Julian Goodman, a Glasgow, Kentucky native and former NBC president who helped establish Chet Huntley and David Brinkley as a well-known news team and led the network from 1966 to 1974, has died. He was 90.
Goodman died Monday after a brief illness in Juno Beach, Fla., where he lived after retiring as chairman of NBC's board in 1979, the network said.
Goodman joined NBC on the night news desk in Washington in 1945. He rose through the ranks to become executive vice president of NBC News at the time when Huntley and Brinkley were competing with Walter Cronkite on CBS. He produced the second presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960, guided the network's TV coverage of several presidential conventions and oversaw the early TV news magazine "David Brinkley's Journal."
As network president, he gave Johnny Carson a long-term contract to stay on the "Tonight" show and helped make the American Football League a force by broadcasting the upstart league. NBC televised Super Bowl III in 1969, in which the AFL's New York Jets beat the highly favored Baltimore Colts of the NFL.
Julian Byrn Goodman was born May 1, 1922, in Glasgow, Ky., and while a teenager began working as a reporter for the local newspaper. In 1939 he enrolled in what is now Western Kentucky University, majoring in English, but joined the Army after World War II broke out.
