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Chapter 8

In the Line of Fire

Few careers compare with the awe-inspiring trajectory of Dan Rather, a handsome Houston lad from modest circumstances who in
1950
got himself into Sam Houston State Teachers College. A series of small-market jobs led him to the Houston CBS television affiliate. In
1961
, Hurricane Carla blew through Texas and the reporter chained himself to a tree. In
1962
, Rather was hired by CBS News and sent to New Orleans to head up the bureau there. He reported to Don Hewitt.

In November
1963
, Rather flew to Dallas to help run the coverage of President Kennedy's trip. His aggressive street-level reporting from Dallas on the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath (and the fortunate decision not to deck Abraham Zapruder and walk off with the film) earned him a promotion to the White House beat in
1964
. In
1965
, CBS News asked Rather to run the prestigious London bureau; he went, but quickly realized the big story was in Vietnam. After a year's worth of combat coverage he returned to the White House and became a familiar, authoritative face on the
CBS Evening News.

Dan Rather, a star in the making, had an uncanny ability to bring attention to himself. In the summer of
1968
, he was beaten and shoved by a security detail on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, in full view of CBS cameras that broadcast it live. “I think we've got a bunch of thugs in here,” said anchorman Walter Cronkite as he narrated the events from his broadcast booth. The incident earned Rather new status at CBS as a victim of unwarranted attack. (The assault would turn out to be just the first in a series of weird physical confrontations over the course of his career, including a celebrated and bizarre mugging on a New York street in
1986
by a man muttering, “What's the frequency, Kenneth?” and a fight with an erratic Chicago cab driver in
1980
.) He covered the Nixon presidential campaign that fall (sitting in for Mike Wallace, who had left to cohost
60 Minutes
), then returned to the White House after the election. Although Rather's name came up as a replacement for Reasoner in
1970
, he was passed over in favor of dark horse Morley Safer.

Staying at the White House turned out to be yet another brilliant career move. Rather quickly distinguished himself as the president's most relentless antagonist in the White House press corps. In
1971
, before the break-in had even occurred, Nixon operative John Ehrlichman targeted Rather for removal in a breakfast meeting with Salant. Once the
Washington Post
broke the Watergate story, Rather began to take on the president in ways that earned him even more scrutiny from the White House and the public.

Their first notable face-off came in August
1973
, when Rather began a news conference question this way: “Mr. President, I want to state this question with due respect to your office, but also as directly as—”

“That would be unusual,” Nixon interrupted Rather.

At another news conference, one question from Rather—about Nixon's state of mind concerning calls for impeachment—prompted the president to reply, “Well, I'm glad we don't take the vote of this room, let me say.”

But their most memorable showdown took place in March
1974
, when Nixon came to address a meeting of the National Association of Broadcasters in Rather's hometown of Houston. It was all very civilized, as the president genially fielded softballs from the audience and White House correspondents for CBS, NBC, and ABC. Toward the end, Rather introduced himself to ask a Watergate question, and his name prompted both cheers and boos from the crowd. “Are you running for something?” Nixon asked Rather.

“No sir, Mr. President,” Rather replied. “Are you?”

That brief interchange was an immediate transforming moment for Rather. Which was interesting, in part, because in retrospect his response to Nixon makes very little sense. What did Rather mean, exactly? It's hard to believe that Rather's mind immediately leapt to the metaphoric notion of Nixon “running” to keep his office in the face of impeachment. Still, Rather's willingness to repeatedly take on the president so directly evidenced his doggedness as a reporter—a characteristic of his personality that Rather has never tempered. (Almost a quarter-century after becoming the anchor of
60 Minutes
, Rather continues to compete. His scramble for a wartime interview with Saddam Hussein in
2003
was only one recent example. CBS insiders have speculated that the reason there are no other star reporters at CBS News is that Rather can't stand the idea of competition.)

An increasingly annoyed White House wanted Rather out, and CBS wasn't going to fight the feds. A compromise was reached (after Rather entertained offers from NBC and ABC) that put him in charge of
CBS Reports,
the now-creaky documentary unit begun by Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly, less than a month after Nixon resigned as president. He was also given the anchor desk at the weekend broadcasts of the
CBS Evening News
. Rather wasn't happy. He'd been shuffled off to a part of CBS News so removed from the action that it wasn't even in the same building as Walter Cronkite—and seemingly for political reasons that made little sense. Hell, his new offices didn't even have hot water. It wasn't long before he found himself fantasizing about a position on Hewitt's
60 Minutes
. Wallace signed on to the plan—he loved the idea of vying with a formidable opponent like Rather and proving himself the more capable reporter. Safer never liked Rather much, but in any case, by the time it was settled that
60 Minutes
would be televised every week starting in December
1975
, Rather's future on the program was set.

 

At
7
:
00
P.M.
on Sunday, December
7
,
1975
—with Dan Rather officially on board as the show's third correspondent—the new season began with a piece by Wallace called “Secret Service Agent #
9
,” about a man few Americans had heard of until he appeared on
60 Minutes
. His name was Clint Hill, and he was a broken man.

Hill had been part of the Secret Service detail that protected President Kennedy during his visit to Dallas on November
22
,
1963
. He was the agent who climbed onto the president's limousine moments after the first shot was fired. Hewitt had heard rumblings about Hill and speculated that he might have a good story to tell. Producer Paul Loewenwarter reached him by phone and sensed that the former agent was feeling guilty over the way events had played out in Dallas that day. There was certainly enough potential, Loewenwarter thought, to justify renting a suite at the Madison Hotel in Washington and flying down with Wallace to interview Hill.

But for the first hour or so of conversation, Hill seemed oddly stiff and ill at ease; his answers were weak and unemotional. Wallace was bored and annoyed, his eyes rolling to the ceiling as Hill droned on. Finally, he motioned to the cameraman to stop filming.

“This is just pabulum,” Wallace told Hill. “You're not telling us anything. This is just not of interest.”

Hill looked back, stunned, as Wallace continued in a manner he often used to get reluctant subjects to talk.

“You've got a story to tell,” Wallace went on. “You were part of this major event, part of history. And you're just not telling us how you feel about it.” He stopped speaking and motioned to the cameraman to start up again. Wallace then asked the ashen Hill—now retired—to review publicly, for the first time, his feelings about the Kennedy assassination.

 

W
ALLACE
: Can I take you back to November
22
in
1963
? You were on the fender of the Secret Service car right behind President Kennedy's car. At the first shot, you ran forward and jumped on the back of the president's car—in less than two seconds—pulling Mrs. Kennedy down into her seat, protecting her. First of all, she was out on the trunk of that car—

H
ILL
: She was out of the back seat of that car. Not on the trunk of that car.

W
ALLACE
: Well, she was—she had—she had climbed out of the back, and she was on the way back, right?

H
ILL
: And because of the fact that her husband's—part of his—her husband's head had been shot off and gone off to the street.

W
ALLACE
: She wasn't—she wasn't trying to climb out of the car? She was—

H
ILL
: No, she was simply trying to reach that head. Part of the head.

W
ALLACE
: To bring it back?

H
ILL
: That's the only thing—

 

The former agent, so impassive only minutes before, burst into tears at that moment, the camera in characteristic tight close-up on his face. Wallace allowed him to pull himself together for a moment. Hill, gripping a cigarette in his fingers, smoked it down to the butt as Wallace continued:

 

W
ALLACE
: Was there anything that the Secret Service or that Clint Hill could have done to keep [the assassination] from happening?

H
ILL
: Clint Hill, yes.

W
ALLACE
: “Clint Hill, yes”? What do you mean?

H
ILL
: If [I] had reacted about five-tenths of a second faster, or maybe a second faster, I wouldn't be here today.

W
ALLACE
: You mean, you would have gotten there and you would have taken the shot?

H
ILL
: The third shot, yes, sir.

W
ALLACE
: And that would have been all right with you?

H
ILL
: That would have been fine with me.

W
ALLACE
: But you couldn't. You got there in—in less than two seconds, Clint. You—you couldn't have gotten there— You don't—you surely don't have any sense of guilt about that?

H
ILL
: Yes, I certainly do. I have a great deal of guilt about that. Had I turned in a different direction, I'd have made it. It's my fault.

W
ALLACE
: Oh, no one has ever suggested that for an instant.

H
ILL
: I—

W
ALLACE
: What you did was show great bravery and great presence of mind. What was on the citation that was given to you for your work on November
22
,
1963
?

H
ILL
: I don't care about that, Mike.

W
ALLACE
(reading)
: “Extraordinary courage and heroic effort in the face of maximum danger.”

H
ILL
: Mike, I don't care about that. If I had reacted just a little bit quicker—and I could have, I guess. And I'll live with that to my grave.

 

Hill's consuming grief delivered
60 Minutes
a classic water-cooler story, one that cemented
57
-year-old Mike Wallace's reputation as the most deft and probing interviewer of his time. In addition, after a long series of hard-headed sessions with major social and political figures, Wallace's Clint Hill conversation revealed a sensitive side to the reporter that many had never seen before. “Secret Service Agent #
9
” also stood perfectly for what
60 Minutes
produced so well—the visual intersection of news and narrative. In fact, the emotional turmoil of Clint Hill later became the back story for the Clint Eastwood character in
In the Line of Fire,
the
1995
thriller with John Malkovich as the would-be presidential assassin who preys on an agent's dark secret.

When it worked the way it was supposed to, as in “Secret Service Agent #
9
,”
60 Minutes
gave viewers small, beautifully crafted movies with fully developed story arcs—what Hewitt called “packaged reality.” And just as Hewitt, the Hildy wannabe, once imagined bridging the worlds of news and show business, the producer of a
60 Minutes
piece now functioned less like a journalist and more like a movie director.

 

In December
1975
, a
33
-year-old North Carolina journalist named Patrick O'Keefe placed a call to Lewis Lapham, the editor of
Harper's
magazine
.
O'Keefe had done the occasional story for Lapham, nothing extraordinary. He was an ambitious young man, not too thrilled to be teaching journalism at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where the likelihood of stumbling on stories worthy of a
Harper's
assignment was not all that high. O'Keefe decided to call Lapham on this particular day because of a recent phone call to the university from a man identifying himself as Chuck Medlin. It seemed that Medlin wanted to write a book but needed help; hence his call to the school, searching for a writer to help him tell his rather dramatic and commercial story. Medlin—a scowling low-life who had the uncanny ability to strike mortal fear into just about everyone—claimed to know the location of missing Teamster's Union president Jimmy Hoffa, who had disappeared the previous July in what most Americans logically assumed was a case of murder. Medlin also said he knew who killed Hoffa.