One night while my family was having dinner, the president of the United States called my dad to complain about something he’d seen on television. My father, Newton Minow, was then the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. And the president, John F. Kennedy, was furious.
“Did you see Huntley-Brinkley tonight?” Kennedy asked, referring to NBC’s nightly news broadcast, anchored by the journalists Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. The news report had featured steel executives bitterly attacking Kennedy, who was angry with them about an increase in steel prices. The president yelled over the phone, “Did you see how those guys lied about me? Outrageous! Do something about it!” Dad said he would.
The next morning, Dad called the White House and spoke with Kennedy’s aide Kenny O’Donnell, who had been with the president during the phone call the night before. Dad said he would be happy to talk to the president, or O’Donnell could give him this message: “He is lucky to have a friend at the FCC who knew not to pay attention to the president when the president was angry.” A week later, at a diplomatic reception, Kennedy beckoned to my dad, waving him over. He then put his arm around Dad’s shoulders and whispered, “Thank you.”
What my father knew, and what Kennedy appreciated once he’d calmed down, is that it may be hard to hear what people think of your ideas, but it is the only way to test them. And even when people do not agree, feeling heard often helps gain their confidence and support.
Dad is best remembered for a speech he gave on May 9, 1961, to the National Association of Broadcasters, when he told television executives that they needed to do a better job of living up to their license agreements to serve the public interest. He said, “When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better.” But, he warned, television is also a “vast wasteland.” In return for the privilege of using the public airwaves, he said, broadcasters had to do more for the good of the citizenry. (He reflected on that speech in the pages of this magazine in 2011, in honor of its 50th anniversary.) The broadcasters were not happy. One producer even decided to insult him by naming the sinking ship on Gilligan’s Island the S.S. Minnow. (We are all very proud of that.) They may not have liked his message, but Dad knew where to draw the line. He had assured the broadcasters, “I am unalterably opposed to governmental censorship. There will be no suppression of programming which does not meet with bureaucratic tastes. Censorship strikes at the tap root of our free society.”
So, in his nearly three years at the FCC, Dad’s priority was not restricting content but expanding choices. (In those days, network news was just 15 minutes a day, and programming for children included local productions and Howdy Doody.) When Dad was at the FCC, the equal-time rules and the fairness doctrine were still in effect. The theory was that because the broadcast spectrum was limited, anyone granted a license to use the public airwaves had to allow all sides of an argument to be presented.
Dad got three major pieces of legislation passed while he was at the FCC, all giving viewers more choices. The laws required new television sets to have chips enabling access to UHF channels—remember the “U” knob on old televisions?— launched the first telecommunications satellite, and created an alternative to the commercial networks. All of these moves meant more access to more choices in television programming for the public.
Dad and President Kennedy both came from cities with educational television channels, WTTW in Chicago and WGBH in Boston, respectively. (WGBH is now chaired by my sister Martha Minow.) When they learned that most cities, including Washington, D.C., did not have an educational station, they worked together to establish PBS. I remember him explaining to my sisters and me why it was important that “educational television” was becoming “public television.” And when Kennedy asked Dad why the telecommunications satellite mattered so much to him, Dad told him it was more important than putting a person in space, because the satellite would launch ideas, and ideas last longer than people.
Dad did once threaten a station’s license when he was at the FCC, and it was because of another phone call, this time from a former resident of the White House. Eleanor Roosevelt called Dad just before Election Day in 1962 and said, “Why aren’t you helping Reverend Smith?” Reverend L. T. Smith was a Black minister who was running for Congress in Jackson, Mississippi. The local station, WLBT, refused to sell him advertising time. The FCC staff had decided not to get involved, because his opponent, the incumbent, was not seeking time, and thus their decision complied with the equal-time rules. Dad directed the staff to send WLBT a telegram telling the station that it had to sell Smith airtime or risk not being able to renew its license. And that’s how, for the first time ever, a Black candidate in Mississippi had a chance to speak to voters on television.
Twenty years after he left the FCC, I got to hear Dad argue for the revocation of a radio station’s license. A station then called KTTL, based in Dodge City, Kansas, was broadcasting virulently racist and anti-Semitic programming. The FCC ruled that hate speech was protected under the First Amendment and it could not deny a license for that reason. By then, though, the station had been sold and the new owner changed the call letters and switched the programming to contemporary music. I am sure Dad thought that was the right solution.
Dad was 97 years old when he died in 2023. I think about him every day, and I have a good sense of what he’d say about what is unfolding in our country now. He decided to share publicly the story about Kennedy’s phone call—and his decision to disobey the president—just before Donald Trump was inaugurated for his first term. He thought of it as a cautionary tale for Trump’s incoming appointees. Dad was passionately committed to robust argument and the marketplace of ideas as the best way to solve problems and seek a fairer world. (You should have heard the debates every night at our family dinners. Unsurprisingly, my sisters and I all became lawyers.)
I have spent much of my career studying corporations that fail, and the one consistent theme in all of them is leadership that insulates itself from bad news, complaints, and disagreements. Dad taught us that arguing can be productive, but that insults are not arguments. He said we had to be able to disagree in good faith, and we had to be able to state an opposing view in terms that even those who disagreed could see as accurate.
He would have admired Harvard President Alan M. Garber’s response this week to Trump’s efforts to control universities. Gerber promised that his institution would “proceed now, as always, with the conviction that the fearless and unfettered pursuit of truth liberates humanity.” Just as my dad told Kennedy he was wrong, the people who make up the institutions we depend on for the pursuit of truth— people at news organizations, schools, museums, and libraries—must remain committed to supporting fearless empiricism, logic, and debate, even when it hurts the president’s feelings.
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