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

by David Blum

  SPIEGEL: I have my birth certificate.

  SOCIAL SECURITY CLERK: May I see it, please? All right, thank you very much. You should be receiving this within six weeks.

  The group left the Social Security office and headed for the state welfare office, where Spiegel applied for food stamps; in doing so under an assumed name, she was breaking the law—perhaps the first crime ever committed in front of a television camera by a representative of a major American news organization. Next, she went to get a driver’s license, a crucial step in the building of a false identity; a license would permit her to cash checks. The learner’s permit was easily obtainable by mail; the license would arrive a few days later. (The 60 Minutes piece never quite explained how Spiegel got around the exams required for a driver’s license, a shortcut that probably went unnoticed on television.)

  Next came a passport, the toughest form of identification to get. Speigel simply went to her local post office in Bethesda (again with CBS cameras right behind); within two weeks, her passport came in the mail.

  Now the fun began. Spiegel opened a checking account at a Maryland bank, then took her new checks to a Washington, D.C., camera shop, where she admired a camera in the window. Going inside, with Wallace, Lando, and the CBS camera in full view of the shop’s employees, she told the merchant she wanted to buy it.

  CAMERA SHOP MERCHANT: The price is $95, and there’s a $4.75 tax.

  SPIEGEL: Okay.

  MERCHANT: $99.75.

  SPIEGEL: All right.

  MERCHANT: You pay by check, right?

  LUCY: Right.

  MERCHANT: Okay.

  When Spiegel had finished writing the phony check, Wallace stepped up to the counter to speak to the sales clerk.

  WALLACE: As far as you’re concerned, this lady is okay?

  MERCHANT: Yes.

  WALLACE: You’re sure?

  MERCHANT: I’m quite sure.

  Speigel went on to fraudulently buy $636.30 worth of camera merchandise, even though she had far less in her checking account than that. Next stop—the Eastern Airlines ticket office, where she bought a one-way ticket to Mexico City leaving that night. Once again, she emerged successful. Afterward, Mike Wallace stepped up to the counter, microphone in hand:

  WALLACE: I wonder if I can ask you some questions?

  AIRLINE AGENT: Sure.

  WALLACE: First of all, forgive me, this young woman could simply go to Mexico and disappear from sight, and Eastern Airlines would be out 170-odd dollars.

  AIRLINE AGENT: That’s right. Well, I’m quite satisfied that she is okay. I mean—

  WALLACE: Why?

  AIRLINE AGENT: Well, I just have that feeling. After all, I have been in the business twenty-eight years. I should know a little about accepting checks.

  The “Fake IDs” segment proved more than just how easy it was to forge an identity; it also demonstrated that 60 Minutes wasn’t reluctant to bend the rules of journalism to make its point. Surely it said in a rule book somewhere that CBS News reporters were expressly prohibited from committing felonies in pursuit of a story. But was there any other way, really, to make the point of this one? At the time Lando and Wallace didn’t think so, although Lando recently expressed some regret about the techniques used on this piece. “We never really considered what the effect would be on a person’s life, by putting them on national television and making them look foolish,” Lando says. “We probably cost some innocent people their jobs, who were just doing what they were supposed to do.” But back then, Lando embraced the latitude 60 Minutes gave him to get the story, and Wallace—well, Wallace just loved the camera, and he knew precisely how to use it for maximum effect. His pointed post-scam interviews put his instincts as a showman on full display, and once the story aired, the response only fueled his desire to flaunt his on-air persona.

  Wallace may have been recognized as the show’s most aggressive muckraker, but all three correspondents heatedly vied for airtime with pieces designed to use the show as an instrument for self-promotion and headline grabbing—a way of doing well by doing good. Wallace and Rather weren’t the only ones changing laws and getting indictments; Safer’s January 5, 1975, story about gun purchases made in South Carolina—“Have Gun, Will Travel”—resulted in a new handgun law.

  In news accounts about 60 Minutes Hewitt had taken to referring to his correspondents as his “tigers.” And, yes, there were news accounts at last; by 1976 the mainstream media coverage was steadily increasing, and the reviews were predominantly positive. But nothing mattered so much to Hewitt and his staff as having their exploits chronicled in the New York Times and, better yet, praised. They usually had the support of their hometown paper; but when they didn’t, it hit them harder than any other critique imaginable.

  In the fall of 1975, consumer advocate Ralph Nader tipped off producer Harry Moses about a young, disillusioned project manager for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission named Robert Pollard. It had been Pollard’s job to assess the safety of various power plants around the country, and he’d become convinced that some plants were unsafe—unsafe enough that his failure to get them shut down had made him deeply frustrated, and thus a potentially explosive central character for a 60 Minutes piece. In Pollard, Moses sensed he’d found exactly the right person to dramatize a vitally important (but potentially dull) story. With Pollard’s help, Moses studied nuclear power safety for three months, until one day he stumbled on the hook he needed.

  Pollard had been rambling about not being able to convince his bosses of the meltdown threat at several nuclear power plants, including Indian Point Three power plant up the Hudson River from New York City. “I want to resign,” Pollard told Moses. “I want to make a big impact.”

  “You want to make a big impact, Bob?” Moses responded. “Resign on the air!”

  While he realized this might be hard to engineer for maximum effect on a show that wasn’t broadcast live, Moses nevertheless believed it was the perfect way to deliver a devastating blow to the federal agency responsible for regulating nuclear power. He envisioned a dramatic sequence in which Pollard would tender his resignation, and his bosses—with Mike Wallace and camera close at hand—would scramble and no doubt lie to counter their righteous employee’s explosive allegations. It would make great television.

  But for the piece to work the way he wanted it to, they’d have to get the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—William Anders, a former astronaut—to appear on camera with Wallace without knowing of Pollard’s plan.

  The delicate task of securing Anders’s cooperation was assigned to Ellen Collyer, a 60 Minutes associate producer, who placed a call to Anders’s public relations consultant to arrange an interview. What Collyer didn’t know was that her 45-minute conversation with the consultant was tape-recorded. (This wasn’t illegal in New York State.) A subsequent account of the conversation in the New York Times reported that “Anders would agree to come on the program to explain the agency’s role in nuclear safety; however, he did not want to get involved in a debate, either direct or simulated through film-editing techniques.”

  “Who the hell else is going to be on the program?” the Anders spokesman demanded, then backed off: “But you don’t know either, do you?”

  “At this moment, no,” Collyer said.

  In fact, Collyer (along with Wallace and Moses) knew full well that Pollard would appear on the program. They fully intended the piece to be a debate over the safety issues raised by Pollard and had every intention of cross-examining Anders on his performance and that of his agency. It was going to be a classic Wallace “gotcha!”

  The piece “How Safe Is Safe?” aired on February 8, 1976, three years before the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant; it served as one more example of the show’s prescience. But it also demonstrated the ways in which television journalism can sometimes telegraph ideas in simplistic ways to make a point and offered a vivid glimpse into an essential difference between print and television reporti
ng. For a 60 Minutes producer, it was not only necessary to tell the story; it was also important to create drama, and quickly.

  First, Wallace introduced Pollard—not just as an expert but as an utterly sympathetic expert, backed up by shots of the 35-year-old former Navy man with his wife and two young sons. Wallace then moved to the heart of the matter, with a megadose of embellishment for dramatic effect.

  WALLACE: This is the nuclear power plant Bob Pollard worries about—Indian Point Number Three, up the Hudson River from New York City. When it goes into operation (if it goes into operation), it’ll furnish 900,000 kilowatts of energy to New York City and Westchester County. But Bob Pollard says it does not meet today’s NRC safety regulations. (To Pollard) Give me the bottom line. Indian Point is 45 minutes from my home. I have a right to know whether that plant is going to be safe when and if it goes into operation.

  POLLARD: In my opinion, it—it will be just a matter of luck if Indian Point doesn’t sometime during its life have a major accident.

  Several minutes later, Wallace interviewed Anders, and quickly launched a missile into the conversation:

  WALLACE: Have you ever heard of a fellow by the name of Bob Pollard, Mr. Anders?

  ANDERS: The name does not jump to my memory.

  WALLACE: Bob Pollard is one of your project managers, and he resigned today. Reason he resigned was, he is not sure about the safety of your program.

  ANDERS: Bob Pollard has never tried to contact me or any of the members of the commission. I never even heard of Bob Pollard before.

  After some additional discussion about plant safety issues, the tension began to ratchet up a few notches, with Anders placing an on-camera phone call to Ben Rusche, the director of the Office of Nuclear Regulation for the NRC, to find out more about Pollard.

  BEN RUSCHE: Well, Mr. Chairman, I am not aware, or was not aware, of Mr. Pollard’s disturbance, nor his likelihood to resign, or any indication of this. . . . I have had him at meetings in my office for a couple of times. Of course, I don’t—I don’t know the gentleman that well. I would have guessed that that sort of fitness report would have been an appropriate fitness report.

  WALLACE: Appropriate?

  RUSCHE: Yes. We have in our interactions, of course, recognized that he has a specific, what shall I say, has given very specific and acute attention to a number of the fine points of rules and regulations which appear to give him some internal problems.

  At this point in the interview, Anders became uncomfortable, knowing that Pollard—this man he did not know—was being criticized, in the presence of Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, for precisely the sort of nit-picking that can be seen to save lives.

  ANDERS: Well—well, that—that certainly is what people are being paid to do.

  RUSCHE: Sure.

  ANDERS: And keeping in mind, of course, that we’re—that your conversation, in case I didn’t get it across to you, is being recorded—

  RUSCHE: Yes.

  Anders clearly understood, by then, what was happening—but too late to keep the viewer from seeing what 60 Minutes wanted them to, a government bureaucrat criticizing the courageous behavior of the story’s designated hero, fearless young Bob Pollard.

  Not everyone thought this was such great television. Foremost among the skeptics was John J. O’Connor, the New York Times TV critic who had been a champion of the show since arriving at the paper in 1971 from the Wall Street Journal. His doubts deepened once he had been given access to the transcribed conversation between the 60 Minutes researcher and the public relations consultant to the NRC’s Anders. The consultant had expressed concern that his client might be unwittingly dragged into the very kind of debate over safety that the piece ultimately became.

  Before writing his critique, O’Connor visited 60 Minutes to get its side of the story. When he was ushered into Wallace’s office, O’Connor recalled, he was greeted by Hewitt and Wallace, who both proceeded to yell at him about his plan to publish a critical column. But the hard-nosed style that was so effective around the office and against the bad guys failed to dissuade the critic. He returned to his desk and filed a harshly critical commentary on 60 Minutes and its methods.

  “How, then, does a TV newsman convince a potential target of an investigation to expose himself, perhaps unflatteringly, before a camera?” O’Connor wrote in a lengthy essay for the Sunday paper’s “Arts and Leisure” section. “One way, it seems to me, borders dangerously on what could be interpreted as false pretenses and entrapment.” After laying out a compelling case for entrapment of Anders by 60 Minutes, O’Connor did due diligence by printing the show’s responses, which argued that by telling Anders that the topic of that segment was “the safety of nuclear reactors,” they’d given him sufficient and fair notice. It was a powerful essay, but it had little impact compared to the 60 Minutes piece itself, which reached a far larger audience.

  Hewitt’s response in the Times to O’Connor’s argument couldn’t have been more explicit: “Anyone who submits to an interview on television is fair game for anything.” He later added, “Within his field of expertise.” This echoed an earlier description of the medium’s power by Wallace, its foremost manipulator. “Television,” Wallace once said, “is a thousand-pound pencil.”

  Chapter 10

  Too Much Profit

  Behind the one-way mirror were CBS cameraman Walter Dumbrow and producer Barry Lando; inside the closet was Mike Wallace. And in the front room of the ramshackle storefront on Chicago’s Morse Avenue, 60 Minutes had set up shop with the local Better Government Association. The mission: to catch laboratories in the act of setting up Medicaid kickback arrangements by using an ersatz “medical clinic” staffed by two BGA investigators. A Senate subcommittee was already investigating clinical labs that paid money to doctors and medical clinics to get their business, in return for the lucrative reimbursements from Medicaid for blood and urine tests. And some doctors had reported that labs were even offering to pay their rent and overhead in return for their Medicaid testing.

  But 60 Minutes wanted to document this for itself—and Lando decided the best way to do so was by using a hidden camera, something never before done by a TV news organization. It was a sort of entrapment, to be sure, yet it was all within the confines of Illinois law and all done for the benefit of a viewer whose eyes might glaze over at the thought of a story about Medicaid fraud.

  It was January 1976, and the show was just beginning to show signs of ratings strength. Now more than ever, the goal of Hewitt, Wallace, and everyone else at 60 Minutes was to get the audience to come back every week. Lando loved to use Wallace as the surrogate for an outraged public—and to milk the dramatic effect of his presence for everything it was worth. But Wallace wasn’t sold on the Medicaid scam story right away. When he landed in Chicago to begin the final phase of the reporting, he huddled with Lando. “Are we sure this is a crime?” he asked.

  Lando, having spent the better part of two months reporting the story without the cameras in the room, was able to lay out for his correspondent the laws being violated, the millions of dollars involved, and the potential result of exposing the fraud on 60 Minutes.

  Wallace was convinced.

  The next day, with BGA personnel Doug Longhini and Geraldene Delaney behind a desk in the seedy office (and Wallace, Lando, and Dumbrow safely out of sight), the clinic was officially “opened” and a parade of visitors from numerous labs began. Longhini and Delaney were careful to never indicate that they wanted kickbacks in return for lab referrals. Of the 11 labs that came, 9 made kickback proposals in front of the 60 Minutes camera. Several were invited back for a second meeting; at that time, Wallace was ready to make his move. Dumbrow’s camera recorded the conversation as Wallace narrated.

  WALLACE: First to arrive—two men who said they were the owners of North Side Clinical Labs. North Side’s Medicaid business has rocketed from $28,000 a year in 1974 to almost $1 million a year by 1975, an increase of 3000 percent in one year’s time.
As we said, Illinois law prohibits secretly recording a person, so we taped only one side of the discussion—just the questions of the BGA investigators, who this time included Pat Riordan playing the role of the clinic doctor. Standing behind the wall in the back, I could hear what was going on in the front office. Part of the North Side Lab offer was that if the Medicaid business the clinic sent them amounted to more than $1000 a week, they would return 50 percent of that money to the clinic by leasing a small space in the back.

  RIORDAN: So I could get $500 a week?

  WALLACE: In other words, by renting a few square feet in the clinic hallway to the lab, the clinic could earn from that small space alone more than four times the rent of the entire clinic.

  RIORDAN: We’d be getting in rent for that hallway $2000?

  At which point Wallace opened the door to the closet where he’d been hiding and walked into the room, holding a microphone.

  WALLACE: Pardon me just a second, fellows.

  Wallace explained that he was “recording for broadcast,” though he failed to give his name or mention that he was with 60 Minutes—none of which was required by law but might have been of interest to the parties being exposed to Dumbrow and his camera. What followed was what Wallace described as “a pretty frank discussion” about kickbacks, in which the visitors more or less admitted to wrongdoing in front of the 60 Minutes camera. Emboldened, Wallace and his team kept going, and the encounters kept getting more interesting. Wallace continued to tell people only that he was “recording for broadcast.” It wasn’t until his final grand entrance—after hearing yet another promise of kickbacks from “Mr. E—— of DJ Laboratories”—that someone reacted to him as something other than an odd intrusion.

  WALLACE: I want to interrupt, if I can. I’m recording this for broadcast, and I just heard you say that you will give back 25 percent in a kickback, 25 percent on a rebate. Is that correct, Mr. E——?