My pal Paul Harris, who is now retired from roughly the same business Larry King was in, has a good essay up about Mr. King. What bothered Paul about the man's broadcasting was the same thing that sometimes bothered me about it: When he'd hand his widely-heard or widely-watched forum over to some charlatan or phony psychic. I believe, by the way, that the term "phony psychic" is redundant.
Occasionally, King would challenge their claims but not often enough for me. And as Paul reminds us, there was that time when "The Iron Horse of Broadcasting" (as many called him) turned his CNN show into a series of infomercials for Ross Perot's presidential candidacy. I've written before about this moment…
A day or two before the presidential election of 1992, independent candidate Ross Perot went on Larry King Live, the TV program which was largely responsible for him even being on the ballot. King asked him the obvious question: "How do you think you're going to do on Tuesday?"
I haven't been able to find a video or transcript online but I remember his answer quite vividly. It struck me as especially stunning since Perot's appeal to voters — the only real reason he was a major candidate who'd been included in the debates — was that he was a straight-talking, atypical politician. And what this straight-talking, atypical politician said was that he was going to carry every state and win 100% of all 538 electoral votes. All of them.
I remember the look of shock on Mr. King's face and he muttered something about how no one in history had ever done that, to which Perot replied with dead seriousness that he'd be the first. I don't recall if King then pointed out that at that moment, not one single pollster was showing Perot as being even close to winning one state, let alone every one. And indeed on Election Day, Perot won as many as I did. Or you did. Or Donald Duck did. Zero.
I wonder to this day: Was that what he really believed or was it something he thought he should say? It had to be one or the other and neither is flattering to the man.
If I'd been Larry King on that show, I would have been thinking: I shouldn't have given this man as much air time as I did. And by the way, I don't think I ever want to be "The Iron Horse" of anything.
Meanwhile, my one-time writing partner Dennis Palumbo has written a piece that's well worth reading. Dennis is still a writer but also a psychotherapist and he wrote a piece about how some of his patients are coping with the downtime caused by The Pandemic. For the record, I am not one of Dennis's patients nor have we spoken lately except for the video chat we did. I would fall into the "optimistic" category of those he discusses but really, my writing career ain't changed much during the lockdown.