by David Blum
Reasoner’s colleagues, who were knocking out upward of 30 stories a year, seemed similarly vigorous. All three had become famous—more so than Hewitt—and the show’s success gave the correspondents wide leverage to continue their headline-earning investigations. It also opened doors to celebrities who had never talked on television before. Stars knew they’d get fair treatment from the show, as well as a kind of gravitas not afforded elsewhere. And the timing continued to be impeccable—not just the timing of the stories but the correspondents themselves, whose instincts for being at the right place at the right time remained unparalleled.
On January 14, 1979, the show aired Morley Safer’s interview with Katharine Hepburn, the legendary—and legendarily reclusive—actress, who had granted Safer a session after meeting producer Jim Jackson and him in London, for reasons Safer could only surmise. Maybe she loved 60 Minutes, he thought.
Nevertheless, Safer almost botched the interview, Hepburn had warned him that if he arrived at her East Side townhouse even one minute after the scheduled 12:00 noon interview, she would cancel it and send the camera crew home.
On the day of the interview, Safer got into a cab with what he thought would be plenty of time to get there. But by 11:50, he was still caught in traffic; at 11:55, he still hadn’t reached her front door. With seconds to spare, Safer realized he had no other option; he jumped out of the cab blocks away and raced all the way to her house, arriving breathless and terrified at her front door at precisely 11:59.
“Mr. Safer,” Hepburn said as she answered the door herself, “you are a very lucky young man.”
Safer’s luck continued once the interview got underway, as he explored the eccentricities of the idiosyncratic actress.
HEPBURN: I won’t go to a restaurant now.
SAFER: You don’t go out to restaurants?
HEPBURN: I don’t go out to restaurants because they charge $60 a meal, and I can serve you here anytime you want to come. You give me $60 and I’ll give you dinner.
SAFER: Are you a bit of a—how should I say this—
HEPBURN: Tight.
SAFER: Tight?
HEPBURN: No, I’m not tight, I just don’t like injustice . . .
SAFER: If you hadn’t been an actress, what would you have been?
HEPBURN: I never thought. I would have tormented some man, I suppose, and had about eight children. And tormented them.
After the interview, and out of view of the CBS cameras, Hepburn took Safer on a tour of her home’s private quarters, including the part of the house where she’d lived with Spencer Tracy.
Not to be outdone, of course, Mike Wallace swooped down in late April with a breaking-news interview of his own. Just as Wallace was about to interview Johnny Carson, the elusive host of NBC’s Tonight Show—after months of negotiations—newspapers around the country bannered the news that Carson might be leaving the show because of a contract dispute with Fred Silverman, the head of the network. Wallace was able to capitalize brilliantly on the interview and do what 60 Minutes had come to do best: get noticed. Guests had become so familiar with the show’s routine that they knew precisely how to handle interviews. A master like Carson clearly relished the chance to cross comic swords with Wallace.
WALLACE: Is there anything you’d like to say to Mr. Silverman?
CARSON: I hope when this show is seen that you’re still with NBC. (Laughs) I’m as cruel as you are.
WALLACE: Is it a—is it a fact—
CARSON: What—what—what—is what a fact?
WALLACE: Is it a fact that in the middle—
CARSON: Boy, you’re getting warmed up now, aren’t you?
WALLACE: Yeah. Is it—
CARSON: Takes you a while, but, boy, when that cruel streak starts to come up, you’re murder.
For all the scoops and quotes and exposés and headlines, the success of each story always came back to what made Hewitt happy: great characters and human drama. And sometimes the best of these came in the form of pieces about unknowns, men and women who earned a showcase on 60 Minutes for their achievements, not their failures or their fame. Which is what led Morley Safer, in the fall of 1979, to the memorable story of a Chicago schoolteacher named Marva Collins, who had started the West Side Preparatory School in 1975, an alternative school for inner-city kids. Collins was an extraordinary but largely unrecognized character doing something groundbreaking and important; Safer’s spotlight on her would earn her unimagined fame and financial support. (The story also marked probably the first appearance of what would become a staple of television news—the profile of the inspirational inner-city teacher. In the years to come, would-be Marva Collinses showed up with regularity on every newsmagazine and evening news program.)
The Collins story also reminded viewers—and Hewitt as well—of Safer’s singular talent among the 60 Minutes crew. While Wallace soared with his interviews, and Rather scored with his dogged determination, Safer brought to certain stories a unique voice that reflected his personal gifts as a writer. Despite a team of talented producers, no one could ever mistake Safer’s words for anybody else’s. Safer claims to have written the first draft of every story he did for 60 Minutes until approximately 1999, when at last, he says, he entrusted the task to producers. The Collins story was a perfect example of Safer’s poetry:
SAFER: You have it all here on West Adams Street, all the familiar big-city blight: the forever broken windows, the burned-out flats, the disemboweled abandoned cars—all that look and smell that even a crystal afternoon cannot change. And up the street or around the corner, you have a school that, for whatever reason, does not teach, and children who, for whatever reason, do not learn—castaways to that ever-growing legion of unskilled black teenaged unemployed. And then you have 3819 West Adams, just another tired-looking house with a blank face staring out at a mean street. But come on in 3819, come on in and take a look. And what you find on the inside could not be more different from what you see on the outside. Come on in and take a look: alert and challenged children being pushed way beyond the boundaries most school systems set.
Without flowery language or far-reaching metaphor, Safer could set a scene with words that created as much a mood as any picture, and with subjects like Collins, he was giving distinction to 60 Minutes as something more than just a muckraking institution out for headlines.
At a few minutes after midnight on October 21, 1978, Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd turned to each other on the “Weekend Update” segment of Saturday Night Live and began a sketch called “Point-Counterpoint.” Savvy viewers recognized it perhaps as an arcane reference to the 60 Minutes segment of the same name, in which Shana Alexander and James J. Kilpatrick had been trading barbs for years. Curtin led with a strong opinion, but the memory of it pales next to what followed, when Aykroyd looked dryly into the camera and intoned, “Jane, you ignorant slut.”
Among other things, that night marked the beginning of the end for “Point-Counterpoint” on 60 Minutes. Hewitt later claimed that the feature—which had begun in the early 1970s with Nicholas Von Hoffman and had grown into a regular (and, at times, tedious) closer to the show—had already run its course when Saturday Night Live skewered it. It is true that the parody segment lasted through the end of the current SNL season, which repeated the “Jane, you ignorant slut” joke several more times before Aykroyd and Curtin left the cast in the spring of 1979. And it is also true that a few months after that (in September 1979) it was announced that Alexander was quitting her position on 60 Minutes after a fight with Hewitt over salary. She claimed in the New York Times that Hewitt refused to raise her weekly $600 fee for appearing on television’s top-rated show. Hewitt countered that Alexander had demanded a raise to $1,500 a week. “I never disagreed with Shana and her strong support of the proposition that men and women should get equal pay for equal work,” Hewitt told the Times, “but when she demanded two and a half times what Jack [Kilpatrick] received, I had to say no.” Alexander denied having asked for that much,
and insisted she sought a raise for Kirkpatrick as well. It was a chance for Hewitt to simultaneously get rid of Alexander and make himself look like the wronged party.
In the fall of 1979, with the show now so totally in the spotlight (what greater badge of status as a cultural icon could there be than to be regularly parodied on Saturday Night Live?) Hewitt knew he had the leverage to expand and deepen his territory more than ever before. It didn’t hurt that his old friend Bill Leonard—who more than anyone else at CBS News was responsible for getting 60 Minutes on the air back in 1968—was about to replace Dick Salant. Hewitt was ready to add yet another correspondent to the mix. It wasn’t enough to have Reasoner back; he wanted someone young, fresh, and different to enliven the mix. He was ready to cast another star, and this time he didn’t need any advice about who to pick. The perfect performer for 60 Minutes was already working at CBS News, and Hewitt couldn’t wait to hire him; he had to hurry, though, because the man he had in mind had a tendency to get bored and restless.
In 1971, just as 60 Minutes was moving to Sunday nights, Ed Bradley moved to Paris, leaving behind a perfectly respectable job as a reporter for WCBS News radio in New York. It was just the kind of move you’d expect from Bradley, who cared far more about being happy than being famous. He loved music, especially jazz. He probably loved music more than journalism, which is how he ended up hanging around Paris without a job or an income for quite a while, hanging out in smoky bars and enjoying the moment with the kind of calm and contentment a man like Hewitt would never understand. But eventually, of course, the money ran out, and—Paris being an expensive city for an impoverished and unemployed 29-year-old—Bradley wandered into the CBS radio office in Paris to see if they might need a stringer. He didn’t want a full-time job, though—just enough work to pay the bills and stay as long as possible. And somehow, as had always been the case for Bradley, things worked out better than he expected. It wasn’t long before he landed on television for CBS; eventually the news division asked him to go to Vietnam as a contract assignment reporter, at a salary of $20,000 a year. He wasn’t thrilled about the money—it was half what he’d been making in radio—but he took it anyway, and it turned out to be a canny career move. Bradley covered Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos before CBS brought him to Washington in 1974.
The move proved frustrating. Bradley didn’t like being the new guy in the Washington bureau, getting lousy assignments that no one else wanted, so he took a month off from work and went to Canada to ski; afterward he drove across Canada to Windsor and then to Detroit, to visit his father. Along the way he formulated a plan for what came next: Go back and give this your best shot. Don’t put any time frame on it. If it’s not working, you’ll know it’s not working. And be careful with your money. You’ll still be on contract (to CBS News), you’ll have to ride out the contract. Then you can quit CBS News forever.
A fortuitously timed return trip to Cambodia in the winter of 1975 rendered all that moot. The Khmer Rouge had started their annual dry-season offensive, and many said that this time they would at last succeed in toppling the American-supported government led by President Lon Nol. Bradley jumped on Pan Am Flight 1 from New York to Southeast Asia and arrived in the midst of chaos and breaking news stories everywhere he looked. In February, Bradley was on hand to report the successful overthrow of the government of Cambodia, followed in April by the fall of Saigon—and was evacuated from both places by military helicopter. For 24 eventful hours, Bradley was the only TV journalist on the scene to gather first-person reports of the Saigon evacuation.
Bradley returned to the United States a network news star and quickly advanced to the front of the line for plum Washington assignments. He began the 1976 presidential campaign covering Democratic Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana and finished as a reporter on the Jimmy Carter campaign. It was during that campaign that he made the acquaintance of Rolling Stone reporter Hunter S. Thompson, who invited Bradley to come with him to cover the Florida primary. He turned that assignment into a job covering the Carter White House for the next two years, and his acquaintance with Thompson became a lifelong friendship.
But even at the pinnacle of broadcasting, Bradley grew restless. It seemed a part of his nature to want to escape the confinement of a full-time job; no matter how golden the handcuffs, he still felt imprisoned by the demands of deadlines. By 1978 he had gotten himself transferred to a job held only three years earlier by Dan Rather—chief correspondent for CBS Reports. It was an escape to the world of hour-long documentaries and the freedom he’d been wanting for so long.
It was a good gig for Bradley. He relished the chance to do documentaries on subjects of his own choosing, and over most of the next two years, his broadcasts earned him attention as both a thoughtful journalist and a smooth-talking on-air personality. Even by the late 1970s, black reporters remained a small minority in television news, and in blunt Q-ratings terms, even fewer were in the same league as Ed Bradley. His handsome face and perfectly modulated voice made him a natural, and an obvious choice for job openings. It was around this time that Bradley got married, briefly, to Rita Coolidge’s sister, Priscilla; he’d been married once before, in the early 1960s.
Thrilled with his new job, Bradley did hours on the boat people in Cambodia, the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, the Central Intelligence Agency, and a two-hour show on the impact of Brown v. Board of Education. But eventually Bradley started to notice that CBS wasn’t giving the show any more time slots; he soon had his eye on the door yet again, this time looking across the street from his office at CBS News—where the staff of 60 Minutes had set up shop in a nondescript office building that housed a car dealership on the ground floor.
A year earlier, in July 1978, Walter Cronkite had gone to the office of newly appointed CBS News president Bill Leonard and dropped a bit of unexpected—and unwelcome—news on the new boss.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” Leonard asked his biggest star performer. “Is everything all right?”
“Well . . . well, Bill, actually, there’s one little thing,” Cronkite said.
“Go right ahead, Walter.” Leonard already knew that whatever it was, it wasn’t going to be little.
“Well,” Cronkite said, “I want to give up the Evening News.” After registering the shock on Leonard’s face and explaining how the weight of the show had become unbearable after nearly two decades as anchorman, Cronkite had concluded, “I’d be a damn fool not to quit while I’m ahead.” It was a decision Cronkite would live to regret, particularly once CBS News froze him out of a future on-air role in network news coverage. (Now 87 years old, he most recently hosted a political special for MTV.)
Cronkite’s contract kept him in the job until his sixty-fifth birthday in 1981, but Leonard understood that he needed to move quickly and decisively to find a successor. One crucial reason: Leonard wasn’t the only news president in town shopping for an anchor. With Reasoner’s departure from ABC and the debacle of the Barbara Walters pairing, Roone Arledge was looking for someone with well-established credibility to be the new face of ABC News, and he was obviously willing to pay for it. Just about everyone in the business knew the face he had in mind: Dan Rather’s.
Until just recently, CBS insiders had voiced a decided preference for Washington correspondent Roger Mudd as Cronkite’s successor; had Arledge not started waving a lot of money around, Mudd might have gotten the job. But Arledge, who suspected that the promise of a bigger paycheck might entice Rather to leave 60 Minutes (where he earned $300,000 a year) and CBS for the chance to anchor his own nightly newscast, put a $2.2 million annual salary on the table, prompting a heated round of negotiations between CBS and ABC through Rather’s tough-talking agent, Richard Leibner.
The price was not insignificant—$22 million over 10 years and the eventual loss of Roger Mudd—but Leonard finally paid it on the morning of February 18, 1980, at which point Dan Rather prepared to leave 60 Minutes for the seat behind the most trusted desk in America.
Hewitt, ever the pragmatist, didn’t devote much time to bemoaning the loss of his star, having already picked Ed Bradley to take his place. Besides, he knew that in a few months—well before Rather was set to bolt—60 Minutes would air a piece that would likely be remembered, far more than any single nightly newscast could, as a defining moment in the history of the show and of Rather’s career.
Chapter 12
I Never Saw the Knife
Gunga Dan was born on the night of April 6, 1980. To the single-minded Dan Rather, the image of the correspondent swaddled in a blanket and a knit cap and being smuggled into war-torn Afghanistan was intended to give this difficult and complicated story a human dimension for Americans unconcerned about a small country under attack. But in typical Rather fashion, “Inside Afghanistan” quickly became more about Rather than about the horrors he was reporting, whether by accident or by design.
It all began in late December 1979, two days after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Soon after Christmas, Rather went into Hewitt’s office—they were the only two people left at 60 Minutes that night, by Rather’s account in The Camera Always Blinks Twice—and proposed going to Afghanistan to report on the war. “Forget it,” Hewitt said, making it perfectly clear to Rather that he wasn’t all that interested in Afghanistan.