by David Blum
By the fall Vieira had become pregnant again, but this time, she knew better than to rush into Hewitt’s office with her good news. Hewitt had been pleased with “Ward 5A.” It had earned Vieira the kind of critical praise that led people to think she might just make it at 60 Minutes.
In the winter of 1991, 60 Minutes had its first real brush with a breaking-news story of enough importance that it demanded wall-to-wall coverage: the Gulf War. In a series of broadcasts through the first two months of the year, the show pounced on the story, demonstrating its ability to compete in a universe that now included the first 24-hour news channel, CNN. The January 20 broadcast included “Saddam’s Bodyguard,” a Morley Safer interview with a former bodyguard to the Iraqi dictator; “The Man Who Armed Iraq,” Steve Kroft’s piece about a weapons dealer; “Inferno,” a Mike Wallace story about allegations that Hussein had seeded land mines around Kuwaiti oil wells; and “Iraqi Terror,” an Ed Bradley look at the possibility of Iraqi terrorist attacks on the United States. In the weeks that followed, the show continued to produce topical, breaking stories, including “Saddam’s Billions,” a memorable Kroft piece in March, produced by Lowell Bergman, that reported on the possibility that Hussein had stashed money all over the world to fund his war efforts. While the media obsessed over the impact on the TV news business of round-the-clock coverage, 60 Minutes was demonstrating the continued value of its approach: narrative, magazine-length features that explored the complexities of an increasingly fractious political environment.
While the show may have been outwardly perceived as a well-oiled machine, Meredith Vieira’s future remained unsettled. In January 1991, Hewitt called Vieira one Saturday night to ask her to get on the Concorde to Paris to cover a story. Not wanting to travel so early in her pregnancy—the baby was due in August—she finally had to tell Hewitt the truth. “I have to get off the phone to call Morley,” Hewitt said before hanging up.
Thus began an intense round-robin of recriminations and negotiations that continued for weeks, as Vieira struggled to work out a part-time arrangement for the next season. Finally, in March, Hewitt made it clear that there was only one option for Vieira if she wanted to remain at 60 Minutes, one he was certain she would never accept: a full-time load of 20 pieces a year. Vieira knew there was no way to complete that amount of work with two small children at home. She resigned.
In the immediate aftermath, other women in the news business expressed mixed feelings. “She didn’t get fired,” Linda Ellerbee, the former ABC News correspondent and outspoken feminist, told the New York Times. “That’s progress.” Others didn’t see quite so rosy a picture. “It’s a little scary,” said Maria Shriver, then of NBC News.
Almost immediately, Vieira and Hewitt began a war of words in the press. Vieira criticized CBS for not accommodating her needs or allowing her to continue to contribute to 60 Minutes on a part-time basis. “I understand his point of view,” she said of Hewitt in Entertainment Weekly, “but I think it could have been a trailblazing thing for 60 Minutes. As women come up in this business, people are not putting families on hold. I would have loved them to say, ‘We’re in a position to try something creative.’ I didn’t go into this job misleading anybody.”
Hewitt never acknowledged Vieira’s pull to parenthood as anything other than competition for her loyalty to 60 Minutes. He’d given ample evidence over the years of his insistence that his troops commit themselves to 60 Minutes and nothing else. “If you have six people, they only appear twice a month, and the audience loses familiarity with them,” Hewitt said. “The game is played with five people. And to show up once in a while doesn’t cut the mustard.”
Feeling betrayed, Hewitt chose to cast the decision as a reflection on Vieira’s talents as a journalist, with public statements designed to embarrass her. “They just disappeared,” he said to Entertainment Weekly of her 60 Minutes contributions. “Do you remember any Mere- dith Vieira stories? Nobody does. Look, in a nutshell, if Meredith Vieira had created half as much attention working with us as she’s created complaining about us, I would have turned handsprings to keep her here.” Hewitt kept up the diatribe for days. “For reasons I don’t understand, she never made anybody sit up and take notice,” he told the New York Times. “Your fingertips told you that nobody was talking about Meredith Vieira.”
Hewitt’s attacks eventually turned personal. “She brought her baby! I set up a nursery so she could nurse her baby in the office,” Hewitt said. “You know who was horrified at that? The women around here who had had their babies and gone back to work. They couldn’t believe it.”
In a September 2003 interview, Vieira disputed Hewitt’s assertions: “There was never a nursery. There was nothing. Nothing. Zero. I had brought in some toys, like little squeezy toys that I would throw on the floor. There was nothing, no. Nor would I have expected it. I never asked for a nursery. I wouldn’t want a nursery. I would never expect it.” Vieira also said that once she returned to work after her first maternity leave, she hired full-time help and rarely brought Ben to the office.
In March 2004, Hewitt took a different stance on Vieira’s departure. “If I knew then what I know now about how sick her husband was, how absolutely horrific her life was, I’d have handled it a lot differently,” Hewitt says, referring to Vieira’s husband, Richard Cohen, a former CBS News producer who had left the company after being stricken by multiple sclerosis. “I didn’t know. I did everything. I went out and bought a fucking—we had teddy bears in there for her kids, and a crib, and a playpen.” He went on: “Meredith left because I went to my boss and said, ‘My guys cannot take up the slack for the stories she’s not doing.’ Had she come to me and said, ‘Listen, I’m only working here half-time, I’ll take half a salary, get somebody else to take half the salary,’ that would be great. . . . It wasn’t that what she did wasn’t good enough.”
In the final days before Vieira departed 60 Minutes, Morley Safer made a rare visit to her office and stood in the doorway, smoking a cigarette.
“You know, kid,” Vieira recalled Safer saying, “my wife and my daughter, to this day, resent the fact that I’ve spent so much time on the road and wish that I could have been around more. I did a lot of things that were great for me but not so great for my family.”
To Vieira, it was Safer’s way of saying that if she was questioning her decision, there were a few people around 60 Minutes who thought it was the right one.
Shortly after Vieira left 60 Minutes, Harry Reasoner retired. He’d had a second lung cancer operation, and his health had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer contribute to the show.
In May 1991, Hewitt and the show threw a retirement party for Reasoner at the Russian Tea Room. It was not a happy event for those who loved Reasoner, and who objected to the way he had been treated in recent months by Hewitt and his correspondents, men who’d long called themselves his friends. It was felt that his colleagues blamed him for his own illness, resented him for letting down the team, and believed he was no longer deserving of their admiration and kindness.
“They treated him like shit,” Jeffrey Fager recalls of that day. “Nobody really got up and gave a good toast except George Crile [by then a Reasoner producer on 60 Minutes]. It was really odd for those of us who were young producers then to watch it happen. Mike got up and said something snide. Don got up and said something snide. Morley got up and said, ‘Never a noble moment.’ We all came back and thought, My God. Harry could barely walk. He died a month later. And then, everybody was like, ‘Harry was so great, Harry was the best.’. . . He had abused himself. He’d been smoking too much, he’d been drinking too much. And because of that they had no respect for him. You’re supposed to be a giant. You’re supposed to be immortal. So it was pretty striking. I remember it, because Harry was such a sweet guy.”
Reasoner died on August 6, 1991, at the age of 68. A CBS spokesman reported the cause of death as “cardiopulmonary arrest.”
Chapter 18
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!
It’s all well and good to take bows and curtsies for being No. 1, but unless you get off your backsides and start working harder, we’re going to be lucky to end up No. 51. Nowhere in all of journalism are their [sic] news people as well paid and loudly applauded as you are. Come on, for Christ’s sake, start turning out stories.
—Memo to the troops from Don Hewitt in September 1990
When Lesley Stahl arrived at 60 Minutes, there was some confusion as to whether she was replacing Vieira or Reasoner. She’d been chosen to take Reasoner’s spot, but because of her gender—and Vieira’s almost simultaneous departure—many assumed she was taking the woman’s slot, even though one news account at the time harshly referred to her as “an honorary man.” The notion that Stahl was a token of anything represented a bum rap against a woman who had earned her reputation as a terrific reporter regardless of her sex. In almost two decades at CBS News, Stahl had distinguished herself repeatedly as exactly the kind of journalist Hewitt loved—aggressive, smart, and appealing.
“I was born on my 30th birthday,” she wrote as the opening sentence of her 1999 memoir, Reporting Live, referring to the beginning of her television career. And 400 pages later she had done nothing to contradict that odd assessment of herself. She’d graduated from Wheaton College in 1963, junked graduate school in zoology, married a doctor, written speeches for New York mayor John Lindsay, worked as a researcher at NBC, gotten divorced, moved to Boston, and landed a correspondent’s job at WHDH-TV in Boston, then catapulted to another one at CBS News. Despite her long career in the spotlight, she has revealed little else about herself to viewers or readers—except, in various spots in her memoir where she allows scattered details about her demanding mother. Like her 60 Minutes predecessor (and eventual friend) Diane Sawyer, Stahl depicts a mother focused obsessively on her daughter’s appearance, despite her considerable achievements and a longstanding reputation as one of the most beautiful women in television news.
“She was always harping on me about my hair,” Stahl wrote, describing her early years at CBS News in the early 1970s, having been hired in 1972 in the Washington bureau as a beneficiary of affirmative action policies—her own assessment of how it happened. “‘You need to go to New York and get Kenneth to style it. That’s where Jackie Kennedy goes.’ About my makeup: ‘Can’t you find something to hide those circles under your eyes?’ My clothes: ‘Where on earth did you pick up that little number? Get rid of it.’ It wasn’t that I disagreed with my mother. It was just that her formula for success, being beautiful, had the effect of making people think I was brainless.”
But few people mistook Stahl for brainless. She’d landed in Washington just as the Watergate scandal was heating up, and as a junior reporter was assigned to cover the story. Not only did she land numerous TV scoops—and regular appearances on the evening news—she also dated Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, then one of the capital’s most eligible bachelors. Covering the Senate Watergate Committee hearings in 1973, she met Aaron Latham, then a writer for New York Magazine, whom she would eventually marry. After distinguishing herself during Watergate, she was assigned to cover politics, and later the Carter White House—and after that, even more memorably, the Reagan administration. With CBS News still the gold standard, Stahl had become a household name and a fixture at White House press conferences. She earned a reputation as a fearless reporter who would ask anything of anyone; legendary stories of her dogged reporting followed her throughout her career—like the time she was dragged away after cornering then-Nixon chief of staff Alexander Haig on Capitol Hill and asking him about the president’s plans to turn over the secret White House tapes.
When Van Gordon Sauter took over as president of CBS News in 1981, Stahl was promoted, replacing George Herman as host of the Sunday-morning talk show Face The Nation. By then she’d given birth to a daughter, Taylor, yet seemed unwilling to cut back on her reporting duties. When given the difficult choice between work and family, she preferred to simply do both. She continued as host of Face The Nation and as White House correspondent.
Don Hewitt had been courting Stahl with phone calls about her work for years; in 1977, he’d even assigned veteran 60 Minutes producer Paul Loewenwarter to travel with her to Puerto Rico to do a piece to test her potential. By 1991, he decided he needed her. Reasoner and Vieira were leaving; as a woman and an already-established CBS News personality, Stahl neatly filled both vacancies, and Hewitt finally called her with an offer to come work at 60 Minutes.
Stahl passed along a hot tip to her producer Rome Hartman: her friend Ray Stark, the Hollywood producer, thought there might be a good segment in the story of Dr. Thoralf Sundt, a brain surgeon at the Mayo Clinic who had operated on President Reagan in 1989 following a horseback riding accident. What made Sundt an appealing subject—aside from his preeminence in the field—was the state of his own health. He had been diagnosed in 1985 with bone marrow cancer but continued to operate on patients—particularly those who’d been deemed inoperable by other physicians. Hartman knew it had the makings of a good story, but he also knew there was a higher bar for a 60 Minutes piece. Until Stahl brought him with her to work as her first producer at 60 Minutes, he’d been a CBS News producer on a comfortable path to management. Though he’d never produced a piece longer than a typical evening news segment, he knew the mandate he had to meet: tell me a story. The doctor he found on a reporting trip to Minneapolis was a perfect 60 Minutes character, the center of one of Stahl’s first stories on September 22, 1991.
SUNDT: Fortunately, the illness hasn’t affected my mind. I don’t know how great it is, but it’s as good as it ever was. And my hands—it’s not hurt my hands.
STAHL: Dr. Sundt’s bones are so brittle from his disease that he has broken ribs just coughing or rolling over in bed. He must wear a special brace to protect him during operations. But he won’t give in to the pain.
MRS. SUNDT: He looks better when he comes home at night than when he left in the morning, because he’s doing what he needs to do.
STAHL: Saving lives.
MRS. SUNDT: And they’re saving his.
Although the Sundt story appeared, on the surface, to be just another classic human interest story, it also tapped into a private but shared obsession of the men who ran 60 Minutes—a singular passion for work and its redemptive powers.
It was coming up on a quarter century since 60 Minutes had gone on the air; Don Hewitt was now almost 70, and Mike Wallace was 75. This season had started off well, with the numbers up over the year before—and neither man showed any sign of wanting to quit working full-time at the jobs they loved. The year before, Hewitt and Wallace had boarded a flight together from Los Angeles to New York; Hewitt had just been inducted into the Television Academy of Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame, and they were returning from the ceremony. Just before the plane took off, Wallace got out of his seat and collapsed in the aisle of the plane. “Oh shit,” Hewitt thought to himself, “he’s dead. Now we’re never going to catch Cheers in the ratings.” Wallace was fine, though it turned out he needed a pacemaker. If anything, the equipment only seemed to energize him more. Maybe Hewitt and Wallace weren’t saving lives, but they surely identified with Sundt and his passion for work as a means of staying alive.
Steve Kroft, still the unlikeliest candidate for stardom in the 60 Minutes pantheon, was on the phone in January 1992 with George Stephanopoulos, a young press aide to Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton.
Over the last few days, the energetic Stephanopoulos had been occupied doing damage control on the latest rumors that swirled around his candidate. In the most recent issue of the Star, a weekly tabloid, a cabaret singer named Gennifer Flowers had alleged a 12-year affair with Clinton that ended in 1989. The tabloid—which admitted to having paid Flowers—also claimed to have tape recordings that corroborated her story. Clinton had denied the story, but Kroft had heard that Clinton might be interested in having the platform of a
national television interview to defend his integrity. Unfortunately, 60 Minutes was being preempted that Sunday because of the Super Bowl, which, he explained to the press aide, would mean he couldn’t get the interview on unless CBS agreed to make time after the game.
“What time would this run?” Stephanopoulos asked.
Probably not until after 10, Kroft explained.
“That’s awfully late,” Stephanopoulos replied. “I’m not sure anybody would be watching.”
“Well, we can’t do it any earlier because of the game.”
“What game?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“The Super Bowl,” Kroft said, barely able to contain his reaction to Stephanopoulos’s ignorance.
“The Super Bowl is on this Sunday?”
“Yes.”
“On CBS?”
“Yes.”
“We’re interested,” Stephanopoulos said, the excitement suddenly rising in his voice.
Kroft quickly reached Hewitt at the San Francisco airport. Hewitt made a bunch of calls and arranged for a short, special segment of 60 Minutes to air immediately after the game; he then spoke to both Stephanopoulos and Clinton aide James Carville, before flying to Boston to meet Kroft at the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where the interview was to take place that Sunday, only hours before airtime.
Just before the interview began, Hewitt approached the candidate and told him that honesty and direct answers would win him votes. “I think at some point you’re going to have to be as candid as you know how,” Hewitt counseled Clinton, “and then from there on you say, ‘I said it on 60 Minutes.’” Hewitt wanted Clinton to make sure he understood: this was going to be history in the making. Hewitt and Kroft both understood the implications of catching Clinton at this perfect moment, and giving him a platform to speak to the American people for the first time.