Tick... Tick... Tick... (25 page)

Diekhaus went to lunch with Bergen to talk about ideas. It was the belief of both women that to pull it off, Bergen would have to demonstrate to her future colleagues the ability to get big interviews—the kind that could be gotten only by a celebrity of Bergen's caliber. So she set to work: her first tries were John F. Kennedy Jr. and TV producer David E. Kelley, both famously reluctant. Unfortunately for Bergen, they remained so. When word leaked out to the other
60 Minutes
correspondents that Bergen was a potential candidate to join the staff, they rose up as one to protest what they perceived as yet another boneheaded Hewitt idea.

The Bergen plan was quickly scuttled, but not before Hewitt's correspondents were reminded, yet again, of their boss's fundamental weakness: He desperately needed someone to remind him that despite his proven record of great ideas, he seemed to have an even greater propensity for bad ones. As recently as
2003
, Morley Safer said that he couldn't recall the last good idea he got from Hewitt. “You just take them and put them gently under another piece of paper on your desk,” Safer said. “You know another whim will strike and he will have forgotten all about it.” Then, as always, Phil Scheffler played perhaps the most crucial role in Hewitt's professional life—censoring the worst ideas before they reached beyond his office. God forbid Hewitt should ever be alone at the top, the correspondents thought often and aloud, without Scheffler there to keep him from jumping off the ledge into the abyss.

Chapter 21

This Is Wrong!

On the morning of October
7
,
2001
—the day the United States began a rigorous bombing campaign in Afghanistan—Don Hewitt woke up in the hospital. He was here for an angioplasty. Nothing serious—just a tune-up to keep the old man moving. It was less than a month after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. These were troubled times, and he needed to get back to work as fast as he could.

Plans for an entire fall season of new pieces on
60 Minutes
had been scuttled on the morning of September
11
,
2001
; instead, the show's correspondents produced three weeks' worth of stories related to terrorism and the attacks. On September
16
,
2001
—the first episode to air since the attacks—Ed Bradley reported from a New Jersey community that lost several of its citizens at the World Trade Center. Steve Kroft examined weaknesses in U.S. airport security. Lesley Stahl led a roundtable discussion with General Electric chairman Jack Welch, former treasury secretary Robert Rubin, and investor Warren Buffett on the impact of terrorism on the nation's markets. Mike Wallace explored the flaws and errors in U.S. intelligence that allowed the attacks to take place. Producers worked nonstop and the office took on a deadline atmosphere not felt at
60 Minutes
since the Gulf War in
1991
.

Hewitt worked as hard as he ever had to make his show indispensable in a world of wall-to-wall news coverage. On September
23
, Stahl returned with a Laura Bush interview; Kroft examined problems with immigration policies; Bob Simon explored the mind of a suicide bomber; and Ed Bradley reported on the Arab world's reaction to the events of September
11
. On the following Sunday, Wallace focused on U.S. preparations for a chemical or biological attack; Bradley did a story on differences between American Muslims and those involved in the attacks; and Morley Safer went to West Point to look into the future of the American Armed Forces.

Looking back on the last four weeks from his hospital bed, Hewitt had to admit to himself that the skills of the
60 Minutes
crew didn't do crash reporting as well as they used to. Any way you looked at it, Wallace was too old to cover a story as aggressively as a decade ago. Same with Safer. He could still count on Kroft for a great hard-hitting story. Stahl knew Washington better than any of them. Bob Simon always delivered a first-rate foreign piece, but was he one of the
60 Minutes
correspondents or not? Not really. Not yet. Hewitt would have hired him full-time, but that would have meant wrestling him away from Jeff Fager, where Simon was a
20
-pieces-a-season correspondent for
60 Minutes II
. Then there was Christiane Amanpour, who'd been recruited for part-time
60 Minutes
duty in
1997
but in wartime was contractually owed to CNN for breaking news.

Hewitt needed to figure out how to distinguish himself and his show—not only for the show's benefit but also for his own. He knew that sooner or later, Heyward wanted to replace him at
60 Minutes.
No one had yet raised the issue with him directly, but he'd heard the rumblings. Was Moonves gunning for him? It probably wasn't Mel Karmazin, the number two at parent company Viacom. Karmazin was a pal. Still, Hewitt realized he had to put together some classic
60 Minutes
broadcasts fast, and prove to everyone that it wasn't yet time for him to leave. The newsmagazines (aside from
60 Minutes
and
60 Minutes II
) had been neglecting hard news to focus on stories like the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. In theory, then,
60 Minutes
ought to have been positioned better than anyone else to cover these tragic events. Whether it had remained a matter of debate.

That night's show would probably go smoothly enough. If any last-minute emergencies arose, Phil Scheffler would be around, as always. For
50
years, that had been a big part of Scheffler's job: to be around. Hewitt and Scheffler had a working relationship resembling that of a blind man and a seeing-eye dog. Scheffler's only purpose was to serve his master. It remained Hewitt's impulses that guided
60 Minutes,
and Scheffler primarily functioned to help his boss achieve that vision.

Scheffler owed Hewitt his career, starting from their first encounter in
1951
when Scheffler was a student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. One day, Hewitt had taken a couple of hours off from running
Douglas Edwards With the News
to spread the gospel of television to eager students. Scheffler boldly asked Hewitt if he could come down to watch them do a broadcast; once he got to the newsroom, Hewitt offered him a job as a news assistant. Within two years, Scheffler was a street reporter for CBS News—perhaps the first such reporter in the history of television news. The two men stayed tethered, and when Palmer Williams retired as senior producer of
60 Minutes
in
1981
, Hewitt promoted Scheffler, by then a seasoned and respected producer for several correspondents at
60 Minutes,
including Dan Rather, to the number two spot.

And if for some reason Scheffler couldn't handle that night's show by himself, there was always Josh Howard, who Hewitt promoted last year to the job of senior producer. In this news shop, the
47
-year-old Howard was the equivalent of a baby-faced teenager. But fortunately for Hewitt, Howard had way more tenacity and drive than Scheffler—and that would come in handy for Hewitt in the dark days ahead.

 

The previous afternoon, senior vice president Betsy West had gotten word from reporters covering the Defense Department for CBS News that the war would begin the next day. She and Heyward had spoken immediately about plans for coverage. Heyward's initial plan had been to broadcast that night's
60 Minutes
episode (already geared to the topic of terrorism) with a news opening to report on the latest developments. Knowing that Hewitt was in the hospital, West had phoned Scheffler to explain the situation.

“What do you expect me to do about it?” Scheffler had responded in what colleagues described as a typically downbeat response—“Doctor No” had lately become Scheffler's nickname around the
60 Minutes
office. “Let the special events unit handle it,” he said. It was an odd attitude to take, considering the likelihood that Hewitt would disagree, and perhaps explains why Hewitt didn't hear about that night's plans until Sunday morning.

Meanwhile, CBS News management moved ahead on its own, acknowledging that Scheffler was neither ready nor willing to tear up the next day's
60 Minutes
to reflect the breaking-news development of imminent war.

On Sunday morning, management turned the task of producing that night's
60 Minutes
—now extended at Heyward's request to a two-hour special—over to Jim Murphy, the executive producer of
CBS Evening News
with Dan Rather.

 

“We'll do it,” Hewitt said to West when he arrived at CBS from the hospital. “We'll do all the things you want to do, but let us package.”

Hewitt's argument came too late. By the time he'd reached the CBS Broadcast Center, the CBS crew had already started putting together that night's episode of
60 Minutes.
It would feature reports from various CBS News correspondents with no connection to the Sunday night show. Hewitt was helpless to stop it and furious that his show had been taken away.

In the late afternoon, Hewitt was standing around the “fishbowl”—the central area of the
CBS Evening News
where newswriters and producers gathered to work on the special that would emanate from the nearby anchor desk. It was in the fishbowl, a generation ago, that Hewitt had once been the first man to executive-produce the evening news. Now Murphy and his producers were working feverishly, and Don Hewitt was a bystander.

“This is wrong!” he yelled at the busy producers, according to an eyewitness. “You shouldn't be doing this! Everyone ought to walk out right now!” Hewitt genuinely wanted—in fact, expected—everyone to stop what they were doing and get up and leave. Finally, Hewitt had to be asked to leave, to allow the
Evening News
team to proceed with the broadcast as planned.

The show aired that night under the
60 Minutes
logo, complete with the ticking stopwatch; but to Hewitt it was, in his words, not
60 Minutes
but “a fucking abortion.”

Chapter 22

Across the Road

One afternoon several months later, Andrew Heyward left the CBS Broadcast Center, crossed West
57
th Street, entered the BMW car-dealership building where
60 Minutes
had its headquarters, flashed his CBS News badge to the front desk security, rode the elevator to the ninth floor, and proceeded left past the dull-gray carpeted reception area, with its facsimile of the
60 Minutes
stopwatch on the wall across from a Ben Shahn drawing of TV antennas, toward Room
177
, Hewitt's corner office.

Heyward had picked this March day in
2002
to begin the delicate matter of removing from his job the man who had been running
60 Minutes
for the last
34
years. Heyward wanted to tell Hewitt his proposal for the future. It called for next season to be Hewitt's last as executive producer, and for Phil Scheffler to leave a year earlier—by this coming June. For several years there had been a clause in Hewitt's contract allowing CBS News to remove him as executive producer of
60 Minutes
at the corporation's discretion; Heyward now wanted to exercise that contractual right. Heyward's plan was to replace Hewitt and Phil Scheffler with Jeff Fager of
60 Minutes II
. This meeting was to begin that process. Heyward would be joined for this meeting by Betsy West, who oversaw production on
60 Minutes,
and would help explain to Hewitt their plan for the future of the show.

However, this was not the plan Don Hewitt envisioned, at least not now. Not yet. When he'd signed his most recent contract with CBS, he told one correspondent that he would leave when it expired; at that point he would be
79
years old. But now that he had passed his seventy-ninth birthday, he'd shown no inclination toward leaving anytime soon. Anyway, Hewitt had his own successor in mind—Josh Howard, who'd been the senior producer (the show's third in command) since
1996
. The good-natured Howard had begun at
60 Minutes
as a producer for Mike Wallace, and had also worked on the
CBS Evening News
with Dan Rather and even served a stint at New York's local WCBS affiliate. He had friends throughout CBS News, in part because he was one of those people who always seemed on the verge of a chuckle.

Heyward believed he had a legitimate case for Hewitt's removal. As a corporate manager, he needed to prepare responsibly for the transition of power that was inevitable, given Hewitt's age. It was clear that Hewitt was slowing down in the afternoons. Knowing this, correspondents and producers vied to schedule screenings of their pieces earlier in the day; by
4
:
00
P.M.
, Hewitt was frequently yawning, if not asleep. On top of everything else, he remained as intractable and difficult as always, at least from management's point of view. For example, he had never been willing to discuss in detail with CBS a clear and definitive plan for a handover of authority at
60 Minutes.

Making matters more complicated for Heyward was the astonishing longevity of everyone at
60 Minutes.
As a group, they defied science with their amazing looks and health. Wallace, at
83
, looked and acted like a man
20
years younger. Morley Safer drank and chain-smoked (Rothman Specials) but at
71
years old looked vital. Andy Rooney—born in
1920
—in some ways looked better than any of them; his thick shock of white hair and his remarkable analytical mind continued to define his persona, and though his walk had grown a little shaky, he continued to function as a sharp and cynical observer of American life. Lesley Stahl and Ed Bradley (she of the leather miniskirt, he of the earring) had both just celebrated their sixtieth birthdays and still traveled the world with the energy of far younger reporters. Steve Kroft, at
56
, remained the kid of the bunch, a fact that regularly amazed him as he approached retirement age. He too smoked—Merits—and sometimes enjoyed a glass of wine with lunch. But the median age of a
60 Minutes
viewer hovered near
60
. To a generation raised on journalists like Tabitha Soren and John Norris on MTV, the
60 Minutes
crew looked like the guests at their parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary party.

Like most of the American news media, television now focused its attention on finding and nurturing young talent; but at
60 Minutes,
there was rarely any attention paid to finding someone under the age of
50
(or
60
, for that matter) who could one day lead the show after Hewitt died. In
1996
the promotion of
41
-year-old Josh Howard to senior producer had marked the first time a member of the baby boomer generation entered the show's top management circle. Otherwise, in
2002
Hewitt still headed a staff of cronies he'd worked with for decades and planned to keep near him indefinitely. Despite Hewitt's age and the presence of grandchildren in his life (by then he had three, ranging in age from
2
to
31
), he had no desire to stay at home and pursue hobbies. Work had always been his hobby. In
35
years he'd never once seriously considered leaving control of
60 Minutes
to anyone else.

“I want to die at my desk” was rapidly becoming his catch phrase.

With Hewitt's new work schedule, though, that was starting to seem unlikely. He had always gone to his house in Bridgehampton for long weekends; but the weekends were getting even longer, and the workdays were getting shorter. It was rare to find Hewitt in his office on a Friday or a Monday, making the notion of dying at his desk at best a figure of speech.

 

Heyward and West sat down in the overstuffed black leather armchairs that Hewitt kept directly opposite his large, immaculate glass desk. Hayward seemed ready, at last, to act for the sake of the show's future—and his own.

There was no disputing that
60 Minutes
had become less profitable in recent years, primarily because of the huge salaries paid to the show's biggest stars. That included the salary paid to Hewitt himself, close to $
6
million by one estimate. Wallace's salary reportedly hovered in that vicinity. Ed Bradley had reached the salary A list after his
1993
flirtation with ABC News, and Safer's salary was estimated at $
3
million. Stahl and Kroft were believed to earn between $
1
million and $
2
million. Then, of course, there was the healthy expense account for each correspondent; this included first-class airfare (often on the Concorde), as well as high-end hotels and transportation. Add to these fixed costs the highly paid producers of
60 Minutes,
who earn anywhere from $
100
,
000
to $
300
,
000
a year, depending on seniority and importance to the show. Stories themselves typically cost a minimum of $
70
,
000
to produce, and could cost as much as double that, depending on location. With
24
producers working behind the scenes
,
the total salary allotment for
60 Minutes
amounted to an estimated two-thirds of the show's annual budget—double that of other TV newsmagazines.

Heyward needed to recover at least some of that money. Because of the September
11
terrorist attacks in
2001
, the news division had spent far more than could have been anticipated to deliver wall-to-wall coverage; now Heyward had to find a way to make up for those unexpected costs. In November
2001
, two months after the attacks, CBS News had ordered each correspondent to cut one associate producer. To most people at
60 Minutes
the cuts seemed not so much invasive as pointless.

Now, four months later, Heyward was sitting in Hewitt's office about to propose the most difficult cut of all.

“We need to start planning for the future of
60 Minutes
after you leave,” Heyward told Hewitt. “And we need to start that process right now.”

 

The meeting did not go well. After it was over, Hewitt went to Wallace, Bradley, and other correspondents to tell them that Heyward was trying to fire him. (Hayward denies this but concedes, “He'd pass a lie detector test, he truly believes it.”)

The correspondents were conflicted about the future. They knew Hewitt was getting tired, and there were days they wanted him gone. But at other times, they reminded themselves that he'd created this show, their jobs, everything. They owed him for their huge salaries, their perks, their fame, their clout. He'd said vicious, hurtful things to all of them, but he always apologized, and there was no one quicker to credit their achievements or to defend their honor. They knew he would protect their secrets and their jobs and their livelihood for as long as humanly possible. Most of all, however, they didn't like the idea of management—“the folks across the road,” as Safer referred to them—telling them what to do.

After the meeting with Hewitt, Heyward thought he had at least the understanding, if not support, of Hewitt to push forward with a plan for Scheffler to leave at the end of the
2001
–
2002
season, an act to be followed at the end of the
2002
–
2003
season by the retirement of Hewitt himself.

But then—in a move that took management by surprise, after weeks of friendly retirement talks between Scheffler and management Scheffler seemed to change his mind about leaving. At that point, according to Safer, Hewitt (to the annoyance of management, which knew differently) acted as though he knew nothing of CBS's intention to get rid of Scheffler. The correspondents were unnerved by the idea of Scheffler leaving so soon; they knew Hewitt couldn't function without him around. As long as Hewitt remained in charge,
60 Minutes
needed Scheffler to function as a buffer between Hewitt and the outside world—and them.

Word of the correspondents' concern filtered back to Heyward, who called a meeting in his office. The meeting was to deal specifically with a retirement plan for Phil Scheffler, but hovering in the background was the matter of the eventual departure of Hewitt himself.

“Scheffler's hard to deal with,” Heyward explained to the group, shortly after they settled in his office. Heyward had always been appreciated by many as a plainspoken, intelligent man, but this observation made no obvious inroad with the correspondents.

“Of course he's hard to deal with,” Andy Rooney said “We're all hard to deal with.”

Both knew that wasn't what Heyward meant. He was trying to address a deeper issue between him and
60 Minutes
than the obvious personality quirks of its staff. As the head of a news division that had seen its profits erode year after year, Heyward was looking for any way possible to make
60 Minutes
a more highly rated, less expensive show. Getting rid of Scheffler (and then Hewitt) would accomplish two main goals: it would lower the salary budget of
60 Minutes
and open the avenues of communication between CBS News management and the people who shape the show.

“Don doesn't function without Phil. Phil makes it possible for Don to be Don,” one correspondent explained. “To get rid of him is a huge mistake.” The two men functioned as more than just a team, the correspondents told Heyward. Scheffler operated as a governor on Hewitt's impulses; without him, Hewitt might easily spin out of control.

Heyward and the correspondents agreed on this much: Hewitt couldn't care less about an orderly transition and would probably be just as happy if
60 Minutes
died on the same day he did. That was the common ground of self-interest that led Heyward to assemble this group, without Hewitt, in the hopes that together they could pull off a management shift to keep
60 Minutes
alive—and somehow manage to preserve, for the future, the oldest and still most successful news show on CBS.