An old letter from President Lyndon Johnson has been making the rounds on social media in the wake of ABC’s nervous-gulp suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and CBS’s more definitive cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”—decisions noisily lobbied for by our current President, whose minions contributed some Paulie Walnuts-style arm-twisting. The Johnson letter was addressed to Tom and Dick Smothers, the comedians whose hit CBS variety show, “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” took shots at the President’s stewardship of the Vietnam War in the late nineteen-sixties. L.B.J. offered magnanimity: “It is part of the price of leadership of this great and free nation to be the target of clever satirists,” he (or a secretary) wrote. “You have given the gift of laughter to our people. May we never grow so somber or self-important that we fail to appreciate the humor in our lives.”
The letter was dated November 9, 1968, five days after Richard Nixon defeated Johnson’s Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey, for the Presidency. Five months after that, with Nixon in the White House, CBS abruptly cancelled the Smothers brothers’ show. The network claimed that the series’ producers violated their contract by not providing finished episodes to its censors in a sufficiently timely manner (an assertion that would not pass muster in a subsequent civil-court case won by the brothers). Many, including the brothers themselves, felt that they were victims not only of skittish advertisers and conservative affiliates but also of the new Administration, which would prove unshy about targeting perceived foes in the media and elsewhere—though one might give that President a wee bit of credit for not going about it quite as nakedly as others.
Dick Smothers, who is eighty-six, took the long view the other day. “It sure didn’t start with us,” he insisted, when asked about politicians’ recurring habit of attempting to muzzle TV performers. “In my lifetime, it started with Edward R. Murrow, of course. But they didn’t fire him. They just switched him to a time slot not many people watched.” This is true. In 1954, Murrow exposed many of Joseph P. McCarthy’s lies on his CBS news-magazine show, “See It Now,” a tipping point in the senator’s downfall. Just a year later, the series lost its sponsor, Alcoa, and was shunted from its Tuesday-night prime-time slot to random, irregular dead zones on the schedule.
Smothers was speaking on the phone from his home upstate, not far from Niagara Falls, in the village of Lewiston—“a booming economic juggernaut of a hundred and fifty years ago,” as he put it. (A native Californian, he moved there for love.) Tom, his older brother by two years, died in 2023. They first found acclaim, in the early nineteen-sixties, as comedic folksingers, playing night clubs and releasing popular LPs. A failed but apparently likable sitcom led to “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” which débuted in February, 1967. It was a broad tent. Guests included Jack Benny, George Burns, Kate Smith, and Red Skelton. “We wanted the people we hung around the radio listening to when we were kids, people that meant something to us,” Smothers said. But the brothers also wanted the program to be “relevant. Not a silly show.” They assembled a legendary writers’ room, which included Steve Martin, Rob Reiner, and Bob Einstein. But relevancy turned out to be a moving, even accelerating target. “The sixties hadn’t really got into top gear yet,” Smothers said. When they did, “it was like being at the scene of an accident.”
The brothers clashed with the network over silly things, like a “Mutiny on the Bounty” sketch with George Segal that had naughty, homophonic fun with the word “frigate.” They also got in trouble for more serious efforts, like bringing on Pete Seeger, who was still blacklisted from the McCarthy era, to sing his antiwar song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” But all in all, Smothers said, the show’s satire “was gentle. We didn’t do things that were right in your face, like the monologues today.” That wasn’t meant as criticism: he said that he’s a fan of Kimmel, Colbert, and especially Jon Stewart. “They’re brilliant. Brilliant,” he said. The times, in his view, demand in-your-faceness.
Back in the day, Dick was the duo’s straight man; Tom was the pretend naïf who got the best lines and, backstage, served as the act’s guiding hand. “My brother had a little bad-boy thing,” Smothers said. “But to the day he died he also had a strong moral compass.” To that end, he recalled, Tom wrote an earnest letter to L.B.J. which both brothers signed, “basically not apologizing for what we were doing, but saying that, if we were heavy-handed, we didn’t mean to be.” Johnson’s letter to the brothers was his reply. It concluded, “If ever an Emmy is awarded for graciousness, I will cast my vote for you.”
Needless to say, the current White House occupant, an actual member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (though Emmy-less himself), is offering no such absolution. ♦
