Ward Chamberlin; helped establish PBS, build stations . By Adam
Bernstein Washington Post . WASHINGTON - Ward B. Chamberlin Jr., a
public broadcasting pioneer who led major stations in New York and
Washington and played a critical role in kick-starting the career of
documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, died Feb. 23 at a retirement community
in Bedford, Mass. He was 95. The cause was complications from dementia,
said a daughter, Carolyn. He was a resident of Westport, Mass. An Ivy
League-educated corporate lawyer, Mr. Chamberlin was in his late 40s
when he swerved by chance into a career as a media executive. He had
spent years as the right-hand man in executive suites to Frank Pace
Jr., a former US budget director and Democratic Party stalwart. In
1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson named Pace board chairman of the
nascent Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He knew nothing of the
medium of television, so he tapped Mr. Chamberlin, who was also his
squash and backgammon partner, to investigate. Mr. Chamberlin spoke
with a friend in the industry and reported back, according to a
Princeton alumni publication, "Frank, you'd better take this job or
we're not going to be friends. This is going to be a lot of fun. It was
also a lot of work, but over the next several years, Mr. Chamberlin was
given free rein to take an enormous and ill-defined mandate and shape
it into a concrete reality. As Pace's deputy, he had the authority and
the organizational skills to arrange the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting's budgetary, personnel, and programming distribution
structure. He said his most important endeavor was persuading all the
station heads - from the most powerful to the smallest - to agree to a
decentralized structure in which each licensee had autonomy. Over the
next several years, he served as executive vice president of public
broadcasting's WNET in New York and senior vice president of the Public
Broadcasting Service. In 1975, he became president and chief executive
of WETA, the struggling Washington-area public radio and television
station. Sharon Percy Rockefeller, his successor, said WETA was a "tiny
afterthought" in the constellation of public broadcasting at the time,
approaching bankruptcy, suffering from weak leadership and
organization, and offering scant original programming despite its prime
location in a world capital. Over the next 14 years, Rockefeller said
in an interview, Mr. Chamberlin "took us from that fragility to a
position of strength," making WETA the third-largest producer of
original shows for PBS, behind WNET and WGBH in Boston. Its operating
budget rose to $28 million from about $6 million during his tenure.
(WETA is now the No. 2 producer, after WGBH, and its budget is $96
million, according to Rockefeller.) The station produced under Mr.
Chamberlin's watch some of the nation's best-known public affairs fare,
including "The MacNeil/Lehrer Report" (now "The NewsHour") and
"Washington Week in Review" (now "Washington Week"). WETA also produced
entertainment programs such as "In Performance at the White House,"
"The Kennedy Center Presents" and "A Capitol Fourth. In an interview
Friday, Burns said he first approached Mr. Chamberlin in 1985, before
the filmmaker was widely known. Burns said he needed $50,000 to
complete his feature-length documentary about Huey Long, the fiery
Louisiana governor and US senator who was assassinated in 1935. He had
heard Mr. Chamberlin was a history buff and took a chance on showing
him a rough cut. "I immediately recognized that this was a really
talented man," Mr. Chamberlin later said, explaining why he had WETA
take the unusual step of covering the cost of finishing the film. Mr.
Chamberlin remained an ardent champion of Burns's works, with WETA
coproducing many of his subsequent documentaries. Perhaps most notable
was "The Civil War" (1990), which was initially projected to run five
hours but more than doubled in the editing room. Furthermore, it was to
rely heavily on still photographs over action sequences - hardly a
promising way to engage the attention of viewers for one hour, much
less 12. "The Civil War" had already proved a hard sell with
underwriters. Burns said he bought Mr. Chamberlin dinner and, once they
were both fortified with stiff drinks, spilled the news that the
documentary's run time was a half-day. "All he said was, 'Is it good? "
Burns said. "He stood by me . . . when no one else would. "The Civil
War," which drew critical superlatives and a shelf of awards, became
one of the most-watched series ever to air on public television. Ward
Bryan Chamberlin III was born in New York City and grew up in South
Norwalk, Conn. He lost his right eye to meningitis as a child but
excelled in sports, becoming an all-American soccer player and captain
at Princeton University. Exempt from military service because of his
missing eye, he left college in 1942 - a year before his scheduled
graduation - following a classmate into the American Field Service
relief organization during World War II. He became a volunteer
ambulance driver, serving on the front lines during the Battle of Monte
Cassino in Italy. Mr. Chamberlin completed his Princeton degree in
1946, graduating summa cum laude from the Woodrow Wilson School of
Public and International Affairs. After graduating two years later from
Columbia Law School, he joined his father's corporate law firm. He also
worked for the post-World War II economic aid program called the
Marshall Plan. In 1955, he joined the legal department of the military
contracting giant General Dynamics, working under Pace there and later
at the International Executive Service Corps before they went to the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Within a few years of leaving
WETA, Mr. Chamberlin was recruited to WNET in New York to revive the
financially flailing station. As station vice president, he helped
undertake a fund-raising campaign and poured money from newly flush
coffers into vibrant original programming. His first marriage, to
journalist Anne Nevin, ended in divorce. His second wife, the former
Lydia Gifford, died in 2009 after 58 years of marriage. He leaves two
daughters from his second marriage, Carolyn of New Haven and Margot of
Newton, Mass; and four grandchildren.
