by Wendy Walker
The defense is expected to call other journalists, including Sam Donaldson of ABC, to give similar testimony… Whitworth testified that Dale’s job was not easy, especially when presidents decided to travel on short notice, a frequent occurrence…
On December 7, 1994, I was distressed to learn that Billy Dale had been formally indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of embezzlement and criminal conversion. He was charged with wrongfully depositing into his own bank account the sum of $68,000 in checks from media organizations, while traveling with the president between 1988 and 1991. If convicted, he could serve up to twenty years in prison. But Billy’s attorneys insisted that he had used the deposited monies for substantial tips and off-the-book payments that the job required, especially when we traveled to foreign countries.
The trial lasted thirteen days during the latter part of October and the beginning of November 1995, and a group of us testified. ABC’s Sam Donaldson and LA Times reporter Jack Nelson both appeared as character witnesses for Billy, as did I. We knew that all these gentlemen, particularly Billy, were honest and their function had been critical to the well-being of the entire press corps. I was glad for the opportunity to stand up for Billy and there was a moment when my testimony proved pivotal in this terrible ordeal.
Here is an excerpt from the transcript during my direct examination:
Q: Does the fact that he [Billy Dale] put those fifty-five checks into his personal bank account cause you to change the opinion that you have developed over the ten years that you have dealt with him?
A: No.
Q: Why not?
A: Because it doesn’t surprise me if that were the case. I mean it wouldn’t—Billy is not an e-mail kind of guy. He doesn’t know a lot—he doesn’t do—he doesn’t have a lot of computers or things like that in his office. He—if he was doing this, it is probably something that he was doing for a long time.
At this point, there was an objection from opposing counsel that was overruled. A few minutes later, during cross-examination, I gave the following testimony:
Q: Ms. Walker, did you ever put checks that belonged to CNN into your personal account?
A: Yes.
Q: And those belonged to CNN?
A: Yes.
Q: The money belonged to CNN, and you used it for your personal purposes?
There was an objection made that was sustained, but I had made my point.
We went on:
Q: The travel office didn’t ask you to come in and look at those [documents], and you never asked to look at them, did you?
A: No.
Q: You trusted the travel office employees, didn’t you?
A: That is right.
Q: You said that the fact that these checks were in Mr. Dale’s personal account wouldn’t change your opinion about them, right?
A: Right.
Q: You are aware that this case involved charges of embezzlement, right?
A: I am aware that is the charge, yes.
Now everyone knew that both he and I kept a large amount of cash on hand, and while we didn’t do the same job, we both had to be prepared for any kind of emergency. Like Billy, I had deposited certain CNN checks into my account for easy access. Billy’s accounting was harder to track than mine, though, because of his old-fashioned bookkeeping practices.
When the jury went out, they deliberated for less than two hours before they acquitted Billy on all charges on November 16, 1995. The other suspects were acquitted as well, and on January 16, 1996, Larry had the seven travel office officials on the show. Here are some excerpts:
DALE: I would like for her [Mrs. Clinton] or for anyone at the White House to prove that I mismanaged one dollar of funds. If she wants to look at mismanagement, let’s look at the Energy Department, those were government funds. I want to make it clear to the American people right now, not one dollar of government funds are we talking about. This is money that I collected from the press corps and paid out on their behalf.
KING: Did you spend your own funds on your defense?
DALE: I have spent $105,000 of my own funds. All my life savings.
KING: Gary Wright, you are the assistant former deputy director. Mrs. Clinton has stated that there was expressed concern over financial mismanagement. Was that fiction?
WRIGHT: As far as I am concerned it was fiction. I’d like to know who she heard it from. I believe that the people that she was hearing it from perhaps had an agenda of their own, or a reason for taking over the White House travel office, that was giving her this information. At no time, before or after the Clintons took office, did they ever send any top level senior administrative types to our office to ask us what our job was, how we did it.
KING: Barney Brasseaux, are you saying that Mr. Watkins, Vince Foster, none of them ever came to see you?
BRASSEAUX: They never came to see me. You may want to check with Billy, because I know Billy made several attempts to meet with some of the staff there at the White House just to discuss how he ran his office and what they expected of him and his office.
KING: Billy?
DALE: That’s correct. The day after the inauguration I went to George Stephanopoulos’s office, who I assumed was the press spokesman, that was my understanding, and it was tradition for us to introduce ourselves to the people that we were going to be working closest with. I was told by his assistant that they would get back to me as soon as they could arrange an appointment. In the next few days, in three attempts to see him with no success, I turned to Dee Dee Myers and I met with the same luck there. So, up until the time that we were fired, I never had the pleasure of meeting George Stephanopoulos or Dee Dee Myers.
The travel people were all acquitted, but the wounds had cut deep. No one got their jobs back, and since Billy was close to retirement age, he retired early, a sad ending to a bad experience. It remains something to ponder: When integrity is called into question, how do you want to be remembered?
HOW DO YOU WANT TO BE REMEMBERED?
There are people in this world with great attributes, they contribute to charities and help elderly women, but they are not necessarily people of integrity. Are you? Ask yourself the following questions:
• If you could get away with stealing a million dollars and nobody would ever find out, would you do it?
• If you could get away with cheating on your spouse and he or she would never know, would you do it?
• If you could tell people that you graduated with honors from Harvard and nobody would ever know you went to Middle Nowhere State, would you do it?
If you answered yes to any of the above questions, ask yourself, “What if my children found out? Would that be okay with me? What if my husband or wife knew? And then, would my boss be impressed to know who I really am?”
All we can really count on is our integrity in this life, and what you do in your professional life bleeds over into your personal life as well. Think Tiger Woods who, unfortunately for him, became the poster child for lack of integrity. So did Bernie Madoff when his billion-dollar scam became public.
You can be a really good president or the best golfer in the world, but if you have no integrity, that is what people will remember about you. Tiger Woods may be able to repair his golf game, but his reputation is forever soiled. You just can’t get that back. He should have kept in mind that no matter how subtly you sacrifice your integrity, it will come back to haunt you. Someone will find out, and the world at large will discover who you truly are from the inside out.
CHAPTER 12
Opposites Attract
Larry King is a true icon who is known the world over. He is instantly recognizable by his face and his voice, and I feel privileged to be an integral part of his life and his extraordinary career. He just makes it look so easy. No matter whom we put on the show, no matter how Larry feels personally about someone, he is masterful at setting aside his feelings so his guests always get a fair shake during the hour.
One of his most impressive
qualities, arguably the backbone of his success, is that when the spotlight starts to shine on him, he immediately brings the attention back to his current guest. This is a rare quality in a talk-show host. Larry never tries to skew the show to be about him as he asks direct questions, he listens to the answers, and he doesn’t judge. He really is an egoless interviewer who gets right to the point. When there’s a breaking news story, if we have five inroads by which to cover it, Larry tackles the topic with gusto, and together we figure out which road to take. He eats these challenges up, he always has, something I saw in him when we first met seventeen years ago.
The White House producer job had been my dream, and it had taken me all over the world for a decade. During this time, I met a number of world leaders and I stood beside President Reagan in the Far East when he visited the Great Wall of China. I saw and heard him exhort Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. I accompanied President George H. W. Bush when he ate Thanksgiving dinner with the troops in the Persian Gulf. I saw Clinton elected, I testified in court, and I was on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for a decade. When it was time to meet Larry to talk about being his executive producer, I was ready to make a change. Actually, I’d been on alert for the right opportunity for some time, since my White House job would be a hard act to follow.
While I waited for the proposed meeting between Larry and me, I understood that interviewing a baseball great every night would have been his dream come true. Since Larry describes himself quite simply as “a Jewish guy who loves sports,” he had his heart set on filling the empty producing spot with another “Jewish guy who loves sports.” He had even found someone he was considering, so it’s a good thing Larry didn’t know how disconnected from baseball I really was.
Several years earlier, in 1983, I had been Dean Reynolds’s White House producer when he was CNN White House correspondent.
Dean, a baseball freak like Larry, took me to a game in Baltimore where we were sitting with a load of VIPs. Clearly in his element, Dean was very excited, and at one point, he asked me if I wanted a hot dog.
“Thanks,” I said, “but I think I’ll wait until halftime.”
He looked around to see if anyone else had heard my ignorant comment and then he looked at me like he had no idea who I was. At that moment, I realized that he and I would never make it as a couple because I had no idea that baseball had a seventh-inning stretch instead of a halftime. Believe me, I have never told Larry that story (until now), because there is no way he would get the humor in it. Rather, he might see it as violation of his chosen religion—baseball.
But I didn’t let my baseball-challenged personality deter me. It was obvious Larry and I were polar opposites, which could work in our favor. If he and I were exactly alike, I reasoned, the show’s topics could get boring and so could our relationship. As opposites, we would bring different things to the table and it would never get humdrum.
When the big meeting was approaching, I knew Larry was only seeing me to placate Tom Johnson (then CNN boss), but I also knew that I was far more qualified for the job than his other pick. Since I loved a good challenge and I really wanted the job, I kicked in and made a concerted push.
Before the meeting, I contacted some of the most influential people in my life so far, such as Ethel Kennedy, financier T. Boone Pickens, and George Bush, Sr., to name a few. I asked them to write recommendation letters for me and send them to Larry. They all complied. Gail Evans, who was head of CNN’s central booking unit at the time, touted me to Tom Johnson who was already pulling for me, so I had a lot of allies. Still, as a blonde WASP female with little to no interest in baseball, I knew I had to overcome the “Jewish sports guy.”
“I already have someone I want,” Larry told me immediately when we sat down for coffee at Duke’s Restaurant for the very first time.
“Okay,” I said, not appearing concerned. I was ready for him.
“But I did get your letters of recommendation,” he added.
“Oh, good,” I said. “What did you think?”
“I was impressed with the number of influential people you know and how they feel about you,” he said.
“Would you like more?” I asked him.
He looked deeply impressed as I went on to explain to him how much I wanted this job, what I was willing to put into it, and how much I disliked losing anything. He sat back, smiled broadly, and said, “I don’t need any more letters. I just made up my mind. The job is yours.”
Larry swears to this day that when I offered more endorsements, that did it for him. I believe he gave me the job when he saw how badly I wanted it and how competitive I truly was. And my contacts didn’t hurt a bit, either. When a host of a show is shopping for an executive producer, he and his pick are entering into a sort of marriage, in which they agree to talk several times a day every day, to make decisions, and to work out compromises together. The host needs to know that the producer is loyal, something that can only be proven with time, but he also needs her to be effective on the phone and to be on top of whatever is going on at any given moment. Basically, a host needs to know that his executive producer can pull off whatever she needs to, has all the right contacts, and always has his best interests at heart. I think Larry realized on that day that not only could I do these things but that I was eager, I had a healthy competitive edge, and I was ready to go forward right away. And did I have contacts!
As I began my new job, two things were foremost in my mind. The first was getting to know Larry, since he was so different from me. I needed for us to build trust, and I worked on balancing the two distinct parts of my job that sometimes clashed: doing what was right for the network and doing what was right for Larry. Today, I’m one of the few people who can say pretty much anything to Larry without offending him. He trusts me totally because he has learned that my criticisms come from a good place. And I always make sure he remembers how much I admire his work. That’s easy because I don’t think anybody else can do what he does, and I respect him for his ability to show up every night and give it all he’s got. People are eager to criticize him, because when he slips up, he does it publicly. But how many people do you know who could do a live show for an hour, five nights a week, for twenty-five years? Actually, no one. In fact, Larry just made Guinness World Records for the longest-running show with the same host in the same time slot on the same network!
Second only to getting to know my new boss was finding great guests for the show. Fate was in my corner, since two of my closest friends in the world are Palestinians named Sabih and Hani Masri, part of a famous Palestinian family who are as wealthy and influential as the Kennedys are in the United States. It just so happened that the Masris were close to Yasser Arafat, Palestinian leader and chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Arafat was labeled a terrorist in America, and I wondered what Larry would think if I got him an interview with Yasser Arafat himself? He never did interviews, but I had an in.
I had always considered Arafat to be one of the bad guys, and now I had the unique opportunity to hear about Israeli-Palestinian issues from a different perspective. I learned a great deal about those issues from the inside.
As we began to negotiate the terms to have Yasser Arafat as a guest on Larry King Live, I became privy to the security machinations that were necessary to keep this man safe. He feared assassination most of the time, so it was not uncommon for him to be moved from one place to the next several times during a night. I recall being at Hani’s Washington home where Arafat was staying. We had a Zen moment when we saw his outfit with his red headpiece folded on the bed, ready for a quick exit to the next place. Needless to say, his security detail was so rigid that it was difficult to get him to agree to an interview.
We got him, though, and Larry was excited. I could actually say that Larry was thrilled since all the other networks wanted this interview so much. I impressed Larry with this fantastic “get,” and we were off and running.
Everyone ag
rees that Larry and I are an interesting team, mainly because we are so different. But we have enough mutual respect to get along with each other and hear what the other has to say. There are days that Larry would prefer not to do a certain interview and I have to explain to him why I booked it. Ninety-nine percent of the time, at the end of such a show, he tells me, “Now I get why you booked that guest.” We usually see eye to eye in the end, we talk several times every day, and we tell each other that we love each other nearly every time we talk.
What most people don’t know about Larry is that he can feel anxious when he’s off the air. Imagine walking down the street and a perfect stranger calls out, “Hey, do you think the Lakers are going to win?” Everyone thinks they know Larry, and he tries to accommodate them by being kind and giving them an answer. But it does create stress that he has to combat. When he’s on the air, though, something overtakes him. It’s as if a miracle happens and he is endlessly patient, he sits still with no problem, and he feels and looks utterly comfortable in his own skin—characteristics of a true professional.
Of course, there are many times when Larry and I don’t agree. And there are times when we tease each other. He may call and say, “Wendy, we’re doing a show about Manny Ramirez tonight, right?”
“No, Larry,” I’ll answer. “We’re working on getting the octomom.”
“You’re kidding,” he’ll say.
“Yes, I’m kidding,” I’ll answer.
Our shared sense of humor, one of the few things about us that is similar, keeps us laughing at each other and ourselves. I remember a party at Larry’s house when, out of the blue, Don Rickles said Larry looked like a “Jew Buick.” Larry and I laughed our heads off.