Tick... Tick... Tick... (18 page)

 

On August
9
,
1982
, a young black man in Greenville, Texas, robbed a Kentucky Fried Chicken of $
615
. The case remained unsolved for weeks, until a white woman reported a suspicious-looking parked car with South Carolina license plates at the park across from her home, which was
31
/
2
miles away from the restaurant. The Greenville detective in charge of the case, Lieutenant James Fortenberry, traced the license plate to a young black man named Lenell Geter. Fortenberry passed Geter's picture to other nearby police departments, who suspected Geter of similar unsolved robberies in Plano and Garland. Less than two weeks later, a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in nearby Balch Springs was robbed. Eyewitnesses picked Geter's photograph from lineups, and before long Geter had been charged with three armed robberies. But Geter insisted he wasn't responsible for any of the crimes. He earned $
24
,
000
as an engineer for E-Systems, a defense contractor, and was engaged to be married. On the day of the Balch Springs robbery—at
3
:
20
in the afternoon—Geter had gone into downtown Greenville to register to vote and to apply for a loan at a local bank. He'd returned to his office, where coworkers recalled seeing him. Geter adamantly refused to plead guilty, but local authorities were certain they'd found the perpetrator, and the rush to judgment began.

The story first surfaced in the Texas press; as Don Hewitt tells it, a loyal viewer then contacted
60 Minutes
on Geter's behalf. Morley Safer recalls hearing about the story from an article in
People
magazine, though he admits to being uncertain of his memory.

In fact, it should be noted that the exhaustive December
9
,
1983
, account of the case, “Lenell Geter's in Jail”—which went on to become perhaps the most celebrated single segment in
60 Minutes
history—was a perfect example of how
60 Minutes
often followed the reporting of others, only to receive the lion's share of the credit when the TV version got results. With its bumbling detective, poorly assembled evidence, and victim claiming innocence, the Geter story made for a great narrative. It fit Hewitt's “tell me a story” dictum, plus it advanced the case; after months of on-the-scene reporting, Safer and his producer, Suzanne St. Pierre, left little doubt in their segment of the weakness of the prosecution's case. Interviews with white witnesses who spoke on Geter's behalf, as well as Safer's conversation with the prisoner himself—who was composed and articulate throughout—made for a deeply disturbing and powerful piece.

Four days after the story aired on
60 Minutes,
both the prosecution and the defense moved for a new trial, and Geter was released from prison. For a prosecutor to abandon his own case was as precedent-shattering an event as anyone could remember in the Texas legal system.

For all the print stories that preceded it, none could hope to create the dramatic immediacy of interviews like this one in Safer's piece, which conclusively demonstrated Geter's innocence—or, at the very least, established a reasonable doubt of his guilt.

 

S
AFER
: Two people who were not called to testify and did not realize until after the trial that their testimony could have been crucial were Dan Walker and Debra Cotton.

D
EBRA
C
OTTON
: I talked to [Geter] shortly, right around one o'clock, and then again at a—at three, right at three.

S
AFER
: At three o'clock?

C
OTTON
(affirmative)
: Mm-hmm.

S
AFER
: And the robbery took place at three-twenty.

C
OTTON
: Three-twenty.

S
AFER
: Absolutely impossible to get from E-Systems to Balch Springs?

C
OTTON
: It was impossible for Lenell Geter to be there.

D
AN
W
ALKER
: No question about it. He came by to use my phone at, right around three-forty-five, somewhere between three-forty-five and four o'clock, that afternoon.

S
AFER
: No way you could get back from Balch Springs in fifteen minutes?

W
ALKER
: No. No way. No.

 

Safer's piece—a point-by-point deconstruction that reinterviewed witnesses and closely examined the flaws in the case—showed the unique power of television to shape the national debate. By the following spring, Geter's case had been overturned, and
60 Minutes
had popularized the exoneration of the innocent by crusading journalists. Such stories have become a routine part of media coverage—as well as the frequent subject of movies and plays—but in
1983
the Geter case marked an early instance of a journalistic investigation by a TV show that resulted in a reversal of a conviction.

 

In July
1984
, Diane Sawyer and Don Hewitt found themselves at the same dinner party. They'd both gone to San Francisco to cover the Democratic National Convention, and while there they went to a dinner hosted by Gordon and Ann Getty in honor of Charles Manatt, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Over the course of the evening, Hewitt learned that Walter Mondale—soon to be the Democratic nominee—was planning to remove Manatt from his party position.

Sawyer, seated at another table, hadn't picked up the news and was happily engaged in small talk with other guests when she felt something tugging at the hem of her skirt. She looked under the table expecting to find the Gettys' dog, and instead saw Hewitt on his hands and knees. (As implausible as this sounds, both Hewitt and Sawyer tell the same version of this story.) “Hey,” Hewitt whispered, “I have a scoop!” Sawyer didn't quite know what to make of the sight of the executive producer of
60 Minutes
pulling at her, but it seemed easier to follow him out of the room. Together they slipped into the Gettys' library, Hewitt explaining his news along the way. “We have to call this in to CBS radio!” Hewitt said. “Get it on the air, right away!”

Quickly, the two scribbled out a script for Sawyer to phone in to the radio desk; within minutes, Hewitt's scoop was on the air. Perhaps as a result of their reporting, an embarrassed Mondale later abandoned his plan to displace Manatt. Even in her earliest days as a CBS News reporter, trudging out to Three Mile Island while more fearful (and senior) reporters stayed at home, Sawyer hadn't quite experienced the rush of a Hildy Johnson moment before; she was engaged enough by Hewitt's passion to be certain that
60 Minutes
was where she belonged.

Sawyer accepted Hewitt's offer of a job and showed up at
60 Minutes
in the late summer of
1984
. In typical fashion she was greeted warmly by no one at all. No one told her where the bathrooms were, or where to have lunch. She didn't even have an office of her own; for a time, she roamed from office to office while her own was readied. Once she finally got her own digs, various correspondents stopped by to tell Sawyer they were going to help her out by letting her have the best producers from their staff. It all seemed nice enough, until Sawyer saw through the phony Welcome Wagon facade: she was getting the producers the other correspondents didn't want. It wasn't politics, she realized; it was something both impersonal and ferocious, something Darwinian and a little scary. She knew she was on her own.

It didn't help that she was the designated golden girl in an office of middle-aged men. Within weeks, newspapers heralded her arrival with articles detailing her glamorous social life (the
New York Times
told readers of her dinners with Warren Beatty and CBS chairman William Paley) and hinted at her ambition (which she denied) to one day replace Rather as anchorman of the
CBS Evening News.
“I want to do explorations of character as well as investigative pieces that make a difference to consumers,” Sawyer told the
Times
in October
1984
. Later in the interview, she pointed out the disparity between her glowing media image and her wrinkled clothes and unkempt hair with her characteristically excessive humility to reporter Sally Bedell Smith: “Aren't I the picture of perfection?” she said.

Sawyer's first story aired on October
21
,
1984
, a compelling profile of a
51
-year-old North Carolina grandmother named Velma Barfield, who'd been convicted of murdering members of her family and was scheduled to be executed a few weeks later. The following Sunday, Sawyer interviewed the stepchildren of Claus von Bulow, the Danish aristocrat found guilty in
1982
of the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny, now in an irreversible coma. The piece—called “Did He or Didn't He?”—followed a recent reversal of the verdict against Von Bulow, and might have been expected to deliver some fireworks. Unfortunately, while Sawyer may have had the look of a
60 Minutes
correspondent, her questions lacked the confrontational edge of her colleagues. Talking to Alexander von Auersperg and Ala von Auersperg Kneissl, Sunny von Bulow's children from a previous marriage, Sawyer tried out her Mike Wallace impression with disappointing results.

 

S
AWYER
: If he had the intent to harm your mother, and particularly to harm her with insulin, why would he leave a black bag where people could find it?

V
ON
A
UERSPERG
: I don't know why it was there. All I can say is it was there.

S
AWYER
: Doesn't it strike you as odd or maybe a little stupid for someone with criminal intent?

K
NEISSL
: I don't know. I don't know why Mr. von Bulow did certain things, and I don't know. And does it strike me stupid? Maybe it strikes me stupid, but I don't understand why he did it that way.

 

That piece was overshadowed on that October
28
,
1984
, broadcast by Morley Safer's now-legendary interview with Jackie Gleason. Safer again approached his subject with his witty voice and erudite perspective and delivered an interview still remembered as The Great One's best. The most memorable part of it concerned the train that Gleason had gotten from CBS as part of his contract when his show moved to Florida—a party train befitting a man of Gleason's stature.

 

S
AFER
: What was on that train?

G
LEASON
: Everything!
(Dixieland music)
We had two Dixieland bands coming from California. They would spell each other. I'd say to ‘em, “Take five miles.” And parties went on twenty-four hours. I found out that I couldn't attend the parties.

S
AFER
: Were the—were there girls on that train?

G
LEASON
: Were there girls?
(Laughing)
There certainly were, and they were very, very nice girls. Nothing untoward happened. Might have been because the berths were too small.
(Safer laughing)
But regardless of that, nothing happened on that train.

S
AFER
: And was there a bar on that train?

G
LEASON
: A bar on—? The train
was
a bar.

S
AFER
(laughing)
: I guess that's a classic example of what clout is.

G
LEASON
: Yes.

S
AFER
: To say, “A train, please!”

G
LEASON
: That's right. When you've got good ratings and you're one, two, or three in the ratings, there is nothing your little heart desires that they don't provide.

S
AFER
: Doesn't work that way anymore, Mr. Gleason.

G
LEASON
: Did you have a comedy show?

 

No, Safer didn't, but there was no overestimating the clout of
60 Minutes
in the fall of
1984
, when the salaries of its stars—including Don Hewitt—had surpassed $
2
million a year. Even Sawyer, the new kid, was making $
800
,
000
a year. If Hewitt had asked CBS for a party train, management might well have considered it.

Chapter 15

A Whim of Iron

“Mike Wallace said he was feeling better yesterday,” reported Peter Kaplan in the
New York Times
on December
21
,
1984
. “The CBS correspondent had spent most of the last week sick in bed and admittedly depressed. . . .”

The reason for Wallace's apparent recovery was simple: He had learned that he would not be called as a witness in the libel trial currently under way in the federal courthouse in Foley Square. It had been almost three years since CBS News had aired the documentary about Vietnam that had so incensed Gen. William Westmoreland. And nothing terrified Wallace more than the thought of getting on the stand and testifying. He didn't quite know what was wrong; lately he had been feeling distracted, unable to sleep, unable to eat. He'd also had trouble focusing on stories, motivating himself, or doing much of anything at all. He had informally separated from his wife, Lorraine, and moved into a new apartment. The libel suit was dragging on and on, and there seemed to be no end in sight. The highly visible trial had limited his ability to do pieces for
60 Minutes,
and Wallace had described himself to others as feeling “trapped” by the trial. On December
30
, Wallace was admitted to the hospital for what a CBS spokesman described as “exhaustion.”

It wasn't until mid-February of
1985
that Westmoreland finally dropped his suit against CBS, just before it was to go to the jury. Neither side declared victory; the settlement included an agreement that “the court of public opinion” would ultimately decide the divisive case. For Wallace, it was also an emotional victory of sorts, but it didn't alleviate the odd symptoms he'd been experiencing. On the day the case came to a formal end, Dan Rather, Don Hewitt, and others took Wallace out to lunch at the
21
Club to celebrate. Once again, the
New York Times
account of the occasion took passing note of Wallace's less than jovial mood: “After the lunch, in a taxicab, Mr. Rather, grinning, turned and made a mock-gallant toast to Mr. Wallace. ‘To Mike,' he said. ‘Congratulations. Your hide has never been thicker and your spine never straighter.' Mr. Hewitt laughed, and Mr. Wallace smiled without mirth.”

What his colleagues didn't know was that in December, Wallace had admitted himself to Lenox Hill Hospital to be treated for the disease he now felt certain he had been suffering from for months, if not years: depression. To get through the pressures of the regular courtroom appearances, he had been prescribed Ludiomil, an antidepressant that had begun to help him. But in the aftermath of the trial and against the recommendation of his doctors, he had stopped taking the drug entirely.

It was typical behavior for the stoic, otherwise healthy
67
-year-old, who had yet to truly confront the reality that depression was an illness that did not go away. After the trial, Wallace seemed to return to normal levels of intensity and combativeness, but he continued to suffer. He has battled depression ever since, though for years he chose not to acknowledge it to others. He first went public with his illness at
1
:
30
A.M.
on the morning of December
10
,
1988
, while appearing as a guest on the NBC talk show
Later With Bob Costas,
when he says he realized that the late-night TV audience no doubt shared the insomnia that helped doctors diagnose his depression. He has since become a frequent spokesman on depression, along with his close friend, novelist William Styron—and admits that he will be taking antidepression medication for the rest of his life.

 

One floor below
60 Minutes
in the office building across from CBS News, Andrew Lack—producer of the now-legendary “Gunga Dan” piece—was gathering a small, relatively young staff of newsmagazine producers and correspondents to create
West
57th,
CBS's first newsmagazine show since
60 Minutes.
So far, nothing about the show made Don Hewitt happy. When the
West
57th
staff moved into the building, Hewitt put a sign in the elevator that read: “Eighth Floor, Video Fluent People Get Off Here” and “Ninth Floor, Yesterday's People Get Off Here.” It wasn't clear whether he was mocking the new show or his own, but concern within the network about the image and future of
60 Minutes
began to seep out into the press.

Lack was working with the full support of CBS News and particularly of Howard Stringer, an affable Scot who'd risen quickly through the ranks to become executive vice president of the news division. Stringer was anxious to offer viewers an alternative to
60 Minutes
using the same quick-cutting editing that had recently lured young audiences to MTV. It was clear Lack had been given free rein to create a newsmagazine for the MTV audience that was fresh—and different from
60 Minutes.

“If we are not going to keep repeating the past,” Stringer explained shortly before the show debuted in August, “we have to ask, how do we experiment to pace things differently? With the use of sound and editing and video, television has created something that works terribly well, and
West
57th
is advancing it. . . . We can't just walk away from every new idea just because it isn't the mirror of yesterday's programming.” Lack described the show as “audacious and dense.” “It's geared to reflect my interest,” he told the
Times
, “and the interest of my colleagues whose ages start in their twenties and go through their midfifties.”

Lack hired a young, good-looking crew of four correspondents, each of them half the age of Don Hewitt or Mike Wallace. They represented a cross-section of the hottest talent available. John Ferrugia had been a CBS News White House correspondent; Bob Sirott had been a popular Chicago radio personality and entertainment reporter; the women, Jane Wallace and Meredith Vieira, were both attractive and ambitious young CBS News reporters widely considered solid parts of the network's future. They were an appealing bunch of young journalists, part of a rock-'n'-roll
60 Minutes
with a dash of MTV flash.

Right away, TV critics mauled the show for precisely that combination of elements. “Think of a supermarket tabloid set to music,” John Corry wrote in the
New York Times
. The opening episode included pieces on an Oregon cult headed by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh; a profile of the actor Chuck Norris; an organ transplant involving the actor Jon-Erik Hexum, who had been killed in a shooting accident; and famine in Ethiopia. “If CBS is serious about reshaping our definition of news, and it does seem to be serious, it will have to do better,” Corry wrote. “A little more sex, a little more violence just to grab our attention; then it can get on to new cures for psoriasis and the latest in diets. We are maybe at a turning point in television journalism.” The
Times
, seemingly in high dudgeon over this stab at a new newsmagazine approach, assembled the Great Old Names of television to critique the show, one by one. “It was disappointing journalism, but not as glitzy as I was afraid of,” was the kindest comment former CBS News president Richard Salant could summon. Former president Bill Leonard had harsher words. “I thought it was well photographed and attractive to watch, but I didn't think it was journalism by any stretch of the imagination,” Leonard said, adding snarkily: “But I don't think that counts anymore.”

Hewitt, always ready with a quick barb, chose his words carefully, calling the show “quite good and every bit as entertaining as other light summer fare.”

West
57th
ended up being too superficial to shape the future of anything except the careers of two future
60 Minutes
correspondents, Vieira and Steve Kroft, a CBS News foreign correspondent who joined the
West
57th
team shortly after the show's launch. (Lack's career didn't suffer, either; after several years as president of NBC News, he's now the chairman and chief executive officer of Sony Music, working for his old boss, Howard Stringer, the chairman and chief executive officer of Sony Corporation of America.) Of the four original correspondents, only Vieira has maintained a national television presence, as a cohost of
The View
and host of
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Hewitt could feel the change in the air. It was being murmured, around the time Sawyer joined the show in
1984
, that
60 Minutes
was slipping in quality. Howard Stringer, who'd vigorously supported the idea of
West
57th
as an alternative to
60 Minutes,
stuck with it despite poor ratings when he took over as CBS News president the next year. (
West
57th
wasn't canceled until
1987
.) And while the network continued to back Hewitt and his still-successful show, his effort to fight
West
57th
and the powers that be at CBS News signaled his acknowledgment that the threats to his supremacy were real.

 

When Hewitt got in to work early on the morning of October
11
, he spotted fellow early riser Diane Sawyer and burst into her office. “Let's buy CBS News,” he said, and explained his plan.

He'd had the idea the night before, watching an
Evening News
broadcast with Dan Rather appearing by remote via satellite. As he looked at the satellite dish from his window atop the news headquarters across the street, he had a thought: What if
I
had a dish? And, more to the point, what if my millionaire friends—and famous TV star colleagues—got together to form our own TV news network to use said dish? Sure, it sounded crazy; but with CBS bleeding assets, maybe it wasn't completely far-fetched to imagine company president Thomas Wyman (a former food industry executive) sensing the business possibilities of such a deal.

“Sure, Don. Yeah,” Sawyer said. “Count me in.” It may not have crossed Sawyer's mind that Hewitt actually planned to take his idea to the chairman of CBS, Laurence Tisch. With Sawyer's endorsement he returned to his office to make calls. Bill Moyers. Check. Dan Rather. Check. Morley Safer. Check. Mike Wallace. Check. With five CBS stars on board, Hewitt raced across town to present his proposal to Gene Jankowski, president of the CBS Broadcast Group, at Black Rock. But Jankowski wasn't in yet, so he called James Rosenfield, senior executive vice president of the CBS Broadcast Group, at home; Peter Boyer's history of that period,
Who Killed CBS?,
details that day's developments.

“Jimmy, where are you?” Hewitt asked.

“Don, it's quarter to eight in the morning,” Rosenfield replied. “I'm in the bathroom, shaving.” Hewitt agreed to wait until Rosenfield could get to the office to pitch his concept. Hewitt laid out the basics—claiming he'd gathered enough big-money backers to foot the bill—and convinced Rosenfield to take him seriously. A series of meetings and phone calls followed, and then Jankowski finally informed Hewitt that the news division simply wasn't for sale. But the message to management was clear, particularly when news of Hewitt's audacious bid became public soon afterward: the leading lights of the news division were unhappy with current management and wanted to see significant change. Leading the revolt was Don Hewitt, a man Morley Safer once described as having a “whim of iron.”

 

Diane Sawyer's contract was running out, less than two years after her arrival at
60 Minutes.
Up until now, the show had been known as a place that people were loath to leave. It had been
5
years since Dan Rather's contract talks with ABC led to his selection as Cronkite's replacement, and
15
years since Harry Reasoner left the show for ABC. There had never been much talk of a raid on
60 Minutes
for the talents of Safer and Wallace. The fact is, no one could have offered them anything nearly as good as what they had at
60 Minutes,
still a top
10
show. The most desirable promotion available to a
60 Minutes
correspondent was the opportunity to anchor the evening news, and those jobs were already taken—Rather, ABC's Peter Jennings, and NBC's Tom Brokaw were all relatively young and new to their jobs.

Even so, speculation began that
60 Minutes
was merely a way station for Sawyer en route to an anchor chair and a million-dollar paycheck. Rather had yet to make the kind of definitive impact on the network's bottom line that would make him irreplaceable. With the glamorous Sawyer increasingly thought of as the next big star of TV news, it was inevitable that she would use her growing clout (and Richard Leibner, the powerful talent agent she shared with, among others, Wallace and Rather) to find her way to something better.