by David Blum
Chapter 14
See You on Television!
For 15 years 60 Minutes had managed to maneuver its way into great stories and high drama with little second-guessing of its techniques. Sure, there’d been the occasional article or analysis, but for the most part the show had remained immune, both critically and legally, to those who would challenge its basic methods or threaten its approach.
But that was all about to change, thanks to a slander suit against the show and its now-departed correspondent Dan Rather. It was a minor case involving a December 9, 1979, piece called “It’s No Accident,” about insurance scams in which spurious medical claims are filed in reference to faked auto accidents. In the story, Rather had reported that Dr. Carl Galloway, a California doctor, had signed a fraudulent medical report; Galloway claimed that though his name was on the report, it was not his signature—and that 60 Minutes and Rather hadn’t made adequate effort to prove that it was.
When the case came to trial in the spring of 1983, it offered the public a rare glimpse behind the curtain of the TV newsmagazine. For the first time in its history, the news-gathering techniques of 60 Minutes would themselves go on trial, in what became something of a media circus—with Rather taking the stand for three days in his own defense in a Los Angeles courtroom. But what really mattered to 60 Minutes—over and above the embarrassment of having its former star on trial—was one crucial part of Galloway’s defense, which (thanks to a favorable court ruling) enabled him to introduce interview outtakes that cast Rather or 60 Minutes in a less than flattering light.
During the Galloway trial, audiences learned how 60 Minutes obtained what was known as the “reverse” shot, in which the correspondent was filmed asking a question—sometimes repeatedly—after he’d already heard the answer. Because the reporter was essentially the star, he could redo his questions as often as he liked, until he got it right—a freedom not afforded those answering the questions. (The 1987 movie Broadcast News, written and directed by a former CBS News writer named James L. Brooks, did much to malign this particular technique. In one sequence, correspondent Tom Grunick, played by William Hurt, used the “reverse” shot to insert a shot of himself crying during an interview with a victim of date rape; it was later revealed that Grunick had filmed the crying after the interview had been completed.) Overall, the exposure of raw, unedited footage did little to enhance the reputation of the anchorman or of 60 Minutes. In one instance, someone trying to get away from an unwelcome CBS camera was yelled at by a raucous Rather: “Adios! See you on television!”
A jury ultimately ruled in favor of Rather and CBS; the case went away. But the fallout from the public’s peek backstage into the process tempered the victory. 60 Minutes later instituted a requirement that all interviews be shot with two cameras, in an effort to lessen the public perception that its correspondents were not so much reporters as well-rehearsed actors reading from a script. (However, two decades later CBS News standards still do not explicitly require two cameras to be used for interviews. “There may be times when the reporter or producer feels that reaction shots and reverse questions made out of real-time sequence are necessary,” the rules state. “In such cases, the subject must be made aware of what we are doing and why, and, if questions are to be repeated, the subject or his or her representative is to be given the opportunity to be present during the recording of those questions.”)
As usual, Fred Friendly—who’d become an éminence grise to the industry, often quoted as an unassailable critic of network news practices—weighed in on the latest 60 Minutes imbroglio. “We put our cameras on an awful lot of people,” he remarked to the New York Times after the verdict came in. “I think the fact that we are accountable that way can’t help but be good for all of us.” That said, Friendly conceded that the presence of Rather on the witness stand had only helped bolster the anchorman’s position. “Viewers have seen Dan Rather in a new light and a good light, not just the talking end of a TelePrompTer,” Friendly said, “but as someone who is able to cope with a very difficult problem, willing to face his accusers.” In the end, the case proved the principle of 60 Minutes yet again—that the show depended heavily on the performance skills of Hewitt’s tigers to keep audiences coming. It would always be the correspondents who turned good reporting into great storytelling.
By the fall of 1983 the other networks had tired of ceding the Sunday night at 7:00 time slot to CBS and were at last gearing up to challenge 60 Minutes. ABC was bringing in James G. Bellows, a onetime print journalist and now managing editor of Entertainment Tonight, to come up with a competing strategy—maybe even starting a new show at 6:30 to give it a head start. Meanwhile, at NBC, the plan was to move Monitor, its own newsmagazine, to the Sunday-night-at-7 time slot. Monitor had launched the previous March with Lloyd Dobyns as the host, on Saturday nights at 10:00, and quickly plummeted to the bottom of the ratings. NBC News president Reuven Frank promised an overhaul of the show—new music, new sets, new correspondents, even an investigative unit—to draw viewers away from 60 Minutes, which still owned first place in the ratings.
Hewitt, as always, had nothing but public sarcasm for his would-be competition. “I have seen Lloyd Dobyns maybe once in my life, maybe twice,” he told a New York Times reporter. “We have lived in this neighborhood for 15 years. It is a nice neighborhood. Mr. Disney used to live across the street. Father Ripley lives down the block. [Hewitt was referring to Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, the latest family fare thrown up against his show.] I don’t imagine a nice man like Mr. Reuven Frank would do anything to ruin our neighborhood.”
Behind the bluster, Hewitt was always looking for ways to retain his edge and stay ahead. Not that he feared getting beaten, but just in case, it couldn’t hurt to heap a little more star power onto his enterprise. Fortunately for him, CBS News had the perfect piece of talent to give his show the adrenaline boost it might one day need.
Back in 1969 when she was a 23-year-old weathergirl at WLKY in Louisville, Diane Sawyer, having nothing to show for herself but a well-honed sense of gumption and poise, dialed up CBS and asked the switchboard operator to connect her with Don Hewitt of 60 Minutes. Minutes later, Sawyer was talking with Hewitt—who has always made a habit of answering his own phone. They made an appointment for Sawyer to see him on her next trip to New York. When that day came, Sawyer was granted a 45-minute audience with the executive producer, after which she was politely informed that she would not be immediately joining the cast of the number one show on television—although the meeting presumably did go on far longer than most of Hewitt’s interviews with weathergirls from local stations.
“We’ll get back to you,” Hewitt said at the end of their chat.
It wasn’t all that surprising that Hewitt found himself in a room with Diane Sawyer so early in her career. Sawyer, born December 22, 1945, had been brought up to be the best, the brightest, the first. Growing up in Louisville as the daughter of a Republican county judge and a schoolteacher, Diane had singing lessons, walking lessons, and dance lessons. She and her sister, Linda, had looks, height, talent, and charm, and their mother was determined to exploit that in full—without much credit to them. “She’s not pretty,” Mrs. Sawyer once said of Diane. “My daughter’s not the least bit pretty!” That harsh standard still pertains; Sawyer’s mother, Jean, routinely calls from her Kentucky home to criticize her daughter’s appearance on Good Morning America. “To this day,” Sawyer said in a 2002 interview, “I get messages about clothes that didn’t look good or how I didn’t sit in a ladylike position. She thinks that if she just says the right thing, one day I’ll get it right.”
As the girls grew older and their training program progressed, they entered numerous beauty pageants—Linda winning the Miss Kentucky pageant and Diane later earning the Junior Miss crown in 1963. Her winning essay compared the music of the North and South in the Civil War. Sawyer has said she aspired to a career on the stage, devoting what little spare time she had as a child to practic
ing show tunes.
In 1963, Sawyer followed her sister to Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she kept up with her passion for singing and the stage, performing in college productions, including The Threepenny Opera. She graduated in 1967 with a degree in English; with no clue how to turn herself into a Broadway star, she headed home to Louisville and found herself a job doing the weather on WLKY, the local ABC affiliate. In 1969, her father was killed in a car crash; a year later, Sawyer decided to leave Louisville and test herself in Washington, D.C.
She met with Bill Small, an old family friend from Louisville who had become the Washington bureau chief of CBS News. He was upbeat about her chances in broadcasting; but she needed a job, not a cheerleader. Through other family connections, she landed a spot in the Nixon White House, working for press secretary Ron Ziegler. She remained there throughout the Watergate scandal, handling press inquiries and reportedly earning her nickname “the smart girl” from Nixon. During that time, she began dating presidential speechwriter Frank Gannon; it was with him that she traveled to San Clemente after Nixon’s resignation, to work on the presidential papers. Sawyer was the tall blonde visible to viewers as Nixon boarded the chopper departing the White House lawn for the last time in August 1974.
After Sawyer finished helping Nixon with his memoir, RN, she went back to Washington. A job had opened up at CBS News, and Bill Small had risen to CBS News management. With his help, Sawyer was hired in 1978 as a reporter in the CBS News Washington bureau. (Dan Rather, who’d gotten to know Sawyer while covering the Nixon White House, told the New York Times in 1981 that he’d advised against hiring her. “She proved me wrong,” he said.) Her experience working for Nixon did little to endear her to her new colleagues, and her lack of on-air experience made her an easy target for sniping. But Sawyer’s solid performance covering the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster in 1979 (not to mention her telegenic appearance) earned her a promotion to covering the State Department. She stayed until September 1981, when the latest management team at CBS News—headed by division president Van Gordon Sauter—acknowledged her glamour and skill and handed her the job of co-anchor of the perpetual last-place finisher CBS Morning News, along with veteran newsman Charles Kuralt.
It was 1981; Sawyer was 35 years old. That year, a TV Guide reporter asked Sawyer if she planned to get married. “Oh yes,” she replied. “I’m going to have the world’s most rapturous, fun-filled, wise and generous marriage. And I’m going to have the most fascinating and autonomous children. I’m going to have it all.” At that time she was dating Richard Holbrooke, a former assistant secretary of state and prominent New York investment banker. But Sawyer’s focus seemed to be primarily on her burgeoning career. The morning news—redubbed Morning—raised her stature in the industry: the minuscule rise in the show’s ratings was attributed to her, and in 1982 CBS replaced Kuralt as her partner with Chicago anchorman Bill Kurtis. The switch brought no further improvement to CBS’s long-standing weakness in the morning TV wars.
By 1983, CBS News was in chaos. Under the leadership of Ed Joyce—who stepped in as head of the news division when Sauter was promoted to a corporate post—the network’s morning show was one of the most visible symptoms of the news division’s lack of direction. A succession of executive producers was recruited to help save the show, but they only cemented Sawyer’s growing desire to leave. The last straw was the appointment of Jon Katz, a former print journalist. “The low point of my Morning News existence,” Sawyer recalled to author Peter Boyer, “was when I interviewed the yo-yo queen of America for about five minutes. I did that. That was a Jon Katz special, which I never let him forget.” Meanwhile, Hewitt, infatuated by her obvious star quality as well as her social connections, was angling to get her over to 60 Minutes. She, too, had cultivated a friendship with CBS chairman William Paley and blended easily into the upper-crust social circuit to which the less-polished Hewitt aspired. Their paths didn’t exactly cross, but Hewitt made no secret of his desire to have Sawyer in his company of players.
On August 9, 1982, a young black man in Greenville, Texas, robbed a Kentucky Fried Chicken of $615. The case remained unsolved for weeks, until a white woman reported a suspicious-looking parked car with South Carolina license plates at the park across from her home, which was 31/2 miles away from the restaurant. The Greenville detective in charge of the case, Lieutenant James Fortenberry, traced the license plate to a young black man named Lenell Geter. Fortenberry passed Geter’s picture to other nearby police departments, who suspected Geter of similar unsolved robberies in Plano and Garland. Less than two weeks later, a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in nearby Balch Springs was robbed. Eyewitnesses picked Geter’s photograph from lineups, and before long Geter had been charged with three armed robberies. But Geter insisted he wasn’t responsible for any of the crimes. He earned $24,000 as an engineer for E-Systems, a defense contractor, and was engaged to be married. On the day of the Balch Springs robbery—at 3:20 in the afternoon—Geter had gone into downtown Greenville to register to vote and to apply for a loan at a local bank. He’d returned to his office, where coworkers recalled seeing him. Geter adamantly refused to plead guilty, but local authorities were certain they’d found the perpetrator, and the rush to judgment began.
The story first surfaced in the Texas press; as Don Hewitt tells it, a loyal viewer then contacted 60 Minutes on Geter’s behalf. Morley Safer recalls hearing about the story from an article in People magazine, though he admits to being uncertain of his memory.
In fact, it should be noted that the exhaustive December 9, 1983, account of the case, “Lenell Geter’s in Jail”—which went on to become perhaps the most celebrated single segment in 60 Minutes history—was a perfect example of how 60 Minutes often followed the reporting of others, only to receive the lion’s share of the credit when the TV version got results. With its bumbling detective, poorly assembled evidence, and victim claiming innocence, the Geter story made for a great narrative. It fit Hewitt’s “tell me a story” dictum, plus it advanced the case; after months of on-the-scene reporting, Safer and his producer, Suzanne St. Pierre, left little doubt in their segment of the weakness of the prosecution’s case. Interviews with white witnesses who spoke on Geter’s behalf, as well as Safer’s conversation with the prisoner himself—who was composed and articulate throughout—made for a deeply disturbing and powerful piece.
Four days after the story aired on 60 Minutes, both the prosecution and the defense moved for a new trial, and Geter was released from prison. For a prosecutor to abandon his own case was as precedent-shattering an event as anyone could remember in the Texas legal system.
For all the print stories that preceded it, none could hope to create the dramatic immediacy of interviews like this one in Safer’s piece, which conclusively demonstrated Geter’s innocence—or, at the very least, established a reasonable doubt of his guilt.
SAFER: Two people who were not called to testify and did not realize until after the trial that their testimony could have been crucial were Dan Walker and Debra Cotton.
DEBRA COTTON: I talked to [Geter] shortly, right around one o’clock, and then again at a—at three, right at three.
SAFER: At three o’clock?
COTTON (affirmative): Mm-hmm.
SAFER: And the robbery took place at three-twenty.
COTTON: Three-twenty.
SAFER: Absolutely impossible to get from E-Systems to Balch Springs?
COTTON: It was impossible for Lenell Geter to be there.
DAN WALKER: No question about it. He came by to use my phone at, right around three-forty-five, somewhere between three-forty-five and four o’clock, that afternoon.
SAFER: No way you could get back from Balch Springs in fifteen minutes?
WALKER: No. No way. No.
Safer’s piece—a point-by-point deconstruction that reinterviewed witnesses and closely examined the flaws in the case—showed the unique power of television to shape the national debate. By the follo
wing spring, Geter’s case had been overturned, and 60 Minutes had popularized the exoneration of the innocent by crusading journalists. Such stories have become a routine part of media coverage—as well as the frequent subject of movies and plays—but in 1983 the Geter case marked an early instance of a journalistic investigation by a TV show that resulted in a reversal of a conviction.
In July 1984, Diane Sawyer and Don Hewitt found themselves at the same dinner party. They’d both gone to San Francisco to cover the Democratic National Convention, and while there they went to a dinner hosted by Gordon and Ann Getty in honor of Charles Manatt, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Over the course of the evening, Hewitt learned that Walter Mondale—soon to be the Democratic nominee—was planning to remove Manatt from his party position.