HE STARTED IT

As associate producer of “The David Susskind Show” for the last seven of its 28 years on the air, I was alternately amused and appalled by the revisionist history of Robert Strauss’ “Why Is Everybody Talking?” (Oct. 1).

It is no diminution of Phil Donahue’s talent to point out that it was not he but Susskind who created the “serious” talk show. “The David Susskind Show” started as “Open End” in 1958 and aired until eight months before David’s death in 1987. During that time, David hosted the likes of Harry Truman, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Parker, Bertrand Russell and Abba Eban, introduced Turman Capote and many others to TV audiences, provided the stage for the opening salvo in the Gore Vidal-William F. Buckley media feud, prompted public outrage and sponsor cancellations by interviewing Nikita Khrushchev, and broke new ground by talking, seriously, with people never seen on national TV before: welfare mothers, feminists, cabdrivers, Mafia hit men, homosexuals coming out and (yes) Men Who Go to Prostitutes--followed a few weeks later by Prostitutes Who Answer Back.

David, who was inducted posthumously into the TV Hall of Fame in 1989, was a film and TV producer who didn’t take a salary for the talk show. In fact, if it ran a deficit, he made up the shortage out of his own pocket. He considered the program a form of, as he put it, “continuing education” for himself and the audience.

The Susskind show was the “granddaddy” that made all the others possible.

DAN BERKOWITZ

President, Intermedia

Communications Inc.

West Hollywood