by David Blum
A month before, ABC News had announced settlement of two multibillion-dollar lawsuits against its own weekly newsmagazine Day One brought by Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds. In that case, ABC agreed to withdraw its previously reported assertion that Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds added significant amounts of nicotine to their tobacco. “That was a mistake that was not deliberate on the part of ABC,” were the carefully chosen words of substitute anchor Diane Sawyer on ABC’s World News Tonight, which aired on Monday, August 21, 1995, “but for which we accept responsibility and which requires correction. We apologize to our audience, Philip Morris, and Reynolds.”
ABC’s apology was seen by outsiders as a cave-in to the legal threat of the huge tobacco companies seeking damages that could have had a dire effect on the network’s financial picture. It was also strongly rumored that CBS would soon complete a merger with Westinghouse; current owner Laurence Tisch didn’t want any multibillion-dollar lawsuits gumming up the deal.
After the meeting, Bergman recalls, he, Hewitt, Wallace, and Scheffler stood together for a few tense moments in the long, narrow hallway outside Ober’s office. “She has great tits,” Hewitt said finally, of Ellen Kaden. “I’d like to fuck her.”
A little more than two weeks later, on September 29, Ober, Wallace, Hewitt, Scheffler, and Bergman watched a rough assembly of the Wigand story. Ober felt the piece wasn’t finished; he wanted corroboration of Wigand’s story from another source. But Hewitt loved it. The following week, on October 3, Kaden’s office informed 60 Minutes that outside counsel agreed that the story was too risky to pursue—at which point Bergman was expected to stop work on the piece.
“We’ve got a gun pointed at our head,” Hewitt told the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on October 17. “We’ve got a story we think is solid. We don’t think anybody could ever sue us for libel. There are some twists and turns. And if you get in front of a jury, in some state where all the people on that jury are related to people who work at tobacco companies, look out. That’s a $15 billion gun pointed at your head. We may opt to get out of the line of fire.”
The next day, the Wall Street Journal published a front-page story that delved into essentially the same charges that Wigand would have made on 60 Minutes about the chemical manipulation of nicotine. Bergman explained to Hewitt and Wallace, who felt they’d been scooped, that in the wake of the Kaden decision he had released Wigand from any obligation to 60 Minutes. Hewitt then told Bergman he wanted him to pursue “a story about the story”—so the producer went back into his material, hoping to find some way to salvage a 60 Minutes piece without naming Wigand. In early November, Wigand reported to Bergman that several newspapers were trying to talk to him about what he knew—and also about possible censorship of the story by CBS.
On Tuesday, November 7, Bergman and Wallace screened their revised segment, set to air the following Sunday. The piece examined the way tobacco companies covered up information about cigarettes and health, but it did not include the sensitive inside information provided by Wigand.
That Thursday, the front page of the New York Times carried this stunning headline: “60 Minutes Ordered to Pull Interview in Tobacco Report.” The story, written by Bill Carter, reported that CBS lawyers “ordered the news program 60 Minutes not to broadcast a planned on-the-record interview with a former tobacco company executive who was harshly critical of the industry.” Carter attributed the move to “an atmosphere of heightened tension between cigarette manufacturers and the press,” alluding to the recent ABC settlement and apology.
Carter reported that both Hewitt and Wallace “agreed with” the CBS lawyers’ order to suppress the Wigand interview. “I’m very comfortable with the decision,” Hewitt told Carter, as definitive a statement as the reporter could have wanted; Hewitt was aligning himself with the corporation’s censorship of his own broadcast. “We just knew that ABC had looked into the barrel of a gun,” Hewitt said. “The ABC lawsuit did not chill us as journalists from doing the story,” Wallace told the Times. “It did chill the lawyers, who with due diligence had to say, ‘We don’t want to, in effect, risk putting the company out of business.’”
The story had an immediate and explosive effect. Suddenly 60 Minutes appeared to have sacrificed a legitimate and hard-hitting piece of journalism to management bean counters. Hewitt and Wallace looked a bit like cowards—or at least could be now portrayed that way by journalists secretly gleeful not to be in their position. It was widely assumed within CBS that Carter’s source for the Times story was Lowell Bergman. (“I have never met Bill Carter, nor have I ever spoken with Bill Carter,” is all Bergman will now say on the matter, declining any other comment about possible contact between them.) It didn’t matter who leaked it; for the next 24 hours, few in the 60 Minutes office talked about anything else. In the wake of the Times story everyone had an opinion, and many of them opposed Hewitt and Wallace’s stance.
Steve Kroft went to talk to Hewitt, deeply concerned about morale around the office. “You’ve got to do something,” he said. The correspondent—who, like most others at 60 Minutes, had only just learned the details of the Wigand story—had observed widespread confusion among producers and support staff and believed Hewitt needed to address them directly, and soon. Hewitt agreed. The next day, a Friday, he convened a rare 60 Minutes staff meeting in Screening Room 164, which, as usual, degenerated into screaming and walkouts.
In the piece that finally aired that Sunday, Bergman focused less on the substance of Wigand’s accusations than on how the tobacco industry had historically misled the public—Wigand, referred to only as “the insider,” was hidden, his voice disguised. Wallace had experienced a change of heart over management’s position and expressed it with this new ending to the piece:
WALLACE: We at 60 Minutes—and that’s about one hundred of us who turn out this broadcast each week—are proud of working here and at CBS News, and so we were dismayed that the management of CBS had seen fit to give in to perceived threats of legal action against us by a tobacco industry giant. We’ve broadcast many such investigative pieces down the years, and we want to be able to continue. We lost out, only to some degree on this one, but we haven’t the slightest doubt that we’ll be able to continue the 60 Minutes tradition of reporting such pieces in the future without fear or favor.
The next night, Wallace was invited to appear on Charlie Rose to talk about the story. At the last minute he asked Morley Safer to tag along—a favor Safer came to regret. “The question of whether Mike and the producer induced this guy is out of the question,” Safer told Rose. “He wasn’t paid, he wasn’t threatened, he wasn’t promised anything.” Safer later learned that Wigand had, in fact, previously been paid a consulting fee and fired off an angry memo to the entire staff retracting his comments.
The Charlie Rose appearance served to further divide an already fractured staff; it precipitated yet more conflict between Safer and Wallace—and Bergman—that might have otherwise been avoided. Safer came to believe that Bergman and Wallace had made a deal with Wigand that they shouldn’t have, and his statement said as much. The New York Times editorialized against the show’s handling of the story. None of the show’s insiders seemed certain of anything about their positions except that they wished the entire mess would go away—Hewitt most of all. A few weeks later, Ed Bradley invited the correspondents to his Central Park West apartment for a private breakfast—without Hewitt—to try to bring an end to the divisions created by the story. Bradley told his colleagues that they had to stop going off in different directions. They were a splintered group, afraid the divisions created by the Wigand story would become permanent. Their efforts helped to restore order to the show, but some believed the wounds would never completely heal.
It was December 4, 1995, only 10 days before Hewitt’s seventy-third birthday, but there appeared to be no immediate prospect of Mike Wallace wheeling in cake and champagne.
Hewitt was tense; his show had been shaken to its fo
undation by the media’s incessant coverage of the Wigand story. He hated the ongoing portrayal of 60 Minutes as having caved to corporate power. Ever since it landed on the front page of the New York Times, the Wigand story had been a nightmare for Hewitt. He had to defend the story publicly, again and again, even before it aired. Hewitt had fought relentlessly over the years to protect the reputation of his creation, but some stories he could not control, and this was one of them. At the same time, he had to maneuver delicately around the power structure at CBS, which issued his rather substantial paycheck.
When Hewitt got tense, he liked to write someone a memo. He might not ever send it, but the process helped him to crystallize his thoughts into a coherent form. Often he would show it around and get the opinion of others before sending it. So, early on this Monday morning, before anyone else arrived for work, Hewitt sat down at his desk and typed a memo to a man whose office was less than 50 yards away, and whom he had worked alongside every day of his professional life since 1968.
In the letter—copies of which were sent to Eric Ober, the president of CBS News, and Peter Lund, the president of the CBS Broadcast Group—Hewitt described what he called the “obsessive nature” of the show’s reporting on Wigand, which he said “caused us damage far in excess of any good that could have come to us” from airing the piece. Hewitt said that while 60 Minutes “committed no glaring crimes against journalism,” he professed disappointment that the story led to “disclosure of information that was nobody’s business but our own.”
He then cited Shakespeare’s famous “admonition” (as he described it) from King Lear that “discretion is the better part of valor” and concluded that “until the right moment presents itself I would like to put the Jeffrey Wigand story on the back burner and get on with our business—which is reporting, not crusading.” It was signed: “Sincerely, Don.”
Hewitt had at last articulated a feeling that had consumed him since the beginning of this controversy. He measured the value of this story itself against the damage it had caused his creation, 60 Minutes, and the answer was simple.
Kill the story.
In suggesting this, Hewitt’s position ran counter to his star correspondent, Mike Wallace, as well as Wallace’s longtime producer, Lowell Bergman—not to mention Hewitt’s own public stance. This was Hildy Johnson quitting, after all—turning in his badge to Walter Burns. He knew journalists expected them to fight the corporate bosses to death over the Wigand story, not put it aside. But Hewitt cared deeply about his show and the epic divisions the battle had already created. He worried the wounds would show in his beloved broadcast. By stopping the fight now—by putting the Wigand story on the back burner and getting on with our business, as Hewitt put it—he believed there might be some chance 60 Minutes could save itself.
In January, the New York Daily News identified Wigand by name as the 60 Minutes source, and the Wall Street Journal then published a Wigand deposition that freed 60 Minutes and CBS from any culpability in airing its interview. In late January, Wigand returned to New York for another 60 Minutes interview; and on February 4, 1996, the show broadcast a two-part segment, “Jeffrey Wigand, Ph.D.,” that at last told the entire story as Bergman and Wallace originally intended to tell it.
At the end of 1999, The Insider was at last set for release. This was the movie the 60 Minutes crew had all dreaded, a semifictional account of the Wigand crisis based on Marie Brenner’s exhaustive account in Vanity Fair and directed by Michael Mann. No one knew quite what to expect, particularly since the central character—the hero—was not Jeffrey Wigand but Lowell Bergman. He would soon come to represent the notion of the dashing 60 Minutes producer, thanks to Al Pacino’s performance and much to the chagrin of Hewitt and Wallace.
The movie came out in December 1999, with Christopher Plummer as a reptilian Wallace and Philip Baker Hall as an ineffectual Don Hewitt. (“That’s not an actor,” Hewitt became fond of saying. “That was a dormitory.”)
There was no way for The Insider to reopen old wounds, because they’d never healed to begin with. The battles between Wallace and Hewitt had escalated, becoming more volatile and personal than ever before. The movie left what many at 60 Minutes consider a permanent stain on the show’s reputation, only made worse by the movie’s mediocre performance at the box office.
Without question, The Insider took liberties with the truth in representing Bergman as the one who quit CBS in moral high dudgeon at the end of the movie—perhaps Hewitt’s most loudly voiced criticism of the film. Bergman had, in fact, remained at CBS long after the Wigand controversy and was hoping to become Jeffrey Fager’s number two producer during the start-up of 60 Minutes II, a scenario approved by Fager but ultimately blocked by Hewitt and Wallace.
Bergman now acknowledges that the movie misrepresents the truth in some respects. “I didn’t like the way the movie ended, the way that they did it,” Bergman says. “I told them it was going to cause me trouble. That didn’t change Michael Mann—it’s his movie. He said, ‘You left 60 Minutes.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but it makes it look like I left CBS.’ And so that’s a criticism of the accuracy of the film, I’ll grant it to them. But it’s no more of a fiction than what’s actually produced on 60 Minutes. And presented by Don every week. His correspondents never make a mistake, never lose an argument; they never look like they need any help from anybody.”
Wallace describes Bergman’s attitude as that of a producer frustrated with a lack of proper credit. “He always felt he didn’t get enough attention,” Wallace says. “Which I can understand. I mean, come on. You do all the reporting and it says, ‘Produced by Lowell Bergman.’”
By the time The Insider came out, Hewitt had just turned 77, and Wallace was 81. For all their endless battling, they still relished the control they had over the institution they’d created together, and neither showed any sign of wanting to give it up or sharing a piece of it with the likes of Lowell Bergman or anyone else.
Chapter 20
The Tin Eye
Andrew Heyward may owe his longevity as president of CBS News in part to an act of loyalty performed for his then-boss Dan Rather on the night of September 11, 1987, one that forever cemented the bond between anchorman and producer. On that memorable night, it had been announced that a U.S. Open tennis semifinal match might run over into the 6:30 P.M. time slot and delay the start of the evening news broadcast. Furious, the bullheaded Rather stormed off to call Howard Stringer, then president of CBS News, in protest. The game ended at 6:32 P.M.; since Rather was not in the anchor chair, the entire CBS network went black.
While the Evening News’s executive producer Tom Bettag (now executive producer of ABC’s Nightline) tried to reason with Rather, senior producer Heyward—sitting in the control room in New York—was being strongly urged to press the button to broadcast a taped version of the opening of the evening news. That opening had been taped within the last hour, as a standard precaution against technical failure. “If Heyward had pushed the button, he would have done the right thing by CBS News but would have been Rather’s lifelong enemy,” recalls a producer present that night. “Obviously, he made the right decision.”
Heyward had been an Evening News junkie his entire life. It surprised no one when he landed at CBS News. He’d grown up in New York as the son of an executive at UNICEF. After graduating from Harvard, he went directly into television journalism and produced the local newscast at Channel 5 in New York before moving to CBS News in 1984, where he rose quickly through the ranks to become a producer for the evening news. In 1988 he became the original executive producer of the weekly newsmagazine 48 Hours, with Rather as its anchor. The show’s original format—an hour devoted to a single story—caught on and hastened Heyward’s ascent. Even the failure of Eye to Eye with Connie Chung, launched in 1993 with Heyward in charge, didn’t slow his progress.
In 1994 he took over as executive producer of the evening news, during the period of the experimental Rather-Chung evening newscast, and alt
hough the ratings never quite took off, it strengthened his alliance with Rather—then, as now, the 800-pound gorilla of CBS News. When Eric Ober lost his job as head of CBS News at the end of 1995—having presided over the ill-fated pairing of Rather and Chung, not to mention the Wigand episode—Heyward got the nod to replace him as president and has remained ever since.
Heyward was not someone you would expect to find running the news division of a network. He had the well-spoken manner of a college professor, or perhaps a psychologist. (In fact, he married the daughter of Dr. Willard Gaylin, a well-known psychiatry professor and medical ethicist at Columbia University.) But Westinghouse had just completed its acquisition of the network from Laurence Tisch, and perhaps that was what the new management of CBS was looking for.
Heyward’s ascension came amid turmoil in the news division, and at 60 Minutes in particular. The show was suffering from the deep divisions inflicted by the 1995 tobacco story. NBC News—under the leadership of president Andrew Lack, the former 60 Minutes producer who had clashed with Hewitt as executive producer of West 57th—was about to challenge 60 Minutes by putting on another edition of its Dateline NBC broadcast up against it on Sunday nights at 7. Asked by a reporter in January 1996, right after taking the job, whether that counterprogramming might result in changes to the 60 Minutes format to keep its audience, Heyward replied: “Anybody who would tinker with the most successful program in television history and say, ‘Uh-oh, Dateline is coming,’ would be nuts.” Within four months, 60 Minutes had nevertheless announced several changes, including new, hip commentators (Texas journalist Molly Ivins, humor writer P. J. O’Rourke, and acerbic black columnist Stanley Crouch) to complement Andy Rooney and a revised weekly format with an emphasis on breaking news. As with most attempts over the years to fiddle with the 60 Minutes format, these lasted less than a season.