One Sunday afternoon thirty-six years ago, in Chicago, I sat with my parents in front of the family’s brand-new television set, with its small, round-cornered screen, and watched the first of a new kind of program on CBS. It was called “See It Now,” and while most of what was shown during that first half-hour has faded from my memory, two things remain vivid. At one point a pair of monitors simultaneously showed New York Harbor and the Golden Gate—both a little wobbly, as I remember, and in black and white, of course, but each unquestionably live. (No technical achievement since—not even the sight of the first moon walkers, eighteen years later—has ever seemed to me so miraculous.)

Beyond that there was the extraordinary presence of the baleful host, squinting into the camera through a writhing blue-gray scrim of cigarette smoke, his voice, low, authoritative, a little weary, conveying the sense that there was very little in the world he hadn’t seen or heard or thought before.

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