Prime-Time News and the Ghost of JFK Rival network-news divisions were part of a strange, coincidental Camelot convergence on their prime-time shows on Wednesday night: Both summoned the ghost of President John F. Kennedy but to very different ends (beyond ratings, that is). Between them, they covered the two main approaches that network news takes when it operates in prime time: fawning (CBS's brand-new "Person to Person," featuring George Clooney with Kennedy memorabilia) and censorious (NBC's "Rock Center With Brian Williams," about a JFK affair). Beyond a shared lack of news, both maintained a straight face while pretending that the retailing of celebrity lifestyle fluff and half-century-old sex scandals was a good use of their resources. Moreover "Rock Center" and the opening segment of "Person to Person" overlapped with and amplified each other in interesting and depressing ways. The night could be seen as a sort of seance for a more uncomplicated, straightforward period in the history of white male privilege where it intersects with political idealism. "Person to Person" has nostalgia built in, being a revival of the seminal celebrity-chat program first hosted by Edward R. Murrow in the 1950s. In Wednesday night's premiere episode, just about the first thing we saw was a clip of Murrow chatting with Kennedy. That set up the first interview, nearly half an hour in the Los Angeles home of the actor George Clooney, who, among his many qualities, embodies our current notion of Rat Pack, Kennedy-era cool through his association with the "Oceans" movies. Sure enough, as he led the cameras through his house, commenting on tchotchkes and family photographs, Mr. Clooney stopped at a particularly kitschy bit of memorabilia: a framed set of two presidential neckties worn by Kennedy. Mr. Clooney, who was consistently more articulate and charming than his interviewers, Charlie Rose and Lara Logan, then made a little ideological joke about President Obama not being able to "go to his left" as a basketball player, but no one picked up on it. An unspoken connection was established to Mr. Clooney's subsequent discussion of his own political and humanitarian efforts. This time-capsule effect was reinforced by the house itself, which was certainly large and comfortable but was surprisingly "understated," in the Hollywood sense of looking as if it had been designed for a studio executive or casino owner in the late 1950s or early "60s. You expected Mr. Clooney to turn a corner and stumble into a Corleone family meeting. An hour later on NBC, "Rock Center" devoted its entire length to Meredith Vieira's interview with Mimi Alford, who in her book "Once Upon a Secret" describes her affair with Kennedy while he was president and the sexual and personal demands he made of her. The tone there was completely different: Ms. Vieira went after Ms. Alford like a terrier on the issues of truthfulness and, assuming it was all true, of victimhood and prostitution. It was "almost like you were a call girl," she said. Mr. Williams, reduced on his own show to introducing Ms. Vieira's segments and then interviewing her about her interview, supplied ominous teasers about the tarnishing of the Kennedy image. "How do we square it with JFK's vaunted role in our history and our society?" and my favorite, "A personality that Mimi Alford says included an even more shocking side that went beyond infidelity." At one point he suggested that parents might want to take their children out of the room, displaying a surprising lack of knowledge about how people actually watch television these days.