The White House Years
Between 1969 and 1970, Whitehead served as Special Assistant to President Richard Nixon. In this capacity, he crafted the “Open Skies” domestic satellite policy that allowed any qualified private company to launch communications satellites, thereby rejecting the monopoly model for the technology.
The policy enabled cable television networks including C-SPAN, CNN, and HBO to prosper and created a ripple effect that ultimately led to sweeping and lasting changes in the telecommunications landscape.
In 1970, Whitehead led the effort to create the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy (OTP), which he announced at a White House Press conference on January 23, 1970. Having tried to recruit heads for the new office, and finding none that fit the description he had in mind, he took the job himself and was confirmed by the U. S. Senate in 1970. Brian Lamb was an assistant. He resigned in 1974.
One of OTP’s accomplishments included ending the regulatory freeze on the infant cable industry, which then permitted it to compete with television broadcasting and, eventually, the established telephone industry.
Whitehead’s policies also impacted broadcasting directly. “He was credited with formulating policies that gave more autonomy to local stations in the public broadcasting system, which was seen by some PBS executives as an attack on the service in large part because of Dr. Whitehead's early reputation for antagonizing the press.”
In a noted 1972 speech, Whitehead used the terms "elitist gossip" and "ideological plugola" to echo the Nixon administration's claims of liberal bias in network news. Walter Cronkite claims in his memoir that Whitehead suggested to affiliate stations that they need not carry network news reports such as Cronkite's, and instead could rely on wire dispatches.
In the spring of 1974, Whitehead secretly organized and led the effort, including Jonathan Moore, assistant to Attorney General Elliott Richardson; Brian Lamb, a journalist; and Laurence Lynn, Jr., Assistant Secretary for Policy, Health Education and Welfare, to plan Vice President Ford's transition to the Presidency.
Read more about this topic: Clay T. Whitehead
Famous quotes containing the words white, house and/or years:
“Less smooth than her Skin and less white than her breast
Was this pollisht stone beneath which she lyes prest
Stop, Reader, and Sigh while thou thinkst on the rest
With a just trim of Virtue her Soul was endu’d
Not affectedly Pious nor secretly lewd,
She cut even between the Cocquet and the Prude.”
—Matthew Prior (1664–1721)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of man, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.—And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)