Once upon a time, there was a man named Eichmann who wore a knitting suit and had tortoise shell glasses. He looked like a nervous accountant, not someone who had engineered the deaths of millions of people. Except, wait a minute, I was at his trial for genocide!

My old man, Leo Hurwitz, got to direct the television coverage of this infamous trial in Jerusalem back in 1961. How he landed the gig was through some convincing of Capital Cities Broadcasting and David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister of Israel. My dad was one of the pioneers of American social documentary film in the 1930s, directed two films on the Holocaust, and helped invent many of the techniques of live TV. And as a socialist, he was blacklisted from all work in television for a decade prior. So, he came cheap.

My mother and I got to join him in Jerusalem, and we watched in awe as my father called the coverage each day in the control room. For the first time in history, a trial was being recorded, but not in a boring newsreel style with a single camera. Oh no, it had to be more like a feature film, with concealed cameras covering every point of view imaginable. We’re talking witnesses, judges, attorneys, public and, of course, Eichmann. It was like a personal drama that was being cut, one against the other, often in close-up. My father went all-out, and it became the defining style of the trial, eclipsing even Eichmann’s confession.

Serious News: nytimes