by David Blum
There would, after all, have been no way for this audience to know anything had happened to Wallace. For some reason the Vineyard Gazette hadn’t printed the news of the fall, even though its own reporter was on the scene for the previously scheduled interview. CBS News hadn’t disclosed it, either; not knowing the seriousness of the injuries, there hadn’t seemed any need to alarm the public with an announcement.
“I’m having a bit of difficulty,” Wallace said at last. “I should explain. About two or three weeks ago, I fell. Landed here.” He pointed to his head. “As a result of which my hearing, memory, and sight have suffered.” He paused again, and then resumed his Kevorkian comments as though nothing had happened, but in the same halting, confused manner as before. At the first possible moment, the moderator Small jumped in to interrupt, and Wallace said little else all morning.
Afterward, there was a special Emmy lunch to honor the show’s producers; and by that afternoon, everyone at 60 Minutes had heard what happened to Wallace. The show’s press spokesman, Kevin Tedesco, arranged for the story of Wallace’s accident to go out, at last, over the Associated Press wire, where it was picked up in many papers around the country, including, at last, Wallace’s hometown paper, the Vineyard Gazette.
Chapter 26
It’s Not Who You Know
In a glen plaid suit, white shirt, and red-patterned tie, Don Hewitt leaves his 17th-floor apartment in the spectacular San Remo, a sprawling building on Central Park West at 75th Street. On this October morning in 2003, a car service picks him up and takes him to the corner of 116th and Broadway, a 15-minute trek to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. At 9:00 A.M., he is to speak to a group of graduate students in the World Room, an ornate lecture hall on the third floor with wood paneling and stained glass windows.
The students trickle in slowly. By the appointed hour every seat is full. Hewitt, holding in his hands two videocassettes, sits down at a table in front of the students. “I’d like to show you these tapes,” he says, “of two pieces I consider among the best we’ve ever done.” He holds up one cassette and then looks over helplessly at the student who escorted him to the lecture hall. “Can you help me? I’m terrible with these things.” The first tape, from the 2002–2003 season, is called “All in the Family.” It’s the investigative piece by Steve Kroft, produced by Trevor Nelson, about close ties between Halliburton and Defense Department contracts. The second piece, “Musically Speaking,” is a Lesley Stahl story, produced by Shari Finkelstein, about a young musical savant.
Hewitt watches the stories with the students and then opens the floor to questions.
“How do you make pieces that good?” one student asks.
“It’s a lot of work,” Hewitt explains. “It’s a casting process. Just like a movie or a TV show. You need just the right element, the right personality to tell the story. A writer in a magazine can use his writing talents to make the subject interesting. Not in television. In television, dull is dull is dull.”
Hewitt clearly enjoys his time on campus. As he leaves the World Room, an enterprising female student approaches him with a smile and says, “I’ve waited all my life to meet you, and I want to work at 60 Minutes, so I’m going to take advantage of this opportunity and give you my resumé.” Hewitt smiles, folds the résumé, and puts it in his pocket. “Well, I’ll read it!” he says in a way that sounds sincere enough.
Hewitt heads back downtown. He has a meeting at the corner of 60th and Madison at 11:00 A.M. to discuss his latest inspiration: three-dimensional TV. He says he’s found a guy who can do realistic 3-D visuals on a television screen.
“The 3-D still requires glasses, so people tell me adults won’t go for television that way,” Hewitt says. “But kids will. Kids will wear the glasses and play video games. I’ve already talked to Sony about it. This is going to be big.” He reaches into a FedEx envelope next to him on the car seat and pulls out several pictures. The first is a three-dimensional photograph of Penelope Cruz. After that, a 3-D Van Gogh painting. “I’m going to talk to Graydon Carter about this,” he says, referring to the editor in chief of Vanity Fair.
Hewitt reaches into his pocket for his cell phone, opens it, and says “office” into it; the phone speed-dials the number of his 60 Minutes office. His secretary isn’t around, so he asks to speak to Josh Howard, now executive editor of the show.
“Hey, kid,” Hewitt says. “I’m going to a meeting at eleven, and I’ll be in by noon. What’s going on?”
Howard tells him he’ll be going out to lunch today, but he reviews the schedule of afternoon screenings with Hewitt, mentioning the fact that newspapers reported this morning that Barbara Walters will be interviewing Martha Stewart on ABC. That was one of the big “gets” of the past year, and the loss of it pains Hewitt; at the moment his show could use all the gets it can get. Two weeks ago, the show aired a Steve Kroft interview with Sam Waksal, the convicted head of ImClone who prompted Martha Stewart’s interest in the company’s stock. Under Kroft’s fierce cross-examination about his spreading of insider information, Waksal struggled to defend himself, making for passably good TV. But the interview lacked the emotional dimension that Walters was famous for finding in her celebrity conversations. It comes as no surprise to Hewitt or Howard that Stewart will go with Walters instead of anyone on the 60 Minutes crew. Still, Stewart is the kind of interview that makes Andrew Heyward and Leslie Moonves happy—if that’s anyone’s concern.
“It’s ridiculous that they’re pushing me out,” Hewitt says after hanging up the phone. “I’m still doing the job. Have you seen the show? It’s great. It’s just great. We’re doing some great work. It’s just ridiculous.”
Hewitt has talked to several people about reviving “Who’s Who,” the one-season failure of the mid-1970s. He had in mind his 60 Minutes star Ed Bradley to host it. But Bradley remained weakened by his quintuple bypass surgery and subsequent lung problems; it isn’t likely he could still be considered for the job.
Still, there are other people out there who might work. Perhaps Hewitt is considering Matt Lauer, the genial cohost of the Today show, whom he met for breakfast earlier this week.
“Lauer told me the reason they think the Today show has been dropping in the ratings recently is because WNBC dropped Jane Hanson as the early-morning local anchor,” Hewitt says. Hanson had been WNBC’s Today show lead-in local anchor since 1988, until the affiliate announced in July 2003 that Hanson was being “promoted” to host news specials and replaced by Darlene Rodriguez, who’d joined the station in 1998. “People want stability. They don’t want to see change for the sake of change.”
Hewitt’s observations tend to echo his own experience. As anyone will tell you who has spent more than five minutes in Hewitt’s company, he loves, more than anything, to talk about himself. In spite of a long career that by definition required a curiosity about the outside world, he continues to live an almost completely self-referential life; even his closest friends say he talks too much about himself, tells the same stories too often, seems too enamored of himself. But at the same time, it is impossible to be in Hewitt’s presence without finding yourself in awe of his legend. You look at him and want to have seen the world through his eyes, to have experienced the history he watched and made. No other journalist alive today comes close to having the résumé of this man, and it would be a pleasure to discover this about him if it wasn’t so likely that he would soon tell you himself.
His car reaches 60th and Madison. He opens the car door and bounds out onto the Manhattan sidewalk. Across the street, cameras are filming a scene from the sixth and last season of Sex and the City in front of Barney’s department store.
“One last thing,” he says, standing in the bright midmorning sun. “Osborn Elliott, a great journalist, used to say this at the end of the graduation ceremonies at Columbia. To the students. It’s not who you know . . .”
Hewitt smiles the wicked smile of a man who knows he’s still a master stor
yteller, the best in the business, and pauses for the perfect interval of time.
“It’s whom you know,” he says, dancing off into the crowd of pedestrians, teeming with life.
Don Hewitt’s eighty-first birthday begins at 5:15 A.M. with a call from Betsy West, alerting him to the news that Saddam Hussein has been taken into American military custody. A new episode of 60 Minutes is scheduled to air in 14 hours. West—who lives only minutes from the office by taxi—launches into action with the assistance of executive editor Josh Howard, whose willingness to help strikes a notable contrast with Phil Scheffler’s nay-saying when the Afghanistan war story broke. By the late afternoon, the three of them—one from the old guard, two from the new—have completed a show that ends up completely replacing the one previously scheduled for that night.
Hewitt calls Andy Rooney, who is in town and agrees to put together a new commentary. He then reaches Ed Bradley, who comes in to anchor the broadcast. Lesley Stahl’s producer in Washington, Rome Hartman, says he can deliver Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—but only if it can be a live interview. This is extremely rare but not unprecedented, and everyone agrees it’s worth it to get the government’s top military strategist for what appears to be an exclusive with Stahl. The decision is made to entrust the lead piece to David Martin, who covers the Pentagon for CBS News and who, it is agreed, can deliver a better overview than anyone else. Hewitt was arguing for a news opening, but he is persuaded that Martin could cover breaking developments in his piece. Mike Wallace was pushing for an interview with the UN’s secretary general, Kofi Annan, but it appears doubtful it will make it in.
Late in the day, as the show is being readied for air, Andrew Heyward and a birthday cake arrive in 60 Minutes Control Room 33 to commemorate the occasion. “I can’t think of a happier way to spend my eighty-first birthday,” Hewitt says, “than right here in this control room.”
The next night is the 60 Minutes Christmas party at Tavern on the Green. The party has been held at various places over the years, ranging from a lavish spread in Hewitt’s apartment to sipping champagne from plastic cups in the office. Most staffers find that 60 Minutes parties are stiff, cold affairs with awkward, cringe-inducing toasts. This year, it ends up being slightly more festive—no toasts, no farewells, just mingling and drinking and gossiping about next year. Much of the talk still centers on Hewitt’s plans. His friends and colleagues believe that it will take something on the order of the Jaws of Life to remove Hewitt from his office next June. Yes, he has told people he is comfortable with the transition plans in place. But he has also continued to say that there’s no logical reason for him to go—not now, not while the show is having its best season in years.
There’s no arguing with Hewitt on that point; the 2003–2004 season of 60 Minutes has marked the first time in several years that the ratings have improved, not declined. After losing a million viewers a year for four straight seasons—the steady audience decline that helped push the Hewitt replacement plan into action—the show has recently landed back in the Nielsen top 10 several times. But while the renewed ratings vigor have given Hewitt and CBS bragging rights, it is mostly irrelevant as an indicator of the show’s financial value to the network. Since the late 1970s, networks have sold advertising based on demographics; NBC and ABC use the 18–49 age group as the basis for their rates, while CBS prefers the 25–54 market measure, in part because the network has always attracted an older audience. There’s no question that 60 Minutes remains television’s most-watched TV newsmagazine, but not in the 18–49 bracket. For a show like ABC’s PrimeTime Live, advertisers will pay a premium to get those viewers—particularly when the network ad salespeople assure them that host Diane Sawyer will produce a number of “specials,” with guests like Jennifer Lopez or Jessica Lynch, that deliver big numbers.
How does CBS sell 60 Minutes? Networks never reveal their sales strategies, but analysts conjecture that CBS might induce an advertiser to buy a 30-second spot on, let’s say, The Handler—a low-rated prime-time network series—by also offering them a reduced rate for a commercial on 60 Minutes, considered a “prestige” buy. The show earns that status in part because of the total households it attracts and in part because of the number of its viewers who earn over $75,000 a year—coveted “premium” viewers for some advertisers. This way the advertising sales force can bypass the issue of the show’s aging demographics. Such calculations make it difficult for anyone to figure out the real profitability of 60 Minutes. It isn’t enough to know the show’s editorial budget; you also need to know how much revenue it produces for the network. Those numbers are so closely guarded that even Don Hewitt can’t get access to them. (During his 2002 campaign to keep his job, Hewitt called Tom Wolzein, a noted media analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, to see if Wolzein had any profit numbers to bolster his case.)
The season begins well enough, with an opener that includes an Ed Bradley interview with the undercover drug officer from Tulia, Texas, accused of targeting the town’s black community. It continues with provocative interviews with disgraced ImClone founder Sam Waksal and former HealthSouth CEO Richard Srushy. A two-part Steve Kroft examination of pornography lands in the November sweeps. But the first blockbuster doesn’t come until November 30, when Mike Wallace’s interview with former New York Giant star Lawrence Taylor (tied to the release of Taylor’s book) lands the show in the number four position for the week in total viewers—thanks in large measure to blanket promotion during the CBS football games that preceded it that day and to Taylor’s sensational revelations about sex and drugs in the NFL. The show even manages to end up in the top 10 shows of the week in the coveted 18–49 demographic, with a 6.4 rating for that age group.
Buoyed by its success, 60 Minutes follows up the next week with another piece aimed at the youth market: “The Look,” a Morley Safer segment about discriminatory hiring practices at upscale retailer Abercrombie & Fitch. The story, prominently featuring shots of scantily clad women, draws an unusually large audience to the show. The special broadcast about the capture of Saddam Hussein wins even bigger numbers.
With the show experiencing its biggest success in years, Hewitt is feeling in a better position to accept his fate at last.
It’s a lazy Friday afternoon in early December 2003. Outside, a blizzard has just descended on Manhattan. The picture window behind Mike Wallace’s desk shows nothing but a wall of white, with snowflakes floating upward as they seem to do when they fall particularly hard. Elsewhere at 60 Minutes, staffers are packing up purses and briefcases and backpacks to leave early for the weekend, but not Wallace. He doesn’t even notice the snow. He’s at his desk, working; it is the place he loves the most, and he shows no particular desire to get home before dark.
“Did you read Liz Smith’s column from a couple of days ago?” Wallace asks, referring to the famous gossip column that appears in the New York Post and is syndicated around the country. Wallace presses the buzzer on his phone that signals to his secretary. It takes her a while to respond, so he keeps buzzing, annoyed. When she finally answers, he says, “Do you have that Liz Smith column?” She enters and finds it on his cluttered desk.
“Here,” Wallace says. “Read it, and then I’ll tell you a funny story.”
The December 4, 2003, Liz Smith lead item is about Michael Jackson. After describing network plans to cover the forthcoming Jackson trial, Smith recalls similar overkill in the O. J. Simpson story.
It hasn’t been lost on a single network executive that the people who pursued the O. J. Simpson trial from the get-go, the ones with the most pizzazz, push and perseverance, were the ones who left the others, the more fastidious ones, in the dust. (I do recall when 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt sniffed at coverage of O. J. and took his show out of the running. I don’t think the great news magazine has completely recovered even yet.)
But this time they are all going to mix it up; they are going to war like you can’t imagine. As Al Jolson said: “You ain’t heard noth
ing yet!”
“Don went nuts when he saw that item,” Wallace whispers, in the conspiratorial tone he often takes on when talking about Hewitt. “Nuts! He called Liz’s office three or four times yesterday. Yelled at her assistants. Screamed at them! He was furious. Liz wasn’t there. Who knows if she even wrote the item? Anyway, she wrote Don this letter, and she sent me a copy. I’ve known Liz for years. She worked for me a long time ago as a secretary, in the 1950s.”
Wallace hands over a faxed copy of a letter from Smith to Hewitt. Written in her chatty, friendly voice, she chides Hewitt for exploding at her over the item and mentions that she has resisted the temptation to do the same with him in the past, when she’d felt his show had slighted her.
“You want to know the real reason we didn’t cover O. J.?” Wallace leans forward to whisper again. “The true story is, the whole O. J. thing happened during the summer. We were on vacation. We didn’t want to come back in. It had nothing to do with anything but the fact that we didn’t want to come back in. Who wants to come in and cover the goddamned O. J. story? Everybody’s going to be all over it, all the time, anyway. So it was concocted . . . along with everybody else. Don sniffed at coverage of O. J. and took the show out of the running.”
Wallace leans back in his chair again. The snow has started to fall even heavier now.
He is asked to reflect on how he and Hewitt are getting along these days.
“Better, these last couple of months,” he says. “Finally.”
For a moment Wallace glances toward the wall of his office, in the direction of where Hewitt would be if he hadn’t already left for the weekend. By now the entire office is empty except for Wallace.