by David Blum
Heyward also reached out for young, good-looking new correspondents and respected, well-known commentators to shake up the status quo. From MTV he hired a correspondent named Alison Stewart to contribute youth-oriented stories. As commentators (to be used throughout the news division) he hired the former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley from the left and author and analyst Laura Ingraham from the right. He also brought in Christiane Amanpour, the CNN star, for part-time 60 Minutes duty. “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile,” an anonymous CBS News executive told the New York Times of Heyward’s changes in May 1997.
As it turned out, Heyward had one flaw in his otherwise stellar list of achievements, what colleagues jokingly referred to as his “tin eye”—his seeming inability to recruit to CBS anyone who might develop the stature or staying power of an existing network news star.
Heyward’s first demonstration of the tin-eye problem came in the spring of 1997 when he lured Susan Molinari, then a Republican congresswoman from Staten Island, out of politics to cohost a new Saturday morning news and talk show—“a sort of 60 Minutes meets Rosie O’Donnell,” as Molinari described it. The move came up for instant ridicule. Maureen Dowd parodied the move in a May 31, 1997 Times column written in Molinari’s voice: “The only person at CBS who was really upset—she came at me one day in the cafeteria with an ice pick—was Laura Ingraham, who thought if Andy wanted a GOP blonde with no experience to star in this show, it should be her.” The reviews weren’t particularly warm, either. “A television star was not born,” New York Times television critic Caryn James wrote in her morning-after review.
In June 1998, less than a year later, it was announced that Molinari would be leaving. “I think she missed the political arena—not being in politics per se, but political commentary and analysis,” Heyward explained when Molinari left. “There’s very little of that on a Saturday morning show.”
In March 1997, Heyward announced his biggest move yet: he’d hired NBC Today Show star Bryant Gumbel with a five-year deal said to be worth at least $5 million a year. Heyward desperately hoped the move would inject life into a news division in major decline. There was just one problem: no one knew what do to do with Gumbel once they had him. First Heyward handed him a newsmagazine called Public Eye. It launched in October 1997 and to most observers lacked a distinctive personality—a hybrid of Nightline and Dateline, with the ratings pull of neither. Production shut down in August 1998.
Heyward was now stuck with a multimillion-dollar player with no important tasks to perform. The next idea he floated was to make Gumbel an integral part of something he’d been discussing with his bosses: a second edition of 60 Minutes. It was a notion the network brass loved—to use the brand name of 60 Minutes to launch another newsmagazine. It made perfect economic sense, but there was just one problem: selling the concept of 60 Minutes II to Don Hewitt and the ornery, stubborn correspondents of 60 Minutes.
Leslie Moonves wanted it to happen, and that meant it probably would. To the CBS entertainment chief it was only logical—to spin the hugely successful franchise into a second show. It had already worked for NBC; by 1997, Dateline had expanded to four nights and become highly profitable. But to Hewitt and the correspondents, it was nothing more than a misguided attempt by the network to diminish the value of the franchise by going “down market” with a Dateline clone. The immediate suspicion of the 60 Minutes crew was that Moonves and his corporate cronies would do anything to squeeze another buck out of the news division, even at the risk of destroying the credibility built up over three decades by Hewitt and 60 Minutes.
Moonves went to a birthday lunch for Mike Wallace in the spring of 1997 and was a bit surprised when some of the correspondents used the occasion to corner him, furious about the plan. They continued to spill their venom at a series of meetings meant to mollify the angry stars. “All you guys want to do is use the brand.” Morley Safer fumed at Moonves. “And what you’re going to do in the process is destroy it.” More nasty meetings followed; at one point the correspondents told Moonves that none of them would appear on his proposed new show. Then Hewitt and Wallace took their case upstairs to Moonves’s boss, Mel Karmazin, making their adamant opposition painfully clear.
But Karmazin—a shrewd businessman who at that point held the title of chairman and chief executive of CBS—wasn’t going to be told by anyone, even Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt, what he could or could not do. He was not, he said, going to override Heyward and Moonves. “We’re putting on 60 Minutes II whether you like it or not,” Karmazin reportedly said. “If I have to slap the title 60 Minutes II across The Nanny, I’ll do it, but you’re going to have 60 Minutes II.”
By late spring—after endless meetings, endless calls among the correspondents, and endless leaks to the press—the correspondents had a final meeting with Moonves and Heyward at Black Rock. As Safer recalls it, attempts at consensus went nowhere until, as it was breaking up, he said to the assembled executives: “Look, if you guys want to do another 60 Minutes, you take the best producers you have at CBS News and the best correspondents you have at CBS News, you call that 60 Minutes II, and I don’t see a way we can argue with you. But at the top you need that kind of uncompromising guy to run the broadcast.” At which point, according to Safer, Hewitt stood behind Heyward, pointing at himself. (Hewitt denies ever having wanted to be in charge of the new show, and Heyward has no recollection that Hewitt ever wanted to run it.)
In any case, Heyward’s choice was Jeffrey Fager, the former 60 Minutes producer now running the CBS Evening News. Within weeks (and after a meeting that June in the 60 Minutes screening room with Karmazin and the correspondents to help smooth things over) Fager was installed in the job as executive producer of 60 Minutes II—and that battle, at least, was finally over.
CBS News was hoping to use the new show to anoint Mike Wallace’s son, Chris, as his possible 60 Minutes successor; he’d been a correspondent for ABC News for several years and bore a strong superficial resemblance to his father. But at the last minute, negotiations between the younger Wallace and CBS broke down when ABC News refused to let him out of his contract—a move, according to Mike Wallace and several other sources, that was engineered directly by Sawyer to spite her old 60 Minutes antagonist.
Finally, Hewitt and his rattled tigers acquiesced (at least nominally) to a fate that was probably sealed before they ever protested it. When the official announcement of 60 Minutes II was made at last in July 1997, Hewitt declined to comment except to issue this statement: “I think that under Jeff Fager, 60 Minutes II is a natural to be the second-best broadcast of its kind on television. Inasmuch as I can help, without shortchanging the first-best broadcast of its kind on television, I’m hoping to do that.”
Kathleen Willey had a story to tell, and she fit all the Hewitt standards of a perfect 60 Minutes character. What could be more interesting than an attractive, well-spoken woman claiming to have been sexually harassed by the president of the United States?
In the context of Hewitt’s own troubled history with the subject, of course, the notion of interviewing Kathleen Willey—and lending credence to her invasive, privacy-shattering charges against Bill Clinton—presented certain glaring ironies. Just as the Clinton scandal unfolded publicly, CBS was privately negotiating the settlement of a harassment charge against Hewitt by a former 60 Minutes editor. But if anyone at CBS felt uncomfortable with the possible hypocrisy involved in the coverage of the growing Clinton scandal in the winter of 1998, they did not speak up. And so when Michael Radutzky, Ed Bradley’s producer, informed his bosses that he had nailed down an exclusive interview with the president’s latest accuser, there was never any doubt that 60 Minutes would run with the story.
By the time Willey sat down for an interview with Ed Bradley for the March 15, 1998, broadcast of 60 Minutes, there were differences—some subtle, some significant—between what she was now charging and how others described her response to the incident at the time. Willey had alleged (in her deposit
ion in the Paula Jones case against the president) that Clinton had made sexual advances toward her in the Oval Office; however, one of her corroborating witnesses—a former friend named Julie Steele—had since claimed in an affidavit that Willey asked her to lie to a Newsweek reporter about having been upset over the presidential encounter, which had taken place in the Oval Office in late 1993. Likewise, Linda Tripp had told Newsweek that Willey was “joyful” after her private encounter with Clinton. The president had denied any inappropriate behavior during his meeting with Willey.
All that paled by comparison to the fact that Willey would be the first woman to go public in an interview format with allegations against Clinton. Radutzky had met with Willey’s attorney several times in advance of the session, and once with Willey herself, before Bradley arrived in Virginia to do the interview in a hotel suite on the Thursday before broadcast.
In 17 years at 60 Minutes, Bradley had become a master of this kind of interview. He knew how to use his body language and empathetic demeanor to coax answers from nervous or reluctant subjects. He had a way of putting people at ease if he needed to, or on edge if that was required. In this case, he wanted to relax Willey so that she would tell her story in the most dramatic possible way. This was not, he felt, an occasion for confrontation or tough questions.
BRADLEY: And what happened next?
WILLEY: Well, he—he said that he would do everything that he could to—to—to—help, and w—I turned around, and out of the—out of the office, and he followed me to—I thought he was going to open the door to the—to the Oval Office. And right as we got to the door, he stopped me and gave me a big hug and said that he was very sorry that this was happening to me. And I—I had no problem with that because when I saw—every time I saw him, he would hug me. He used—just does that—is like that.
And I remember I had—still had this coffee cup in my hand, and it was kind of in between us and I didn’t want it to spill on him or me, and it just was this—it was just very strange. And he—he took the coffee cup out of my hand and he put it on a bookshelf and—and he—this hug t—lasted a little longer than I thought necessary, but at the same time—I mean, I was not concerned about it.
BRADLEY: Mm-hmm.
WILLEY: And then he—then he—and then he kissed me on—on my mouth, and—and he pulled me closer to him. And I remember thinking—I just remember thinking, “What in the world is he doing?” I—it—I just thought, “What is he doing?” And I—I pushed back away from him, and he—he—he—he—he’s a big man. And he—he had his arms—they were tight around me, and he—he—he—he touched me.
BRADLEY: Touched you how?
WILLEY: Well, he—he—he touched my breast with his hand, and I—I—I—I was—I—I was just startled. I was—I—I—w— j—was just . . .
BRADLEY: Thi—this wasn’t an accidental, grazing touch?
WILLEY: No, no. And then he—he whispered—he—he w—he said in—in my ear, he said, “I’ve—I’ve wanted to do this ever since I laid eyes on you.”
After going over several more intimate details of their encounter—including Bradley nonchalantly asking Willey of the president of the United States, “Was he aroused?”—Bradley probed briefly into the nature of her response.
BRADLEY: Did you feel intimidated?
WILLEY: I didn’t feel intimidated. I just felt overpowered.
BRADLEY: Did you ever say, “Stop. No. Get away from me”?
WILLEY: I just—I—I pushed him away. I pushed him away and—and I said, “I think I—I’d better go.”
After that, Bradley established with Willey that the story she’d just told was the same as the testimony she’d given to the grand jury, under oath.
Bradley then briefly referred to the reversal of position by her former friend Julie Steele, who now denied Willey’s account of her having told Steele of Clinton’s unwanted advances at the time—and claimed that Willey had been pressuring her to lie to a Newsweek reporter. Willey’s explanation of the Tripp description of her as “joyful”: “I think when I am in—if I get into a very tense—tense situation I try to—fall back on my sense of humor. I think when I said, ‘You are not going to believe this one,’ maybe she took that as joyful.”
Toward the end, Bradley gently inquired as to Willey’s motives for going public with her accusations.
BRADLEY: You—you were a reluctant witness. You didn’t want your story to go public.
WILLEY: No.
BRADLEY: Why not?
WILLEY: I just knew that it was a bad story. It was just horrible—ha—horrible behavior on the part of the president, and I did not think it was my place to make it public knowledge.
BRADLEY: You didn’t walk away. You didn’t lodge a complaint anywhere.
WILLEY: No. That’s right. That was the choice I made. . . .
BRADLEY (voice-over): Then why did she decide now to go public?
WILLEY: I just think that it’s time to tell this story. I think that there—too many lies are being told, too many lives are being ruined, and I—I think it’s time for the truth to come out.
That apparently satisfied Bradley’s curiosity on Willey’s motives.
The president’s lawyer, Bennett, had declined to be interviewed for the story. But on Saturday he changed his mind: the White House contacted 60 Minutes and asked for unedited time on the show to refute Willey’s comments, or the chance to review her comments in advance. Instead Bennett was invited to a CBS studio in Washington, where he was interviewed by Bradley via satellite.
Bennett was apparently unfamiliar with the setup and didn’t know where to look; producers told him to look away from the camera, as though Bradley were in the room with him. (Bradley never disclosed on the air that it was a satellite interview.) As a result, he appeared on camera to be uncomfortable—and to some observers dishonest. CBS News president Heyward later acknowledged to a reporter that the piece should have clearly disclosed Bennett’s location. Bennett told Bradley, in the limited time he was allotted, that the president “hugged” Willey and that “he may have given her a kiss on the forehead.”
BRADLEY (voice-over): Mr. Bennett concedes that Kathleen Willey is not part of what he calls the “get-Clinton” crowd. And like all lawyers, he’s confident his client will be vindicated.
BENNETT: My client is the president. He says it didn’t happen. I believe the president, okay? I believe him. The day is going to come, Ed, either because Judge Wright throws the Paula Jones case out, as I hope and believe she may, or a jury of—of twelve people—not Ed Bradley, not Bob Bennett—are going to sit there and listen to all of the evidence and decide who is or is not telling the truth.
The next day, the White House released to reporters a series of friendly letters written by Willey to Clinton after the alleged harassment incident, some of them seeking a job and one that referred to herself as his “number one fan.” It was also revealed that Willey’s lawyer had been pursuing a $100,000 book deal, raising the possibility that her motivations may not have been so pure as she represented them to Bradley and 60 Minutes. Critics attacked the interview for being too soft; Hewitt’s pleasure at scoring a coup was diminished by the media’s response, not all of it positive. 60 Minutes denied knowledge of the letters or the book deal, and Phil Scheffler, the show’s executive editor, later publicly attacked Bennett for holding back information about the letters during his 60 Minutes interview. According to a 60 Minutes insider, Radutzky called Willey directly and asked her bluntly why she had failed to disclose the letters to him in advance of the interview. (The source said she claimed to Radutzky that she didn’t think they were of any significance.)
But one subsequent press account suggested that 60 Minutes, in its zeal to get Willey onto the air, might have intentionally overlooked information. At the very least, the team’s feelings about the piece went from pride over the scoop to slight embarrassment at having perhaps rushed the interview onto the show without enough reporting.
Howa
rd Kurtz, the media writer for the Washington Post, reported in a Brill’s Content article in August 1998 that according to an unnamed Willey associate, “Willey told a 60 Minutes producer about letters she had written to the White House seeking a job.” Kurtz’s source insisted that the producer never followed up on that knowledge—“directly contradicting statements by 60 Minutes executives that the program knew nothing of the letters.” A 60 Minutes source told Kurtz that producers didn’t want to dig too deeply into Willey’s credibility, for fear of alienating her and losing the interview. “When you’re trying to convince somebody to spill their guts on the air,” a 60 Minutes staffer told Kurtz, “you don’t want them hearing from the neighbors.”
In a letter to the editor of Brill’s Content published in September 1998, Hewitt ridiculed Kurtz for his use of unnamed sources. He condescended and blustered—“As a newcomer to investigative journalism,” he wrote, “perhaps you wouldn’t mind a tip or two from an old-timer about the business you have just embarked upon”—but did not take issue with the substance of Kurtz’s reporting, that 60 Minutes had advance knowledge of the Willey letters or that the show went easy on Willey so as not to lose the interview.
Even Andy Rooney—who had declared on 60 Minutes on the night of the interview that Bradley “did a good job”—later backed off that assertion in an on-air commentary after reading hundreds of letters from viewers. “If you think it fell short of 60 Minutes standards,” Rooney told the show’s audience, “you may be right.”
By the time Hewitt approached Candice Bergen to join the 60 Minutes staff in 1998, she had firmly established herself as a prominent contributor to a highly rated network newsmagazine called FYI. Unfortunately, the show—and her journalism experience—was fictional. Bergen’s journalism experience was limited to what she got playing a character by the name of Murphy Brown—a hugely famous and highly endearing character, but nevertheless the creation of sitcom writers in Hollywood. At the beginning of her career as an actress, she had briefly flirted with photojournalism, but after a 1970s audition for Hewitt, she never produced a 60 Minutes segment—or any news segment at all, for that matter.