Tick... Tick... Tick... (21 page)

Hewitt never acknowledged Vieira's pull to parenthood as anything other than competition for her loyalty to
60 Minutes.
He'd given ample evidence over the years of his insistence that his troops commit themselves to
60 Minutes
and nothing else. “If you have six people, they only appear twice a month, and the audience loses familiarity with them,” Hewitt said. “The game is played with five people. And to show up once in a while doesn't cut the mustard.”

Feeling betrayed, Hewitt chose to cast the decision as a reflection on Vieira's talents as a journalist, with public statements designed to embarrass her. “They just disappeared,” he said to
Entertainment Weekly
of her
60 Minutes
contributions. “Do you remember any Mere- dith Vieira stories? Nobody does. Look, in a nutshell, if Meredith Vieira had created half as much attention working with us as she's created complaining about us, I would have turned handsprings to keep her here.” Hewitt kept up the diatribe for days. “For reasons I don't understand, she never made anybody sit up and take notice,” he told the
New York Times
. “Your fingertips told you that nobody was talking about Meredith Vieira.”

Hewitt's attacks eventually turned personal. “She brought her baby! I set up a nursery so she could nurse her baby in the office,” Hewitt said. “You know who was horrified at that? The women around here who had had their babies and gone back to work. They couldn't believe it.”

In a September
2003
interview, Vieira disputed Hewitt's assertions: “There was never a nursery. There was nothing. Nothing. Zero. I had brought in some toys, like little squeezy toys that I would throw on the floor. There was nothing, no. Nor would I have expected it. I never asked for a nursery. I wouldn't want a nursery. I would never expect it.” Vieira also said that once she returned to work after her first maternity leave, she hired full-time help and rarely brought Ben to the office.

In March
2004
, Hewitt took a different stance on Vieira's departure. “If I knew then what I know now about how sick her husband was, how absolutely horrific her life was, I'd have handled it a lot differently,” Hewitt says, referring to Vieira's husband, Richard Cohen, a former CBS News producer who had left the company after being stricken by multiple sclerosis. “I didn't know. I did everything. I went out and bought a fucking—we had teddy bears in there for her kids, and a crib, and a playpen.” He went on: “Meredith left because I went to my boss and said, ‘My guys cannot take up the slack for the stories she's not doing.' Had she come to me and said, ‘Listen, I'm only working here half-time, I'll take half a salary, get somebody else to take half the salary,' that would be great. . . . It wasn't that what she did wasn't good enough.”

In the final days before Vieira departed
60 Minutes,
Morley Safer made a rare visit to her office and stood in the doorway, smoking a cigarette.

“You know, kid,” Vieira recalled Safer saying, “my wife and my daughter, to this day, resent the fact that I've spent so much time on the road and wish that I could have been around more. I did a lot of things that were great for me but not so great for my family.”

To Vieira, it was Safer's way of saying that if she was questioning her decision, there were a few people around
60 Minutes
who thought it was the right one.

 

Shortly after Vieira left
60 Minutes,
Harry Reasoner retired. He'd had a second lung cancer operation, and his health had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer contribute to the show.

In May
1991
, Hewitt and the show threw a retirement party for Reasoner at the Russian Tea Room. It was not a happy event for those who loved Reasoner, and who objected to the way he had been treated in recent months by Hewitt and his correspondents, men who'd long called themselves his friends. It was felt that his colleagues blamed him for his own illness, resented him for letting down the team, and believed he was no longer deserving of their admiration and kindness.

“They treated him like shit,” Jeffrey Fager recalls of that day. “Nobody really got up and gave a good toast except George Crile [by then a Reasoner producer on
60 Minutes
]. It was really odd for those of us who were young producers then to watch it happen. Mike got up and said something snide. Don got up and said something snide. Morley got up and said, ‘Never a noble moment.' We all came back and thought, My God. Harry could barely walk. He died a month later. And then, everybody was like, ‘Harry was so great, Harry was the best.'. . . He had abused himself. He'd been smoking too much, he'd been drinking too much. And because of that they had no respect for him. You're supposed to be a giant. You're supposed to be immortal. So it was pretty striking. I remember it, because Harry was such a sweet guy.”

Reasoner died on August
6
,
1991
, at the age of
68
. A CBS spokesman reported the cause of death as “cardiopulmonary arrest.”

Chapter 18

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!

It's all well and good to take bows and curtsies for being No. 1, but unless you get off your backsides and start working harder, we're going to be lucky to end up No. 51. Nowhere in all of journalism are their [
sic
] news people as well paid and loudly applauded as you are. Come on, for Christ's sake, start turning out stories.

—Memo to the troops from Don Hewitt in September 1990

When Lesley Stahl arrived at
60 Minutes,
there was some confusion as to whether she was replacing Vieira or Reasoner. She'd been chosen to take Reasoner's spot, but because of her gender—and Vieira's almost simultaneous departure—many assumed she was taking the woman's slot, even though one news account at the time harshly referred to her as “an honorary man.” The notion that Stahl was a token of anything represented a bum rap against a woman who had earned her reputation as a terrific reporter regardless of her sex. In almost two decades at CBS News, Stahl had distinguished herself repeatedly as exactly the kind of journalist Hewitt loved—aggressive, smart, and appealing.

“I was born on my
30
th birthday,” she wrote as the opening sentence of her
1999
memoir,
Reporting Live,
referring to the beginning of her television career. And
400
pages later she had done nothing to contradict that odd assessment of herself. She'd graduated from Wheaton College in
1963
, junked graduate school in zoology, married a doctor, written speeches for New York mayor John Lindsay, worked as a researcher at NBC, gotten divorced, moved to Boston, and landed a correspondent's job at WHDH-TV in Boston, then catapulted to another one at CBS News. Despite her long career in the spotlight, she has revealed little else about herself to viewers or readers—except, in various spots in her memoir where she allows scattered details about her demanding mother. Like her
60 Minutes
predecessor (and eventual friend) Diane Sawyer, Stahl depicts a mother focused obsessively on her daughter's appearance, despite her considerable achievements and a longstanding reputation as one of the most beautiful women in television news.

“She was always harping on me about my hair,” Stahl wrote, describing her early years at CBS News in the early
1970
s, having been hired in
1972
in the Washington bureau as a beneficiary of affirmative action policies—her own assessment of how it happened. “‘You need to go to New York and get Kenneth to style it. That's where Jackie Kennedy goes.' About my makeup: ‘Can't you find something to hide those circles under your eyes?' My clothes: ‘Where on earth did you pick up that little number? Get rid of it.' It wasn't that I disagreed with my mother. It was just that her formula for success, being beautiful, had the effect of making people think I was brainless.”

But few people mistook Stahl for brainless. She'd landed in Washington just as the Watergate scandal was heating up, and as a junior reporter was assigned to cover the story. Not only did she land numerous TV scoops—and regular appearances on the evening news—she also dated Bob Woodward of the
Washington Post,
then one of the capital's most eligible bachelors. Covering the Senate Watergate Committee hearings in
1973
, she met Aaron Latham, then a writer for
New York Magazine,
whom she would eventually marry. After distinguishing herself during Watergate, she was assigned to cover politics, and later the Carter White House—and after that, even more memorably, the Reagan administration. With CBS News still the gold standard, Stahl had become a household name and a fixture at White House press conferences. She earned a reputation as a fearless reporter who would ask anything of anyone; legendary stories of her dogged reporting followed her throughout her career—like the time she was dragged away after cornering then-Nixon chief of staff Alexander Haig on Capitol Hill and asking him about the president's plans to turn over the secret White House tapes.

When Van Gordon Sauter took over as president of CBS News in
1981
, Stahl was promoted, replacing George Herman as host of the Sunday-morning talk show
Face The Nation.
By then she'd given birth to a daughter, Taylor, yet seemed unwilling to cut back on her reporting duties. When given the difficult choice between work and family, she preferred to simply do both. She continued as host of
Face The Nation
and as White House correspondent.

Don Hewitt had been courting Stahl with phone calls about her work for years; in
1977
, he'd even assigned veteran
60 Minutes
producer Paul Loewenwarter to travel with her to Puerto Rico to do a piece to test her potential. By
1991
, he decided he needed her. Reasoner and Vieira were leaving; as a woman and an already-established CBS News personality, Stahl neatly filled both vacancies, and Hewitt finally called her with an offer to come work at
60 Minutes.

 

Stahl passed along a hot tip to her producer Rome Hartman: her friend Ray Stark, the Hollywood producer, thought there might be a good segment in the story of Dr. Thoralf Sundt, a brain surgeon at the Mayo Clinic who had operated on President Reagan in
1989
following a horseback riding accident. What made Sundt an appealing subject—aside from his preeminence in the field—was the state of his own health. He had been diagnosed in
1985
with bone marrow cancer but continued to operate on patients—particularly those who'd been deemed inoperable by other physicians. Hartman knew it had the makings of a good story, but he also knew there was a higher bar for a
60 Minutes
piece. Until Stahl brought him with her to work as her first producer at
60 Minutes,
he'd been a CBS News producer on a comfortable path to management. Though he'd never produced a piece longer than a typical evening news segment, he knew the mandate he had to meet: tell me a story. The doctor he found on a reporting trip to Minneapolis was a perfect
60 Minutes
character, the center of one of Stahl's first stories on September
22
,
1991
.

 

S
UNDT
: Fortunately, the illness hasn't affected my mind. I don't know how great it is, but it's as good as it ever was. And my hands—it's not hurt my hands.

S
TAHL
: Dr. Sundt's bones are so brittle from his disease that he has broken ribs just coughing or rolling over in bed. He must wear a special brace to protect him during operations. But he won't give in to the pain.

M
RS.
S
UNDT
: He looks better when he comes home at night than when he left in the morning, because he's doing what he needs to do.

S
TAHL
: Saving lives.

M
RS.
S
UNDT
: And they're saving his.

 

Although the Sundt story appeared, on the surface, to be just another classic human interest story, it also tapped into a private but shared obsession of the men who ran
60 Minutes
—a singular passion for work and its redemptive powers.

It was coming up on a quarter century since
60 Minutes
had gone on the air; Don Hewitt was now almost
70
, and Mike Wallace was
75
. This season had started off well, with the numbers up over the year before—and neither man showed any sign of wanting to quit working full-time at the jobs they loved. The year before, Hewitt and Wallace had boarded a flight together from Los Angeles to New York; Hewitt had just been inducted into the Television Academy of Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame, and they were returning from the ceremony. Just before the plane took off, Wallace got out of his seat and collapsed in the aisle of the plane. “Oh shit,” Hewitt thought to himself, “he's dead. Now we're never going to catch
Cheers
in the ratings.” Wallace was fine, though it turned out he needed a pacemaker. If anything, the equipment only seemed to energize him more. Maybe Hewitt and Wallace weren't saving lives, but they surely identified with Sundt and his passion for work as a means of staying alive.

 

Steve Kroft, still the unlikeliest candidate for stardom in the
60 Minutes
pantheon, was on the phone in January
1992
with George Stephanopoulos, a young press aide to Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton.

Over the last few days, the energetic Stephanopoulos had been occupied doing damage control on the latest rumors that swirled around his candidate. In the most recent issue of the
Star,
a weekly tabloid, a cabaret singer named Gennifer Flowers had alleged a
12
-year affair with Clinton that ended in
1989
. The tabloid—which admitted to having paid Flowers—also claimed to have tape recordings that corroborated her story. Clinton had denied the story, but Kroft had heard that Clinton might be interested in having the platform of a national television interview to defend his integrity. Unfortunately,
60 Minutes
was being preempted that Sunday because of the Super Bowl, which, he explained to the press aide, would mean he couldn't get the interview on unless CBS agreed to make time after the game.

“What time would this run?” Stephanopoulos asked.

Probably not until after
10
, Kroft explained.

“That's awfully late,” Stephanopoulos replied. “I'm not sure anybody would be watching.”

“Well, we can't do it any earlier because of the game.”

“What game?” Stephanopoulos asked.

“The Super Bowl,” Kroft said, barely able to contain his reaction to Stephanopoulos's ignorance.

“The Super Bowl is on this Sunday?”

“Yes.”

“On CBS?”

“Yes.”

“We're interested,” Stephanopoulos said, the excitement suddenly rising in his voice.

Kroft quickly reached Hewitt at the San Francisco airport. Hewitt made a bunch of calls and arranged for a short, special segment of
60 Minutes
to air immediately after the game; he then spoke to both Stephanopoulos and Clinton aide James Carville, before flying to Boston to meet Kroft at the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where the interview was to take place that Sunday, only hours before airtime.

Just before the interview began, Hewitt approached the candidate and told him that honesty and direct answers would win him votes. “I think at some point you're going to have to be as candid as you know how,” Hewitt counseled Clinton, “and then from there on you say, ‘I said it on
60 Minutes.
'” Hewitt wanted Clinton to make sure he understood: this was going to be history in the making. Hewitt and Kroft both understood the implications of catching Clinton at this perfect moment, and giving him a platform to speak to the American people for the first time.

The session itself lasted an hour. Its most eventful moment came
40
minutes in, when a
50
-pound klieg light toppled over and nearly hit Mrs. Clinton before crashing onto the floor. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” the candidate's wife exclaimed. Clinton took her in his arms and clutched her while the cameras still whirred. Those terrifying seconds did not make it into the original broadcast, and have been shown only a few times since on
60 Minutes
anniversary shows. When Clinton signed on to do his “Point-Counterpoint” debate with Bob Dole, he referred to Don Hewitt as “the man who tried to kill me.”

As soon as the interview ended, Hewitt, Kroft, and producer Frank Devine rushed to edit it into a nine-minute segment to air in just a few hours. They all knew the obvious pieces to use, yet just moments before the piece was finalized for broadcast, Devine reminded everyone of their plan to include a neglected clip of something Mrs. Clinton had said:

M
RS.
C
LINTON
: You know, I'm not sitting here as some little woman standing by my man, like Tammy Wynette. I'm sitting here because I love him and I respect him and I honor what he's been through and what we've been through together. And, you know, if that's not enough for people then, heck, don't vote for him.

The rest of the interview somehow managed to make news, too, though not quite at the level of Mrs. Clinton's comments. It also demonstrated, for the first time, the full extent of Kroft's skills as a questioner; a combination of Wallace's pointed digging and Stahl's repertoire of quizzical expressions, with no respect given to a politician's right to privacy. If there seemed to be little or no compassion or hesitation in Kroft's performance, it was no doubt due to his awareness that Clinton was fighting for his political life. Kroft seized the historic opportunity with apparent relish.