"…Leading candidate for a current Republican vacancy on the FCC is
Seymour Siegel, Director of WNYC - the municipally owned radio-TV station of New York City. New York Republicans were amazed to discover that Siegel, long an employee of Democratic city administrations, was a Republican after all. The surprise was shared by Democratic Mayor Robert Wagner, Siegel's employer. Siegel's claim to Republicanism stems from a long-ago association with Fiorello La Guardia, New York's maverick Republican mayor of the 1940s. But apparently that's good enough for President Johnson, who ordered the routine FBI check for Siegel.
"If a New Yorker is to be named, Republican Sen. Jacob Javits prefers Kenneth Barlett, Dean of Communications at Syracuse University. Many Republicans outside New York are plugging Charles King, Dean of Law at the University of Detroit and an FCC member briefly during the Eisenhower administration."*
Source: Rowland Evans and Robert Novak's syndicated column,
Los Angeles Times, February 23, 1965, pg. A5.
*Note: None of the above were selected for the FCC post. James J. Wadsworth, a former member of the New York State Assembly and former U.N. ambassador, was appointed Commissioner, May 5, 1965.
Siegel's brother Marc says that at the time Sy Siegel was enthusiastically endorsed by the electronic media and that "the people opposing Sy's being tapped as commissioner of the FCC were very big business interests and Jack Javits." Aside from heading up WNYC, Seymour Siegel was the President of the Prix Italia, had served as President of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, and promoted major program exchanges with the BBC and other national broadcasting outlets. According to Marc Siegel, there had been the hope that his brother's appointment to the FCC "would signal a new era nationally and internationally of dedication to the public interest, welfare and necessity."
