by David Blum
The session itself lasted an hour. Its most eventful moment came 40 minutes in, when a 50-pound klieg light toppled over and nearly hit Mrs. Clinton before crashing onto the floor. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” the candidate’s wife exclaimed. Clinton took her in his arms and clutched her while the cameras still whirred. Those terrifying seconds did not make it into the original broadcast, and have been shown only a few times since on 60 Minutes anniversary shows. When Clinton signed on to do his “Point-Counterpoint” debate with Bob Dole, he referred to Don Hewitt as “the man who tried to kill me.”
As soon as the interview ended, Hewitt, Kroft, and producer Frank Devine rushed to edit it into a nine-minute segment to air in just a few hours. They all knew the obvious pieces to use, yet just moments before the piece was finalized for broadcast, Devine reminded everyone of their plan to include a neglected clip of something Mrs. Clinton had said:
MRS. CLINTON: You know, I’m not sitting here as some little woman standing by my man, like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him and I respect him and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together. And, you know, if that’s not enough for people then, heck, don’t vote for him.
The rest of the interview somehow managed to make news, too, though not quite at the level of Mrs. Clinton’s comments. It also demonstrated, for the first time, the full extent of Kroft’s skills as a questioner; a combination of Wallace’s pointed digging and Stahl’s repertoire of quizzical expressions, with no respect given to a politician’s right to privacy. If there seemed to be little or no compassion or hesitation in Kroft’s performance, it was no doubt due to his awareness that Clinton was fighting for his political life. Kroft seized the historic opportunity with apparent relish.
KROFT: Who is Gennifer Flowers? You know her?
CLINTON: Oh yeah.
KROFT: How do you know her? How would you describe your relationship?
CLINTON: Very limited, but until this—you know, friendly but limited. . . .
KROFT: She’s alleging—and has described in some detail in the supermarket tabloid—what she calls a 12-year affair with you.
CLINTON: It—that allegation is false. . . .
KROFT: You’ve been saying all week that you’ve got to put this issue behind you. Are you prepared, tonight, to say that you’ve never had an extramarital affair?
CLINTON: I’m not prepared, tonight, to say that any married couple should ever discuss that with anyone but themselves. I’m not prepared to say that about anybody. . . .
KROFT: You’re trying to put this issue behind you, and the problem with the answer is, it’s not a denial. And people are sitting out there—voters—and they’re saying, “Look, it’s really pretty simple. If he’s never had an extramarital affair, why doesn’t he just say it?”
CLINTON: That may be what they’re saying. You know what I think they’re saying? I think they’re saying, “Here’s a guy who’s leveling with us.” You may think that we should say more, and you can keep asking the question, but I’m telling you I think that we’ve told—I’ll come back to what I said. I have told the American people more than any other candidate for president. The result of that has been everybody going to my state, and spending more time trying to play Gotcha!
MRS. CLINTON: There isn’t a person watching this who would feel comfortable sitting on this couch detailing everything that ever went on in their life or their marriage. And I think it’s real dangerous in this country if we don’t have some zone of privacy for everybody. I mean, I think that’s absolutely critical.
KROFT: I couldn’t agree with you more, and I think—and I agree with you that everyone wants to put this behind you. And the reason it hasn’t gone away is that your answer is not a denial, is it?
CLINTON: It’s interesting—let’s assume—let’s—
KROFT: But it’s not a denial.
The Kroft interview is often cited as a foreshadowing of Clinton’s conduct as president. It’s worth noting that the issue that ultimately led to Clinton’s impeachment was not infidelity, but rather the question of a sitting president lying under oath. In the Kroft interview, the subject on the table was whether a presidential candidate had a responsibility to affirm or deny an extramarital affair to a representative of the press. If (as Kroft and others have since observed) that interview contributed to Clinton’s eventual victory that November, then voters must have rewarded Clinton’s position that his private life was none of Kroft’s business.
Whatever the interview did for the Clintons, it accomplished the short-term goal of another ratings triumph for 60 Minutes and clearly established Steve Kroft as a formidable player on a still-relevant team.
One week later, 60 Minutes offered up “Anita Hill,” the first television interview with the woman who’d accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his confirmation hearings to become a U.S. Supreme Court justice. It defined a 60 Minutes scoop—a conversation with a formidable newsmaker who chose the broadcast to make an exclusive statement that the world was waiting to hear. In this case the scoop belonged to Ed Bradley.
In his dozen years at 60 Minutes Bradley had perfected a deceptively easygoing but, in fact, intense conversational style that could intimidate or relax in equal measure. He had an innate sense of phrasing and intonation, and he used his hands as instruments. Perhaps it was his off-camera passion for music that enabled him to find the perfect point of emphasis in every sentence, every question. It probably didn’t hurt that he had jazz music playing at all times in his 60 Minutes office and everywhere else he could. The music relaxed him—he called it his “bliss.” And he loved skiing at his home in Woody Creek, Colorado, which he was careful to distinguish from Aspen. He didn’t mind reminding a visitor once or twice that Hunter Thompson remains a friend. He went to the New Orleans Jazz Festival every year and picked all his destinations carefully. (One day recently, Steve Kroft was planning a trip to Orlando and went to Bradley’s assistant, Paulettte Robinson, to ask if Bradley had a hotel preference there. “Ed doesn’t go to Orlando,” Robinson explained to Kroft.)
Bradley exhilarated and exasperated his producers. They loved using his prodigious gifts as an interviewer and relished the moments when he would peer down over his glasses at a subject like a bemused district attorney, eyebrows raised in disbelief—or when his hands would chop through the air like a knife or punctuate his points like a conductor’s baton. Not interested in maintaining the usual anchorman’s poker face, Bradley used an array of expressions; his eyes would widen and narrow to underscore his thinking, and no one doubted the sincerity of his smile. To top it off, he’d been blessed with a melodious voice that added weight and nuance to everything he said, with an orator’s sense of just how to emphasize. He might have made an impressive politician or actor—skills that were central to a 60 Minutes correspondent’s craft.
If it was Bradley’s love of music and leisure that made him such a deft interviewer, it was that same passion that made him difficult to work with. In his early years Bradley traveled constantly, but by the mid-1990s, his pace had slowed somewhat. Producers always had to work around his considerable and increasing need for personal time. He had a daily gym workout, and interviews had to be scheduled around his appointments with his personal trainer. Bradley also considered his Colorado ski trips an inviolable part of his schedule—this made it tough on producers trying to squeeze reporting trips onto his calendar. He didn’t like to become involved in a story until it was fairly far along in the process, didn’t relish long talks with his producers about interviews, and preferred to read research materials on his own time. Nor did he write drafts of his stories; he rarely set pen to paper except to rewrite the work of others. It wasn’t that he was lazy—anyone looking at his list of produced pieces would have to admit that Bradley worked hard. But he refused to give over his entire life to work the way Wallace did. As much as possible his nights and weekends were his own—and sometimes, so were parts of his weekdays. And
the lack of social interaction with his colleagues suited him just fine.
When it came to interviews with people like Anita Hill, Bradley brought all his talents to the table. The end result was a serious conversation that lent new understanding to the underlying issues of sexual harassment for women in the workplace.
BRADLEY: People say, “Well, I sat there and I watched her, and I wanted to believe her, but I don’t understand how she could say nothing for ten years. I don’t understand how she could stay with him. I don’t understand how she could follow him to another job.” How do you make those people understand?
HILL: I cannot make those people understand. But I can share with those people what others have experienced. One of the things that women do when this happens is to examine themselves—even to the extent of blaming themselves, their own behavior, their own actions, their own words. And so that is a factor in women not coming forward. Another thing that happens very often is that women are told, either by their harassers or by others, that they won’t be believed if they come forward. And they know of enough experiences of other women where, not only were they not believed, but they were actually made to be the culprit.
Once again—and this time with great irony—a 60 Minutes piece resonated not only with the audience, but with those who knew the inside story of the show itself.
On the Saturday morning after the Los Angeles riots began in May 1992, Rome Hartman went into the 60 Minutes office and was summoned to Don Hewitt’s office. That was almost unheard-of; he’d always been told 60 Minutes doesn’t even have meetings. Hartman raced down and discovered people gathered around Hewitt’s desk, discussing how the show should cover the riots that had followed the acquittal of four Los Angeles policemen in the videotaped beating of a black motorist named Rodney King.
In a matter of minutes, it was decided that Hewitt, Stahl, and Hartman would immediately go to Los Angeles to interview Daryl Gates, the outgoing police chief. This was the kind of crash journalism that Stahl and Hartman had been doing for years, and with Hewitt now leading the charge, it was guaranteed to deliver a reporting high. The true thrills came the next day, as Gates interrupted a roving interview to get out of his car, holding a nightstick, and brandished it at a group of youths in full view of the 60 Minutes cameras.
Stahl’s interviews were just as revealing as the camera work. Her style as a questioner reflected her own aggressive and somewhat intimidating nature; she had little patience or tolerance for mistakes, either by those she was interviewing or those who worked for her. In a matter of months, Stahl had become known around the 60 Minutes offices as a tough, demanding boss. She ran her life according to a precise and rigorous schedule—determined, as she was, to make her mark on 60 Minutes just as she had in Washington. Inevitably, producers who didn’t enjoy the experience of working with her or according to her rules dubbed her a “bitch.” Other producers praised Stahl’s style, citing her determined work ethic and personal compassion for their family issues. Many ultimately found her to be a generous and thoughtful boss in ways that mitigated the impact of her demanding temperament. Still, some felt Stahl had an overdeveloped ego and was excessively concerned with her appearance on camera; others resented her detail-heavy demands, including a requirement that all papers be assembled for her with paper clips, not staples.
Even her detractors had to admit that Stahl had a natural rapport with the camera and an instinct for making news. Soon after the Gates piece aired, she followed up with scoops for 60 Minutes that included a June 1992 interview with Russia’s president, Boris Yeltsin, and one in October of that year with Ross Perot—interviews that revealed not only Stahl’s stern side as a rugged questioner but also her talent for nailing down truths from evasive public figures. She had quickly shown Hewitt that she fit in perfectly with a dysfunctional group of correspondents who’d become as famous as the stories they covered and used their celebrity to further the cause of their show. It was only those behind the camera who occasionally felt they were handling a newly minted and temperamental movie star, rather than a network news correspondent.
Chapter 19
Reporting, Not Crusading
It had been another great season for 60 Minutes, ending in June 1993 as the number one show on television for the fourth year in its history. That tied it with I Love Lucy and Gunsmoke and left only The Cosby Show and All in the Family ahead of it on the all-time list. On an average Sunday, more than 31 million people watched 60 Minutes, which by then had broadcast 2,299 original segments.
The show had just survived a momentary scare: Ed Bradley threatened to quit and join a new ABC prime-time newsmagazine. At the last possible moment, during a boat cruise around Manhattan to celebrate a successful season, he told his producers he’d changed his mind. That flirtation with another network eventually netted Bradley a salary increase that put him at the level of Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt—both thought to be making in the vicinity of $4 million a year.
In the 1992–1993 season, the show had reached a 21.9 rating and was number one; by 1994, though it remained in the top ten, its ratings were starting to slip. The blame was put on football. In a clever counterprogramming move, Fox, which now owned the broadcast rights to the NFL, was scheduling Sunday games to end at 7:30, cutting into 60 Minutes, still CBS’s top-rated show. But there was also a glut of newsmagazines, more than ever before: NBC had finally launched a successful one, Dateline NBC. ABC had added Turning Point (the show Ed Bradley was to have hosted) to Prime Time Live and 20/20. CBS now offered both Eye to Eye With Connie Chung and 48 Hours. All this competition led to an increase in tabloid topics; this, at least, gave 60 Minutes an exclusive hold over viewers who liked their newsmagazines to contain some actual news.
CBS itself was facing new challenges; the median age of its audience was rising just as advertisers were putting an increasing premium on the 18–49 market. Even with the ongoing success of 60 Minutes, there was no ignoring the fact that its audience (and, of course, its cast) was aging rapidly enough to create some long-term concerns. In the fall of 1995, as speculation grew that Laurence Tisch was considering the sale of CBS, NBC decided to challenge the supremacy of 60 Minutes directly by programming an hour of its profitable new newsmagazine, Dateline NBC, on Sunday nights at 7:00 P.M. Other shows that had tried to go head-to-head with Hewitt had left the lineup battered, but given his show’s recent ratings decline, it seemed like a propitious time to take him on again.
One day in the spring of 1993, Wallace producer Lowell Bergman opened the door of his house in Berkeley, California, and discovered that someone had dropped a bundle of tobacco industry documents on his doorstep. Bergman, a big bear of a man, was considered one of the best investigative producers ever to work on 60 Minutes—good enough for the show to allow him to live 3,000 miles away from his bosses.
Needing help to decipher the documents, which were a tangle of legalese and scientific jargon, Bergman went to Jeffrey Wigand, a biochemist who had been hired in 1989 by Brown & Williamson, a tobacco company that makes Kool, Lucky Strike, and other brands, to develop a “safer” cigarette. Over the next few years he became acutely knowledgeable about the addictive properties of nicotine; his outspoken opinions led to his dismissal in March 1993. Bergman had long been interested in the dangers of smoking, and saw in Wigand great potential for a 60 Minutes story. Wigand agreed to consult for CBS on a 1994 piece on fire safety and cigarettes, but Bergman—a gruff, obsessive, and unstoppable reporting machine—realized that if he could convince Wigand to go public with his knowledge of the inner workings of Big Tobacco, it could make a far bigger story.
The story Bergman wanted to tell—an exploration of Brown & Williamson’s chemical manipulation of nicotine—was important and timely, but complex and highly technical as well. Wigand’s presence in the piece—as scientist and discarded employee—would offer the perfect humanizing touch. But when he approached Wigand to talk, he discovered a man in fear. Wigand had signed a confidentiality agreement wit
h his former employer. He claimed he had received death threats and insisted that he couldn’t and wouldn’t talk until at least March 1995, when his severance package with Brown & Williamson expired. Bergman was relentless, however; he wasn’t going to let the story slip away.
Finally, in August 1995, he convinced Wigand to come to New York for an interview with Mike Wallace. After he had written a rough draft of the piece, Bergman was summoned to a meeting at Black Rock on September 5 and told to suspend work on the Wigand story for a week until he and his 60 Minutes bosses could meet with a CBS lawyer to discuss the legal implications of the story.
On September 12, Bergman, Hewitt, Wallace, and Phil Scheffler crossed the street from the 60 Minutes offices to the CBS Broadcast Center and went into a meeting in the conference room of Eric Ober, then president of CBS News. There the 60 Minutes crew first encountered Ellen Kaden, the woman who set into motion the events that made the Wigand story a crossroads in the show’s history: Kaden, who was general counsel of CBS Inc., told the crew that the Wigand piece was too risky to air because of a relatively obscure legal concept known as “tortious interference.” She wanted a three-week delay (though Bergman could continue to work on the piece) while CBS sought an opinion from outside counsel.
As Kaden explained, Wigand had a contract with his former employer, as part of his severance, that prohibited him from revealing inside information about the company. Any attempt by CBS to induce Wigand to break that contract was considered tortious interference. More important, it was the stuff of a potential multibillion-dollar lawsuit against CBS News. Airing the interview with Wigand would put the entire corporation into jeopardy. If the 60 Minutes crew needed convincing, they only had to consider the mess ABC had gotten into as a result of a tobacco investigation.