From an old Huffington Post article:
...the day that Mike Wallace scooped Sullivan, Paar, Cronkite, Brinkley, Huntley and every other American TV host by presenting a film clip of the Beatles on his mid-morning show CBS Morning News With Mike Wallace was... Friday November 22nd 1963.
The tragedy of President Kennedy's assassination naturally meant that everything else that happened earlier that day was of zero consequence. And as the world mourned JFK and became engulfed in the awful news, the light-hearted story that Mike Wallace had presented just two hours earlier faded very rapidly. Wallace himself forgot all about it. But 18 days later one man DID remember it. Mike Wallace's senior colleague at CBS News -- Walter Cronkite.
Cronkite was looking for a way to lift the spirits of the devastated American public with a cheerful segment. And he recalled the film clip that Wallace had introduced on his Morning News show that dreadful Dallas morning. The clip had originally been intended to be repeated that same night (November 22nd) on Cronkite's own newscast. But of course the regular Nightly News was preempted by rolling news coverage about the assassination. Cronkite decided to resurrect the story and on Tuesday December 10th 1963, he re-aired the sparkling five-minute film clip of the Beatles enchanting their British fans.
There's a lot of craziness about this story; that Mike Wallace showed a short clip of The Beatles for the first time ever in America only to have it removed from everybody's minds forever two hours later when JFK was killed, or just how relentless the march of The Beatles was: this scenario almost perfectly set up a comical story that could've had Paul McCartney spending the next 60 years working at a Tesco's while bitching & moaning that his band would've been huge were it not for the awful timing of JFK getting shot. But other than any general sadness when speaking of the event, I've never heard any of The Beatles for a second wonder what would've happened if 2 1/2 months later they weren't on Ed Sullivan about to change the world. But wow how close did we really come to the biggest news event of the last half-century almost wiping out the biggest cultural even of the last half-century?
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