Face to Face

New York: William Morrow and Company, 1962. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. [12], 430, [6] pages. DJ is in a plastic sleeve. Scuff on fep. Edward A. "Ted" Rogers was born in Cleveland on Oct. 24, 1920, He graduated from Cornell University and was a Marine reconnaissance bomber pilot in the Pacific Theater during World War II. After the war, he became a doorman at CBS in Los Angeles and worked his way into radio writing and directing. He moved on to the Dancer, Fitzgerald advertising agency, where he began working with Nixon, and later relocated to New York. Rogers worked for Metromedia and was vice president of Playboy in Chicago before retiring to Sarasota in 1972. In Florida, he was president and general manager of two radio stations -- WQSR-FM and WQSA-AM -- between 1973 and 1985. He arranged the career-saving "Checkers" speech for a young Richard M. Nixon and handled Nixon's interests in the precedent-setting John F. Kennedy-Nixon presidential debates in 1960. When Nixon made his first bid for the presidency against Kennedy, Rogers served as Nixon's TV advisor; he worked on the first televised presidential debates in history. Rogers always maintained that he had opposed the debates on grounds that Nixon was better known than Kennedy and had nothing to gain from the television exposure. In 1962 the media advisor wrote his own book on the long-discussed topic raised by the Kennedy-Nixon debates: the crucial importance of how a candidate looked on television. But Rogers avoided nonfiction discourse in favor of a novel which he titled "Face to Face," clearly illustrating how television could be manipulated in politics. Face to Face is fiction which will sweep you along in a swelling wave of suspense rarely encounter in a novel. Its story focusses on a behind-the-scenes political struggle to produce a Presidential television debate...and how this affects the lives and the morals of the men and women surrounding the candidates. And although this is a novel you will realize that no writer, however brilliant, could have given this book the inside authenticity it has unless that writer had been one of the key men in the 1960 Presidential campaign. Edward A. Rogers, the author, was Richard Nixon's television advisor during the former Vice President's bid for the White House. Face to Face will introduce you to a variety of fascinating people: campaign managers, politically ambitious network executives, girls from Washington, television "advance" men, the political volunteers, the real pros, the candidates themselves and their wives. Here then is fiction which has drama and believable people.