Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan each appeared on the show before becoming president, but there never was a president who went on the show while in office. Lyndon B. Johnson used the show shortly after the JFK assassination to advertise his liberal stand on the civil rights movement. When Johnson took over the White House, he requested a new slate of secretaries. He saw Geraldine Whittington working in another U.S. government agency and requested that his special assistant Jack Valenti get her home phone number. Johnson called her unannounced one evening and requested that she come in that night for an interview. According to audiotapes of Johnson's phone calls, Whittington at first thought the call was a joke but came to believe that it really was the president on the line. She applied for the position and got it. Having a black woman in the White House was very unusual in 1964. Johnson wanted to advertise the fact that he'd hired a black woman but chose not to call a news conference. Instead, he arranged for Whittington to appear on "What's My Line," where Bennett Cerf and Dorothy Kilgallen figured out her line of work. This may have seemed less overt but probably exposed her to more viewers than if a standard press conference had been held. The LBJ Library in Austin, Texas has a White House telephone log from January 19, 1964, the night Whittington was in New York doing the show, but the log says erroneously that the president made a long distance call to the "I've Got A Secret" studio to check on his secretary. Whittington died of cancer in 1993 without knowing that her live TV appearance would be revived on the Game Show Network.
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05-03-2025 alle ore 07:48
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