Tick... Tick... Tick... (29 page)

The fights would typically begin over something small; perhaps Hewitt would find some flaw in the first screening of a Wallace piece.

“This sucks,” he would say, or, “You've told it backwards,” or, “I don't get it.” A lesser ego might be stopped cold by such direct criticism; for Wallace, it only energized him to fight back.

“What do you mean you don't get it?” he would reply. “It's right there. Right there.”

“Right where? Not in the fucking piece I just saw.”

“Well, maybe if you were looking at the piece instead of . . .”

“Fuck you!”

“Fuck you!”

Before long one or the other would head to the exit of the screening room and walk out—Wallace was often the first to leave. One producer recalled remaining behind after a Wallace walkout and discussing more calmly Hewitt's objections to the story, until about
20
minutes later Wallace stormed back into the screening room, still in a lather.

“What the fuck are you still doing here?” Wallace yelled at his producer. “When I walk out, my producer walks out too!”

 

At a lunch the day after the Scheffler retirement party, a
60 Minutes
correspondent was asked whether Don Hewitt could still perform the job of executive producer.

“No,” the correspondent answered definitively. “He can do it to a certain degree if it doesn't go past noon. He doesn't hear, he doesn't comprehend. This doesn't mean that he's a basket case. What I mean is that his sensibilities are not what they were by any means.” The correspondent paused for a moment, then added: “His sensibilities were extraordinary.”

Chapter 25

Still Climbing

Trevor Nelson, who at the age of
29
became a producer at
60 Minutes
in
1999
, was the kind of guy who easily earned a
4
.
0
grade point average at the nation's finest prep schools, like Andover and the Putney School, only to be tossed out for partying. Wild and intense and charming and brilliant, he loved to flaunt his contradictions. He carried a briefcase to his classes at the University of California at Berkeley, and wore jackets and ties that hid the wild man underneath. Nelson's intelligence and self-confidence carried him past every obstacle, all the way to the staff of
60 Minutes
at the age of
27
—a young, gifted producer in the hothouse of television news, destined for greatness in an industry always ready to worship the eager face of a young man who knows what he wants.

Nelson arrived at
60 Minutes
in
1996
, after a five-year tour of duty at the
Christian Science Monitor
radio network in Boston. A friend had tipped him to an opening in Washington, working for Lesley Stahl as an associate producer; only
18
months later, Nelson was transferred to New York and Ed Bradley's team. He made a dramatic impression; his quick sense of humor and storytelling talents made him an immediate force to be reckoned with. Nelson became a full-fledged producer for Steve Kroft in
1999
, having completed his climb to the pinnacle of TV news in near-record time.

Nelson quickly made his mark with the kind of sharp-edged investigative pieces that distinguished
60 Minutes.
His stories sparkled; he tore through topics like dotcom millionaires, terrorism, and investment scams without breaking a sweat. A
2003
piece on the Halliburton company drew special notice; it drew damning connections between Defense Department contracts and the Bush administration's roster of former Halliburton executives, most notably Vice President Dick Cheney. It won the special attention of Don Hewitt, who saw in Nelson the bright, energetic future of a show desperately in need of a new adrenaline supply. Hewitt wanted producers who could tell complex stories in simple, elegant ways; he loved flash and respected substance, and Nelson's stories had both.

In September and October of
2001
, Nelson shared bylines with other producers on a series of distinguished Kroft pieces that followed the World Trade Center attack. Those included stories on airport security, immigration policy, and the survivors of Sandler O'Neill, an investment banking company headquartered in the World Trade Center that lost one-third of its employees. In the midst of crashing stories on September
11
, Nelson produced a Kroft piece for the November
18
,
2001
, edition on allegations of criminal activity at the U.S. Border Patrol. On March
10
,
2002
, he delivered another hard-hitting investigation by Kroft on problems at the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. “Con Man,” on April
14
,
2002
, profiled a Frenchman who represented himself as a Rockefeller to steal from a high-profile crowd. Nelson's segment on New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer on October
6
,
2002
, would earn him an Emmy.

Nelson distinguished himself by dedication, not just to the show but to his life outside it. He left his Upper West Side apartment for work each morning promptly at
9
:
30
, and returned home by
6
:
30
every night to be with his wife, Maggie, and their sons, Conrad,
2
, and George,
1
. He ran
6
miles every day in Central Park and maintained a large network of friends. After the death of his father in early
2003
, Nelson committed himself to spending as much time with his two little boys as he could.

It appeared, to those who knew Nelson only from a distance, that by the summer of
2003
the wild man had achieved a rare measure of happiness and peace. But those close to him knew that for all his success, not everything in his life was as peaceful as it seemed.

 

One day in the spring of
2003
, Trevor Nelson walked back to the office of the graphics designer at
60 Minutes
to take a first look at The Book for a piece he'd assembled on Saddam Hussein and his secret stash of billions. The Book was
60 Minutes
slang for the graphic depiction of the story's content and headline that appeared behind the correspondent, on screen, as the story was being introduced. Producers took a particular interest in The Book because that was the one place their names appeared on
60 Minutes,
where the jolt of ego gratification came after months of hard, anonymous work.

“Saddam's Money” hadn't been Nelson's idea—Kroft had dropped it on his desk some weeks earlier—but he'd reported it nonetheless and found a legitimate story there. As with most of his stories, Nelson had the help of an associate producer at the show, in this case a woman named Dana Miller. Although Miller had helped considerably throughout the reporting and research process, Nelson had been the one to write the script and shape its content.

Which is why Nelson was stunned to see Dana Miller's name above his own on The Book. When two producers worked together on a story—or when an associate producer shared a credit—the order of the name was always the same: the primary producer's name got top billing, and the secondary contributor went below. An associate producer's name almost never went above that of a producer, except in extraordinary circumstances.

“How did that happen?” Nelson asked the designer. He knew that when he'd put the credits on paper for the graphic artist who designs The Book, he'd put his name first.

“Steve switched the names,” the designer explained.

Nelson was stunned. For the last three years he'd been a full-time producer for Kroft and had endured every form of verbal abuse imaginable. Kroft rarely read a Nelson script without tossing it back at him, telling him in the bluntest terms it was defective in some form. Nelson learned to live with it, for the simple reason that he loved working for
60 Minutes
—and he respected Kroft's ability to craft a great script, to take a draft and rework it incessantly until it was brilliant. Also, unlike most Kroft producers, Nelson wasn't afraid to yell back. Though Nelson never instigated the fights, he never shied away from them, either, and gave as good as he got.

That said, Nelson hated the harshness of it, but he loved the results. He'd been nominated for two Emmys and was considered by everyone, including Hewitt, as one of the show's rising stars, so he figured he'd keep living with it for a little longer. His three-year contract with CBS News was up in the summer of
2004
. Maybe he'd find another job in television, or maybe he'd quit TV news altogether and follow his passion for politics and social issues in an entirely different direction.

But this time, when he saw what Kroft had done with the credits on The Book, he couldn't take it any longer. He decided he had to quit—not in August, but right then. He went immediately to find Josh Howard, then the show's senior producer but about to become the show's number two, and told him what happened. Howard told him he was right—that it wasn't fair, that it shouldn't have happened, and that he had every right to quit. But Howard persuaded him to resist resigning from the show; they'd work it out. Sure enough, by the time the story aired, on March
2
,
2003
, “Saddam's Money” carried the credit as originally intended.

Still, the rocky relationship between Kroft and Nelson never really repaired itself. As the summer approached, Nelson began weighing his options; he talked to people at other networks and vaguely considered doing what producers do when their contracts expire—entertaining offers from other programs, and using them as leverage for more money or status. Because Nelson had been promoted from within the ranks, he earned far less than most other producers at
60 Minutes
—and he wanted, if nothing else, enough of a raise to justify remaining in a job that had often made him miserable. Besides, he loved
60 Minutes
—he'd been watching the show every Sunday since his days at Berkeley and considered it a privilege to be producing stories for the greatest TV newsmagazine show around.

 

On the night of July
24
,
2003
, Trevor Nelson died suddenly of complications from meningitis, at the age of
34
. He'd been on vacation with Maggie and the boys in Massachusetts. It was the first death ever of a current member of the
60 Minutes
family.

Because it was July, the entire staff of
60 Minutes
was on vacation; the offices were empty. But everyone quickly assembled to pay their last respects to Nelson. By the next afternoon, both Hewitt and Kroft had issued statements to the press. “He was the most talented young producer I ever worked with,” said Kroft. “He was destined for great things.” Hewitt went even further in his praise. “Trevor Nelson was a guy who had star written all over him,” he said. “I thought one day he might be the executive producer of this broadcast.”

In early August, a letter of condolence came in the mail to Maggie Nelson from Lesley Stahl. “Many years ago,” she wrote, “an expedition of the hardy reached the top of Mount Everest and were surprised to find a lone cross with an inscription. It said merely: “Died While Climbing.” That, Stahl wrote, was also the message of Nelson's life, tragically interrupted on his route to the very top of the tallest mountain in his world.

 

On August
9
, nearly three weeks after Nelson's death, Mike Wallace was heading to the mailbox of his oceanfront home on Martha's Vineyard, where he had been a summer fixture for years. He took the same path he always did, over a rock jetty across the beach. He was hoisting himself up about
5
or
6
feet. It was around noon; after he got the mail, he was supposed to meet a reporter from the
Vineyard Gazette
for an interview.

As Wallace was making his way, he slipped and came crashing down on the rock, where he lay unconscious for several moments. When he came to, he was alarmed to realize that he was covered in blood. He'd slashed his ear and his head, broken an eardrum, and taken a bad enough blow to the head that a local doctor decided immediately that he needed to be taken by helicopter to New York City. He ended up in Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, where he stayed a few days—not as long as his doctors would have liked, but as always Wallace couldn't stay still.

He tried to resume normal function but right away, he observed a few significant changes in himself. His memory (until recently, remarkable for a man of
85
) seemed far more faulty than usual. His hearing wasn't as good as before, nor was his sight. It was a strange, difficult experience for a man whose physical well-being had been the subject of marvel and envy for so long. He still maintained his trim, athletic figure, but behind the facade Wallace was suffering. He'd previously been diagnosed with gastric reflux disease—hardly a killer ailment but nonetheless cause for him to have to clear his throat with uncommon frequency at times. Now, coping with the setbacks from his fall, he seemed less secure about himself than he had in years.

 

At the beginning of September, the
60 Minutes
correspondents and Hewitt were honored by the National Television Academy of Arts and Sciences with an Emmy for lifetime achievement. Even for a group of journalists as celebrated as this one, this particular award marked a special distinction, and as a way of commemorating the event, the correspondents agreed to appear on a panel discussion at Fordham University, to talk about their careers at
60 Minutes.
The panel was run by William Small, the former CBS News executive who'd discovered Diane Sawyer. Ed Bradley didn't come—he was still recuperating from his own illness—but Wallace showed up, along with Safer, Stahl, Rooney, Hewitt, and Bob Simon.

Simon was there despite his ongoing lack of the formal title of
60 Minutes
correspondent. He had been doing pieces for both shows, but his only official status was as a full-fledged member of the
60 Minutes II
family—even though he had the dashing looks and reporting chops to qualify as a correspondent on the more prestigious show. Simon's face—and the words, “I'm Bob Simon”—were only a part of the show's opening credits when Simon had a piece airing that night. That appeared to be the main distinction between Simon and his
60 Minutes
peers.