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- <text id=94TT0330>
- <title>
- Mar. 21, 1994: Died:Lawrence Spivak
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994
- Mar. 21, 1994 Hard Times For Hillary
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- MILESTONES, Page 26
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p> DIED. LAWRENCE SPIVAK, 93, pioneering TV interviewer; in Washington.
- The aggressive grilling of public officials now considered the
- norm for video journalism can be traced to Meet the Press, a
- no-holds-barred interview program introduced on radio, then
- transferred to television in the late '40s, where it remains
- the paradigm of Sunday-morning news shows. The Brooklyn-born
- Spivak originally intended Meet the Press as a promotion for
- his American Mercury magazine, but its refreshing confrontations
- with the powerful soon became phenomena unto themselves. In
- the '50s Meet the Press featured Whitaker Chambers insisting
- that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy, Thomas Dewey's 1950 revelation
- that he would not be running for the presidency and a Pentagon
- general's admission that the Soviets had developed a nuclear
- bomb. Spivak's tenacious questioning made him an object of admiration
- and fear among politicians until his retirement in 1975, by
- which time Meet the Press had long since been paid the ultimate
- compliment--a flood of imitators.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-
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