Tick... Tick... Tick... (6 page)

 

Through the fall of
1968
, Wallace and Reasoner traveled around the world in pursuit of stories no one else was doing, or wanted to do. They were trying to figure out how to navigate this brave new world with only one rule to guide them: Make Hewitt happy.

The stories from the early part of that first season rarely rank among those described as classic
60 Minutes
pieces. Hewitt still couldn't settle on a format for the show or the kinds of stories he wanted. The policy over how to deal with breaking news seemed to shift from week to week. After no news in the first two episodes, for example, the third episode included commentary on that week's wedding between Jacqueline Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis. The “humorous” interludes of the two silhouettes continued as an interstitial device, even though they were rarely amusing.

The meat of the broadcast continued to come from Wallace. This heated Ping-Pong match between Wallace and third-party presidential candidate George Wallace proved the high point of episode
3
:

 

G
EORGE
W
ALLACE
: Let's get off of race. I'm not a racist. If everybody's a racist who's been called one, you're one. How do you explain your racism away? The Kerner Commission said that you're one and that's a presidential report.

M
IKE
W
ALLACE
: Well, not me, you're not speaking—

G
EORGE
W
ALLACE
: It said all the American people.

M
IKE
W
ALLACE
: Oh, I see what you mean.

G
EORGE
W
ALLACE
: You're an American.

M
IKE
W
ALLACE
: Yes.

G
EORGE
W
ALLACE
: Well, that got you.

M
IKE
W
ALLACE
: Touché.

G
EORGE
W
ALLACE
: Touché.

 

The fourth episode included a wrap-up of that week's election, which put Richard Nixon into the White House, and a profile of football star Joe Namath. In the shows to follow, it was clear
60 Minutes
hadn't yet found an identity. Interviews with politicians alternated with such softballs as a Reasoner profile of
New York Times
food critic Craig Claiborne.

Perhaps the most successful single feature was Reasoner's reading of viewers' letters to the show; it provided a nice episode ender and gave the two men a chance to relax in front of the camera, while gradually building a bond with each other and the audience. Based on the mail read on episode
4
, it was working:

 

R
EASONER
: A fan at the University of Tennessee wrote: “
60 Minutes
is wonderful. Does this mean that it will be dropped in a few weeks?” And lastly, this from a student at Catholic University: “Tell Mike Wallace if he continues to imitate David Brinkley he ought to go to NBC. I understand they have a vacancy.”
60 Minutes
returns two weeks from tonight. Good night, Mike.

W
ALLACE
: Good night, Chet.

 

On Christmas Eve,
1968
, Hewitt went for timing over substance. It included the first essay by Andy Rooney—“What Christ Looked Like,” read by Reasoner—and was followed by the talking silhouettes—now known as Ipso and Facto, but still not very funny. The episode also included two contemporary icons: a Wallace visit to Martin Luther King Jr.'s family and Reasoner's interview with the widow of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Perhaps the stories sacrificed weight for emotion, but in Hewitt's view, anything that seemed like it would connect the viewer to the broadcast was a good thing—even if the numbers rarely reflected an audience upsurge. Hewitt continued to trust his impulses as he always had, but in the absence of overt viewer interest it wasn't easy to figure out what worked and what didn't.

Part of what held
60 Minutes
back was the continuing technology constraints of television, which in
1968
remained relatively primitive. Videotape was still not in wide use, and Hewitt preferred the look of film, anyway—and there was no way for him to get film produced, processed, and ready for air without at least
24
hours' lead time. This meant that it was almost impossible for
60 Minutes
to cover breaking news stories, and worse, that the show might never have the feel of immediacy fantasized in its planning stages. Hewitt had little passion for “evergreens,” those stories capable of sitting around for months with no news peg to justify their existence. He wanted stories hot off the press, Hildy style.

As fall turned to winter,
60 Minutes
began to find a hint of its own voice and a way to incorporate ongoing events into the show's weekly format. On the episode that aired on January
21
,
1969
(only the show's ninth), Reasoner and Wallace illustrated the battle between Israel and Lebanon by telling the story from both sides in one week, with pieces from each correspondent. It may not have redefined TV news, but it was the kind of presentation that might eventually set
60 Minutes
apart from other news shows: the nightly newscasts rarely had room for conceptual thinking like that.

And from the beginning, the pieces had another distinguishing feature that reflected Hewitt's cinematic style: they showcased the correspondent as star. Reasoner and Wallace turned up front and center in early stories, often incorporating their own movements and reporting into the narrative. No one watching
60 Minutes
, even in the first season, would have had a moment's doubt about who was doing the reporting behind these pieces—it was Reasoner and Wallace, right? The viewers at home didn't have to trouble themselves with the disillusioning truth—which was that behind-the-scenes producers did the vast majority of the reporting, while the correspondents swooped in at the last minute to film the on-air interviews. This was a format made to order for a former actor like Wallace or a correspondent like Reasoner, who preferred to leave the heavy lifting to others.

This also left considerable room for humor, such as Wallace's introduction to a Reasoner piece about the Jack Daniel's distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee, in which he made strong allusions to his costar's affection for liquor:

W
ALLACE
: I think you can understand that as journalists who cover any and everything, there are certain stories that appeal to us more than others. Harry Reasoner has been working on a story for some time now. I don't believe that in all the years I've known Harry, I have ever seen him devote himself to a story more completely and with more apparent pleasure. Herewith that report.

On February
4
,
1969
, Reasoner weighed in with “Cottage For Sale,” a typically laconic ramble that showed a glimpse of what the show could deliver, while defining the incalculable value of an on-site correspondent to pose pertinent and provocative questions. Essentially an interview with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the piece included this memorable interchange with the one-time monarch, who was now selling his French cottage years after having so famously abdicated the throne.

 

R
EASONER
: How old were you, then, when you became king?

T
HE
D
UKE OF
W
INDSOR
: Forty-two.

R
EASONER
: And you were king for—

W
INDSOR
: Ten months.

R
EASONER
: Is that long enough to be king?

W
INDSOR
: No.

 

Two weeks later, though,
60 Minutes
was back to its mix of the profound and the predictable, including a report about heavy snowstorms in the Northeast; a timely interview by Mike Wallace of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the
23
-year-old French student-rebel; and a piece by CBS sports reporter Heywood Hale Broun about the high cost of skiing, the kind of fluff one imagines being ordered up by some high-level CBS executive who'd recently been to Aspen and found himself horrified at the bill. The inclusion of Broun also showed a lack of fidelity to the show's basic concept of using only its full-time stars; while Broun had an on-screen persona perfected by years on the evening news, his presence on
60 Minutes
did nothing to enhance the show's intended point of view.

By the spring, as the show settled into a biweekly rhythm, its stories began to feel more in line with Hewitt's grand idea. The April
1
,
1969
, broadcast included stories about infants born addicted to heroin, Texas billionaire H. L. Hunt, and fatherless German war babies. Wallace, in particular, was hitting his stride, with his interviews demonstrating a refreshingly pointed style. His Hunt interview elicited responses unlike any heard elsewhere on prime-time television.

 

W
ALLACE
: Give us a horseback guess as to how much H. L. Hunt is worth.

H
UNT
: Well, it would be so—so misleading no one would believe it, so let's don't.

W
ALLACE
: What do you mean—why misleading?

H
UNT
: Well, you see, they talk about that I have an income of a million dollars a week.

W
ALLACE
: Yes.

H
UNT
: And that is a lot of percent erroneous.

W
ALLACE
: Is it erroneous? It's bigger or smaller than that?

H
UNT
: As far as I know, I would starve to death with an income of a million dollars a week.

 

Hewitt sometimes ran out of original material in those early episodes. Two weeks later,
60 Minutes
included another short film by Saul Bass, alongside a freelance interview done for British television with Teddy Roosevelt's oldest daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, now
85
years old. A livelier, homemade May
13
,
1969
, report focused on young American draft resisters who moved to Canada. During the final episode of the first season of
60 Minutes
on June
24
,
1969
, a look at the slow, steady sinking of Venice into the sea was sensationally (though perhaps with some prescience) called “The Death of Venice.”

 

Hewitt, as always, wanted headlines. From his earliest days in television Hewitt knew and respected the capacity of print to promote the cause. For all of television's supposed power, its impact couldn't be quantified by the size of its audience. He wanted to see the impact of his stories on the front page of the newspaper, with copious coverage of his show and its ambitious agenda. He craved reviews and praise but would just as soon settle for controversy and outrage—either produced headlines. It frustrated Hewitt that, for its first year, the show generated hardly any press at all.

But the mere existence of
60 Minutes
on the CBS schedule in the fall of
1969
for a second season somehow seemed to make the show more newsworthy—and perhaps its survival was itself amazing, considering how few people watched it. The show ranked
83
rd out of
103
prime-time shows that season. But the network still had nothing more noteworthy to put in the Tuesday
10
:
00
P.M.
slot, and this season ABC had developed a new medical drama with Robert Young that looked like it might work, a little something called
Marcus Welby, M.D.

Repeating his first-season pattern, Hewitt launched the second year of
60 Minutes
with a yawn-inducing episode that tried too hard to attract attention—which in itself showed Hewitt's apparent bias toward Wallace, despite Reasoner's seniority.

The show opened with a Wallace investigation into a battle over valuable Alaskan land, which ended with Wallace reading a stanza from a Carl Sandburg poem. A piece followed about Moscow at night; then came another Wallace report about a soldier confined to a sweatshop at Camp Pendleton (based on a story previously published in
The Nation
), and, finally, a Reasoner story on racial discrimination by labor unions. But this time the show played better with the newspaper boys. “A varied TV magazine, as it were,” the
New York Times
raved, “with almost limitless potentialities in electronic journalism.”