The '68 election

In 1968, Sgt. Les Jackson (left) and I anchored AFTV-22's coverage of the U.S. presidential election. (USAF photo)

The 1968 U.S. presidential election would be the last to be anchored live in the AFTV-22 studio. Our resources: a UPI teletype machine, American Forces Radio and Television Service short-wave radio broadcasts from the States, and a decent selection of stock slides and film clips. AFRTS was not yet providing any live satellite coverage.

Planning for election night began several months in advance. Sgt. Les Jackson and I were assigned as co-anchors. Master Sergeant Jimmy Walker, the station manager, assigned himself to be producer.

Les and I spent hours in the library researching the candidates, their career paths, and their positions on the issues. Walker and the crew built an election-night set, lit it and plotted camera angles.

In our planning meetings, we realized we faced some obstacles. There were simply not enough of us to produce wall-to-wall coverage. But we could do live cut-ins twice an hour, more often as the unfolding story warranted. We knew we would have short-wave reports from network radio correspondents in the States. (We also knew that relying on short-wave radio could be dicey because of the medium's inherently poor quality.) We knew we would have vote tallies by way of the UPI teletype machine just as fast as they were available in the States. (We also realized that the UPI signal itself relied on short-wave radio from the States, and garbled news copy was a familiar problem.)

Back in the States the polls would close in the early evening. But that would be around midnight in Spangdahlem. It promised to be a long night at AFTV-22.

1968 was a year that came close to ripping the fabric of American unity apart. At AFTV-22, we had not been able to provide live pictures of the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the race riots that spread across the nation, or of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, or of the demonstrations against the Vietnam War, or of the confrontations between police and anti-war protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention. But our audience did read the Stars and Stripes newspaper every day, listened to the news on AFN radio and watched the nightly newscasts on AFTV. They had watched delayed film coverage of the campaign, and they were intensely interested in the Humphrey-Nixon race.

Richard Nixon ran on a promise to restore law and order, developing a strategy of appealing to conservative white Southerners. Hubert Humphrey decided on a combative campaign style and painted himself as an underdog in the mold of Harry Truman. Complicating the race was a strong third-party candidate, former Alabama governor and ardent segregationist George Wallace.

AFTV-22's coverage, given the obstacles, was respectable if not state-of-the-art. Our small staff began its reporting with the 10 p.m. newscast and cut-ins continued through the night. It was not until the next afternoon that a winner emerged. Nixon took the election with 301 electoral votes. (Humphrey got 191 electoral votes, and Wallace took 46. Just half a million popular votes separated the top two.)

By the time our coverage ended, the entire AFTV-22 staff was exhausted. We had done our job with few tools. We had kept our audience informed, maybe not with the bells and whistles of the professionals back in the States, but with the same speed and accuracy.

In the following weeks, as we sat around the bullpen office at the Spangdahlem studio, we talked about the coming of live satellite coverage. We knew that the days when we'd be working alone, and isolated, were numbered.

It happened faster than we expected. Just seven months later, we brought our audience live pictures from the moon.