earlier, Ford had tried unsuccessfully to phone Reagan. So as the President-elect left the Century Plaza Hotel after claiming victory, CBS Correspondent Bill Plante persuaded him to hold a network headset to his ear and trade long-distance pleasantries with Cronkite and Ford. Said Ford: "You'll make a fine President." Responded Reagan: "This victory is certainly yours to share."
ABC was not so cool under fire. Shocked by the 8:15:21 bomb, ABC's crew rushed to catch up—and proceeded to call two races wrong. Retracting his prediction of victory for incumbent Governor William Clinton in Arkansas, a slightly sheepish Max Robinson called Clinton's defeat "a stunning upset."
As the evening wound down to the last few computer-generated graphic bumps and grinds, NBC's fast draw was drawing as much comment in certain quarters as the election itself. CBS News' Bill Leonard insisted, while sipping a Coke, that NBC's cannonball finish was "small beer." He added: "We all knew it was going to be a landslide. If one horse is a foot from the finish line and all the others have fallen down, calling the race then or waiting until he finishes is a technicality, perhaps. Did CBS tell you Carter was winning?" San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, for one, complained when NBC's early prediction effectively ended the race three hours before the polls closed in her state.
In reply, NBC News President William Small snapped: "In 18 years as a journalist, I've lived in a number of places where the best thing you could do to keep an election honest was to report it as quickly as you could. "Small admitted that the crew at NBC was fairly aglow over winning the call-'em-first race. So, evidently, was he. Rubbing it in, he declared a bit condescendingly: "The mystery to us is why the others weren't doing it quicker."
—By Janice Castro.
Reported by Elizabetg Rudulph/New York