Once it was me, not wealthy but doing my job. The CBC reports to parliament as a national public broadcasting system. When Kennedy cleared the US networks at the height of the missile crisis, from Toronto network news headquarters I told CBC management we were clearing our network for his address.

As you and Americans know, our prime minister Diefenbaker and Kennedy hated each other, couldn't abide being in each other's presence. CBC Ottawa, at the time in an executive interregnum of sycophants, said to follow orders, no clearance. I said it had to be carried, no ifs, buts or whys.

CBC Ottawa said Kennedy might be just announcing a bond drive. I complied to higher authority, allowing an egregious breach of partisan politics into the publicly owned system, and added "But you're going to read about what you've done at 9 (o'clock) in the (Toronto) Star's bulldog edition."

Ottawa caved; it would have been a scandal of epic proportions. Another 15 CBC journalists including myself---Minifie, Nash, Burke, Gould, Cameron, Cunningham etc--- were unable to get CBC to remove an incompetent, lying news manager. We hired a lawyer out of Dean Acheson's firm in Washington.

We let the feisty, red-haired Irishman named Kelly do all the talking as we sat around the "Kremlin's" boardroom on Jarvis street. The CBC brass was forced to back down to maintain the news system's and parliament's integrity. The brass then invited us to a "little party" at the Westbury.

We were thanked profusely for taking action. "Hard as we tried, we couldn't get rid of him. You know how it is, management must always protect its own." I am not aware of a single incident where the CBC commanded its news people to bail on anything, except the command above, stopped immediately.

The CBC is one of the most respected media organizations in the world. I was with it from its television beginnings to the late 60s. No US network comes even close---maybe CBS under Fred Friendly when it told Washington to shove it when he was asked to fire Canadian Morley Safer for his Vietnam reporting.