Tick... Tick... Tick... (19 page)

In
1986
, with her contract set to expire and all three networks exploring their long-term anchor options, Sawyer was in a perfect position to negotiate a more favorable deal. She discussed with all the major players the possibility of being their chief substitute for the regular anchor, which would put her first in the line of succession. But none of the networks was willing to replace their current anchors—Jennings, Brokaw, or Rather—with Sawyer at any point in the immediate future. In
1980
, Rather had negotiated himself veto power over any possible co-anchor; according to a
New York Times
account at the time, Rather used that power to nix Sawyer. “He has said someday, maybe, but not now,” a source near the negotiations told a reporter.

Nevertheless, Leibner won Sawyer a new contract with CBS that gave her a nice bump in salary, from $
840
,
000
a year to $
1
.
2
million. The new deal raised the possibility that she might end up hosting one of a number of new possible prime-time CBS News programs—including an update of Edward R. Murrow's
Person to Person
—and meanwhile gave her status as “principal substitute” for Rather, even though his veto would prevent her from taking his permanent place. Still, it seemed likely that the network considered her a logical successor to Rather, if his position ever changed. Though her new contract was said to be for a five-year term, few expected her to last that long at
60 Minutes
—including, most especially, her colleagues on the ninth floor.

Sawyer's negotiations had done nothing to ingratiate her with the
60 Minutes
men. She had no friends among the correspondents at the show—Bradley was the closest thing she'd found to an ally—and seemed unlikely to make any in the near future.

If anything, things were getting worse. Wallace, in particular, seemed to delight in making Sawyer miserable. He had little respect for her work on the show; when interviewers inquired about her qualities as a
60 Minutes
correspondent, Wallace would often refer to her looks. She brought out his competitive streak, and it manifested itself, as always, in pitched battle for producers.

Wallace showed up in Sawyer's office doorway one day with a typical taunt. “All your producers have quit,” he said. He was testing her; it was a favorite pastime of his, to see whether Sawyer could take his needling.

“Mike,” Sawyer said, looking up from her desk, “how many producers of yours have quit over the last fifteen years?” Her response was pointed enough to leave him without a ready comeback, and he turned and left.

Wallace still speaks harshly of Sawyer. “She never made that much impact on the show, she never did,” Wallace said in November
2003
. “The reputation of
60 Minutes
was made long before she came along. . . . She was fine, she did a good job here, et cetera et cetera. She's smart as hell, and she's pretty. . . . She doesn't need the money. Or the fame. She does this crap on
Good Morning America.
That kind of a life? What for? What she really wanted at that time was to be co-anchor with Dan, or if necessary take over the whole thing herself.” Asked for her opinion of her colleagues at
60 Minutes,
Sawyer responds simply: “There's a masculine definition of what is consequential there.”

 

At the very least Sawyer had distracted Wallace from his previous favorite target, Morley Safer. That was just as well for the low-key correspondent, who hated the
60 Minutes
brand of conflict even as he engaged in it.

Safer remained the antithesis to Wallace in both style and substance. He still banged out his scripts on a manual typewriter in an office piled high with books and art. When he traveled, he spent solitary nights in his hotel room, painting, his subjects the rooms themselves. He led a comparatively quiet life in Connecticut, away from the office and the social whirl that kept his colleagues so engaged. While Safer could do battle with the best of them, he preferred a quiet conversation over a good bottle of wine. Alone among the
60 Minutes
correspondents, Safer seemed to enjoy having dinner on the road with his producers; he was known as a witty storyteller offscreen as well as in his pieces, and producers relished assignments on his team.

Closing in on his twentieth anniversary with the broadcast, Safer had long since set himself apart from the rest of the
60 Minutes
correspondents by the types of stories he chose to do. He loved unexpected stories about odd people and offbeat places, from his June
5
,
1977
, piece on the
Orient Express
called “Last Train to Istanbul,” to “Genius,” his October
23
,
1983
, story about savants—including a man named George Finn, who became the basis for Dustin Hoffman's character in the
1988
movie
Rain Man.
Safer traveled to obscure capitals and talked with Muppets and writers and artists and kings. He disdained the kind of in-your-face reporting that had made Wallace famous, instead perfecting his own unique approach to
60 Minutes
stories.

On January
4
,
1987
, Safer delivered a classic example of the genre: “Curtain Call,” a profile of Casa Verdi, a retirement home for opera singers in Milan built by Guiseppi Verdi, produced by his longtime collaborator John Tiffin. Residents roamed the hallways, singing in phone booths or down corridors.

S
AFER
: Casa Verdi is a happy place. If not so rich in talent, it is rich beyond measure in the zest for all things musical. One sour or possible amusing note: when you put a hundred soloists under the same roof, it is not impossible to find a certain amount of vanity. Each person I spoke to here said they loved this place, but each one wondered what all those untalented others were doing here. But, of course, if there was no ego, they would not be artists.

To Safer, it must have seemed all too familiar a place.

 

Nearly a decade into his weekly gig as a
60 Minutes
commentator, Andy Rooney had achieved a level of prominence far beyond anyone's expectations. In addition to being a successful author, he had become what many within CBS News believed to be a key ingredient of the continued influence of
60 Minutes.

Inevitably, a man with so many opinions began to annoy people. Rooney had been the target of attack by numerous groups who disagreed with his curmudgeonly views, and of parody—again on
Saturday Night Live,
where Joe Piscopo had lampooned him in a series of sketches. Rooney now contends, with some exasperation, that he never uttered the phrase, “Did you ever wonder about . . . ?” that Piscopo popularized in his routine. “We've checked the transcripts and can't find it anywhere,” he insists.

In the spring of
1987
he took on his biggest opponent yet: CBS News. The Writers Guild of America had gone on strike against CBS over job cutbacks and other issues, and Rooney—in support of the strike—refused to appear on
60 Minutes.
He also wrote a letter to CBS boss Laurence Tisch attacking the network for cutting more than
215
jobs at CBS News, which he said “has been turned into primarily a business enterprise and the moral enterprise has been lost.” He had fought, unsuccessfully, to sit in on a negotiating session as a reporter, and soon afterward went public with a threat to quit CBS News entirely. But despite his sympathies, Rooney—who had always kept his office across the street from the
60 Minutes
offices, in the main CBS News headquarters—had avoided crossing a picket line by setting himself up temporarily at
60 Minutes,
even though he wasn't appearing on the show.

All this wasn't sitting well with Hewitt and others at
60 Minutes,
who saw Rooney's position as hypocritical; he was, after all, continuing to collect his $
7
,
700
-a-week salary and camping in a CBS office, despite his refusal to appear on the broadcast. For his part, Rooney insisted he'd met the terms of his contract to warrant getting paid—he wasn't a member of the WGA—and told the press he had no animosity toward
60 Minutes,
though it had been reported that he and Hewitt had engaged in shouting matches. “I like the people there, I even like Don,” Rooney told the
New York Times
. “I don't know whether it'll come to my leaving or not.”

A few days later, CBS News announced that it would suspend Rooney's salary. Rooney moved out of the
60 Minutes
offices over the weekend, but Hewitt wasn't mollified, issuing a statement attacking Rooney: “You don't move across the street to another CBS building that for a technical reason is not struck, and sit in an office and draw almost $
8
,
000
a week for doing nothing while his fellow writers are out in picket lines in the cold and wind and rain and snow. I would respect Andy a lot more had he gone out there and walked out on the picket line, and if he'd turned those checks back.” Asked by the
Times
if he would be able come up with a segment to substitute for Rooney's, Hewitt said, “I'm sure I will.” Fortunately for all concerned, a week later the WGA came to terms with CBS News, and yet another Hewitt battle came to an end. When it came time for Hewitt to take sides in a battle between his tigers and his bosses, it was an easy decision; he wasn't about to take on those who controlled his broadcast. In the end, Don Hewitt always wanted the rich and powerful on his side.

Chapter 16

Getting On

“I think it's quite probably peaked,” Harry Reasoner said of
60 Minutes
in a
New York Times
interview on September
13
,
1987
, as the show began its twentieth season on CBS. “I don't see it as coming suddenly to an abyss, but if anything, as an erosion. But we are, many of us, getting on, and it sometimes produces bad decisions. We tend to do profiles of Lillian Gish, instead of maybe Madonna. I assume that half our viewers are younger than our youngest correspondent. It's the beginning of the twentieth year, and as you get that long, you should be making evolutionary changes. And I assume Don is making them. Something's going to happen. Somebody's going to get tired or quit, or get a better opportunity, or somebody is going to be in a life-threatening situation—it's apt to happen to anyone.”

That “somebody” seemed most likely to be Reasoner himself. The lifelong smoker had been diagnosed recently with lung cancer, and in June emerged from his first operation. The Associated Press was told only that Reasoner had undergone lung surgery for a “respiratory ailment.” For the first time, there were whispers that Hewitt might want to replace Reasoner; his contributions to the show had lessened, and it pained Hewitt to allow the public to see one of his tigers as less than invulnerable. Compounding the problem was Reasoner's insistence on continuing to smoke in the face of his illness. He was hardly the only smoker among the
60 Minutes
staff; Hewitt had smoked cigars and pipes, Wallace had smoked cigarettes, and Safer continued to chain-smoke Rothman Specials. But there was something unsettling about this
64
-year-old man, crippled by cancer and still indulging the cause of his illness—and it was beginning to cost him the respect and support of his colleagues, who loved Reasoner and also wanted to preserve the reputation of their show.

On the other hand, it wasn't as though things were falling apart. The
Times
reported that
30
-second commercials on
60 Minutes
were now selling at between $
225
,
000
and $
250
,
000
, delivering approximately $
3
million per episode in advertising revenue. With an estimated weekly budget of under $
800
,
000
, each new episode of
60 Minutes
brought more than $
2
million in profit to the network, hardly reason to worry about the show's future. Not long ago, Hewitt had signed a
10
-year, $
22
million contract for his services—the ultimate endorsement of
60 Minutes
by the businessmen who ran CBS.

But the longevity of the show—and of its correspondents Wallace and Safer, who hadn't slowed much despite their age—had still stirred critics and insiders to wonder how much longer the party could go on. Even Hewitt found himself speculating occasionally on the show's limits, telling the
Times
that “there's going to come a year when this format will not be as appealing.”

 

By
1988
, it was increasingly clear that the courtship of Diane Sawyer by Roone Arledge—the president of ABC News who'd turned the TV news industry upside down with his willingness to pay big money for stars—would likely result in some changes at
60 Minutes.

Hewitt had no desire for Sawyer to stray from his show. She had quickly become his biggest star, after Wallace. But Sawyer's ambitions were plain to even the most casual observer. She'd appeared in
1987
in a series of Annie Liebowitz photos for
Vanity Fair
(much maligned at
60 Minutes
for playing excessively on her sex appeal) and cooperated with articles that reported on her relationships (she married movie director Mike Nichols in April
1988
), her beauty queen background, and her days in the Nixon White House. More than any of her
60 Minutes
colleagues, Sawyer had become a bona fide member of the celebrity culture. And it was her media star status that prompted Arledge to woo her yet again in
1988
—this time, with the promise of a prime-time weekly newsmagazine show of her own and a salary reported to be $
1
.
7
 million a year. It was a difficult offer to turn down.

But in the final days of her negotiations in January
1989
, Sawyer went back to the network one last time with a request: she wanted clearance from Hewitt to do one news special a year, in addition to her duties at
60 Minutes.
Still at least publicly clinging to his belief in the repertory spirit of the show and refusing to accept (or encourage) Sawyer's star status, Hewitt refused.

On February
1
,
1989
, ABC News announced that it had hired away Sawyer from CBS.

“I would have stayed, you know,” Sawyer says in a December
2003
conversation in her ABC News office, still sounding slightly bitter about the final round of negotiations that resulted in her departure from CBS. “I asked for one thing. One little teeny thing. Which is I wanted to be able to do one special a year. . . . I found that the highly successful, extremely intelligent, and pioneering formula of
60 Minutes
pieces—the kind of
11
- to
13
-minute piece, the kind of beginning, middle and end of it all—I thought it was great. But I also found that every now and then I wanted to step outside and see if I couldn't tackle something for an hour, and do it a little differently. Just for me. I would have done it under
60 Minutes,
that wouldn't have been a problem. I just wanted one thing that felt like me. . . . I wanted to do pieces for an hour and see if I could deliver a different kind of punch. . . . Don said no. He thought that it would undermine the singularity of
60 Minutes.
Maybe he was right. I don't know. You had to get a special dispensation, papal level, to appear on the
Evening News.
”

Hewitt still stands by his original position. “You get up in the morning, and you take a shower, and what are you thinking about when you take a shower? I didn't want Diane thinking about anything else but this show. And she wanted to spread her wings and fly higher and wider. And I don't think there is any higher or wider.”

 

In the wake of Sawyer's departure for ABC, CBS News knew it needed a woman on
60 Minutes'
s
team—whether Hewitt agreed or not. And no one seemed better suited to the needs of the aging newsmagazine than
West
57th
alumna Meredith Vieira—a CBS News reporter seen by management as star material, even though she wasn't exactly a perfect match for the men's club mentality of
60 Minutes.
By the time the wildly disparate lives of Hewitt and Meredith Vieira intersected in February
1989
, Vieira had established herself as a formidable journalist with impressive credentials to go alongside her pleasing television persona. After graduating from Tufts University in
1976
, she went to work for WJAR-TV in Providence, Rhode Island. That job eventually led her to WCBS-TV in New York City, where her series on child molestation won her a Front Page Award from the Newswoman's Club of New York. She went to work at CBS News as a reporter in its Chicago bureau in January
1982
; within two years, she'd become a political correspondent for the network, covering Senator Alan Cranston's presidential bid and the
1984
Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. In the summer of
1985
she was named a correspondent for
West
57th
and earned notice as a natural; she had an ease in front of the camera that gave her an edge over her less-experienced colleagues. In
1989
, she earned four Emmy Awards for stories she reported on
West
57th
during its
1987
–
1988
season.

These were still stressful times for CBS. For the first time in its history, the network finished that season in third place. In July
1988
, Tisch moved Howard Stringer to management as president of the CBS Broadcast Group and replaced him with David Burke, then an executive vice president at ABC News. Burke took an immediate hands-on approach to management of
60 Minutes
and pressed Hewitt to accept his choices of Vieira and Steve Kroft, Vieira's colleague at
West
57th,
as correspondents to set the stage for the show's future. Even if he'd wanted to—and he's never admitted to his true feelings on the matter—Hewitt demonstrated yet again a lack of interest in challenging the authority of his boss.

On February
3
,
1989
, Burke went to Vieira with his plan to put her on
60 Minutes
after Sawyer's sudden departure. Her response came as a bit of a shock. The woman who was arguably the network's hottest young star was being offered a job at television's top news show—and was hesitant to accept.

“It's the one broadcast I really want to do,” Vieira said. “But can I go have my baby and then talk about it?” (That quote and many other details of Vieira's period at
60 Minutes
come from
Divided Lives,
by Elsa Walsh, a
1995
account of the struggles of three successful women to balance their personal and professional lives.)

Vieira's first son, Benjamin, was born six days after her conversation with Burke. That pregnancy had followed several miscarriages, and at that point Vieira was uncertain whether she'd be able to have another child. In the weeks that followed,
60 Minutes
courted Vieira aggressively; she even got a phone call from Mike Wallace, whose imprimatur had become a necessary, almost ritualistic part of the show's hiring process. Equally crucial was Roone Arledge's pursuit of Vieira, which provided the leverage she needed to negotiate a deal with
60 Minutes.
The final step in the recruitment process came in April
1989
, when Hewitt and Phil Scheffler took Vieira to Tavern on the Green, the sparkling Central Park restaurant that was a favorite of Hewitt. Vieira brought her infant son to the lunch; he sat in a stroller while the grownups talked and throughout the conversation, Vieira held his hand for comfort.

On May
11
,
1989
, CBS announced that Vieira and her
West
57th
colleague, Steve Kroft, would both be joining the correspondent team of
60 Minutes
that fall. While Kroft would immediately begin work on pieces for next season, Vieira would not start until the following September, when she completed her six-month maternity leave.

 

Steve Kroft had entered the TV news business at exactly the wrong time—in June
1972
, just as affirmative action pushed white males to the bottom of everyone's hiring list. After graduation from Syracuse University and a stint in Vietnam, and unable to find a decent job, Kroft went to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, hoping to reposition himself for a better shot. He managed to get himself hired as an investigative reporter at WJXT-TV in Jacksonville, Florida, which, as it turned out, was a hotbed of municipal corruption with no tough reporters to cover it. The ambitious Kroft jumped into the job full force. Within a year, his reporting resulted in the indictment of the mayor of Jacksonville along with a slew of other corrupt city officials. This got Kroft noticed by the CBS News bureau in Miami. William Small, then the Washington bureau chief of CBS News, heard talk that Kroft was the best young TV reporter in the Southeast.

By January
1980
, Kroft was hired by CBS News. After a stint as a junior reporter in the New York bureau, where he continued to make his mark with hard-hitting stories, Kroft wangled better assignments. Eventually the network moved him to Dallas and Miami before handing him a coveted spot in the London bureau. The overseas job (back in the golden days of the early
1980
s, before budget cuts reduced the network's emphasis on foreign coverage) gave Kroft the visibility he'd been yearning for.

Being a young star correspondent at CBS News in the
1980
s led to great foreign assignments and prominent placement on the evening news broadcast—the TV news business had become increasingly eager to hire young correspondents in hopes of attracting younger viewers. Under the aegis of Howard Stringer, the news division was developing
West
57th.
Kroft wasn't among the reporters hired for the pilot episode that aired in
1985
, but soon afterward he was brought back from London to add heft to a show that seemed to need it. He joined the show's young, attractive cast and stayed with it until it got canceled in
1989
—which is when David Burke called.