Tick... Tick... Tick... (33 page)

“Maybe I'll just leak the documents to the
New York Times
myself, tonight,” Rather told Howard. “I'll make sure they attribute the reporting to
60 Minutes
and to me, and that way it'll promote the piece.”

“Dan, you just can't do that,” Howard replied, exasperated. “It's way too big a risk.”

With only a few minutes before the start of the broadcast, a frustrated Rather hung up and turned his attention to that day's events.

Tuesday, the three CBS News executives most responsible for the
60 Minutes Wednesday
broadcast—Howard, Murphy, and senior vice president Betsy West—began the final editing process. All three grilled Mapes about Burkett (though none knew his name) and about the process of authenticating the documents. During that meeting, in the view of others present, Mapes delivered her first fib. She told everyone that her source had no political bias, that the documents had been fully authenticated, and that her other interviews supported the story. And they believed her; Mapes, after all, was one of the highest-paid, best-respected, and most reliable producers in the network news business. (It was the commission's later failure to acknowledge this aspect of events that most infuriated those who later lost their jobs.)

At 4:30 that afternoon, an assistant to President Bush's press secretary, Dan Bartlett, called Josh Howard to get some information about the story; as of yet, no effort had been made to contact the White House for commentary. At 6:50
P.M.
, Howard called Bartlett back, but didn't mention the documents. It wasn't until later that evening that Howard told Bartlett that the show had obtained documents from Killian's personal file. Mary Murphy read the documents aloud to Bartlett, and Howard arranged for them to be delivered to the White House by the next morning.

At 11:00 on Wednesday morning—while CBS News White House correspondent John Roberts was interviewing Bartlett for his response to the documents—Mapes met with CBS lawyers, along with Howard, Murphy, West, and Esther Kartiganer, a
60 Minutes
senior producer responsible for accuracy and fairness in stories. In later statements to investigators, Mapes claimed that she revealed at this meeting that her source for the documents was “difficult,” a “moralistic stickler” with medical problems, “disgruntled,” and “anti-Bush.” Others present, though, recall that Mapes expressed “enormous confidence” in her source and claimed that, in the words of the commission that later looked into these events, “he was solid with no bias or credibility issues.” (Those sources now believe Mapes lied to them repeatedly about the reporting and expert backup for her story.) She also elided several key elements of her reporting that contradicted her portrait— including, most significantly, the fact that none of the documents experts could authenticate the memos, essentially because they were photocopies, rendering her story virtually unfounded. Indeed, one of the experts had told Yvonne Miller, Mapes's associate producer, that there were concerns about the typeface in the documents that made them suspect.

But Mapes told her bosses none of this. She also failed to disclose that former Lieutenant Strong, the officer she and Rather had flown to Texas to interview four days earlier, had no personal knowledge of Bush's service records, and was therefore not a legitimate source for the story.

The meeting was interrupted with word that John Roberts was on the phone from Washington, and Mapes went to take the call. She returned jubilant; Roberts reported that the White House hadn't challenged the accuracy of the documents. That was seen by everyone as yet more confirmation of the story's essential accuracy. The meeting ended on a positive note, and Mapes went to finish writing the script for that night's broadcast.

 

When Betsy West got the draft of Mapes's script, she knew the story required the first-hand attention of her boss, Andrew Heyward. She e-mailed him a copy, and within minutes, the president of the news division (a talented, longtime news producer himself) e-mailed West back with his revisions.

Everyone had now signed off on the piece. The consultations among management at this point were meant to influence its shape, not its future. And at the moment, the biggest debate concerned an interview Rather did on September 6 with David H. Hackworth, a retired Army colonel who had no direct knowledge of events and who wasn't a part of the Texas Air National Guard—but who still managed to sound like an expert as he declared the documents “genuine.” Rather and Mapes had insisted, over everyone's objections, on keeping the interview in. Now, Heyward agreed with West and Howard that it had to come out. (Well after his public apology, Rather would tell the Thornburgh-Boccardi investigative panel he considered Hackworth “a strong and valuable expert witness.” Both he and Mapes brought lawyers to their panel interviews.)

The first cut of the edited story was screened soon afterward, and West, Howard, and Murphy agreed to give it the green light. West then called Heyward to the control room in Studio 33, where
60 Minutes Wednesday
is produced, to view the piece an hour before broadcast; it was only the second time in recent memory that Heyward had screened a
60 Minutes
piece before it aired, an act he later attributed to the fact that the piece was “politically sensitive.” No one, including Heyward, raised any questions about the reporting, and less than an hour later, the story—called “For the Record”—was broadcast on CBS and seen by approximately seven million Americans. “You continue to astound,” a CBS News colleague wrote to Mapes in an e-mail immediately after the story aired. “I continue to be in awe of you,” swooned another.

 

Early Thursday morning, everyone involved allowed themselves a few minutes of relief when they discovered their scoop, untinged by doubt in their authenticity, on the front page of most major American newspapers. That joy turned to panic by around 11:00
A.M.
, when the first inquiries about a possible hoax began filtering into CBS News. By that afternoon, whatever pleasure may have been derived from the scoop had been replaced by the conflicting emotions of annoyance and frustration with the media calls coming in. The firestorm began to gather strength by that following afternoon, after some early attacks on political Web sites the same night as the broadcast questioned the authenticity of the documents. By 3:00
P.M.
the Drudge Report reported on the frenzy, thereby ensuring that it would continue for quite a bit longer. It was clear that Friday morning's newspapers would be filled not with follow-ups to the original story, but reports of accusations that CBS News had been hoaxed and that the documents weren't real.

Mapes was already being pushed for an explanation—and her answers sounded suspect. In a mid-afternoon e-mail to an outside reporter, Mapes called the documents verification process “sort of a black art.” She then prepared a set of bullet points for Rather at his request, so that he'd know how to handle the steady stream of press questions. The bullet points were also posted on the CBS News Web site. All of a sudden, the phrase “a preponderance of evidence” appeared in print to describe the back-up for the documents. That was a phrase no one ever remembered Mapes having used before, in her relentless assertions of the documents' authenticity.

At 4:53 Friday morning, after a sleepless night, Josh Howard went to his computer to write an e-mail to his boss, Betsy West. In it he fleshed out strategies for handling media inquiries—and even raised the possibility that the network had been hoaxed: “I wonder if it's time for us to take the offensive and say, look, we think we're on solid ground, but we're not just sitting on our hands. We're continuing to investigate, and if we're the victims of an elaborate hoax, no one would be more anxious to get to the bottom of it than CBS News. . . . The point would be to shift the conversation from CBS did something wrong, to something wrong was done to us and we're mad as hell.”

West wrote back to Howard nearly four hours later: “I think we need to defend ourselves specifically [and] not even concede that we think it could be a hoax.”

West's e-mail to Howard followed, by less than an hour, one she got from her own boss, Andrew Heyward. He'd watched a piece critical of CBS aired on ABC's
Good Morning America
by their top investigative reporter, Brian Ross, and was starting to panic.

After imploring West to come up with more evidence to support the documents, Heyward wrote: “Specifically, let's find out much more about Mary's expert(s) on the authenticity of the papers. How many were there? Why are we keeping their names back? . . . You should also talk to Mary more about how she got the documents. At this point, we need to know more than we do.”

But contrary to CBS's public defense of Heyward when he got to keep his job, a close reading of Heyward's e-mail reveals something far short of a “directive.” (That was how the CBS News press release described the e-mail in its erroneous January 10, 2005, depiction of Hey-ward's handling of the matter. Indeed, the network used this e-mail as the linchpin of its reasoning in allowing Heyward to keep his job.) “I think all this can be done without undercutting our own people,” Heyward wrote. “Your posture with Mary should be that since we're confident in our reporting, we should be able to prove it. Let's see how far we can go down that road.” Yes, Heyward's e-mail had called for “substantial new information” instead of “stubborn repetition” of the reporting in question, but it reads far less like a directive than a gentle, desperate plea.

In any case, Heyward—with the guidance of Gil Schwartz, CBS's executive vice president of communications—allowed Mapes and Rather to essentially stonewall the media with a defense of the documents unsupported by facts. He also failed to object or intercede as Mapes continued to have a hand in producing stories on the controversy for the evening news. Initially, CBS even went so far as to deny the possibility of an internal investigation, and to declare the source of the documents “unimpeachable.” In the days to follow, the network would back off those assertions and attempt to find more support for its initial claims. On the night of September 10, Rather and Mapes put their own dubious source, Marcel Matley, back on camera. A few days later, they dragged out an elderly former secretary to Lt. Col. Killian and put her on
60 Minutes Wednesday
, only to further obfuscate the facts.

But Rather refused to budge. He believed in the story, supported Mapes, and knew that to admit failure would be a devastating blow to his reputation at the twilight of his career. “I'm hard to herd,” Rather said in a February 2005 magazine interview, “and impossible to stampede.” Even after the network finally acknowledged—almost two weeks later—that the September 8 story on President Bush was based on documents that couldn't be authenticated, Rather wouldn't concede that a specific mistake was made.

“I no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching for them journalistically,” Rather said during his nightly newscast on September 20, 2004. After blaming the episode on having been misled by a source, Rather concluded: “We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry. It was an error that was made, however, in good faith and in the spirit of trying to carry on a CBS News tradition to investigative reporting without fear or favoritism.”

As it turned out, the outside commission later appointed by CBS to investigate the documents scandal would conclude that there was no good faith involved—but, rather, a systemwide failure to adhere to the basic tenets of good journalism. It involved a producer who lied, bosses who failed to ferret out the truth, and an anchorman too busy to do his own reporting. It was a failure of monumental proportions, and would be a stain on the reputation of CBS News and
60 Minutes
for years to come. And Dan Rather, who once dreamed of retiring from his job as anchorman on his 25th anniversary as anchorman in 2006 and returning in triumph to
60 Minutes
, was instead forced to retire under a cloud of scandal in March of 2005. The stigma of that failure will be forever attached to his once-golden name, and that of
60 Minutes
itself.

But somehow, that stigma never attached itself to CBS Inc.'s own senior management team—who, remarkably, remain in their jobs a year after their own bungling of events led to the public-relations disaster created by the National Guard report. The commission's 223-page report makes almost no mention of Leslie Moonves, CBS's chairman, even though it stretches plausibility to imagine he never discussed the news division's ill-advised defense of the documents with his lieutenants. Nor does it hold accountable the network's chief public-relations strategist, Gil Schwartz, despite his personal design of the news division's hang-tough strategy. In retrospect, had Heyward and Rather not followed Schwartz's advice—and, instead, forthrightly admitted the possibility of a mistake—there might never have been any need for an outside investigation. And nothing will ever adequately explain the network's decision to allow CBS News president Andrew Heyward to keep his job, despite his obvious responsibility for his division's failures, not to mention his own.

As of this writing in July 2005, Heyward remains in his office; his contract reportedly expires at the end of the year, and few expect him to survive beyond that. However, he will likely remain at CBS in some capacity. “He knows too much for them to let him leave,” as one close Heyward confidant explained it. Most recently Heyward oversaw the cancellation of
60 Minutes Wednesday
and the layoffs of dozens of experienced and talented news producers. Rather, along with
60 Minutes Wednesday
colleagues Scott Pelley and Bob Simon, has shifted to the Sunday edition—where, now, eight correspondents will now compete for the chance to say “I'm . . .” at the start of the Sunday night broadcast. And the show itself has only one year left before NBC begins its broadcast of
Sunday Night Football
in 2006, ending forever the exclusive domain of
60 Minutes
over Sunday nights at seven—a blow that many at CBS believe will lead, at last, to the cancellation of the most successful show in the history of television.