by David Blum
“No, no, no,” Bradley replied, his anger rising. “I don’t accept that. This producer is working for me, and you’re just going to take him away without asking me about it? Bullshit. So who do I appeal to at the next highest level?”
The next day a CBS News vice president came to 60 Minutes for a tense meeting with Hewitt, Wallace, Bradley, and Phil Scheffler, who had recently replaced Palmer Williams as the senior producer of the show.
“We think that it’s for the good of the show,” explained the CBS executive, “because Marion’s gone, that Steve go to Mike.”
Bradley looked around the room at his new colleagues and realized he had no hope of salvaging the situation.
“You know, this was all decided before I got in here,” Bradley said with resignation. “No matter what I said, this was going to happen.” At which point he turned to face Wallace directly.
“I never saw the knife,” Bradley whispered to Wallace. “It won’t happen again.”
The producer issue was particularly important to Bradley; for all his gifts, he’d never been known as a particularly energetic writer for television, and he knew it. Often he depended entirely on his producers to deliver camera-ready copy to him; he preferred a constant travel schedule and endless reporting to the idea of sitting alone in his office writing a script. In the fall of 1981 he went on air with memorable stories about the Irish Republican Army and a profile of the philosopher-journalist I. F. Stone. And within just two months he’d delivered one of the most memorable pieces ever aired on 60 Minutes—a heart-wrenching profile of the singer Lena Horne, a piece that demonstrated Bradley’s interview gifts and the show’s own continued appetite for definitive interviews with cultural icons. In it, he got Horne to confess—with tears streaming down her cheeks—the pain she felt at growing up as a light-skinned black woman who could pass for white. Horne also talked with Bradley about her passion for sex in a way that appeared to be thinly disguised flirtation.
HORNE: If a lady treats other people as she’d like to be treated, then she’s allowed to go and roll in the grass if she wants to.
BRADLEY: Even if she’s 64?
HORNE: Even if she’s 64. Particularly then!
It was as refreshingly honest an answer as had been given on 60 Minutes, and Hewitt’s longstanding affection for the Horne piece perhaps had something to do with Horne’s energetic attitude toward age and sex, which bore a significant resemblance to his own.
Chapter 13
Watermelon and Tacos
With Reasoner back at 60 Minutes and Bradley on the team, all looked right to the outside world. The show had never been better than in 1981. Stories on homelessness, surrogate mothers, chemical dumping, and the murder of Malcolm X were balanced by trenchant profiles of journalist Tom Wolfe, architect Paolo Soleri, Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, and tennis star Martina Navratilova. Hewitt’s formula had effectively killed off the competition on other networks. The show was earning an estimated $70 million a year in profit, and Hewitt and his tigers had become major television celebrities.
Behind the scenes, however, the atmosphere remained toxic. There was rarely a time at 60 Minutes when everyone was speaking to each other; at any given moment, at least two correspondents (Wallace and Safer, Safer and Rather, Wallace and Bradley) were embroiled in a conflict serious enough to warrant the silent treatment. With 60 Minutes still hovering around the number one spot in the Nielsens and consistently in the top 10, the show’s success spurred the correspondents to battle for supremacy in the eyes of Hewitt as well as the public. Nobody backed off. Nobody gave in.
While Wallace, Safer, Reasoner, and Bradley all had gentlemanly aspects to their character, at times they all got caught up in the competitiveness that was also essential to Wallace’s nature. Though he could also be a seductive and charismatic leader, his producers contended he could also be something of a bully. Most of them say in his defense that it was always about the work, but late-night calls from Wallace to criticize their performance or demand more of their time left them drained. It wasn’t uncommon for even the most loyal Wallace producer to defect to another correspondent’s team for a year, seeking a respite from the grind. Paul Loewenwarter, who had worked steadily and without complaint for Wallace since the show’s earliest days, took time off from him at one point to “recharge his batteries,” as he put it, before returning later. “Wallace is Wallace,” Loewenwarter explained, echoing the conflict felt by so many who were captivated by the correspondent’s magnetic aura but feared his lacerating criticism. Wallace had no tolerance for anything but the best and often picked apart his producers’ work with the same kind of abusive and obscene language that had become commonplace in the show’s screenings and hallways.
Wallace, to his credit, didn’t deny his difficult manner. When longtime producer Norman Gorin was in the hospital recovering from major surgery, Wallace sent a cactus to him with a note that read, “From your prickly friend.” To which Gorin replied: “Nice try, but adding the suffix doesn’t change a thing.”
Despite his courtly demeanor, Safer often found himself drawn into battle. His relationship with Rather had always been rocky, going all the way back to conflicts from their days in Vietnam together. There had also been a period of silence between Safer and Reasoner over minor issues that somehow exploded into larger ones. He screamed back in screenings when Hewitt yelled at him, and later kicked himself for stooping to his boss’s level. That said, Safer appreciated the way Hewitt could quickly forget his anger. Often, five minutes after an expletive-laden diatribe, Hewitt would wander into Safer’s office and sit down for a jaw, as though nothing had happened. Often he even apologized.
Safer’s issues with Wallace went deeper than with the others. In the early days of 60 Minutes, the two men had spent at least two years not speaking to each other, and the wounds from that schism took a while to heal. They were cordial to one another, but at heart their relationship had no hope of becoming anything more; in fact, Safer kept an old 1968 campaign button that read “To Hell With Wallace” on his office wall. Their conflicts ranged from control of producers—a matter of supreme importance to Wallace—to ownership of story ideas.
Everyone was always in some kind of battle with Hewitt, whose ego had been further inflated by the show’s continued triumph. His screening room persona as the American Everyman gave him a platform to attack his correspondents and their pieces on a regular basis. While they often conceded that their boss was a “genius” at editing pieces in a screening room, they were just as likely to label him an idiot savant out of earshot. The more famous they became, the less likely any of them were to tolerate Hewitt’s critiques of their work.
It was hard for anyone to find fault with the piece Harry Reasoner delivered on the night of November 15, 1981, “The Best Movie Ever Made?” If ever the main character of a 60 Minutes story was the correspondent telling it, this was it—an elegiac examination by Reasoner of Casablanca, undertaken for no reason whatsoever, except that Reasoner happened to love the film. Producer Drew Phillips dutifully came up with a few news pegs for the piece: it turned out, for instance, that replicas of Rick’s Cafe were opening up everywhere, and a recent showing of the movie in Pittsburgh pulled in a crowd of 1,200. Here and there, Phillips and Reasoner interviewed moviegoers about the experience of seeing it or found trivia concerning the production. But mostly the piece existed to allow Reasoner to rhapsodize about a movie that touched him like no other. Intercutting what was essentially an essay by Reasoner with clips from the movie itself, it gave viewers a rare glimpse into the psyche of a man they knew only through television.
REASONER: Our romantic minds are a hodgepodge, storage rooms full of objects meaningless in themselves except as they serve as props to bring back a song or a smile or a remembered line. . . .
Phillips had arranged for the props from Casablanca to be used in the piece, including the legendary piano at which Dooley Wilson, as Sam, played “As Time Goes By.”
REA
SONER: Bogart liked music, too. Although as every student of trivia knows, he never said, “Play it again, Sam.” By the time he said what he did say, most of the bourbon in the bottle was gone.
More clips, more comments, and then this poetic summation of the story:
REASONER: If in a standard movie boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl, this was boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, boy gives up girl for humanity’s sake. That’s better than Gone With the Wind, when he gave her up out of ennui. . . . There is great power in the ending, too, possibly because almost up to the moment it was filmed and up to the moment an audience sees it for the first time, nobody knew what the ending was going to be. Rick gets everybody together at the airport, and keeps Claude Rains in line with a gun in the now-famous trench coat.
Another clip from the movie followed, then this snippet from Reasoner’s interview with Ingrid Bergman.
BERGMAN: Now, we were going to shoot two ends: one that I stayed on the ground with Humphrey Bogart, and my husband would be so understanding and so generous that he would say good-bye—(laughs)—and leave alone; or I would go with my husband, feel my duty, and Humphrey Bogart would be alone in the fog. And we shot that scene first. Cut, and everybody said that’s it, we don’t have to shoot the other end, because we cannot get anything better than this. But they didn’t know until they saw it.
REASONER: To tidy things up, Rick shoots the Nazi major, and Claude Rains gets the opportunity to take advantage of the film’s most dramatic pause. . . . And that leads to what sure has become the most familiar exit line in movie history.
At which point the necessary clip played—“Louie,” Bogart says to Rains, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”—followed by Reasoner’s own classic ending, a glimpse of him at his most eloquent and touching.
REASONER: I don’t suppose then or now young men wind up for good with the young women with whom they first saw Casablanca. I didn’t. The story seems to lead to bittersweet endings in real life, too. But you never forget who you first saw it with. I wonder if she remembers. If she does, here’s looking at you, kid.
In 1981, 60 Minutes represented a rare bright spot on the CBS News balance sheet. Dan Rather’s arrival as anchorman on the CBS Evening News translated into an immediate ratings drop for that broadcast, and the network continued to struggle with its morning show, now well behind both the Today show and Good Morning America.
The network had trouble on another front, too: the burgeoning success of afternoon talk shows, in particular Phil Donahue’s popular 4:00 P.M. weekday series. In a desperate effort to compete, CBS News convinced the men of 60 Minutes—Mike, Morley, Ed, and Harry—to appear on Up to the Minute. It ripped off various aspects of the Sunday night show, including the large stopwatch that appeared behind the correspondents. They took turns each week hosting the show, which featured audience participation led by that week’s guest correspondent. The show would deal each day with a variety of topics aimed at women, such as “Aggressive Women: Turn On or Turn Off?” and included parenting commentary from Bob Keeshan, otherwise known as Captain Kangaroo—who’d been given this slot in return for donating a half-hour of his morning time to the news division.
But by November, after just two months on the air, Up to the Minute was canceled, its ratings even lower than the previous occupant of the time slot—reruns of One Day at a Time. As it turned out, the 60 Minutes stars were no guarantee of ratings outside their protected Sunday nighttime slot, to which they happily retreated.
Success was beginning to take its toll on the 60 Minutes team. The worst of it came in the form of increasing media scrutiny, mostly focused on Mike Wallace—still the show’s biggest star and thus its most obvious target.
In January 1982, the Los Angeles Times revealed that Wallace—the correspondent who most loved catching people unawares with a camera—had himself been taped surreptitiously, with embarrassing results. It happened the previous March, when Wallace was interviewing a bank executive in San Diego for a story about lien contracts, in which customers unwittingly put their houses up as collateral for loans to buy amenities like air conditioners and carpeting. Minorities in particular were losing their homes in foreclosures by unscrupulous lenders. It was a well-intentioned piece, but while doing the San Diego interview, Wallace let slip a politically incorrect wisecrack that was recorded on tape.
“I wonder why they sign those contracts without reading them,” remarked someone in the room with Wallace, according to a record provided by the bank, which later claimed it had gotten Wallace’s permission to videotape the interview. (Wallace insisted the remarks were made during a break in the interview, while a 60 Minutes cameraman was reloading his camera, having run out of film.)
“They’re probably too busy eating their watermelon and tacos,” Wallace replied.
Wallace didn’t deny the remark to the Los Angeles Times, but told reporter Nancy Skelton for her page-one story on January 10, 1982: “Look, I happen to have a penchant for obscenity and for jokes.” The next day in the New York Times, Wallace claimed the comment was “off the record” and was made to elicit “latent racist” views from the interview subject. “In hindsight,” Wallace said, “it’s conceivable that I made a mistake.”
The Los Angeles Times reported that Wallace asked the bank to erase the comment from its tape. In the New York Times account of the incident, Hewitt defended Wallace and claimed that the correspondent had thought better of his request after having made it. “Mike called the bank back,” Hewitt said, “and said forget it, that if they eliminated any part of the tape it could be misconstrued, and he didn’t want that to happen.” Ever the master of spin, Hewitt pointed out the irony that Wallace’s piece was designed to help minorities. “Like almost everyone else in America, Mike sometimes indulges himself in ethnic humor,” Hewitt said. “It has been my experience that the people with the least bias sometimes tend to do that.”
But as Wallace would have been the first to admit, the comment was completely in character for the blunt and outspoken correspondent. Despite Hewitt’s protestations on Wallace’s behalf, the news that his biggest star had been caught saying something inappropriate on tape seemed like the only irony worth noting.
Only a few days later came the airing of “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception,” a CBS Reports documentary produced by George Crile, with Wallace narrating. It wasn’t done under the auspices of 60 Minutes, and Crile, who had done most of the reporting himself, had brought Wallace into the project mainly for his interviewing talents. When the 90-minute documentary aired at 9:30 P.M. on Saturday, January 23, 1982, it created an immediate firestorm for Wallace, Crile, and CBS News itself and only deepened the correspondent’s despondency over the recent downturn in his reputation.
The documentary charged that in the period before the 1968 Tet offensive, American intelligence had altered estimates of Viet Cong troop strength to bolster the government’s position that it was winning the war. It specifically accused General William C. Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, of having conspired to misrepresent the size and strength of Viet Cong guerrilla forces in order to curry favor for the war effort, which was going badly. But even though Westmoreland and other top officials sat willingly for interviews, Westmoreland was quick to deny the charges; in a news conference several days later, he called the documentary “a vicious, scurrilous, and premeditated attack on my character and personal integrity.” CBS responded that Westmoreland’s charges were “totally unfounded.” The news media largely sided with CBS News; editorials and reviews regarded the documentary as a powerful exposé of military manipulation.
There were exceptions, though. In a May 1982 article entitled “Anatomy of a Smear,” two reporters for TV Guide charged CBS with its own distortion of facts to fit its thesis. The article specifically accused the producers of having “rehearsed” an interview, contrary to network rules and then edited out points of view that
didn’t agree with that of the documentary. While the magazine took pains to note it wasn’t challenging the essential truth of the Crile-Wallace documentary, it still managed, by use of the loaded word “smear,” to taint what had been considered a first-rate reporting job.
What made matters even worse for Wallace was the reaction of CBS News, now under new management. Bill Leonard, the executive who’d been responsible for getting 60 Minutes on the air to begin with, had been overthrown in favor of Van Gordon Sauter, a bearded dynamo from the Midwest who (at least to the old-timers at CBS, of which there were many) seemed more concerned with the superficial aspects of news—sets, graphics, and the like—than with the serious business of news gathering. Rather than coming to its defense, Sauter immediately commissioned an inquiry into the charges against the documentary, creating what Wallace felt was an atmosphere of uncertainty about it.
The network assigned Burton Benjamin, a former CBS documentary producer and now a senior executive producer of CBS News, to look into the accusations. In July, after reviewing Benjamin’s report, Sauter issued an eight-page memo that sharply criticized aspects of the documentary—and implied that Wallace had not been active enough in the reporting, creating a disconnect that should be avoided in “projects of a complex and controversial nature.”
It may not have been the reaction Westmoreland wanted—he called the report a “whitewash”—but in true military fashion he sensed division in the ranks and moved to exploit it. In September, Westmoreland filed a $120 million libel suit against CBS; among those named in the lawsuit were Sauter, Crile, and Wallace. It would be a long, ugly, and expensive legal fight.
By 1983, after 15 years on the air—with 5 of them spent among the top 10 shows—it wasn’t uncommon for those involved in 60 Minutes to take brief breaks from looking forward by patting themselves on the back. They had done a tenth anniversary show, and now a fifteenth. Mike Wallace was hard at work on an autobiography (with Rather collaborator and CBS News historian Gary Paul Gates) to be called Close Encounters; Hewitt had a memoir in the works, too—to be called Minute by Minute, with the modest subtitle, The Best Show on TV Becomes the Best Book on TV. May 1983 marked Wallace’s sixty-fifth birthday—particularly notable in that CBS would make what appeared to be its first exemption to its mandatory retirement age by allowing him to sign another contract. Hewitt, a few years later, would be its second. (This was no mere technicality: Eric Sevareid and Charles Collingwood, two CBS stars of earlier vintage, had been forced to retire at age 65.) Of course, as Wallace was the first to note, the decision had only to do with economics, since it would have been a reckless business decision to break up the 60 Minutes team at the top of its game. The show ranked number one for the season, and was regularly watched by 40 percent of the television audience. 60 Minutes had devoted 1.4 million minutes to nearly 1,500 stories, and Wallace the workhorse had done nearly 500 of them. His contract earned him more than $1 million a year, and soon afterward Hewitt would join him at the seven-figure mark—an unheard-of sum for a news producer never seen by the audience at home.