Growing up Brian Lamb

Brian Lamb, born in 1941, is the founder, retired CEO, and executive chairman of C-SPAN. WORLD Magazine’s Sept. 19 issue includes an interview with him, but we didn’t have room in the print edition to examine the circuitous path he took to becoming a cable journalism pioneer. Here are edited excerpts from the interview in front of students at Patrick Henry College.

In 1952, when you were living in Indiana, your parents took you to the inauguration of Dwight Eisenhower. What’s most vivid? There was a huge accident at Union Station, where the train from Baltimore lost its brakes and ran all the way into the concourse and dumped into the train station, just as we were getting in. Fortunately no one was killed, but that was my entrance to Washington—a train wreck.

Happens all the time at Union Station. All the time. Every day.

As a child in Indiana you listened to talk radio shows from Chicago and they often put you to sleep. I built a little crystal set that didn’t cost more than a piece of wood and a little crystal to listen to the local radio station. I had a little earpiece at the time, and the odd thing is that I still listen to the radio the same way, with an earpiece. I don’t listen to put myself to sleep. I listen because I want to learn something, but at that time of night often you fall asleep. I think it’s osmosis—if it keeps on playing I’m hoping to pick up some new information.

Like learning foreign languages while you’re asleep so you don’t have to study? Foreign languages and I never got along very well, so I don’t know if that would have helped me.

Do you have hand puppets of congressmen? I do.

How do you have those? Two girls, who were probably 10 and 8, and their father was a C-SPAN junkie—probably still is—they made these hand puppets configured like members of Congress or Cabinet officers. I still have them somewhere in my office.

Do you ever have the temptation to do a puppet show on TV? When my brother and I were in grade school, we did puppet shows all the time. I had marionettes and we used to put on little skits for my mother’s bridge club. That was probably my first very exciting experience in show biz, so I should get those out. That would probably drive somebody I was interviewing completely crazy if I sat there with the hand puppets on my hands as I was interviewing them.

You graduated from Purdue and then joined the Navy for four years—and the last two of those in Washington, where you became an aide to Lyndon Johnson. It was not as big as it sounds. I worked inside the Pentagon and got this fabulous opportunity from time to time to be called to the White House to be part of the service crowd and keep everything running. President Johnson was a very interesting man to observe.

What was most interesting? The most engaged of all the presidents I’ve ever seen. We had the Vietnam War going at full speed and he also was trying to pass the civil rights laws and Medicare.

You started going over to Congress at times to listen to the debates. I would wander in at night into the House of Representatives or the Senate, and just see what it was like up close.

Was that encouraging or discouraging? Just educational. There were no cameras there at the time and no people in the galleries. It was a lot more rowdy than it is now and a lot more drinking going on, at least that you could see. It wasn’t surprising to see somebody a little tipsy. There was a lot of backroom partying going on.

Some describe that period as if it were a golden age of everyone getting along. I have a hard time believing that. It was very, very partisan at the time in a different way than it is now because you had a Democratic Party with both far left and far right people, and a Republican Party with both Jacob Javits and Barry Goldwater. There was nothing nastier than the civil rights fight because you had people like Richard Russell, basically a white separatist, fighting Hubert Humphrey, who wanted a civil rights bill. But you didn’t see that much of it in those days because there was no television coverage.

At one point you went to Detroit to report on how George Romney handled riots. I was in the Pentagon, and in July 1967 there were horrible riots in Detroit in which 43 people were killed and several hundred wounded. They sent in the 82nd Airborne. They thought George Romney, the governor of Michigan, would run for president, and Lyndon Johnson wanted somebody to keep watch on everything Romney said there. I was not the slightest bit political, but they came to me because I was a lieutenant junior grade in the Navy. They told me to get on an airplane in civilian clothes, take my tape recorder, and record everything George Romney said in public. They’d transcribe it at the White House and send it to the president.

You didn’t get married until later in life. I didn’t get married till I was 63, so I’m sure being a lifelong bachelor had some impact on my life and how I see things.

What took you so long? I should have been able to figure this out a long time ago, because my wife’s so terrific that it would have been a plus for me to have been married to her a lot longer. But we’ve been married 10 years and it’s going well.

Weren’t you in the fifth grade and she in the first grade when you met? You’ve done research. That is absolutely true. My wife and I went to the same grade school. We dated in the early ’70s and things didn’t work out—for no major reason, they just didn’t work out circumstantially. And then 27 years later I found I could call her and she might want to have a meal. I called her and we only waited eight years before we got married.

Don’t want to rush into things. Yes, but it’s been so good it was worth waiting for.