Tick... Tick... Tick... (32 page)

Knowing the dangers of presenting a one-sided story about Jackson—with every media outlet in the country watching closely to see how
60 Minutes
handles this delicate story—Howard orders changes that they promise to deliver later that day, when both he and Hewitt will be in the control room, waiting.

 

It isn't until
2
:
00
on Sunday afternoon that Radutzky and Bradley feed the first segment of the two-part piece. They've filled the five-minute gap by this time, but the piece still fails to properly address Hewitt's objections. He still wants more clarity concerning the response to Jackson's own allegations of abuse. With Howard and West nearby, he screams his instructions to Radutzky over the phone in a manner that everyone at
60 Minutes
has grown accustomed to over the years. “How the fuck can we put a piece on where the police department is giving us no fucking answer!” he rages. “It's not enough! It's fucking bullshit!”

Hewitt is profoundly frustrated by being forced to wait for an incomplete story he has no real time to fix. He can easily see the weaknesses in the piece—the questions that Bradley doesn't ask, the absence of response from those Jackson accuses of wrongdoing (let alone the child at the center of the case), and the lack of perspective on Jackson's essential oddness. It is clear to everyone in the control room that one more week would give Bradley and Radutzky the chance to turn this piece into something much stronger. But there isn't another week, or even another minute. Radutzky and Bradley need to feed a final version to the network by
5
:
00
P.M.
, to leave enough time for the extended mechanical process of readying a
60 Minutes
to go out on the airwaves. But
4
:
00
P.M.
comes and goes, and then
4
:
30
P.M.
, and still no piece.

“Goddamnit! God-fucking-damnit!” Hewitt screams into the phone at Radutzky. “Where the fuck is the piece?!” Hoarse from yelling, Hewitt starts banging the phone against the control room table. “Don, how am I supposed to finish the story with you yelling at me?” Radutzky yells back, but to no avail—Hewitt is too enraged to listen.

There is one bright spot amid the panic that has quickly enveloped Control Room
33
at CBS News. CBS is broadcasting a professional football game that is running late—as it does most weeks—and it now appears likely that
60 Minutes
won't go on the air much before
7
:
30
P.M.
, giving Radutzky and Bradley another half-hour. In the end, with not a minute to spare, the show goes on the air that Sunday night—as though nothing had happened.

But clearly something has happened. The night has proven pivotal for Hewitt. Everything he loves and hates is on the table: Hollywood, news, drama, celebrity, sex, ratings, deadlines, and rules. It is a quintessential Hewitt moment, and one that has disrupted the smooth and uneventful final year at
60 Minutes
he planned for himself. If Hewitt is lucky, good ratings will distract everybody from the problems facing the show itself.

 

The next morning, Hewitt gets the overnight numbers. The episode reached the highest number of the
18
-
49
audience in almost four years. It scored a
12
.
0
/
20
household rating and share and a total audience of
18
.
8
million viewers, making it the number one show of the week. This marks the first time that
60 Minutes
has been number one on television since the March
1998
broadcast that featured Bradley's interview with Kathleen Willey—another Bradley-Radutzky collaboration that
60 Minutes
had been accused of rushing onto the air without adequate reporting.

At
4
:
00
A.M.
on New Year's Eve, Hewitt is back on the phone with Radutzky, yelling again.

“What the fuck is this about?” Hewitt demands. In that morning's edition, the
New York Times
is reporting that CBS had paid Michael Jackson an additional $
1
million for the
60 Minutes
interview, and alleging that Ed Bradley promised Jackson money at their Neverland encounter the previous February. The
Times
attributes the allegations to a business associate of Jackson and a CBS executive, both anonymous.

Radutzky tries to calm Hewitt down. “I don't have any idea,” he says. “We didn't pay them anything.” Over the next several days, Hewitt launches an angry counterattack against the
Times
, insinuating a lack of ethical standards in its reporting.

 

The internal bruises from the Jackson story have been slow to heal, and some questions about the broadcast remain unanswered to the satisfaction of everyone at
60 Minutes.
“Ten years ago we wouldn't have done a Michael Jackson interview,” Mike Wallace says soon afterward. “Who is he? Not a story for us.”

Morley Safer is even more emphatic. “I think it's going to be very, very dangerous for this broadcast if they try making it too relevant because the pressure will be there to be doing what we shouldn't be doing,” Safer says. “I think everything from Jessica Lynch to Michael Jackson . . . apart from the fact that I have serious questions about how important they are as stories, we don't do those stories very well. I don't do those stories very well. I don't do them. There's no interest.”

In March
2004
, one
60 Minutes
correspondent, requesting anonymity, remains uncertain of what really happened between Jackson and
60 Minutes.
Like the rest of the tigers, this correspondent has an ongoing love-hate experience with Hewitt. “I'm not sure how much Don knew about this,” the correspondent says. “We were just on a roll, and Don wanted to get ratings, and I don't think he even knew about most of this stuff. I don't think he knew anything about deals. I don't think anybody in the front office would have raised that with Don because his reaction would have been so unpredictable.”

The correspondent pauses for a moment and then adds: “I think that maybe I'm underestimating. Maybe Don was in it up to his ears, you know?”

As for Jeffrey Fager, poised to succeed Hewitt as executive producer of
60 Minutes
in the fall of
2004
, his main reaction to the Jackson episode is relief that it didn't happen on his watch. He tells associates that he feels certain he would have been crucified for it by the news media: “They would have said, ‘That sort of thing would never have happened if Don Hewitt was still around.'”

But the chase for ratings and riches has been Don Hewitt's obsession pretty much ever since he went to work in television over a half-century ago. That's when he first merged a childhood infatuation with Hildy Johnson and the movies into the dry, dull business of reporting the news—and, in the process, created something no one had ever seen before.

Epilogue

Mike Wallace has wandered back to his office from Don Hewitt's impromptu good-bye party, well ahead of most of the others still drinking champagne in the screening room and listening to their deposed boss rail against the CBS managers who have inexplicably removed him from his job.

“It's time for Don to go,” Wallace whispers.

It has been a difficult winter and spring at
60 Minutes.
Hewitt has alternated between accepting his fate and denying it, frequently complaining that he still doesn't understand the reasons for his forced resignation. Even the high points of these last several months were tinged with controversy; the ratings and headlines generated by a February interview with former White House terrorism chief Richard Clarke were followed by criticisms that the show should have disclosed its corporate tie to the Free Press, Clarke's publisher, which, like CBS, is owned by Viacom. Even Ed Bradley's return to health, following last year's bypass surgery, was slowed by an emergency appendectomy. And the ratings triumphs for the broadcast from earlier in the season diminished considerably as the year progressed. By May, the show was back to its usual numbers, way down from the highs reached by the Lawrence Taylor and Michael Jackson episodes.

Hewitt's imminent replacement, Jeff Fager, has been taking producers and correspondents to lunch all spring at Gabriel's to discuss the show's future. He has told people he doesn't want to make wholesale changes, but it is clear he wants to make
60 Minutes
more timely and relevant. After the Tyco mistrial in March, Hewitt had passed on a Bradley interview with the infamous Juror Number Four who stood in the way of a guilty verdict. Fager, at
60 Minutes II
, immediately scheduled a two-part interview of the juror by his star correspondent, anchorman Dan Rather. (It didn't do anything in the ratings, CBS chief Leslie Moonves mutters afterward.) Most people expect that Rather will play an integral role next season in Fager's
60 Minutes.
(One week after taking over the show, Fager used a Rather piece on his June
13
,
2004
, Reagan special following the former president's death—instead of using one by Lesley Stahl, for example, who covered the Reagan administration. The following week, Rather appeared in a special one-hour
60 Minutes
interview with Bill Clinton.)

Meanwhile, Hewitt has managed to displease his correspondents with one final decision, endorsing the removal of the “II” that has followed the name of the Wednesday-night broadcast since it launched in
1998
: from now on, it will be known as
60 Minutes.
When that decision is announced, the correspondents complain bitterly that their show has been devalued and voice concerns that pieces from
60 Minutes II
will now compete with theirs for placement on the prestigious Sunday broadcast. No one quite understands why Hewitt has agreed to this, except perhaps to make the Wednesday show less likely to get canceled—and somehow reflect poorly on his legacy. It may also be a parting gift to Josh Howard, who had been his personal choice to succeed him at
60 Minutes
and who instead has been named executive producer of
60 Minutes II
.

“Everyone was very upset about that,” Wallace says. “It made no sense.”

But Wallace, like his fellow correspondents, is focused on the future. He has agreed to devote at least one more season to
60 Minutes,
producing
10
stories for Fager; after that, he'll see how he's feeling. “What else am I going to do?” he says, with a twinge of sadness.

Wallace knew nothing about Hewitt's plans for next season until his surprise announcement at the party a few minutes earlier—Hewitt's revelation of the
30 Minutes
concept he claims to have sold to
19
CBS owned-and-operated stations. It will be a locally produced newsmagazine under Hewitt's oversight—
30 New York Minutes,
30 Miami Minutes,
etc. Wallace holds out no hope at all for its success.

“How do you control an idea like that?” Wallace asks. “Nineteen different shows. How can he run all of them? Nineteen! How does he plan to make sure of the quality? He's squandering the name.”

Wallace then shakes his head dismissively. “Terrible idea,” he says. “Terrible.”

It is pointed out that
36
years ago, Wallace had a similar opinion of another crazy Hewitt idea, a show called
60 Minutes.
Wallace turns away, lost for a moment in the memory. “True,” he says, looking out his office window. “That one worked.”

Afterword

On Sunday afternoon, September 5, 2004,
60 Minutes Wednesday
producer Mary Mapes telephoned Dan Rather in Florida, where he was covering the aftermath of Hurricane Frances, and implored him to drop the story immediately and fly to Texas to begin interviews for a new piece. Despite the inconvenience, the story Mapes dangled in front of him was undeniably enticing, and Rather left for Dallas to meet her. They landed in Austin that night at 10:30 and dashed off to begin interviews.

A few days earlier, Mapes had been given a handful of documents from a source in Texas that appeared to demonstrate what the media had for some time insinuated without proof—that President Bush had received preferential treatment during his years of service in the Texas Air National Guard, from 1968 to 1973. Three memos, purportedly from the personal files of President Bush's squadron commander— Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian—reported Killian's feeling that he had been pressured by the National Guard leadership to ignore Bush's poor Guard performance, and to “sugarcoat” his evaluation of the future politician.

Rather's interview that night was with former Texas Air National Guard Lieutenant Robert Strong, who they hoped would help authenticate the documents and establish a pattern of favoritism. After spending an hour with Strong, Mapes and Rather returned to New York via a chartered jet, so that Rather could go live the next morning— Labor Day—with coverage of President Clinton's surgery.

Over the next three days, Mapes and Rather crashed the story with every ounce of energy they had. Rather interviewed documents experts gathered by an associate producer, Yvonne Miller, as well as Ben Barnes, the former Lieutenant Governor of Texas, who claimed to have helped Bush get preferential treatment. Their excitement was palpable; the network's number-one reporter and the show's top producer had an explosive story and were working day and night to get it on the air. On Monday, CBS News president Andrew Heyward recalled later, Rather said he hadn't “been involved in this much checking on a story since Watergate” and added: “This isn't as big as Abu Ghraib, but it's very big.”

Rather needed the story. At the age of 73, he was under tremendous pressure from CBS higher-ups to retire from the newscast he'd been anchoring since 1981, and he needed every headline he could generate to convince his bosses of his continued relevance. It had been over a year since his interview with Saddam Hussein, an undeniable scoop that earned him the right to keep bragging about his reporting skills to anyone who would listen. Now he needed another exclusive to remind the world that Dan Rather remained at the top of his game.

This new story, Rather knew, would make front-page news around the world. And there was another attraction: Rather had made his name by taking on then-President Nixon in 1971 and still loved nothing more than the idea of a tough story about the most powerful man in the free world. He'd only been reporting the story for the last three days—and even then, he'd had other stories vying for his attention—but he trusted Mary Mapes; she'd been working on it for weeks, and if she said the story was solid, Rather felt, that meant it was solid.

Mapes was coming off a spectacular spring. Her story about the Abu Ghraib prison abuses by American soldiers in Iraq had made more headlines for
60 Minutes II
than any other segment in its short history, and the previous fall she'd arranged for Rather's newsmaking interview with conservative Sen. Strom Thurmond's biracial daughter. Her
60 Minutes
colleagues assumed, some with a twinge of envy, that Mapes would win the Emmy Award, and deservedly so. Three months earlier, she had renegotiated her CBS News contract, securing her future as a producer for Dan Rather and
60 Minutes Wednesday
. (The show had just been renamed, in what most at CBS News saw as a desperate effort to raise the Wednesday show's sinking ratings by linking it with the more popular Sunday broadcast.) And as a top producer for CBS's peripatetic, camera-loving anchorman, Mapes could hardly have been better positioned to dominate a broadcast now being run by a new executive producer hoping to make his mark.

Some people had even recommended to Josh Howard—who took over
60 Minutes Wednesday
in June after Jeffrey Fager moved over to replace Don Hewitt at the Sunday edition—that he consider Mapes to be his new deputy. Howard had spent much of the spring and early summer interviewing candidates for the job, and despite her lack of managerial credentials, Mapes stayed on his list for a while. But in the end Howard chose as his deputy a CBS News insider named Mary Murphy, who'd not only worked as a
60 Minutes
producer (she'd sweated out a year of abuse under the tyrannical Steve Kroft on the Sunday show) but also had management experience, most recently as a senior producer on the network's political coverage.

Mapes didn't mind. She was hard on the trail of a high-impact story, one that could even influence the course of the reelection campaign now entering the final stretch. If she could bring it in, the true story of Bush's military service record would likely win her even more attention and accolades than Abu Ghraib had.

 

Ever since Bush entered electoral politics as the governor of Texas in 1994, skeptical reporters had suspected a cover-up in the matter of his military record; though the President had consistently denied getting any preferential treatment, Republicans conceded that the future President hadn't served his country with the sort of bravery associated with some of his predecessors. Even Bush admitted as much, though he had vigorously fought rumors that his family connections freed him from military service. Predictably, those denials only spurred speculation among investigative reporters, and the race continued to document rumors that Bush had evaded some aspect—any aspect—of his military service.

Mapes had been working her Texas sources for years to develop a fresh angle on the story. Finally, in August 2004—five years after she and Rather had done their first interviews on the subject—she received a call from Michael Smith, a Texas-based freelance reporter. Within weeks, she'd been promised what she thought would be the biggest scoop yet on the subject: documents from the personal files of a National Guard officer that reported on Bush's preferential treatment in what Mapes believed were incontrovertible terms.

Next to shadowy figures in parking garages, nothing excites a reporter as much as the prospect of secret documents. There's something about those words that sound so official and significant. The very idea of these new documents turned Mapes into a giddy schoolgirl. On the night of August 23, e-mailing Howard with the first hint of their appearance, she referred to them as “new and compelling” and made them sound like an historical find.

“how interesting,” Howard wrote back in a lower-case and unenthusiastic e-mail response. “thank you for sharing!”

Still, Mapes barreled forward. On September 2, Mapes and Smith went to Clyde, Texas, to meet with retired Texas Air National Guard Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett, who had the documents in his possession. He gave two documents to Mapes and promised more, in exchange for Mapes's assurance that his identity would be kept secret. (Burkett also asked for help in contacting the Kerry campaign to pass along some unsolicited advice.) Eager to take the documents with her that day, Mapes didn't press Burkett on his source, but instead tore off to the nearest fax machine at a Kinko's in nearby Abilene. Mapes knew that
60 Minutes Wednesday
would have its first new episode the following week, and she desperately wanted this piece on the air.

 

When the documents emerged from Josh Howard's fax machine, his first reaction was that they didn't contain much news at all.

But Mapes believed that she could build a fresh, hard-hitting piece around them, and next solicited the services of the one man who could help her: Dan Rather. Despite the intense pressure of news events (the hurricane was just winding down, and former President Bill Clinton's heart surgery was imminent), Rather appeared anxious to jump aboard. On Saturday, September 4, at Mapes's suggestion, the anchorman picked up the phone to call Burkett in Texas and thank him for leaking the documents. Or so Mapes later claimed, anyway: As with so many other aspects of this story, Rather had limited recall of events, and didn't remember speaking to Burkett. But Mapes clearly had gotten Rather excited—in calls between Rather and Andrew Heyward over the Labor Day weekend, the piece came up in some detail. Rather was ready to fly to Texas to do whatever was necessary to get the story on the air fast.

Part of the reason Mapes asked Rather for help was that she understood his awesome power at CBS News. (They had also had a long relationship: Before her
60 Minutes
gig, Mapes worked as a producer on the
CBS Evening News
, where she'd gotten to know Rather. That's also where she earned the latitude to live in Dallas, where her husband worked as a reporter for the
Dallas Morning News
, instead of in New York.) Mapes realized it wasn't going to be enough for her to warn that competing news organizations might touch the holy grail first. She was a legend around the
60 Minutes
offices for the way she worked her bosses to get airtime. While it wasn't unusual for a producer to cite an impending piece elsewhere to land a story on the air—”The
New York Times
has this and they're going to run it Thursday”—Mapes had a reputation for overusing such tactics, to the point where it was difficult to believe her. But in the end, her excellent reporting trumped her hysterics; she always delivered the goods.

Having Rather on board would render protests relatively toothless; no one liked to say no to the Anchorman. Even though Heyward had been struggling for years to find a gentle way to remove Rather from the anchor chair, there was no doubting Rather's power at CBS News. He had his own publicist (a Spanish flamenco dancer named Kim Akhtar) and worked overtime to maintain the smooth public image essential to an anchorman. He would always greet an unfamiliar well-wisher by saying, “Nice to see you again!” and grasping his forearm— whether he'd met him before or not. And the Texas aphorisms poured out of him: “If you'll get me another cup of coffee,” he'd say to an underling, “I'll dance at your daughter's wedding.” But the essential fact about Rather was that he loved being on television. All talk of his retirement had been just that; few people could imagine a day when Rather would voluntarily give up any face time on CBS News. It was widely assumed within CBS that Rather was waiting for his 25th anniversary as anchorman, in March 2006, to step down. Until then, most expected that Rather would continue his breakneck pace of broadcasts—not only the evening news but also a full load of segments for
60 Minutes Wednesday
and even, lately, the occasional story for the Sunday broadcast, not to mention coverage of election night and other breaking news. Besides, Rather had a weakness for scoops. More than Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings, Rather relished regularly elbowing his way onto prime time with exclusive interviews and reports; his most recent had been Mapes's Abu Ghraib piece.

 

As alluring as the story was, it presented some problems. On Monday, September 6, Rather had done an on-camera interview with Marcel Matley—one of the experts a
60 Minutes
associate producer had tracked down to verify the documents—and come away from it slightly queasy. (As it turns out, Matley was a handwriting expert, not a document examiner, and never fully endorsed the documents' authenticity.) Rather was privately becoming concerned about the story.

But he put aside his misgivings and accepted Mapes's steady and frequent assurances that the documents were valid and would with-stand public scrutiny. It wasn't until the night before his public apology, on September 20, well into the media frenzy over the documents, that Rather confessed his doubts to Josh Howard while chatting in an associate producer's office. “I knew when I did the Matley interview that something wasn't right with all this,” he told Howard.

 

On Tuesday, September 7, 2004, Rather was sitting at the anchor desk in Studio 47, minutes away from the start of that night's
CBS Evening News
. But instead of pouring over that night's copy one more time, he reached for the phone to call Howard.

“Josh,” he said, “I'm curious to know what kind of plans you have to promote the documents piece tonight. We've got to promote the story in prime time.”

“We can't, Dan,” Howard replied evenly.

“Why not?” Rather had long since grown accustomed to having people accede to even his most outlandish requests.

“Well for one thing, I'm not even sure the piece is going to air tomorrow,” Howard said. “The lawyers haven't even seen it yet. Plus, we haven't even contacted the White House for comment about the documents. There's still a lot of reporting left to do. We can't promote the story until we know for sure we've got it.”

This wasn't what Rather wanted to hear. He wanted the story to air as quickly as possible, and to make a big a splash as possible. From decades of experience, he knew that this would require advance promotion. It wasn't as though
60 Minutes Wednesday
normally attracted much of an audience; most weeks it ranked in third or fourth place among the top four broadcast networks. Rather wasn't about to be told by some underling (one of Howard's first jobs at CBS News was had been a producer on the evening news, working for Rather) that his big scoop was perhaps in jeopardy.