Tick... Tick... Tick... (16 page)

W
ALLACE
: This is Dr. Edward Rubin. He ignored our letters and telephone calls requesting an interview. Nonetheless, we did manage to photograph the silent Dr. Rubin coming to work.

Cut to a shot of Wallace approaching the doctor with a microphone in his hand:

W
ALLACE
: Dr. Rubin, I wonder if I could talk to you for just a moment, sir. Dr. Rubin?

Rubin ignored Wallace. Thus what in a newspaper story would have been a simple sentence—“Dr. Rubin declined to comment”—had become the most compelling visual aspect of the story. Rubin's encounter with the dogged Wallace would be what viewers remembered and talked about the next day—as opposed to, say, the heinous crime of Medicaid fraud.

 

But for all of Wallace's success, some careful observers were worried that his work might be slipping. The swelling ranks of Wallace imitators was contributing to a sense that his style of journalism, once fresh and original, was in danger of becoming predictable. Hewitt was among those determined to ensure that Wallace remained in a class by himself—understanding better than anyone the correspondent's unique role in the success of
60 Minutes
.

Which is what led Hewitt to find himself one day in the spring of
1980
in conversation with Ira Rosen's mother.

Rosen was then a
26
-year-old producer for Channel
9
, a local New York television station, where he had his own weekly newsmagazine show modeled after
60 Minutes
. He'd been a journalist from his late teens in Pontiac, Michigan, where he covered the Mafia and sports for the local paper, but he'd taken a liking to television, particularly the style of journalism in vogue at CBS with correspondents like Wallace. He'd even done his own modified versions of the pieces he admired, including a story about secret films at the Pentagon with its own “gotcha!” elements.

One day that spring, a
60 Minutes
projectionist ran into Hewitt in the company cafeteria. “I saw this piece last night on Channel
9
,” he said. “It was just the kind of piece Mike Wallace used to do.” Incensed that anyone believed Wallace had stopped doing great stories, Hewitt tore back to his office to find out exactly who'd done this reportedly brilliant segment. He got a copy of the tape, then tracked down Rosen's home number—and reached Rosen's mother.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Hewitt,” Rosen's mother told him, “but Ira already has a job,” and hung up on him. That sealed it for Hewitt—he would make it his mission to wrestle Rosen free from the clutches of Channel
9
. In a span of weeks Rosen went from local television to
60 Minutes
, where he produced for Mike Wallace. In
1989
, after nine years at the show, Rosen left to become a senior producer for ABC's
Prime Time Live
, where he introduced hidden-camera and other
60 Minutes
investigative techniques to the show, cohosted by
60 Minutes
alumna Diane Sawyer. Then, in the spring of
2004
—in the wake of a
Prime Time
shakeup—Rosen returned to
60 Minutes
as a producer for Steve Kroft.

But despite Hewitt's passion for the ambush interview, confrontational journalism, and “gotcha!” stories that gave the show its juice, there remained within him some uncertainty over their continued use. Perhaps for that reason, the show began its
1981
season with an unusual hour devoted exclusively to an examination of itself. Jeff Greenfield, a CBS News media critic, was brought in to moderate a panel that included Ellen Goodman of the
Boston Globe
and Herbert Schmertz, vice president of Mobil Oil, who'd often been outspoken in his criticism of the news business. The general conclusion of the panel was that the techniques used by
60 Minutes
posed serious fairness questions. Discussing the Wallace-Lando “Fake ID” story from
1975
, Goodman observed: “You're saying in pursuit of deceit, deceit is okay. What happens if this becomes pervasive?”

Hewitt found himself in full self-criticism mode—a radical departure from his typical attack posture. He conceded that the ambush approach was “a technique that has been abused” and promised that it would be used less often in the future. “It's like trying to get a man to testify against himself,” Hewitt reluctantly admitted, caught in his own “gotcha!” moment.

 

In June
1981
, in preparation for the upcoming season, the support staff of
60 Minutes
was handed a Herculean logistical challenge: to get the entire cast of
60 Minutes
in New York at the same time to pose for a picture. As the number one show on television,
60 Minutes
needed a fresh group portrait to send out each season; chances were, newspapers and magazines would print it on the covers of their Sunday television guides, and it would be used frequently in advertising and corporate promotion. It was a corporate imperative and a matter of maintaining stardom—which is why everyone had taken time from their frantic travel schedules to gather in a New York photographer's studio to pose yet again.

The regularity of the photo shoot also had something to do with the dizzying (at least by
60 Minutes
standards) changes in the cast in recent years. First Mike and Harry, then Mike and Morley, then Mike and Morley and Dan, then Harry again . . . it was getting a little hard for viewers to recall who exactly was on
60 Minutes
from season to season. A new snapshot always helped.

This year, the picture would include, for the first time, its newest correspondent, Ed Bradley, hired to replace Dan Rather. Bradley, about to turn
40
, stood slightly in awe of the men he was about to pose with—Mike Wallace,
63
; Morley Safer,
49
; and Reasoner,
58
, were among the most prized on-air talents at CBS News. It was a heady experience to stand in such distinguished company; these guys, after all, had helped lead
60 Minutes
from the depths of ratings hell to the top of the mountain. They'd also become, in the process, the biggest stars of the news business. Even for a supremely confident man like Bradley, there was something electric, something truly memorable about a moment like this in a career.

The photographer took one last look at the three reporters and said, “Smile!” At that precise moment, Wallace leaned down into hissing distance of Bradley's ear.

“You know, if this show goes into the dumper,” Wallace whispered to his new colleague, “they're going to blame it on you.”

Bradley was able to hide his shock as he and Wallace smiled together for the camera. The picture came out perfectly, preserving for Bradley a quintessential moment that would serve as a portent of the dangers ahead at
60 Minutes
. Moreover, it was a permanent reminder to Bradley to watch his back at all times.

Almost immediately, Bradley had to contend with Wallace's hypercompetitive instincts, which first flared in a pitched battle over the services of a valued producer, Steve Glauber, who had joined Wallace's unit to replace the departing Marion Goldin.

When Bradley learned that Glauber had been poached from his staff, he immediately stomped into Hewitt's office and demanded a reason. It was never Bradley's style to be cowed by management. “Hey, I don't have a voice in this?” he asked. “It happens like that?”

“It's for the good of the show,” Hewitt explained.

“No, no, no,” Bradley replied, his anger rising. “I don't accept that. This producer is working for me, and you're just going to take him away without asking me about it? Bullshit. So who do I appeal to at the next highest level?”

The next day a CBS News vice president came to
60 Minutes
for a tense meeting with Hewitt, Wallace, Bradley, and Phil Scheffler, who had recently replaced Palmer Williams as the senior producer of the show.

“We think that it's for the good of the show,” explained the CBS executive, “because Marion's gone, that Steve go to Mike.”

Bradley looked around the room at his new colleagues and realized he had no hope of salvaging the situation.

“You know, this was all decided before I got in here,” Bradley said with resignation. “No matter what I said, this was going to happen.” At which point he turned to face Wallace directly.

“I never saw the knife,” Bradley whispered to Wallace. “It won't happen again.”

The producer issue was particularly important to Bradley; for all his gifts, he'd never been known as a particularly energetic writer for television, and he knew it. Often he depended entirely on his producers to deliver camera-ready copy to him; he preferred a constant travel schedule and endless reporting to the idea of sitting alone in his office writing a script. In the fall of
1981
he went on air with memorable stories about the Irish Republican Army and a profile of the philosopher-journalist I. F. Stone. And within just two months he'd delivered one of the most memorable pieces ever aired on
60 Minutes
—a heart-wrenching profile of the singer Lena Horne, a piece that demonstrated Bradley's interview gifts and the show's own continued appetite for definitive interviews with cultural icons. In it, he got Horne to confess—with tears streaming down her cheeks—the pain she felt at growing up as a light-skinned black woman who could pass for white. Horne also talked with Bradley about her passion for sex in a way that appeared to be thinly disguised flirtation.

 

H
ORNE
: If a lady treats other people as she'd like to be treated, then she's allowed to go and roll in the grass if she wants to.

B
RADLEY
: Even if she's
64
?

H
ORNE
: Even if she's
64
. Particularly then!

 

It was as refreshingly honest an answer as had been given on
60 Minutes
, and Hewitt's longstanding affection for the Horne piece perhaps had something to do with Horne's energetic attitude toward age and sex, which bore a significant resemblance to his own.

Chapter 13

Watermelon and Tacos

With Reasoner back at
60 Minutes
and Bradley on the team, all looked right to the outside world. The show had never been better than in
1981
. Stories on homelessness, surrogate mothers, chemical dumping, and the murder of Malcolm X were balanced by trenchant profiles of journalist Tom Wolfe, architect Paolo Soleri, Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, and tennis star Martina Navratilova. Hewitt's formula had effectively killed off the competition on other networks. The show was earning an estimated $
70
million a year in profit, and Hewitt and his tigers had become major television celebrities.

Behind the scenes, however, the atmosphere remained toxic. There was rarely a time at
60 Minutes
when everyone was speaking to each other; at any given moment, at least two correspondents (Wallace and Safer, Safer and Rather, Wallace and Bradley) were embroiled in a conflict serious enough to warrant the silent treatment. With
60 Minutes
still hovering around the number one spot in the Nielsens and consistently in the top
10
, the show's success spurred the correspondents to battle for supremacy in the eyes of Hewitt as well as the public. Nobody backed off. Nobody gave in.

While Wallace, Safer, Reasoner, and Bradley all had gentlemanly aspects to their character, at times they all got caught up in the competitiveness that was also essential to Wallace's nature. Though he could also be a seductive and charismatic leader, his producers contended he could also be something of a bully. Most of them say in his defense that it was always about the work, but late-night calls from Wallace to criticize their performance or demand more of their time left them drained. It wasn't uncommon for even the most loyal Wallace producer to defect to another correspondent's team for a year, seeking a respite from the grind. Paul Loewenwarter, who had worked steadily and without complaint for Wallace since the show's earliest days, took time off from him at one point to “recharge his batteries,” as he put it, before returning later. “Wallace is Wallace,” Loewenwarter explained, echoing the conflict felt by so many who were captivated by the correspondent's magnetic aura but feared his lacerating criticism. Wallace had no tolerance for anything but the best and often picked apart his producers' work with the same kind of abusive and obscene language that had become commonplace in the show's screenings and hallways.

Wallace, to his credit, didn't deny his difficult manner. When longtime producer Norman Gorin was in the hospital recovering from major surgery, Wallace sent a cactus to him with a note that read, “From your prickly friend.” To which Gorin replied: “Nice try, but adding the suffix doesn't change a thing.”

Despite his courtly demeanor, Safer often found himself drawn into battle. His relationship with Rather had always been rocky, going all the way back to conflicts from their days in Vietnam together. There had also been a period of silence between Safer and Reasoner over minor issues that somehow exploded into larger ones. He screamed back in screenings when Hewitt yelled at him, and later kicked himself for stooping to his boss's level. That said, Safer appreciated the way Hewitt could quickly forget his anger. Often, five minutes after an expletive-laden diatribe, Hewitt would wander into Safer's office and sit down for a jaw, as though nothing had happened. Often he even apologized.

Safer's issues with Wallace went deeper than with the others. In the early days of
60 Minutes,
the two men had spent at least two years not speaking to each other, and the wounds from that schism took a while to heal. They were cordial to one another, but at heart their relationship had no hope of becoming anything more; in fact, Safer kept an old
1968
campaign button that read “To Hell With Wallace” on his office wall. Their conflicts ranged from control of producers—a matter of supreme importance to Wallace—to ownership of story ideas.

Everyone was always in some kind of battle with Hewitt, whose ego had been further inflated by the show's continued triumph. His screening room persona as the American Everyman gave him a platform to attack his correspondents and their pieces on a regular basis. While they often conceded that their boss was a “genius” at editing pieces in a screening room, they were just as likely to label him an idiot savant out of earshot. The more famous they became, the less likely any of them were to tolerate Hewitt's critiques of their work.

 

It was hard for anyone to find fault with the piece Harry Reasoner delivered on the night of November
15
,
1981
, “The Best Movie Ever Made?” If ever the main character of a
60 Minutes
story was the correspondent telling it, this was it—an elegiac examination by Reasoner of
Casablanca,
undertaken for no reason whatsoever, except that Reasoner happened to love the film. Producer Drew Phillips dutifully came up with a few news pegs for the piece: it turned out, for instance, that replicas of Rick's Cafe were opening up everywhere, and a recent showing of the movie in Pittsburgh pulled in a crowd of
1
,
200
. Here and there, Phillips and Reasoner interviewed moviegoers about the experience of seeing it or found trivia concerning the production. But mostly the piece existed to allow Reasoner to rhapsodize about a movie that touched him like no other. Intercutting what was essentially an essay by Reasoner with clips from the movie itself, it gave viewers a rare glimpse into the psyche of a man they knew only through television.

R
EASONER
: Our romantic minds are a hodgepodge, storage rooms full of objects meaningless in themselves except as they serve as props to bring back a song or a smile or a remembered line. . . .

Phillips had arranged for the props from
Casablanca
to be used in the piece, including the legendary piano at which Dooley Wilson, as Sam, played “As Time Goes By.”

R
EASONER
: Bogart liked music, too. Although as every student of trivia knows, he never said, “Play it again, Sam.” By the time he said what he did say, most of the bourbon in the bottle was gone.

More clips, more comments, and then this poetic summation of the story:

R
EASONER
: If in a standard movie boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl, this was boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, boy gives up girl for humanity's sake. That's better than
Gone With the Wind,
when he gave her up out of ennui. . . . There is great power in the ending, too, possibly because almost up to the moment it was filmed and up to the moment an audience sees it for the first time, nobody knew what the ending was going to be. Rick gets everybody together at the airport, and keeps Claude Rains in line with a gun in the now-famous trench coat.

Another clip from the movie followed, then this snippet from Reasoner's interview with Ingrid Bergman.

 

B
ERGMAN
: Now, we were going to shoot two ends: one that I stayed on the ground with Humphrey Bogart, and my husband would be so understanding and so generous that he would say good-bye—
(laughs)
—and leave alone; or I would go with my husband, feel my duty, and Humphrey Bogart would be alone in the fog. And we shot that scene first. Cut, and everybody said that's it, we don't have to shoot the other end, because we cannot get anything better than this. But they didn't know until they saw it.

R
EASONER
: To tidy things up, Rick shoots the Nazi major, and Claude Rains gets the opportunity to take advantage of the film's most dramatic pause. . . .
And that leads to what sure has become the most familiar exit line in movie history.

 

At which point the necessary clip played—“Louie,” Bogart says to Rains, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”—followed by Reasoner's own classic ending, a glimpse of him at his most eloquent and touching.

R
EASONER
: I don't suppose then or now young men wind up for good with the young women with whom they first saw
Casablanca.
I didn't. The story seems to lead to bittersweet endings in real life, too. But you never forget who you first saw it with. I wonder if she remembers. If she does, here's looking at you, kid.

 

In
1981
,
60 Minutes
represented a rare bright spot on the CBS News balance sheet. Dan Rather's arrival as anchorman on the
CBS Evening News
translated into an immediate ratings drop for that broadcast, and the network continued to struggle with its morning show, now well behind both the
Today
show and
Good Morning America.

The network had trouble on another front, too: the burgeoning success of afternoon talk shows, in particular Phil Donahue's popular
4
:
00
 
P.M.
weekday series. In a desperate effort to compete, CBS News convinced the men of
60 Minutes
—Mike, Morley, Ed, and Harry—to appear on
Up to the Minute.
It ripped off various aspects of the Sunday night show, including the large stopwatch that appeared behind the correspondents. They took turns each week hosting the show, which featured audience participation led by that week's guest correspondent. The show would deal each day with a variety of topics aimed at women, such as “Aggressive Women: Turn On or Turn Off?” and included parenting commentary from Bob Keeshan, otherwise known as Captain Kangaroo—who'd been given this slot in return for donating a half-hour of his morning time to the news division.

But by November, after just two months on the air,
Up to the Minute
was canceled, its ratings even lower than the previous occupant of the time slot—reruns of
One Day at a Time.
As it turned out, the
60 Minutes
stars were no guarantee of ratings outside their protected Sunday nighttime slot, to which they happily retreated.

 

Success was beginning to take its toll on the
60 Minutes
team. The worst of it came in the form of increasing media scrutiny, mostly focused on Mike Wallace—still the show's biggest star and thus its most obvious target.

In January
1982
, the
Los Angeles Times
revealed that Wallace—the correspondent who most loved catching people unawares with a camera—had himself been taped surreptitiously, with embarrassing results. It happened the previous March, when Wallace was interviewing a bank executive in San Diego for a story about lien contracts, in which customers unwittingly put their houses up as collateral for loans to buy amenities like air conditioners and carpeting. Minorities in particular were losing their homes in foreclosures by unscrupulous lenders. It was a well-intentioned piece, but while doing the San Diego interview, Wallace let slip a politically incorrect wisecrack that was recorded on tape.

“I wonder why they sign those contracts without reading them,” remarked someone in the room with Wallace, according to a record provided by the bank, which later claimed it had gotten Wallace's permission to videotape the interview. (Wallace insisted the remarks were made during a break in the interview, while a
60 Minutes
cameraman was reloading his camera, having run out of film.)

“They're probably too busy eating their watermelon and tacos,” Wallace replied.

Wallace didn't deny the remark to the
Los Angeles Times
, but told reporter Nancy Skelton for her page-one story on January
10
,
1982
: “Look, I happen to have a penchant for obscenity and for jokes.” The next day in the
New York Times
, Wallace claimed the comment was “off the record” and was made to elicit “latent racist” views from the interview subject. “In hindsight,” Wallace said, “it's conceivable that I made a mistake.”

The
Los Angeles Times
reported that Wallace asked the bank to erase the comment from its tape. In the
New York Times
account of the incident, Hewitt defended Wallace and claimed that the correspondent had thought better of his request after having made it. “Mike called the bank back,” Hewitt said, “and said forget it, that if they eliminated any part of the tape it could be misconstrued, and he didn't want that to happen.” Ever the master of spin, Hewitt pointed out the irony that Wallace's piece was designed to help minorities. “Like almost everyone else in America, Mike sometimes indulges himself in ethnic humor,” Hewitt said. “It has been my experience that the people with the least bias sometimes tend to do that.”

But as Wallace would have been the first to admit, the comment was completely in character for the blunt and outspoken correspondent. Despite Hewitt's protestations on Wallace's behalf, the news that his biggest star had been caught saying something inappropriate on tape seemed like the only irony worth noting.