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Comment by BeatleBob on January 6, 2013 at 3:04pm

For the day that Mike Wallace scooped Sullivan, Paar, Cronkite, Brinkley, Huntley and every other American TV host by presenting a film clip of the Beatles on his mid-morning show CBS Morning News With Mike Wallace was… Friday November 22nd 1963.

The tragedy of President Kennedy’s assassination naturally meant that everything else that happened earlier that day was of zero consequence. And as the world mourned JFK and became engulfed in the awful news, the light-hearted story that Mike Wallace had presented just two hours earlier faded very rapidly.

Wallace himself forgot all about it.

But 18 days later one man DID remember it.

Mike Wallace’s senior colleague at CBS News — Walter Cronkite.

Cronkite was looking for a way to lift the spirits of the devastated American public with a cheerful segment. And he recalled the film clip that Wallace had introduced on his Morning News show that dreadful Dallas morning. The clip had originally been intended to be repeated that same night (November 22nd) on Cronkite’s own newscast. But of course the regular Nightly News was preempted by rolling news coverage about the assassination.

Cronkite decided to resurrect the story and on Tuesday December 10th 1963, he re-aired the sparkling five-minute film clip of the Beatles enchanting their British fans. To a nation still reeling from the massive emotional trauma of JFK’s assassination, the exuberant optimism of the Fab Four offered solace and the glimpse of a New Beginning. The film clip triggered an astonishing chain reaction that kick-started Beatlemania in the USA. The Beatles would have happened in America anyway of course. But the velocity and magnitude of their American breakthrough sprang from that Walter Cronkite news story. The one that Cronkite saw Mike Wallace introduce…

As so many of his colleagues and competitors would discover over the years — Mike Wallace got there first.