Obit: Julian Goodman at 90...Former head of NBC

[CrankyYankee]

Mr. Goodman served as president of NBC from 1966 to 1974 and helped establish Chet Huntley and David Brinkley as a well-known news team.
 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/business/julian-goodman-dies-at-90-led-nbc.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries

[Mike Stroud]

Oh, yeah. Huntley-Brinkley would have been enough to enshrine anybody as a broadcast legend, and Goodman kept things going there well until Huntley's retirement in 1970. It's just a shame that NBC Nightly News didn't recover from that until the mid-1990s, as John Chancellor was up there with the best of them. Goodman also presided over radical changes in prime time, with the 1971 "Rural Purge" and the move toward "relevance" with shows like All in the Family on CBS. Those were tough enough, but NBC put up a good fight. Unfortunately, after he stepped down, the bottom seemed to fall out with ABC surging ahead to second, and eventually first, place.

[Joseph_Gallant]

Julian Go9odman was an NBC News executive in 1956, when the decision was made to pair Huntley and Brinkley as co-anchors of that year's TV coverage of the political conventions and elections. Their success at the conventions led NBC to have them replace John Cameron Swayze as anchors of the nightly newscast in late October of 1956.

For most of the fourteen years Huntley and Brinkley co-anchored NBC's evening newscast, theirs was the most popular network evening newscast.

By 1967, CBS's Walter Cronkite had overtaken Huntley and Brinkley, but Huntley and Brinkley remained a close second in the ratings until Huntley left NBC in 1970.

If my memory serves me correct, John Chancellor co-anchored NBC's live coverage of the Apollo 13 space mission (with Frank McGee), and it has been claimed that Chancellor's performance during that in-space crisis was what eventually got him an anchor chair.

[Mike Stroud]

If my memory serves me correct, John Chancellor co-anchored NBC's live coverage of the Apollo 13 space mission (with Frank McGee), and it has been claimed that Chancellor's performance during that in-space crisis was what eventually got him an anchor chair.

That's plausible, Joseph, although it must be remember that Chancellor, McGee, and David Brinkley functioned in a rotating capacity, with only two of them anchoring (sometimes one) on a given night, seven days a week, for the first year after Huntley's retirement. The Apollo 13 coverage probably earned Chancellor a spot in the rotation (he had been HBR's senior correspondent since his return to the Peacock Network in 1968), but I think it was mainly by default that he wound up as chief anchor on NBC Nightly News in 1971. Brinkley was tired of the anchor desk grind, having done it for 15 years, and decided to step back and do pre-recorded commentaries about 2-3 times per week. Meanwhile, McGee had been doing the local news on New York's WNBC in '70, and a spot opened up on The Today Show with the departure of Hugh Downs, so he went there. The sagging ratings against Cronkite on CBS above all else influenced NBC to go with Chancellor solo, which lasted until 1976, when Brinkley returned as co-anchor with him.

[oldiesfan6479]

The one thing I most remember about Julian Goodman is--each year at the World Series,
NBC had to take the obligatory shot of him "in his box" with the announcers (Curt Gowdy,
et al?) having to mention "NBC President Julian Goodman" and whomever was with him.

But then, that's (celeb-in-the-stands fawning) still still true with Buck/McCarver on Fox, no?