by David Blum
WALLACE: Can I take you back to November 22 in 1963? You were on the fender of the Secret Service car right behind President Kennedy’s car. At the first shot, you ran forward and jumped on the back of the president’s car—in less than two seconds—pulling Mrs. Kennedy down into her seat, protecting her. First of all, she was out on the trunk of that car—
HILL: She was out of the back seat of that car. Not on the trunk of that car.
WALLACE: Well, she was—she had—she had climbed out of the back, and she was on the way back, right?
HILL: And because of the fact that her husband’s—part of his—her husband’s head had been shot off and gone off to the street.
WALLACE: She wasn’t—she wasn’t trying to climb out of the car? She was—
HILL: No, she was simply trying to reach that head. Part of the head.
WALLACE: To bring it back?
HILL: That’s the only thing—
The former agent, so impassive only minutes before, burst into tears at that moment, the camera in characteristic tight close-up on his face. Wallace allowed him to pull himself together for a moment. Hill, gripping a cigarette in his fingers, smoked it down to the butt as Wallace continued:
WALLACE: Was there anything that the Secret Service or that Clint Hill could have done to keep [the assassination] from happening?
HILL: Clint Hill, yes.
WALLACE: “Clint Hill, yes”? What do you mean?
HILL: If [I] had reacted about five-tenths of a second faster, or maybe a second faster, I wouldn’t be here today.
WALLACE: You mean, you would have gotten there and you would have taken the shot?
HILL: The third shot, yes, sir.
WALLACE: And that would have been all right with you?
HILL: That would have been fine with me.
WALLACE: But you couldn’t. You got there in—in less than two seconds, Clint. You—you couldn’t have gotten there— You don’t—you surely don’t have any sense of guilt about that?
HILL: Yes, I certainly do. I have a great deal of guilt about that. Had I turned in a different direction, I’d have made it. It’s my fault.
WALLACE: Oh, no one has ever suggested that for an instant.
HILL: I—
WALLACE: What you did was show great bravery and great presence of mind. What was on the citation that was given to you for your work on November 22, 1963?
HILL: I don’t care about that, Mike.
WALLACE (reading): “Extraordinary courage and heroic effort in the face of maximum danger.”
HILL: Mike, I don’t care about that. If I had reacted just a little bit quicker—and I could have, I guess. And I’ll live with that to my grave.
Hill’s consuming grief delivered 60 Minutes a classic water-cooler story, one that cemented 57-year-old Mike Wallace’s reputation as the most deft and probing interviewer of his time. In addition, after a long series of hard-headed sessions with major social and political figures, Wallace’s Clint Hill conversation revealed a sensitive side to the reporter that many had never seen before. “Secret Service Agent #9” also stood perfectly for what 60 Minutes produced so well—the visual intersection of news and narrative. In fact, the emotional turmoil of Clint Hill later became the back story for the Clint Eastwood character in In the Line of Fire, the 1995 thriller with John Malkovich as the would-be presidential assassin who preys on an agent’s dark secret.
When it worked the way it was supposed to, as in “Secret Service Agent #9,” 60 Minutes gave viewers small, beautifully crafted movies with fully developed story arcs—what Hewitt called “packaged reality.” And just as Hewitt, the Hildy wannabe, once imagined bridging the worlds of news and show business, the producer of a 60 Minutes piece now functioned less like a journalist and more like a movie director.
In December 1975, a 33-year-old North Carolina journalist named Patrick O’Keefe placed a call to Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s magazine. O’Keefe had done the occasional story for Lapham, nothing extraordinary. He was an ambitious young man, not too thrilled to be teaching journalism at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where the likelihood of stumbling on stories worthy of a Harper’s assignment was not all that high. O’Keefe decided to call Lapham on this particular day because of a recent phone call to the university from a man identifying himself as Chuck Medlin. It seemed that Medlin wanted to write a book but needed help; hence his call to the school, searching for a writer to help him tell his rather dramatic and commercial story. Medlin—a scowling low-life who had the uncanny ability to strike mortal fear into just about everyone—claimed to know the location of missing Teamster’s Union president Jimmy Hoffa, who had disappeared the previous July in what most Americans logically assumed was a case of murder. Medlin also said he knew who killed Hoffa.
O’Keefe met with Medlin, who passed along some colorful details of meeting the Hoffa killer in prison not so long ago. Afterward O’Keefe quickly called Lapham and pitched the story. Normally considered an erudite intellectual with little taste for the sensational, Lapham liked the idea enough to advance O’Keefe $700 to fly himself and Medlin to New York.
The next day, Lapham met Medlin in person and immediately realized the gangster would be better suited to Don Hewitt’s show, so he called Hewitt to recommend that he meet with O’Keefe. Hewitt, of course, was thrilled—the prospect of breaking the Hoffa case was irresistible. Hewitt immediately gathered his senior staff—including Safer (who later claimed that it was his misfortune to have worked late that day) and producer Joe Wershba—in his office for a meeting with O’Keefe and Medlin to discuss the story, and the possibility of paying them for the biggest potential exclusive in 60 Minutes history.
“How do you know where the body is?” Hewitt asked Medlin, according to a 1978 Rolling Stone account. Medlin told the 60 Minutes boss that he had shoved a .38 down someone’s throat and “got him to tell.”
A palpable sense of terror enveloped the room. “I have a beautiful .357 Magnum underneath my bed,” Medlin told Hewitt and his nervous producers.
“What is it about you that makes people accept your warning that you’ll do something to them?” Hewitt asked. Medlin immediately kicked his leg out, right near Hewitt’s head. “Well, that’s a good way to show your authority,” was Hewitt’s response.
Medlin looked around the room at the assembled, trembling group. “I’d like a beer,” he snapped.
“I’d have to send out for it. We don’t have it in the cafeteria,” a secretary whispered, according to a later New York Times report.
“Send out,” Hewitt said urgently. “Send out!”
Medlin explained to the group that he was a hired killer, and at various points he threatened to kill people who were irritating him. By the end of the meeting, Hewitt had agreed to pay O’Keefe $10,000 in cash—a consultant’s fee that would ensure his and Medlin’s help in retrieving the missing body of Jimmy Hoffa.
After the meeting, Hewitt called Dick Salant to get his approval for the expenditure. Salant said okay, and Hewitt told Wershba to go to Salant’s office to pick up the money.
When Wershba entered the office, the CBS News executive had $10,000 in cash waiting on his desk.
“Are we doing the right thing?” Salant asked Wershba as he counted out the money.
“No, we don’t know whether this guy is crazy,” Wershba replied. “We’re not doing the right thing.”
But both men knew there was no refusing Hewitt. His show’s ratings were finally starting to climb, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that if Medlin somehow turned out to be right, it would be the scoop of the year, if not the decade.
Wershba brought the money back to the 60 Minutes offices, where Medlin and O’Keefe were waiting. Before they left for Florida—to be joined shortly by Hewitt, Safer, and Wershba—Medlin agreed to sit down with Safer for an on-camera interview. During that conversation, Medlin matter-of-factly laid out the story of Hoffa’s disappearance for the wide-eyed Safer and
Hewitt.
SAFER: Where is Jimmy Hoffa?
MEDLIN: Key West.
SAFER: Where precisely?
MEDLIN: Smith Shoal Light . . . that’s where Hoffa is. It’s a rock pile.
SAFER: Dead?
MEDLIN: Dead. . . .
SAFER: Just lying there in the water?
MEDLIN: No, he’s in cement. . . .
SAFER: How was he killed?
MEDLIN: He was stabbed on a goddamn boat. . . .
SAFER: Will you show us where Jimmy Hoffa is buried?
MEDLIN: I said I would. If I say I will, I will.
After the interview, Medlin convinced O’Keefe to let him hold the cash; the two men left together that night for Florida.
By the time Safer, Hewitt, and Wershba got to Florida, Medlin had gone missing, along with the $10,000.
That, of course, didn’t deter Hewitt from hiring a boat and going to the location Medlin described, in search of Hoffa. They found nothing, of course. When they got back to the hotel, Hewitt suggested to Wershba that he tell the story of the rip-off to Martin Waldron, a reporter from the New York Times, who they’d noticed was staying at the same hotel. The next day, the debacle appeared on the front page of the Times under the headline, “Hoffa Tipster Gone; CBS Is Out $10,000.” It embarrassed most of those associated with the incident—but not Hewitt, of course, whose show business instincts told him that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. To him, it was just a $10,000 bet that hadn’t paid off.
Back at the office, 60 Minutes producer Paul Loewenwarter was placing calls to his sources at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington about a potential story. Lately, however, he’d been getting a rather odd response to such calls. Rather than answer his questions about a specific story he was working on, they’d ask him questions about ideas he had for future stories about the agency. Finally Loewenwarter asked his sources why they were so interested. “Well, you see,” one source confessed, “if you tell us now what you’re going to be investigating next, that way we can go to our bosses and get some changes implemented by saying, ‘If we don’t do something soon, then 60 Minutes is going to do a piece.’ It saves a lot of time in the long run, plus the embarrassment of being exposed on 60 Minutes.”
At the time, Loewenwarter was working on Dan Rather’s first real piece for 60 Minutes, about workers at a small Allied Chemical plant in Virginia where pollution resulting from the manufacture of Kepone (a pesticide most commonly used overseas) was allegedly causing brain damage among workers. Rather and Loewenwarter had traveled to the town of Roswell, Virginia, with 60 Minutes cameraman Billy Wagner to talk with plant workers. In some cases, their exposure to Kepone had reportedly caused tremors, twitches, and other uncontrollable movements resulting from brain damage caused by pesticide inhalation.
One worker, J. O. Rogers, had been hospitalized five times with nervous tremors. In Rather’s conversation with Rogers, he’d found that one test to determine the extent of brain damage was for a subject to drive in a bolt with a screwdriver. With Rather and Loewenwarter looking on, Rogers tried to perform the test for the CBS camera.
Wagner, the cameraman, zoomed in on Rogers’s hand as he took the screwdriver. For approximately 45 seconds—an eternity in television time—the camera focused on the trembling hand as the man tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to insert the head of the screwdriver into the bolt. Finally, he gave up. It was a powerful visual image, stronger than any words Rather might have said, and vividly conveyed the damage done by this dangerous poison. Loewenwarter had done his research well, having found Rogers and numerous other victims, as well as a “smoking gun”—clear evidence that Allied Chemical scientists had ignored knowledge available to them that might have prevented the exposure. But he needed Rather, who knew as well as anyone how to deliver a knockout blow.
Rather went on to describe other victims—including one man who had, as Rather put it, “37,000 times more Kepone in his liver than is permitted in a public sewer”—before moving on to Loewenwarter’s evidence, presented in a direct confrontation on camera with the man Allied Chemical had represented as the nation’s leading expert on the dangers of Kepone: William Moore, a chemist and chemical engineer and the director of research for Allied’s agricultural division. Sitting opposite Moore, Rather turned on the heat as powerfully as he had done on Richard Nixon two years earlier:
RATHER: My problem—and I want to be candid with you—is what we have here, in no small way, is a who-done-it. I want to ask you, Mr. Moore, whether you’ve seen any of these materials, which were put out by Allied Chemical, studies sponsored by Allied Chemical. We have three of these blue books. Right on the cover: “Kepone Compound 1189, Allied Chemical, General Chemical Division.” Now, this was published in July 1961. Are you familiar with these materials? This . . .
MOORE: No.
RATHER: Never seen those?
MOORE: Never seen them.
RATHER: Right in the summary, very top: “The characteristic effect of this compound is the development of DDT-like tremors, the severity of which depends upon dosage level and duration of exposure.” Quote, unquote—from the first sentence of the summary. You didn’t know about this?
MOORE: No, no.
RATHER: Mr. Moore, let me read you something that Allied Chemical gave to us this afternoon. Now, this is a direct quote from an Allied Chemical spokesman. We went to Allied Chemical, asked: Who is the nation’s expert on Kepone? And the Allied Chemical spokesman said, quote, “The nation’s expert in the manufacture of Kepone, totally knowledgeable about the hazards of the product and the safeguards necessary to produce it, is Mr. Moore.”
MOORE: Well, that’s an interesting comment.
RATHER: Is that true?
MOORE: Well, certainly not.
RATHER: I’m a reporter, and this leaves me at a loss. Allied Chemical, which is a big outfit with a lot of experience in this, says you’re the nation’s leading expert.
MOORE (laughs): Well, I certainly know the chemistry of Kepone. I—
RATHER: Totally knowledgeable about the hazards of the product and the safeguards necessary to produce it?
MOORE: I would say, no, I haven’t seen those data.
When the piece, “Warning—May Be Fatal,” aired on December 14, 1975, it brought nationwide attention to the matter and helped lead to 153 indictments and a $13 million fine against Allied Chemical. The story had appeared almost two weeks earlier as a page one exclusive in the Wall Street Journal, demonstrating to Hewitt yet again the power of television to adapt and dramatize a story for maximum impact. It was exactly the way he’d envisioned it more than a quarter of a century ago. TV was where Hildy Johnson belonged.
Chapter 9
The Thousand-Pound Pencil
Lucy Spiegel, a young researcher for 60 Minutes, didn’t consider that she might one day be viewed as a television news pioneer on the day in early 1976 when a CBS camera began following her around for what would become a classic Mike Wallace story on fake IDs. The idea was straightforward enough: demonstrate how easy it had become not only to fraudulently obtain passports, drivers’ licenses, and voter registration cards but also to use them to commit felonies. In fact, the subject had been suggested to Wallace by Frances Knight, head of the U.S. Passport Office, who was increasingly alarmed by the number of identity-fraud scams.
What made Spiegel’s journey historic was the storytelling technique involved. By filming her movements through the various layers of bureaucracy, then following up with question-and-answer confrontations by Wallace and producer Barry Lando, 60 Minutes laid out the story with a new level of realism. Wallace and Lando—aided by Spiegel—conveyed how frighteningly easy it was to become someone else in America, no questions asked.
Speigel began her odyssey at the Municipal Building in Washington, D.C., where she applied for a replacement birth certificate—for a child who had died two decades earlier. Lando had supplied her with the name of the dead child, along with just enou
gh facts to convince an unsuspecting clerk.
Lando had arranged for Wallace to interview the head of the office, John Crandall. The plan was to set up the camera in the front of the office, so that when Spiegel arrived to apply for her certificate, the CBS camera could zoom in on her without arousing suspicion that she was there undercover. After Spiegel went in, Wallace commenced to grill Crandall on what she was doing:
WALLACE: I asked Mr. Crandall if it might not be possible that the woman in the checkered shirt, whom we were filming, was an imposter, applying for the certificate of a person who had actually died years ago.
JOHN CRANDALL: We would have no way of knowing. That’s right. . . .
WALLACE: So what you have here is a legal document that this woman can use—for whatever purposes.
CRANDALL: For whatever purpose. To claim estates, to inherit money, to get passports, to get unemployment. For almost anything.
WALLACE: And if she were an imposter—I’m sure she’s not, but if she were an imposter—she could use it for fraudulent purposes?
CRANDALL: Yes, she certainly could.
WALLACE: To rip off whatever she wanted to rip off?
CRANDALL: I think I better ask her if she’s going to.
Crandall then approached Spiegel and asked her, with the camera rolling—but without the 60 Minutes crew disclosing its relationship with Spiegel—whether she was an imposter. She denied it; that settled that. Armed with her new birth certificate, Spiegel got a Maryland identification card (equivalent to a driver’s license) as Wallace, Lando, and the camera followed in her wake. After that she proceeded to apply for an all-important Social Security number. Again, with the cameras rolling, under the guise of a general story about identification, they caught this piece of film:
SOCIAL SECURITY CLERK: Do you have proof of age with you?