Tick... Tick... Tick... (7 page)

Two months later, the
Times
put a
60 Minutes
story on its front page for the first time—an interview by Mike Wallace with Paul Meadlo, a
22
-year-old Vietnam veteran who said he had been part of the team of soldiers ordered by Lt. William Calley Jr. to kill men, women, and children in a March
1968
attack on the Vietnamese village of Songmy. The scoop resulted from reporting done by freelance journalist Seymour Hersh, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for the story—and who used
60 Minutes
as a way of promoting his account. (The
Times
story raised a rumor that
60 Minutes
had paid for the interview, which Hersh denied.)

Midway through the second season, Wallace made news with an interview with Eldridge Cleaver, at the time a fugitive from justice and, as a leader of the Black Panther Party, which advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, one of the most controversial figures in American radical politics. Cleaver had been arrested a year earlier in a police shoot-out at Panther headquarters in Oakland, California, and later charged with assault with intent to kill; he fled the country to avoid a trial. In the winter of
1970
he was living in exile in Algeria when Wallace (who had contacts in the black community from an interview years earlier with Malcolm X) reached him by phone and asked for an interview. After some delicate negotiations (Cleaver first asked for money, then settled for a tape recorder pedal to aid in the transcription of tapes for his forthcoming memoir), Wallace left for Algeria on New Year's Day,
1970
.

The interview itself made up only a few minutes of the story about the Panthers, but garnered headlines nevertheless:

 

W
ALLACE
: When the American people hear that you want to shoot your way into the United States Senate, take off the head of a senator—

C
LEAVER
: Into the White House and take off the head of Richard Nixon, you see.

W
ALLACE
: What does that mean? This is rhetoric?

C
LEAVER
: This is not rhetoric.

 

After the story aired, Wallace knew exactly what it meant when he saw the headlines in newspapers around the country, and when the Justice Department subpoenaed notes and outtakes from the interview. It meant
60 Minutes
had finally arrived.

Chapter 5

Mr. Hewitt's War

In spite of the increasingly positive critical reception, the ratings remained just as bad in the second season.
Marcus Welby, M.D.
was an instant monster hit for ABC, the number one show on television, whereas
60 Minutes
ranked
92
nd out of
103
any prime-time series and stayed alive only because of its low cost to CBS. The fact that it was on just twice a month also meant its ratings didn't drag on the network's overall numbers, which were bolstered by top
10
shows like
M*A*S*H
and
All in the Family
.

But the show's future didn't get any brighter when in November
1970
, two months into the show's third season, Harry Reasoner announced to Hewitt that he was jumping to the fledgling ABC News, where he would finally get to anchor the evening newscast every night of the week. As Reasoner had been fond of saying, Walter Cronkite was showing no inclination toward walking in front of a speeding truck.

Reasoner could have remained with
60 Minutes
, of course, but the idea of cohosting a low-rated prime-time show that ran every other week, when it wasn't being preempted, lacked sufficient appeal for a man accustomed to the fame that came from anchoring a nightly network newscast, not to mention the better hours and lighter workload. While Wallace was happy with his newfound berth as Hewitt's hatchet man, Reasoner rankled at the notion that this might be the end of the line for him. CBS News management continued to think of him as lazy, and he knew there wasn't much chance of advancement, whereas the opportunity to anchor the evening news on ABC represented a step forward, as well as more money for less effort. His decision to leave
60 Minutes
turned out to be surprisingly effortless.

 

The first call Hewitt made after getting Reasoner's resignation was to Charles Kuralt.

By the fall of
1970
, the talented CBS News correspondent had become a household name with a series of oddball reports he'd been doing for the Cronkite show called “On the Road,” in which Kuralt and a cameraman would pile into a Volkswagen bus and drive across the United States in search of stories. Kuralt began his “On the Road” reports in the fall of
1967
from Vermont and New Hampshire, where he kicked things off with an elegy to fall foliage. (“To drive along a Vermont country road in this season is to be dazzled by the shower of lemon and scarlet and gold that washes across your windshield.”) Within months, Kuralt had found himself a permanent assignment and a huge following among viewers. His deep, distinctive voice and affable personality appealed to an audience in search of comfort in the midst of an unpopular war in Southeast Asia and student unrest at home—and to a producer like Hewitt who needed a new big-name anchor for his struggling Tuesday night show. But Kuralt had no interest in giving up his gig, going into its fourth year; besides, he had his own issues with Hewitt's style. He hated Hewitt's propensity to cut things short, believing his limited attention span would be the ruin of ruminative stories of the sort Kuralt wrote.

After Kuralt refused Hewitt, the next candidate was Morley Safer, then the London bureau chief of CBS News, an erudite Canadian who'd made a considerable name for himself reporting from such foreign battlegrounds as Vietnam, Nigeria, and Northern Ireland. Safer grew up in Toronto, where his father owned an upholstery business. In
1951
, he was hired as a reporter on the Woodstock, Ontario,
Sentinel-Review
. From there he made his way to a job with the Canadian Broadcasting Company, where at first he was more producer than correspondent. He wrote copy for the nightly newscast before being switched to a show called
CBC Newsmagazine,
which bore a vague resemblance to the format later perfected by
60 Minutes
(a point that still rankles Safer in less charitable moments). Later, he moved to London and covered the
1956
Israel-Egypt war for Canadian television.

For several years he reported from Africa and Europe until he was hired away by CBS News in
1964
by Fred Friendly, who made him the number two correspondent in London and sent him almost immediately to the growing conflict in Vietnam. In October
1965
, Safer and two CBS cameramen were shot down in a helicopter
280
miles north of Saigon. In
1966
, the
New York Times
reported that the assistant secretary of defense had written to Friendly objecting to a Safer story—one that showed U.S. Marines burning a South Vietnamese village at Cam Ne.

On November
12
,
1970
, Bill Leonard called Safer in Paris, where he was covering the funeral of French president Charles de Gaulle, to offer him the
60 Minutes
job. “Shit, can you call back in a year?” was Safer's response. He had a new baby daughter born the previous April, and the family had just moved into a newly renovated house in London. The
39
-year-old foreign correspondent, a dandyish dresser with a taste for the finer things, rather liked his London life—which included the ownership of an antique Rolls Royce—and wasn't sure he wanted to give it up for such a long-odds gamble. He got CBS's assurance that if
60 Minutes
got canceled, he could have his old job back. Safer spent just one night in that London house before accepting the job on
60 Minutes
and moving to New York.

By this time, Wallace had firmly established his reputation as maniacally competitive; his aggressive and often flamboyant approach to the show meshed seamlessly with Hewitt's. He, too, loved the spotlight—Reasoner's fame had gotten in his way, and once he was gone Wallace saw no further obstacles to becoming the lead correspondent of
60 Minutes
. He and Safer had met only once before—in London, when Wallace and his wife went to the theater one night with Safer and his wife, Jane—and he'd come away thinking that Safer wasn't going to be a threat. Safer's position as newcomer would allow Wallace to exercise his muscle as senior partner, and become the most famous face on
60 Minutes
.

Safer, of course, had other ideas. The competition began immediately, resulting in fierce fighting over ideas, producers, and position on the broadcast and raging battles between the two men, with hallway screaming matches, of the “Fuck you!” “No, fuck you!” variety, alternating with extended periods of angry silence. Both men still readily acknowledge their history of battles, though describe each other now as friendlier adversaries, if not friends. “We went a couple of years without speaking,” Wallace says. “It was unpleasant,” agrees Safer. Hewitt merely shrugs at the memory of those days, perhaps recalling his own steady diet of raging conflicts with both men.

On March
16
,
1971
, Safer and his producer Joseph Wershba (a distinguished alumnus of the Murrow era, who had produced the famous
See It Now
broadcast about Senator Joseph McCarthy) delivered the first major
60 Minutes
investigation of government corruption: “What Really Happened at the Gulf of Tonkin?” On August
4
,
1964
, a reported attack on two U.S. destroyers, the
Maddox
and
Turner Joy,
was used to justify the first bombing of North Vietnam. Their report, six years after the fact, raised doubts about the attack, strongly suggesting that the Pentagon may have altered facts about the events. The piece would earn
60 Minutes
its first Emmy award in the fall of
1971
.

In April
1971
, Wallace and Hewitt traveled to the LBJ Ranch for an interview with the former president, a conversation in which Wallace had been forbidden to ask Johnson about Vietnam, only to have Johnson bring it up himself and make headlines.

J
OHNSON
: Throughout our history our public has been prone to attach presidents' names to the international difficulties. You will recall the War of
1812
was branded as Mr. Madison's War, and the Mexican War was Mr. Polk's War, and the Civil War or War Between the States was Mr. Lincoln's War, and World War I was Mr. Wilson's War, and World War II was Mr. Roosevelt's War, and Korea was Mr. Truman's War, and President Kennedy was spared that cruel action because his period was known as Mr. McNamara's War. And then it became Mr. Johnson's War, and now they refer to it as Mr. Nixon's War in talking about getting out. I think it is very cruel to have that burden placed upon a president because he is trying to follow a course that he devotedly believes is in the best interest of his nation. And if those presidents hadn't stood up for what was right during those periods, we wouldn't have this country what it is today.

After three seasons on Tuesday nights, CBS programmers moved
60 Minutes
to Sunday at
6
:
00
P.M.
CBS News president Richard Salant, among many others, fought the switch, believing that the network wanted to dump its best prime-time news offering into the “ghetto” of Sunday afternoons. Public affairs programming always took that slot. While it didn't compete with hit prime-time shows on other networks, it suffered from its position following professional football on most Sundays in the fall—meaning frequent last-minute preemptions of the broadcast and an erosion of an audience it had worked so hard to find.

In any case, a regular Sunday night slot meant doubling the number of pieces, doubling the workload—and doubling the potential for loud, angry conflict. Within one year of Safer's arrival, the atmosphere at
60 Minutes
had transformed from the leisurely pace of a biweekly production to the frenzy of a weekly circus. The intense rivalry emerging between Safer and Wallace cost the
60 Minutes
crew much of the collegiality that marked the show's earliest days. They were working harder than ever on a broadcast that still hadn't found its footing, and the result was a toxic and exhausting environment—mitigated somewhat by the exhilaration of creating something that existed nowhere else on television. Most weeks, the producers and correspondents worked late on Saturday night to get their stories ready for a Sunday broadcast; in a few rare instances, the show went on live. As hard as it became, no one minded the long hours and many seemed to thrive on the constant battles. The yelling had begun in earnest. This was Mr. Hewitt's War.

 

The cacophony at
60 Minutes
stemmed from Hewitt's own long-standing love of loudness. He had long been notorious for barking orders, shouting at underlings and intimidating colleagues with his famously foul language. While it seemed fitting for a nightly news show with the attendant deadlines and tensions, its constant presence on the set of a weekly newsmagazine seemed less a matter of necessity than of habit; it was simply how Hewitt communicated and always had. And sometimes it merely reflected his unbridled and unmatched enthusiasms.

“Come here and fucking look at this!” he would scream after screening a piece for the first time, walking the halls to gather every producer, secretary, and correspondent he could find to get them to see what was so amazing. It remained a relatively small staff, and it didn't take much to cram everyone into the screening room to see the latest cut of a piece. In spite of the bluster, Hewitt's democratic quality endeared him to his staff; he was always reaching out to anyone for an opinion or at least a sign of approval.

But he could also scream louder and longer than anyone on the floor and was viewed less as a mediator than a catalyst for conflict among the correspondents and producers. Everybody loved to pepper their conversations with obscenities, and the words “Fuck you!” could often be heard in the hallways. Just as often, Wallace or Hewitt would walk out of a conversation or screening as a way of making a point to the other. Hewitt, in particular, was also known as a man capable of apology, but it could take a while to arrive.

The yelling was only a small component in a system of story development and production that was unique in television. While most other news shows followed the top-down edicts of an executive producer,
60 Minutes
content came from the reporters and correspondents. Each producer's responsibility was to develop ideas appropriate to his own correspondent, then make a case for the story, first to the correspondent and then to Hewitt via the Blue Sheet, the term for a written proposal. Once the Blue Sheet was approved, that would give the correspondent the exclusive right to the story.

Of course, this prompted producers to “Blue Sheet” story ideas that seemed far-fetched at the time—producers liked to cite “An Interview With God” as the classic wishful Blue Sheet—but nevertheless would lock in the assignment. At that point, the two correspondents might find themselves in Hewitt's office, yelling obscenities at each other over rights to the story. Eventually, one would storm out in anger, slam his office door shut, and stop speaking to the other—sometimes for days and weeks, if not months.