NBC News in April 1962, by Walter Cronkite. NBC's vice president of news and public affairs, J. Davidson Taylor, was a Southerner who, with producer Reuven Frank, was determined that NBC would lead television's coverage of the civil rights movement. In 1955, NBC provided national coverage of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s leadership of the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, airing reports from Frank McGee, then news director of NBC's Montgomery affiliate WSFA-TV, who would later join the network. A year later, John Chancellor's coverage of the admission of black students to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas was the first
Walter Cronkite assignments. During this time he also covered the Nuremberg war crimes trial serving as the chief of the United Press bureau in Moscow. The main content of the papers documents Cronkite's career with CBS News between 1950 and 1981. The Cronkite Papers assemble a variety of interviews with U.S. presidents, including Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, and Ronald Reagan. President Lyndon Johnson requested a special interview with Cronkite while he was broadcasting live on CBS. Between 1990 and 1993, Don Carleton, executive director for the Center for American History, assisted Cronkite as he compiled an oral history to write his autobiography,