Drew Pearson

In 1966, when the still-young Dallas Cowboys franchise ended six years of agony with their first winning season, the team’s owner and founder, Clint Murchison Jr., son of a billionaire oilman, was feeling ambitious. He believed his team would be good, even special, for years to come. With such dreams dancing in his head, Murchison found that the aging Cotton Bowl in Dallas’s Fair Park was no longer a suitable home for what would soon be dubbed “America’s Team.” Hole in the Roof: The Dallas Cowboys, Clint Murchison Jr., and the Stadium That Changed American Sports Forever tells the story of Texas Stadium, with its trademark hole in the roof, which served the Cowboys for 38 seasons without ever requiring a penny of public dollars. In 1966, though the Cotton Bowl was one of the newer stadiums in the National Football League, Murchison saw it as an outdated venue. What he envisioned was a shiny new stadium near downtown Dallas, but to realize his vision for what a professional sports venue could be—and the many benefits that the resulting revenue could generate—he needed buy-in from Dallas city leaders. Opening with a foreword by Drew Pearson, all-time Cowboy great and NFL Hall-of-Famer, and based on extensive research in both public and media archives and Murchison family records, Hole in the Roof chronicles Murchison’s founding of an extraordinary sports franchise and the battles he fought to build the stadium he wanted—where the Cowboys went on to play each of their five Super Bowl-winning seasons and where Murchison proved that stadiums could be a source of revenue surpassing even television.

Were it not so carefully documented, the remarkable football career of former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach would seem more fiction than truth. From his All-Star days as an Ohio schoolboy to All-American and Heisman Trophy-winning heights at the U.S. Naval Academy and from a four-year military stint to a decade spent leading America's Team to Super Bowl successes, the Pro Football Hall of Fame standout served as the gold standard for Sunday afternoon greatness.

For most of three decades, Drew Pearson was the most familiar journalist in the United States. In his daily newspaper column—the most widely syndicated in the nation—and on radio and television broadcasts, he chronicled the political and public policy news of the nation. Meanwhile, he also worked his way into the inner circles of policy makers in the White House and Congress, lobbying for issues he believed would promote better government and world peace.Pearson, however, still found time to record his thoughts and observations in his personal diary. Published here for the first time, Washington Merry-Go-Round presents Pearson’s private impressions on life inside the Beltway. Pearson held the confidence of presidents—especially Lyndon B. Johnson—congressional leaders, media moguls, political insiders, and dozens of otherwise unknown sources of information. His direct interactions with the DC glitterati, including Bobby Kennedy and Douglas MacArthur, are featured throughout his diary, drawing the reader into the compelling political intrigues of 1960s Washington and providing the mysterious backstory on the famous and the notorious of the era.

From 1961 to 1989, a committed group of documentary journalists from the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) reported the stories of America's overseas conflicts. Stuart Schulberg supplied film evidence to prosecute Nazi war criminals and established documentary units in postwar Berlin and Paris. NBC newsman David Brinkley created the template for prime-time news in 1961 and bore the scars to prove it. In 1964 Ted Yates and Bob Rogers produced a documentary warning of the pitfalls in Vietnam. Yates was later shot and killed in Jerusalem on the first day of the Six-Day War while producing a documentary for NBC News. In Into the Fray, Tom Mascaro vividly recounts the characters and experiences that helped create a unique, colorful documentary film crew based at the Washington bureau of NBC News. From the Kennedy era through the Reagan years, the journalists covered wars, rebellions, the Central Intelligence Agency, covert actions, the Pentagon, military preparedness, and world and American cultures. They braved conflicts and crises to tell the stories that Americans needed to see and hear, and in the process they changed the face of journalism. Mascaro also looks at the social changes in and around the unit itself, including the struggles and triumphs of women and African Americans in the field of television documentary. Into the Fray is the story of adventure, loyalty to reason, and life and death in the service of broadcast journalism.