Mr. Rogers Saved Public Broadcasting with a Six-Minute Senate Testimony

President Richard Nixon's first budget, in early 1969, proposed slashing the $20 million annual federal grant to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in half. The cut was widely expected to pass. Public TV in 1969 was small, dependent on the appropriation, and politically defenseless. The Senate Subcommittee on Communications scheduled hearings for the spring; the chairman was John Pastore, a Rhode Island Democrat known for his impatience with sentimental witnesses and his preference for testimony delivered without script.

On 1 May 1969 Fred Rogers, the host of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, took his place at the witness table. He was wearing a suit. He had a single sheet of typed notes in front of him and immediately set it aside. "I'd just like to talk about it, if it's all right," he said. He spoke for about six minutes. He told Pastore the show dealt with the inner life of children — feelings of anger, fear of being abandoned, the question of whether you are loved when you are not behaving well — and that he believed thirty minutes of careful television a day could matter to a young viewer in ways the rest of the medium did not.

At one point he recited the lyrics of a song he had written, What Do You Do With the Mad That You Feel?, in a soft Pittsburgh accent. He looked Pastore in the eye while he did it. Pastore had been visibly skeptical at the start of the testimony — arms crossed, eyes flicking down — and was, by the end, openly tearing up. "I think it's wonderful," he said. "Looks like you just earned the twenty million dollars."

The cut died that day. Federal public-television funding grew to $22 million within a year. The six-minute clip has been replayed every time PBS funding is threatened in Washington since.