Tick... Tick... Tick... (10 page)

 

Elsewhere in the piece, Wallace and Lando tackled even bigger targets, like NBC's highly successful
Today
Show,
and nailed them just as effectively. “When NBC's
Today
Show
spent a week in Romania and one in Ireland, air fares and hotel bills were picked up by the Irish, the Romanians, and Pan American Airways,” Wallace reported. “When
Today
travels overseas, all the expenses over and above their normal budget are paid for by the host country.”

Lando's reporting turned up a list of top TV and print reporters who'd gotten gifts from corporations, a list that included Walter Cronkite. Perhaps as a courtesy to their colleague, the
60 Minutes
piece that aired on January
20
,
1974
, didn't include details of Cronkite's behavior, merely listing him among the guilty parties.

The piece also examined the corporate corrupters themselves, including Wallace and Lando's own employer, CBS. Their camera captured Win Fanning, a TV critic for the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
as he opened an envelope from CBS—given to him during a press junket in New York City—with two $
10
bills provided by CBS to cover “incidentals.” After the story ran, a CBS spokesman conceded to the
New York Times
that the practice of giving cash “looked bad,” but defended the practice as the best means of covering small expenses. “I don't want to talk about that,” was Cronkite's irritated response to the
Times
when asked about the piece. A CBS News spokesman described Cronkite's behavior as “a personal thing” that didn't relate to his activities as anchorman.

 

In
1974
, the Watergate stories still trickled in, and
60 Minutes
was still trying to cover the biggest story of its six-year life without doing much beyond big interviews. Despite its feverish commitment to tough, sweeping journalism elsewhere, for Watergate the show continued to depend mostly on one-on-one chats with scandal-related figures by Mike Wallace, balanced occasionally by Safer's human interest reporting. The fact was that nobody was digging—and the
60 Minutes
Watergate log looks limited now in contrast with the journalistic enterprise found elsewhere in those tense final days of the Nixon administration.

On January
27
,
1974
, Wallace sat down with Egil “Bud” Krogh, a former Ehrlichman aide serving a prison term for his role in the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. (Ellsberg, a longstanding enemy of the Nixon administration, was the former Kissinger aide responsible for leaking the Pentagon Papers to the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
.) On April
7
,
1974
, Safer returned to an Indiana town he'd visited in July
1973
for an update on “Listening to Nixon Country.” Donald Segretti, Nixon's infamous dirty trickster, appeared for an interview on April
28
,
1974
. On May
5
, two profiles—of Father John McLaughlin, the deputy assistant to the president, and David Frye, a noted Nixon impressionist and comedian—took a quirky, beside-the-point view of the Watergate story. Wallace then scored the first TV sit-down interview with Charles Colson, a former White House aide and recent born-again Christian, in a piece called “Come to Christ” that ran on May
26
,
1974
. On June
16
, “A Tale of Two Inmates” contrasted the experiences in Allenwood prison of two high-profile inmates: Egil “Bud” Krogh and former New Jersey congressman Cornelius Gallagher.

Eventually,
60 Minutes
started working a different angle to get big Watergate stories. To score its biggest Watergate scoops yet,
60 Minutes
used a technique unavailable to most reporters: it persuaded CBS to pay a news source $
15
,
000
.

 

“The Man Who Wouldn't Talk . . . Talks” might have also been called “The Network That Wouldn't Pay . . . Pays.” Coming almost a year to the day after Wallace's story about junkets for journalists, it demonstrated the awkward flip side to the issue of networks and rules. In this instance, the network agreed not only to pay an interview subject but also to allow him to dictate the terms of the interview's content. (In the current edition of the CBS News rulebook, the network continues to offer a loophole for news sources who insist on controlled interviews: “While not encouraged, an agreement to exclude a question or area of questioning may occasionally be granted.” As for paying an interview subject, the rules state simply, “Interviewees may not be paid for appearances in CBS News broadcasts.”) The interview at issue was an unrevealing talk with G. Gordon Liddy, one of the original Watergate burglars. Liddy—who had established up front that he would say nothing of substance about Watergate, adding to the mystery of why CBS paid anything at all for it, let alone $
15
,
000
—was less inclined to offer facts than opinions, albeit entertaining ones.

 

W
ALLACE
: What's your opinion of John Dean?

L
IDDY
: I think, in all fairness to the man, you'd have to put him right up there with Judas Iscariot.

W
ALLACE
: Judas Iscariot? In other words, he betrayed Christ? Christ being Richard Nixon?

L
IDDY
: No, he being a betrayer of a person in high position.

W
ALLACE
: And what do you think his motive was?

L
IDDY
: To save his ass.

 

Liddy called Nixon “a very sick man,” but whenever Wallace asked a probing question he replied dryly, “substantive area—no comment.” Still, the interview easily generated enough press for
60 Minutes
to justify the expenditure. In Wallace's memoir,
Close Encounters,
he says that CBS “made no secret” of the payment to Liddy, but the fact of it appears nowhere in the piece itself as broadcast. The evident success of their “investment” emboldened the powers that be at CBS to keep the checkbook handy. Sure enough, only a few weeks later, a better interview—with a higher price tag—came along.

In retrospect, it's stunning that CBS News agreed to it, but after a jury convicted H. R. “Bob” Haldeman in January
1975
of perjury, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice, the network paid the disgraced official $
100
,
000
for an interview with Mike Wallace. As a bonus, the producers would be granted access to some home movies Haldeman had shot during his White House years. While Wallace now freely admits to a $
100
,
000
payment, at the time the figure of $
25
,
000
was being leaked to the media.

The news of the CBS News–Haldeman deal prompted self-righteous protest from other journalists and networks. “We would not pay Haldeman or anyone else for a news interview,” William Sheehan, president of ABC News, sniffed to a reporter. In his regular op-ed column in the
New York Times
, James Reston blasted the move: “Isn't this a dangerous precedent? Isn't it buying, not a property, like memoirs, but buying news? If CBS will pay this kind of money for Mr. Haldeman, won't other big shots or notorious characters demand their price? . . . The practice blurs the line between entertainment and information—a line CBS itself has tried hard to keep straight and clear in the past.”

In the interview, Haldeman slickly portrayed himself as an innocent victim caught in the media crossfire. “CBS News—and the public—were had,” complained a
New York Times
editorial. The home movies, perhaps unsurprisingly, turned out to be boring.

These days Hewitt tries to distance himself from the Haldeman interviews by claiming that they were not aired on
60 Minutes
. That turns out to be technically true, but it's a distinction perhaps lost on viewers and media critics. When asked if they aired during the
60 Minutes
time slot, he says, definitively, “No.” But in fact the interview aired as a CBS News production on two successive Sunday nights in March
1975
in the
60 Minutes
time slot—and with the star correspondent of
60 Minutes
asking the questions—though it won't turn up on any “Best of
60 Minutes
” compilations.

 

Three seasons after
60 Minutes
was moved to Sunday nights, the show continued to be a ratings disaster. Fortunately, CBS didn't care.

For one thing, its flagging Nielsen numbers didn't count against the network's overall ratings, because its
6
:
00
P.M.
time slot fell outside of prime time. Plus it was cheap: it still cost less than $
100
,
000
to produce an episode—fictional shows could cost at least twice that, if not more—and that made it a profitable enterprise, even at the bottom of the ratings.
60 Minutes
had also proven itself a consistent news-making machine and an editorial success. Hewitt's concept worked, and the other networks were toying with the notion of similar newsmagazines to compete with the
60 Minutes
formula.

In the spring of
1975
, the men who ran CBS's programming department—led by CBS president Robert Wood—were considering their options for the fall schedule. The network was riding high with the success of its iconic comedy lineup; Emmy winners
All in the Family
and
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
gave CBS not only TV's top-rated comedies but also bragging rights to having developed some bona fide cultural landmarks.

But hanging over all three major networks was the so-called access rule mandated by the Federal Communications Commission in
1971
, which allowed the networks to program only three hours a night of prime time, giving up the fourth hour to local stations in the top
50
markets. The networks had been fighting it for years; now, the legal battle was nearing an end, and the networks had lost. The FCC allowed only one exception to its rule: on Sunday night, a network could keep the fourth hour for documentaries, public affairs programs, or children's shows. That prompted NBC to move its highly rated
Wonderful World of Disney
to the Sunday night at
7
slot. ABC put its own children's show,
Swiss Family Robinson,
up against Disney.

CBS had no existing children's show to shove into the slot, so they developed a family series,
Three for the Road,
that they hoped to pass off as children's programming, exempt from the new regulations. It starred Alex Rocco as Pete Karras, a widower who takes his two sons, Vincent Van Patten and Leif Garrett, with him on his travels as a photographer. But more than
40
local CBS affiliates showed the good taste to turn it down; not surprisingly, they preferred to carry their own local public affairs programming instead. Local stations were frustrated; NBC and ABC affiliates had pushed their local offerings back to Sunday night at
6
, but that option wasn't available to the CBS outlets—the Sunday
6
:
00
P.M.
time slot belonged to
60 Minutes
.

And so by November—with
Three for the Road
being the lowest-rated show on television—CBS development executives realized they needed a new plan for Sunday nights. Then an obscure CBS programming executive named Oscar Katz came up with perhaps the most financially rewarding idea ever hatched in the history of television programming.

Katz, a vice president of CBS, had been an executive at Desilu Productions, the company behind the CBS classic
I Love Lucy.
It occurred to him that perhaps the answer to CBS's Sunday night problems could already be found on the current CBS Sunday night schedule: What if the network were to simply shift
60 Minutes
from
6
:
00
P.M.
to
7
:
00
P.M.
? Katz reasoned that it would fulfill the network's obligations under the access rule and would also let the local stations use the
6
:
00
P.M.
slot for their own public affairs programming.

CBS announced that on December
7
,
1975
,
60 Minutes
would move to Sunday nights at
7
:
00
P.M.
As a result, his show would no longer face automatic cancellation each fall when CBS broadcast NFL football on Sunday afternoons. That meant an uninterrupted weekly schedule, less chance of being preempted, an increased appetite for stories—and the immediate necessity of adding a third correspondent to help handle the load. Fortunately an obvious choice loomed—an old Hewitt protégé, now a handsome network news star, famous and charismatic enough to threaten Wallace and Safer and make
60 Minutes
a more competitive shop than ever before.