Tick... Tick... Tick...

by David Blum

  Lando’s reporting turned up a list of top TV and print reporters who’d gotten gifts from corporations, a list that included Walter Cronkite. Perhaps as a courtesy to their colleague, the 60 Minutes piece that aired on January 20, 1974, didn’t include details of Cronkite’s behavior, merely listing him among the guilty parties.

  The piece also examined the corporate corrupters themselves, including Wallace and Lando’s own employer, CBS. Their camera captured Win Fanning, a TV critic for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, as he opened an envelope from CBS—given to him during a press junket in New York City—with two $10 bills provided by CBS to cover “incidentals.” After the story ran, a CBS spokesman conceded to the New York Times that the practice of giving cash “looked bad,” but defended the practice as the best means of covering small expenses. “I don’t want to talk about that,” was Cronkite’s irritated response to the Times when asked about the piece. A CBS News spokesman described Cronkite’s behavior as “a personal thing” that didn’t relate to his activities as anchorman.

  In 1974, the Watergate stories still trickled in, and 60 Minutes was still trying to cover the biggest story of its six-year life without doing much beyond big interviews. Despite its feverish commitment to tough, sweeping journalism elsewhere, for Watergate the show continued to depend mostly on one-on-one chats with scandal-related figures by Mike Wallace, balanced occasionally by Safer’s human interest reporting. The fact was that nobody was digging—and the 60 Minutes Watergate log looks limited now in contrast with the journalistic enterprise found elsewhere in those tense final days of the Nixon administration.

  On January 27, 1974, Wallace sat down with Egil “Bud” Krogh, a former Ehrlichman aide serving a prison term for his role in the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. (Ellsberg, a longstanding enemy of the Nixon administration, was the former Kissinger aide responsible for leaking the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post.) On April 7, 1974, Safer returned to an Indiana town he’d visited in July 1973 for an update on “Listening to Nixon Country.” Donald Segretti, Nixon’s infamous dirty trickster, appeared for an interview on April 28, 1974. On May 5, two profiles—of Father John McLaughlin, the deputy assistant to the president, and David Frye, a noted Nixon impressionist and comedian—took a quirky, beside-the-point view of the Watergate story. Wallace then scored the first TV sit-down interview with Charles Colson, a former White House aide and recent born-again Christian, in a piece called “Come to Christ” that ran on May 26, 1974. On June 16, “A Tale of Two Inmates” contrasted the experiences in Allenwood prison of two high-profile inmates: Egil “Bud” Krogh and former New Jersey congressman Cornelius Gallagher.

  Eventually, 60 Minutes started working a different angle to get big Watergate stories. To score its biggest Watergate scoops yet, 60 Minutes used a technique unavailable to most reporters: it persuaded CBS to pay a news source $15,000.

  “The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk . . . Talks” might have also been called “The Network That Wouldn’t Pay . . . Pays.” Coming almost a year to the day after Wallace’s story about junkets for journalists, it demonstrated the awkward flip side to the issue of networks and rules. In this instance, the network agreed not only to pay an interview subject but also to allow him to dictate the terms of the interview’s content. (In the current edition of the CBS News rulebook, the network continues to offer a loophole for news sources who insist on controlled interviews: “While not encouraged, an agreement to exclude a question or area of questioning may occasionally be granted.” As for paying an interview subject, the rules state simply, “Interviewees may not be paid for appearances in CBS News broadcasts.”) The interview at issue was an unrevealing talk with G. Gordon Liddy, one of the original Watergate burglars. Liddy—who had established up front that he would say nothing of substance about Watergate, adding to the mystery of why CBS paid anything at all for it, let alone $15,000—was less inclined to offer facts than opinions, albeit entertaining ones.

  WALLACE: What’s your opinion of John Dean?

  LIDDY: I think, in all fairness to the man, you’d have to put him right up there with Judas Iscariot.

  WALLACE: Judas Iscariot? In other words, he betrayed Christ? Christ being Richard Nixon?

  LIDDY: No, he being a betrayer of a person in high position.

  WALLACE: And what do you think his motive was?

  LIDDY: To save his ass.

  Liddy called Nixon “a very sick man,” but whenever Wallace asked a probing question he replied dryly, “substantive area—no comment.” Still, the interview easily generated enough press for 60 Minutes to justify the expenditure. In Wallace’s memoir, Close Encounters, he says that CBS “made no secret” of the payment to Liddy, but the fact of it appears nowhere in the piece itself as broadcast. The evident success of their “investment” emboldened the powers that be at CBS to keep the checkbook handy. Sure enough, only a few weeks later, a better interview—with a higher price tag—came along.

  In retrospect, it’s stunning that CBS News agreed to it, but after a jury convicted H. R. “Bob” Haldeman in January 1975 of perjury, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice, the network paid the disgraced official $100,000 for an interview with Mike Wallace. As a bonus, the producers would be granted access to some home movies Haldeman had shot during his White House years. While Wallace now freely admits to a $100,000 payment, at the time the figure of $25,000 was being leaked to the media.

  The news of the CBS News–Haldeman deal prompted self-righteous protest from other journalists and networks. “We would not pay Haldeman or anyone else for a news interview,” William Sheehan, president of ABC News, sniffed to a reporter. In his regular op-ed column in the New York Times, James Reston blasted the move: “Isn’t this a dangerous precedent? Isn’t it buying, not a property, like memoirs, but buying news? If CBS will pay this kind of money for Mr. Haldeman, won’t other big shots or notorious characters demand their price? . . . The practice blurs the line between entertainment and information—a line CBS itself has tried hard to keep straight and clear in the past.”

  In the interview, Haldeman slickly portrayed himself as an innocent victim caught in the media crossfire. “CBS News—and the public—were had,” complained a New York Times editorial. The home movies, perhaps unsurprisingly, turned out to be boring.

  These days Hewitt tries to distance himself from the Haldeman interviews by claiming that they were not aired on 60 Minutes. That turns out to be technically true, but it’s a distinction perhaps lost on viewers and media critics. When asked if they aired during the 60 Minutes time slot, he says, definitively, “No.” But in fact the interview aired as a CBS News production on two successive Sunday nights in March 1975 in the 60 Minutes time slot—and with the star correspondent of 60 Minutes asking the questions—though it won’t turn up on any “Best of 60 Minutes” compilations.

  Three seasons after 60 Minutes was moved to Sunday nights, the show continued to be a ratings disaster. Fortunately, CBS didn’t care.

  For one thing, its flagging Nielsen numbers didn’t count against the network’s overall ratings, because its 6:00 P.M. time slot fell outside of prime time. Plus it was cheap: it still cost less than $100,000 to produce an episode—fictional shows could cost at least twice that, if not more—and that made it a profitable enterprise, even at the bottom of the ratings. 60 Minutes had also proven itself a consistent news-making machine and an editorial success. Hewitt’s concept worked, and the other networks were toying with the notion of similar newsmagazines to compete with the 60 Minutes formula.

  In the spring of 1975, the men who ran CBS’s programming department—led by CBS president Robert Wood—were considering their options for the fall schedule. The network was riding high with the success of its iconic comedy lineup; Emmy winners All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show gave CBS not only TV’s top-rated comedies but also bragging rights to having developed some bona fide cultural landmarks.

  But hanging ov
er all three major networks was the so-called access rule mandated by the Federal Communications Commission in 1971, which allowed the networks to program only three hours a night of prime time, giving up the fourth hour to local stations in the top 50 markets. The networks had been fighting it for years; now, the legal battle was nearing an end, and the networks had lost. The FCC allowed only one exception to its rule: on Sunday night, a network could keep the fourth hour for documentaries, public affairs programs, or children’s shows. That prompted NBC to move its highly rated Wonderful World of Disney to the Sunday night at 7 slot. ABC put its own children’s show, Swiss Family Robinson, up against Disney.

  CBS had no existing children’s show to shove into the slot, so they developed a family series, Three for the Road, that they hoped to pass off as children’s programming, exempt from the new regulations. It starred Alex Rocco as Pete Karras, a widower who takes his two sons, Vincent Van Patten and Leif Garrett, with him on his travels as a photographer. But more than 40 local CBS affiliates showed the good taste to turn it down; not surprisingly, they preferred to carry their own local public affairs programming instead. Local stations were frustrated; NBC and ABC affiliates had pushed their local offerings back to Sunday night at 6, but that option wasn’t available to the CBS outlets—the Sunday 6:00 P.M. time slot belonged to 60 Minutes.

  And so by November—with Three for the Road being the lowest-rated show on television—CBS development executives realized they needed a new plan for Sunday nights. Then an obscure CBS programming executive named Oscar Katz came up with perhaps the most financially rewarding idea ever hatched in the history of television programming.

  Katz, a vice president of CBS, had been an executive at Desilu Productions, the company behind the CBS classic I Love Lucy. It occurred to him that perhaps the answer to CBS’s Sunday night problems could already be found on the current CBS Sunday night schedule: What if the network were to simply shift 60 Minutes from 6:00 P.M. to 7:00 P.M.? Katz reasoned that it would fulfill the network’s obligations under the access rule and would also let the local stations use the 6:00 P.M. slot for their own public affairs programming.

  CBS announced that on December 7, 1975, 60 Minutes would move to Sunday nights at 7:00 P.M. As a result, his show would no longer face automatic cancellation each fall when CBS broadcast NFL football on Sunday afternoons. That meant an uninterrupted weekly schedule, less chance of being preempted, an increased appetite for stories—and the immediate necessity of adding a third correspondent to help handle the load. Fortunately an obvious choice loomed—an old Hewitt protégé, now a handsome network news star, famous and charismatic enough to threaten Wallace and Safer and make 60 Minutes a more competitive shop than ever before.

  Chapter 8

  In the Line of Fire

  Few careers compare with the awe-inspiring trajectory of Dan Rather, a handsome Houston lad from modest circumstances who in 1950 got himself into Sam Houston State Teachers College. A series of small-market jobs led him to the Houston CBS television affiliate. In 1961, Hurricane Carla blew through Texas and the reporter chained himself to a tree. In 1962, Rather was hired by CBS News and sent to New Orleans to head up the bureau there. He reported to Don Hewitt.

  In November 1963, Rather flew to Dallas to help run the coverage of President Kennedy’s trip. His aggressive street-level reporting from Dallas on the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath (and the fortunate decision not to deck Abraham Zapruder and walk off with the film) earned him a promotion to the White House beat in 1964. In 1965, CBS News asked Rather to run the prestigious London bureau; he went, but quickly realized the big story was in Vietnam. After a year’s worth of combat coverage he returned to the White House and became a familiar, authoritative face on the CBS Evening News.

  Dan Rather, a star in the making, had an uncanny ability to bring attention to himself. In the summer of 1968, he was beaten and shoved by a security detail on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, in full view of CBS cameras that broadcast it live. “I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs in here,” said anchorman Walter Cronkite as he narrated the events from his broadcast booth. The incident earned Rather new status at CBS as a victim of unwarranted attack. (The assault would turn out to be just the first in a series of weird physical confrontations over the course of his career, including a celebrated and bizarre mugging on a New York street in 1986 by a man muttering, “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” and a fight with an erratic Chicago cab driver in 1980.) He covered the Nixon presidential campaign that fall (sitting in for Mike Wallace, who had left to cohost 60 Minutes), then returned to the White House after the election. Although Rather’s name came up as a replacement for Reasoner in 1970, he was passed over in favor of dark horse Morley Safer.

  Staying at the White House turned out to be yet another brilliant career move. Rather quickly distinguished himself as the president’s most relentless antagonist in the White House press corps. In 1971, before the break-in had even occurred, Nixon operative John Ehrlichman targeted Rather for removal in a breakfast meeting with Salant. Once the Washington Post broke the Watergate story, Rather began to take on the president in ways that earned him even more scrutiny from the White House and the public.

  Their first notable face-off came in August 1973, when Rather began a news conference question this way: “Mr. President, I want to state this question with due respect to your office, but also as directly as—”

  “That would be unusual,” Nixon interrupted Rather.

  At another news conference, one question from Rather—about Nixon’s state of mind concerning calls for impeachment—prompted the president to reply, “Well, I’m glad we don’t take the vote of this room, let me say.”

  But their most memorable showdown took place in March 1974, when Nixon came to address a meeting of the National Association of Broadcasters in Rather’s hometown of Houston. It was all very civilized, as the president genially fielded softballs from the audience and White House correspondents for CBS, NBC, and ABC. Toward the end, Rather introduced himself to ask a Watergate question, and his name prompted both cheers and boos from the crowd. “Are you running for something?” Nixon asked Rather.

  “No sir, Mr. President,” Rather replied. “Are you?”

  That brief interchange was an immediate transforming moment for Rather. Which was interesting, in part, because in retrospect his response to Nixon makes very little sense. What did Rather mean, exactly? It’s hard to believe that Rather’s mind immediately leapt to the metaphoric notion of Nixon “running” to keep his office in the face of impeachment. Still, Rather’s willingness to repeatedly take on the president so directly evidenced his doggedness as a reporter—a characteristic of his personality that Rather has never tempered. (Almost a quarter-century after becoming the anchor of 60 Minutes, Rather continues to compete. His scramble for a wartime interview with Saddam Hussein in 2003 was only one recent example. CBS insiders have speculated that the reason there are no other star reporters at CBS News is that Rather can’t stand the idea of competition.)

  An increasingly annoyed White House wanted Rather out, and CBS wasn’t going to fight the feds. A compromise was reached (after Rather entertained offers from NBC and ABC) that put him in charge of CBS Reports, the now-creaky documentary unit begun by Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly, less than a month after Nixon resigned as president. He was also given the anchor desk at the weekend broadcasts of the CBS Evening News. Rather wasn’t happy. He’d been shuffled off to a part of CBS News so removed from the action that it wasn’t even in the same building as Walter Cronkite—and seemingly for political reasons that made little sense. Hell, his new offices didn’t even have hot water. It wasn’t long before he found himself fantasizing about a position on Hewitt’s 60 Minutes. Wallace signed on to the plan—he loved the idea of vying with a formidable opponent like Rather and proving himself the more capable reporter. Safer never liked Rather much, but in any case, by the time it was settled that 60 Min
utes would be televised every week starting in December 1975, Rather’s future on the program was set.

  At 7:00 P.M. on Sunday, December 7, 1975—with Dan Rather officially on board as the show’s third correspondent—the new season began with a piece by Wallace called “Secret Service Agent # 9,” about a man few Americans had heard of until he appeared on 60 Minutes. His name was Clint Hill, and he was a broken man.

  Hill had been part of the Secret Service detail that protected President Kennedy during his visit to Dallas on November 22, 1963. He was the agent who climbed onto the president’s limousine moments after the first shot was fired. Hewitt had heard rumblings about Hill and speculated that he might have a good story to tell. Producer Paul Loewenwarter reached him by phone and sensed that the former agent was feeling guilty over the way events had played out in Dallas that day. There was certainly enough potential, Loewenwarter thought, to justify renting a suite at the Madison Hotel in Washington and flying down with Wallace to interview Hill.

  But for the first hour or so of conversation, Hill seemed oddly stiff and ill at ease; his answers were weak and unemotional. Wallace was bored and annoyed, his eyes rolling to the ceiling as Hill droned on. Finally, he motioned to the cameraman to stop filming.

  “This is just pabulum,” Wallace told Hill. “You’re not telling us anything. This is just not of interest.”

  Hill looked back, stunned, as Wallace continued in a manner he often used to get reluctant subjects to talk.

  “You’ve got a story to tell,” Wallace went on. “You were part of this major event, part of history. And you’re just not telling us how you feel about it.” He stopped speaking and motioned to the cameraman to start up again. Wallace then asked the ashen Hill—now retired—to review publicly, for the first time, his feelings about the Kennedy assassination.