by David Blum
Steve Kroft had entered the TV news business at exactly the wrong time—in June 1972, just as affirmative action pushed white males to the bottom of everyone’s hiring list. After graduation from Syracuse University and a stint in Vietnam, and unable to find a decent job, Kroft went to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, hoping to reposition himself for a better shot. He managed to get himself hired as an investigative reporter at WJXT-TV in Jacksonville, Florida, which, as it turned out, was a hotbed of municipal corruption with no tough reporters to cover it. The ambitious Kroft jumped into the job full force. Within a year, his reporting resulted in the indictment of the mayor of Jacksonville along with a slew of other corrupt city officials. This got Kroft noticed by the CBS News bureau in Miami. William Small, then the Washington bureau chief of CBS News, heard talk that Kroft was the best young TV reporter in the Southeast.
By January 1980, Kroft was hired by CBS News. After a stint as a junior reporter in the New York bureau, where he continued to make his mark with hard-hitting stories, Kroft wangled better assignments. Eventually the network moved him to Dallas and Miami before handing him a coveted spot in the London bureau. The overseas job (back in the golden days of the early 1980s, before budget cuts reduced the network’s emphasis on foreign coverage) gave Kroft the visibility he’d been yearning for.
Being a young star correspondent at CBS News in the 1980s led to great foreign assignments and prominent placement on the evening news broadcast—the TV news business had become increasingly eager to hire young correspondents in hopes of attracting younger viewers. Under the aegis of Howard Stringer, the news division was developing West 57th. Kroft wasn’t among the reporters hired for the pilot episode that aired in 1985, but soon afterward he was brought back from London to add heft to a show that seemed to need it. He joined the show’s young, attractive cast and stayed with it until it got canceled in 1989—which is when David Burke called.
Kroft was thrilled with his new assignment, and had heard enough stories about the perils of a new 60 Minutes correspondent to deal with at least one issue in advance: the hiring of his own star producer. He knew exactly who he wanted—33-year-old Jeffrey Fager, a former Evening News producer who most recently worked as a deputy to Andrew Heyward, another rising CBS News star producer, during the formation of its latest newsmagazine startup, called 48 Hours. Like Kroft, Fager was an ambitious and determined young journalist who wouldn’t stop until he’d made it to the pinnacle of the news business—which, after all these years, was still 60 Minutes.
Fager grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts, the son of a prominent brain surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital. By the time he graduated from Colgate University in 1977 with a degree in English and political science, he’d decided to pursue a career in broadcasting and was hired as a “broadcast assistant”—a gopher—at WBZ, the CBS-owned affiliate in Boston. He moved up quickly to become an associate director and assignment editor, as well as writing news for WBZ radio. That led him to a quick succession of jobs at Boston TV and radio stations before he landed in 1979 as a broadcast producer at KPIX, now the CBS-owned station in San Francisco. In 1982 he moved up to the network level as a low-level producer at CBS News in New York, working for shows like Nightwatch (CBS’s failed attempt at a late-night news show, with Charlie Rose in the anchor chair), before getting hired as a producer on the CBS Evening News in 1984. Fager worked in New York and London for the Rather newscast, covering the Mideast conflict, the Reagan-Gorbachev summits, and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, then returned to New York to take the job with Heyward on 48 Hours. But he wasn’t there long, either; when the offer came from Kroft, he grabbed it.
Fager produced Kroft’s first piece on 60 Minutes, a profile of a San Francisco orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Lorraine Day, as a window onto health care workers contracting AIDS through exposure in the workplace. After the first screening of the story—called “Dr. Day Is Quitting”—Scheffler and Hewitt gave the piece a standing ovation.
Fager was gentle and soft-spoken. Although he was supremely confident, could report tough stories, and do battle with the best of his peers, he kept his anger in check and typically brushed off tensions with a smile. He had an easygoing, likable manner that won him friends and respect.
Kroft, on the other hand, was difficult. Known for his propensity to yell and go on the attack, he would routinely berate his producers for writing a lousy script, or not making enough phone calls, or failing somehow to live up to the high standards Kroft had for his work. While his criticisms weren’t personal, those who worked for him found it a stressful experience. Nonetheless, many were willing to let his behavior slide; they recognized in him a perfectionist who was himself always willing to go the extra distance to make his pieces better. And few ever argued that a script of theirs hadn’t been improved by Kroft’s heavy hand; he had a reputation as a skilled TV writer and seemed to have a natural voice for 60 Minutes scripts. Fager and Kroft had started off on a positive note, but it was anybody’s guess whether their relationship would continue without incident.
Andy Rooney was in trouble again.
This time it was over racist remarks that had run in an interview he did with The Advocate, a Los Angeles–based gay newspaper, in February 1990. That interview had itself been prompted by other inflammatory comments—this time, ones deemed insensitive to homosexuals—in a 1989 year-end special on CBS, “The Year With Andy Rooney.” During that program, the 71-year-old Rooney had remarked: “There was some recognition in 1989 of the fact that many of the ills which kill us are self-induced. Too much alcohol. Too much food, drugs, homosexual unions, cigarettes. They’re all known to lead quite often to premature death.” When the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) had met with CBS to protest, Rooney apologized for the comment, and his decision to talk to The Advocate was most likely a step toward repairing his image.
But in the interview, Rooney was quoted as saying: “I’ve believed all along that most people are born with equal intelligence, but blacks have watered down their genes because the less intelligent ones are the ones that have the most children. They drop out of school early, do drugs and get pregnant.”
Rooney adamantly denied having made those remarks. “I did not say, nor would I ever have thought, that blacks have watered down their genes,” Rooney told the New York Times. “It is a know-nothing statement, which I abhor.” Rooney’s friend Walter Cronkite also stepped forward with a statement on his behalf. “I’ve known Rooney for almost half a century, and I know he is not a racist,” Cronkite said. “He is an independent thinker and a courageous social critic.” However, Rooney’s troubles weren’t limited to his comments in the interview. In a letter to the editor of The Advocate published in the same issue as the interview, Rooney had written: “AIDS is a largely preventable disease” and referred to “growing public resentment” over the health care tax burden created by what he called “self-inflicted diseases.”
CBS News had little choice but to rebuke him publicly. David Burke, the CBS News president, announced that Rooney would be suspended for three months without pay and said, “I have made it clear that CBS News cannot tolerate such remarks or anything that approximates such comments, since they in no way reflect the views of this organization.”
Within two weeks, pressure mounted on Burke to cut short the suspension, for the simple reason that the ratings of 60 Minutes had shown a precipitous drop in Rooney’s absence. By the last Sunday in February, 60 Minutes had dropped from the top 10 to eighteenth place in the ratings, and ranked second in its time slot for the first time since 1978—Rooney’s first year as a full-time 60 Minutes commentator. (First in the time slot that week was a hot new ABC series, America’s Funniest Home Videos.) Don Hewitt posted news of the ratings drop in a memo, hinting that Rooney might be returning early to the broadcast. “Andy is universally liked,” Hewitt told a New York Times reporter.
Three weeks after announcing the three-month suspension,
Burke restored Rooney to the flagging newsmagazine, in the hopes that the controversy might deliver some ratings luster to the show—which, of course, it did. It couldn’t have worked out better had Don Hewitt planned the entire episode himself. But as at least one 60 Minutes insider muttered to a reporter soon afterward: “Why doesn’t he ever get in trouble for what he says on the air? Because what he says on the air is basically innocuous and in keeping with their desire to please people, to be popular.”
That criticism reflected the enduring struggle at 60 Minutes between those who saw it as an investigative tool, and those who appreciated its value as great television. Hewitt and his team achieved ratings success by keeping their focus as tight as ever on compelling personalities and dramatic stories, instead of coverage of institutions or issues. Hewitt’s Hildy still preferred entertaining his audience to educating or unsettling them. And for all the carping of reporters and critics who fantasized that 60 Minutes could bring down corporations and presidents, it remained a potent journalistic force precisely because of its reach—a direct result of Hewitt’s formula of finding stories with universal appeal. The guy in the Barcalounger might be flipping channels a little more than he used to, but he was still coming back to 60 Minutes in the end.
Chapter 17
Never a Noble Moment
Meredith Vieira and Steve Kroft had arrived during a period when, at last, the baby boomer generation found itself fully represented in the population of 60 Minutes producers. Hewitt still ran the shop, with Scheffler at his side, but the producers were at least a full generation younger. And while the ratings may have declined slightly from the highs of the previous decade, CBS News still valued 60 Minutes as much as ever, and teams of young producers still roamed the world with seemingly unlimited budgets in search of stories.
While they did so, Hewitt was busily maintaining his status as part of the New York power structure. The man who once aspired to be Hildy Johnson had since become Walter Burns and now wanted the perks that came with being the boss.
Hewitt hadn’t yet achieved quite the social cachet he yearned for—the kind that came so easily to Diane Sawyer or Mike Wallace as genuine celebrities—but still counted among his friends Pete Peterson, Nixon’s secretary of commerce; Felix Rohatyn, partner at Lazard Frères; and, of course, his good pal Bill Paley. He continued to spend time at his house out in Bridgehampton, but now, instead of driving, he hitched rides for the weekend on private choppers. He’d charmed the billionaire set with the one thing they couldn’t buy: control of the media. Hewitt owned an hour of prime network real estate, and some suspected his lifestyle was having an influence on 60 Minutes itself.
“I once told him I’d written his epitaph,” Harry Reasoner said in a Rolling Stone interview. “‘Don Hewitt: Married on a real-estate magnate’s yacht, helicoptered out to the Hamptons on weekends with Bill Paley, invited to all the A-list parties.’ And then, in smaller type below, ‘executive producer of the first half-hour network evening newscast and creator of a television-magazine show.” Hewitt’s response: “Success hasn’t spoiled me.”
With Hewitt’s attention diverted by his private ambitions, his crew of producers and correspondents saw the opportunity to shape the show by their own passions, at least to some extent. A workaholic of the first order, Kroft had made a quick mark in February 1990 with “Chernobyl,” a look at the long-term effects of the April 1986 nuclear disaster. Kroft relished the complex and dangerous assignments that others shunned; he had a passion for big stories. While not a stylist like Safer or a dynamic interviewer like Wallace, Kroft nonetheless had a gift for expressing himself as though speaking directly to the viewer, as he demonstrated with this story.
KROFT: You can’t see the contamination, and you can’t feel it. All you can do is hear it on a Geiger counter. In some hot spots we found radiation levels one hundred times normal. . . . To give you some sort of an idea of the effects of the Chernobyl accident on Belorussia, imagine the state of Iowa, a third of it contaminated, a fifth of its land unusable forever.
Vieira delivered one of her most memorable segments on October 21, 1990: “Ward 5A,” produced by Paul and Holly Fine, about the nurses in an AIDS ward at San Francisco General Hospital. With the pressures of a young child at home, it hadn’t been easy for Vieira to report; she’d brought Ben with her on the West Coast trip. It proved compelling in large measure because of Vieira’s sensitive reporting and relaxed on-camera style. Hewitt had attacked her for wearing jeans in some parts of the piece, but it added a touch of humanity to the final product, which showed patients coping with the final days before their deaths, and nurses dealing with severe psychological strain—such as this emotional closing exchange with a nurse named David Denmark.
VIEIRA (voice-over): Now he is talking about leaving because he’s lost so many friends to this virus. He’s lost so much of himself.
DENMARK: A friend of mine died on the unit. I took care of him, wrapped his body and sent it to the morgue—and since that time—
VIEIRA: What did that do to you?
DENMARK: Since I did this for Ken, I have not been able to cry.
VIEIRA (voice-over): On our last day here, David showed me ward 5A’s memorial: a dog-eared book that lists every patient who has died. There are more than 1,200 names. The nurses here have a saying: “Don’t regret growing old. It’s a privilege denied to many.” A privilege Tom, Dorothy, Angel, and Rudy will never know. Their names are now written in that book.
DENMARK: When you look at this, you’re kind of overwhelmed because the faces come back.
VIEIRA: You want to close the book?
DENMARK: Yeah.
In December, Kroft offered a piece in the classic 60 Minutes tradition: produced by Robert Anderson, it revealed how used-car salesmen altered the mileage on odometers to convince buyers of the car’s good condition. Thanks in large measure to 60 Minutes, stories like this had become staples of local news shows; to elevate this one above farm-team standards would require flawless execution and a powerful villain. Kroft knew he had one in obese, sweaty Houston car salesman Bill Whitlow. After filming Whitlow with a hidden camera and getting him to admit to breaking the law, this amusing interchange followed, with Kroft clearly relishing his power to intimidate a bad guy as much as Mike Wallace ever did.
KROFT: I want to show you one thing.
WHITLOW: All right.
KROFT: You know what’s back there? . . . It’s a TV camera back there. . . . We’ve been taping this whole thing. . . . The good news is, we’re not cops.
WHITLOW: Well, I didn’t think so.
KROFT: The bad news is, we’re with 60 Minutes.
Kroft and Vieira were both quickly demonstrating their skills at delivering polished 60 Minutes pieces. But Kroft lacked an incalculable asset that Vieira (and the rest of her 60 Minutes colleagues) had in abundance: star power. With his extra-large head and stocky frame, he looked like nothing so much as a sportscaster at a local station—and in fact was sometimes mistaken for one when he traveled for 60 Minutes. If he wanted the level of stardom that had seemed to have come so easily to his colleagues, it was going to take a while.
True to form, the 60 Minutes boys’ club didn’t make Meredith Vieira’s adjustment very easy. She had difficult screenings of early pieces and run-ins with her colleagues, including one with Wallace in which he called a recently aired piece of hers “embarrassing” to the show. By January 1990, the other new kid, Kroft, had gotten four pieces onto the air; Vieira had yet to crack the lineup. Vieira told one interview subject how difficult it was “competing with people like Mike Wallace.” According to author Elsa Walsh, a publicist present at the interview muttered, “You have nothing to worry about there.”
The perception of some of the old hands was that Vieira wasn’t committed to her four-year contract. Despite a reported annual paycheck of $500,000 she showed up in jeans, worked only the hours necessary to deliver her pieces, and brought Ben along with her to the office and on repor
ting trips. About four months into her tenure on the show, another female 60 Minutes staffer approached Vieira to ask her why she hadn’t hired a live-in nanny to take care of Ben so she could commit herself more fully to her work. “I will never ever get a live-in nanny,” Vieira replied, “because I’m afraid if I ever did that I would delegate more and more to the nanny.” But she feared her point of view was lost on women who felt that she had a singular opportunity to make a mark on television’s best news show. Vieira observed that almost no one else at 60 Minutes had young children at home, and that the mindset of the place was decidedly unsympathetic to the whole notion of parenting.
Still, Vieira continued to pursue the kinds of stories that appealed to her at West 57th: human dramas that highlighted social issues of personal importance to her. Some at 60 Minutes suggested that Hewitt’s conflict with Vieira might have more to do with her political agenda—she was seen as a staunch liberal, in stark contrast to Wallace, for example—than her maternal one. Hewitt had always asserted that one of the show’s greatest strengths was its lack of a political point of view, but he never gave voice to any accusation. It was clear that Vieira had a strong humanist bent and would not devote her time at 60 Minutes to pieces that didn’t inspire her. That first season, her stories included profiles of the president of Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf in Washington, D.C.; “Thy Brother’s Keeper,” a touching piece about Rabbi Harold Schulweis of Los Angeles, who promoted the history of non-Jews who fought to save Jews from the Nazis in World War II; and, of course, “Ward 5-A.”
Vieira kept to herself the fact that she was trying desperately to have another child, until she miscarried again in the summer of 1990 and told Hewitt. According to Walsh’s account of the episode, Hewitt responded to Vieira’s confession by asking her, in tone-deaf fashion, “Does this mean you want to have more children?”