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Ed Sullivan, who in his heyday affected Americans’ Sunday looking-and-listening habits almost as much as the Bible does, would scarcely have believed it. Sullivan—like Milton Berle, like Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca and other unchallengeable early claimants to niches in any television hall of fame—specialized in pure entertainment. So, with one notable exception, has every other ongoing television offering that has achieved conspicuous audience ratings of a size to make advertisers sit up and shell out. The exception is “60 Minutes,” a fourteen-year-old phenomenon of the medium which since 1978, after establishing itself in CBS’s Sunday 7-8 p.m. East Coast time slot, has been the only non-entertainment series consistently to attract a vast and seemingly unflagging following, not to mention some fairly sharp criticism and a number of lawsuits, including one that has come to the attention of the United States Supreme Court.
It is not hard to persuade people who have something to say or sell to appear on “60 Minutes”—an hour-long mélange of short documentaries, features, commentary, and sometimes even news, its varying-length episodes featuring Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Harry Reasoner, and Ed Bradley, who this past season took the place of Dan Rather. Reasoner, who has been a star of the show, on and off, since its inception, has chatted with the Pope in the Vatican. Reasoner also once had an amiable chat with some folk who were afflicted with venereal herpes and were glad to talk on camera about it. (It was a moment held by some television buffs to be almost as touching as the time Mike Wallace, a permanent fixture, appeared with a woman and her twelve-year-old daughter to inform the world that the little girl had been impregnated by her stepfather.) “People will come out of the woodwork for ‘60 Minutes,’ ” Reasoner says, “partly out of their belief that if there’s something wrong in their life Mike Wallace can fix it.”
Last season, while Reasoner was in Scotland to film a segment of the program, he was asked by a native in an Ancient Urquhart kilt what show he worked for. On being told, the Scot said, “I’ll drop my girlfriend in the States a wee note and tell her to watch that.”
“She probably does already,” said Reasoner.
Not all Americans do—only about forty million of them each week. Wallace was on location in Fairbanks, Alaska, some years ago and dropped in at a television station while an announcer was reading the evening regional news. During a break for a commercial, the local man thought it would give his audience a real charge—probably make the station’s switchboard blaze like northern lights—if the celebrity from the Lower Forty-Eight read the next block of copy. Wallace was happy to oblige. As far as Wallace knows, there was no discernible reaction, conceivably because he hadn’t sternly rebuked the evening news for not coming clean about whatever it was that it was doubtless trying to conceal from him.
During the 1979-80 television season, “60 Minutes” outdrew the lathery serial “Dallas,” and the two CBS programs have been contentedly jostling for the topmost ratings ever since. During the season that ended in April, the proprietors of “Dallas” were asking from advertisers, and getting, a hundred and seventy thousand dollars for thirty seconds of air time. “60 Minutes,” which has six minutes available for commercials, got a hundred and seventy-five thousand for thirty seconds. While the show is under way, restaurant employees who might at that hour normally expect to be staggering under trays can minister to their arches. “By now, people are arranging their Sunday lives for us,” it was recently asserted, without documentation but with satisfaction, by Don Hewitt, who orchestrated “60 Minutes” when it began, in 1968, and has been conducting it ever since. Hewitt professes to have an ear—both his ears are surmounted by a carefully teased coiffure—that is delicately attuned to the vox populi. “People talk about Ronald and Nancy Reagan and Alexander Haig and Billie Jean and Reggie and what was on ‘60 Minutes’ last week,” he likes to say, sometimes varying his dramatis personae but never his conclusion. “People will say, ‘O.K., we’ll go to Grandma’s for lunch on Sunday, but we have to be home and eat supper at six so we’ll be ready for Mike and Morley and the rest of the gang.’ Why, in Hollywood, I understand, people say to each other, ‘Do we watch at your house or mine?’ ”
Hewitt and his wife, ABC’s United Nations correspondent Marilyn Berger, usually watch at their home—either the city one, on Central Park South, or the country one, in Southampton. By any given Sunday, the paterfamilias, whose “60 Minutes” title is executive producer, will have seen most of the bits and pieces of that evening’s divertissement many times over. Looking at “60 Minutes,” in full or in part, has roughly the impact on Hewitt that standing at the edge of an unruffled pool had on Narcissus. Upon learning that a visitor to his office (framed on a table is a letter to Hewitt from William S. Paley, the doyen of CBS, extolling “60 Minutes” as “the most successful news series in television history”) had somehow lamentably neglected to see one Morley Safer episode a couple of years earlier, Hewitt tenderly inserted a cassette in his videotape machine, inserted an unlit cigar the size of a small vaulting pole in his mouth, and sat down to savor blissfully one of the fruits of his labors. “I look at stuff like this and I’m in awe,” Hewitt said. “I sit here the way Harry Winston must have sat when he looked at a diamond.”
At home, on Sunday evenings, Hewitt is happiest when he can scrutinize his jewels in a room full of friends. “I like to observe when their interest flags and when they perk up,” he says. “Where’s our competition? It’s not on the other channels. It’s the distractions in the household. The phone ringing, the dog barking, the neighbor at the door—that’s our competition. When Marilyn and I happen to be home alone, I get very edgy if she’s not out of the kitchen in time for the opening. It’s terrible if there’s nobody in the room when I say ‘Watch this! It’s terrific!’ Television is not like the movies. When you go to a movie, you make a commitment. Your dinner is over, you’ve paid your admission, the lights go out, you have only one place to look. If the movie’s no good, you don’t walk out. I can’t name anybody who’s walked out of five movies in his life. The worst thing you do is to turn to your companion and say, ‘Jesus, why are we here?’ But with television there’s no such commitment. People may walk out of ten shows a night. The thing you have to remember in this business is that you have no captive audience. Nobody has paid to see your show. Nobody has hired a babysitter just for you. I sometimes say that if in the middle of ‘60 Minutes’ a kid gets up and says ‘Daddy, will you help me with my homework?’ and Daddy says ‘Yes,’ I’m a loser, but if Daddy says ‘Wait till this is over,’ I’ve won. The most soul-searing experience I can imagine would be if somebody was watching the show with Marilyn and me and in the middle of it asked to have his drink freshened and somebody else got up and went and did it.”
Hewitt, who has accumulated five Emmy awards for “60 Minutes” and in 1980 was dubbed Broadcaster of the Year by something called the International Radio and Television Society, has long liked to be a winner. In 1973, his backhand sparklingly refreshed by a lesson from Pancho Segura, he betook himself to England to direct the CBS television coverage of Princess Anne’s wedding and, once in London, wangled an invitation to the august Queen’s Club, which boasts a spectrum of court surfaces. His host trounced him on clay. Hewitt proposed a shift to an all-weather surface. He fared no better. He enticed his adversary onto wood and then onto grass, but he couldn’t prevail anywhere. Hearty congratulations on his deft handling of the royal nuptials did little to assuage his grief.
Hewitt’s father was an advertising salesman for the Hearst newspapers; the son’s boyhood idol was Hildy Johnson, the ace reporter in “The Front Page.” He embarked on a journalistic career of his own in 1942, at nineteen, as head copyboy at the Herald Tribune, shortly after failing to win a promotion from freshman to sophomore at New York University. He did better in journalism, becoming a war correspondent in Europe. Then there were medium-level stints with the Associated Press in Memphis, with the Pelham Sun in Westchester, and with Acme News Pictures back in New York. In 1948, when it was still something of a novelty to own a television set, he landed a berth at CBS News.
From the outset, Hewitt felt comfortable working in the budding medium. “I am not an intellectual,” he has said. “I operate by my guts and my fingertips. Television is successful when you have a gut feeling about a show. It’s not what your eyes and your ears digest that counts; it’s the impact on your gut. I have a kind of sixth sense for seeing a piece of film and knowing what’s wrong about it and what’s right. I don’t articulate very well, but I can take a producer and an editor into a screening room and show them what’s wrong. I sit in that room and assume that I’m an ordinary viewer, and I ask myself what every television producer should ask himself about every production: ‘If I were sitting at home, would I look at this, or would I switch to a basketball game or would I simply turn the damn set off?’ ”
Hewitt spent sixteen years asking himself questions about CBS presentations of news. He ended up as executive producer of the Evening News. In 1956, he made history of a sort by flying over the sinking Andrea Doria in a Coast Guard plane with a cameraman and Douglas Edwards, who was then the network’s anchorman. Hewitt and his colleagues were the only reporters on the scene as the liner sank. When Edwards was superseded by Walter Cronkite, in 1962, Hewitt ran the Cronkite show. Hewitt fell temporarily from network grace in 1964, when he lost out in a not especially amiable power struggle with Fred W. Friendly, the then president of CBS News. Hewitt was shunted aside to produce documentaries. He won a modest shelfful of awards for these, but he was restless. He continued to think of himself—still does—as a journalist of the Hildy Johnson stripe. He fancied—still does—the kind of swaggering trenchcoat that hot-shot reporters always wear out-of-doors, and sometimes indoors. He is partial to theatricality. He sometimes refers to the star performers on “60 Minutes” as tigers, and to the offices near his that are occupied by Reasoner, Safer, Wallace, and Bradley as tiger cages. “The greatest thing about those guys,” Hewitt is apt to say, his eyes shining and his boots gleaming, “is that they’re the four biggest names in television and yet the easiest to work with. I remember when I was doing some show or other with professional actors, and how hard some of them were to handle. Then, one day, Paul Muni came along, and I was astonished at how coöperative this big star was. It’s the same with the tigers in my cages. I’ve always said that I’m a man on whom God in His infinite wisdom has bestowed Mike and Harry and Morley and Dan and now Ed, and has also bestowed perhaps enough common sense for me to know how to deal with this precious gift. There have been television shows about doctors and nurses and cowboys. ‘60 Minutes’ is a show about four reporters who play themselves, and it is thus more fascinating than Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing Woodward and Bernstein. ‘60 Minutes’ is a broadcast on which four reporters take the audience along with them on a story, almost a sharing of their notes with the audience.” (Several of the lawsuits that “60 Minutes” has engendered involve the refusal of his reporters to share their notes with anyone.) “Newspapers and magazines have overseas bureaus now, and their correspondents don’t have to travel everywhere. There are no Floyd Gibbonses or Lowell Thomases or Richard Harding Davises left on earth—except my tigers. Many people don’t understand what being an authentic correspondent means. When some bigwig government guy was going to China a couple of years ago, ‘60 Minutes’ asked to send a team along. Word came back from Washington that a camera crew would be all right but that there wouldn’t be any room for a correspondent. I said no thanks—that would be like asking James Reston to send his typewriter instead of himself.”
The three big television networks probably spend between a hundred and fifty and two hundred million dollars a year among them in a never-ending search for new and profitable prime-time programs. The start-up costs for “60 Minutes” totalled—in 1968 dollars, to be sure—thirteen dollars and forty-five cents, which covered sandwiches and coffee for four men who hung around CBS late one evening to slap a sample show together out of stock film footage: a couple of film editors, Hewitt, and his first tiger, Reasoner. Reasoner—who strayed from his cage to ABC but was recaptured, after a seven-and-a-half-year flight, from the jaws of Barbara Walters—was then forty-five. He had been at CBS News since 1956. (In the early nineteen-sixties, when tobacco advertisers were a force mightily to be reckoned with, Reasoner, who was a chain smoker—still is—had done one of the first major television documentaries on cigarettes and lung cancer.) He had earlier worked for the Minneapolis Times (for which he wrote drama criticism just after the Second World War), in radio, and for the government, spending three years in Asia as an emissary of the United States Information Agency. He has always had a strong sentimental streak and an insatiable curiosity. In Singapore in the fifties, reminded of Maugham, he made a pilgrimage to the Raffles Hotel to ascertain exactly what the glamorous ingredients of a genuine chotapeg were, and was soberingly disillusioned to discover that “chotapeg” meant merely a small whiskey and soda. On “60 Minutes” this past November, by which time he had become a more widely respected source of enlightenment than any government agency, Reasoner did an almost tear-jerkingly nostalgic segment on the film “Casablanca” and how it has become a cult movie. He himself, he recalled mistily, had first seen it in 1943, when he was in Minneapolis. After screening an excerpt from the film, he told his own television cult, in his familiar avuncular style, “Anyone who doesn’t know that that movie is ‘Casablanca’ may be excused from class, and please don’t come back without a note from your mother.” He went on, “Our romantic minds are a hodgepodge. . . . You never forget who you first saw it with. I wonder if she remembers. If she does, here’s looking at you, kid.” The kid involved, if she was still around and heard the legendary goodbye and remembered, kept mum.
In 1968, CBS had its regular television news programs, which in its view were analogous to newspapers, and it had its hour-long documentaries, which it compared with books, but it lacked a counterpart of magazines. Hewitt and William A. Leonard, then a CBS News vice-president in charge of documentaries, wanted to emulate Life and Look, large-circulation journals which concentrated on people. “I hate issues per se,” Hewitt says. “I’m not interested in the issue of environment but I’m interested in somebody who’s dealing with environment. To me, Noah will always be a more interesting subject than flood control. Or take the issue of school busing. At a dinner party one night in 1971, somebody asked me what I thought about that, and I said I really couldn’t express any opinion, because I’d bought my way out—my kids went to private school. But then I realized how we could do a story about it, and I phoned Mike and said, ‘Hey, let’s go to those members of Congress most vocal in their support of busing and find out where their kids go to school,’ and, of course, it turned out—as we showed in our piece ‘Not to My Kid, You Don’t’—that most of them had bought their way out, too.”
Hewitt and Leonard planned at first to emphasize the magazine nature of their embryonic project by depicting a page being turned. “We didn’t really have any idea where we were going,” Leonard said recently, just before he retired as president of CBS News. “I’d like to be able to say now that we were so smart back then that we knew where we were heading, but in fact Don and I didn’t have the faintest notion. We never dreamed that we’d end up with a candy factory, and that Don would become a guy who made sure that his producers and correspondents concocted enough bonbons and chocolates and nougats so that every week he could pluck one of each out of his inventory and pop them into his candy box and offer them to his customers.” Richard S. Salant, who in 1966 had succeeded Friendly as president of CBS News, was dubious about the prospects of “60 Minutes.” But he did let it go on the air—at 10 p.m. East Coast time, every second Tuesday, opposite NBC’s thumpingly popular “Tuesday Night Movie.” The new program could do CBS little harm in that spot, it was reasoned, because nobody was likely to be looking at it.
Hewitt still thinks of “60 Minutes” as a magazine, though the page-turning device was abandoned long ago. “When television began,” he says, “nobody knew what to call anybody, so they borrowed titles—producer, director—from the stage and the movies. Actually, there’s no resemblance at all between us and them. We’re all reporters and editors, and if I’m anything I’m the editor-in-chief of a television magazine. David Merrick and Ray Stark are producers—not me.” In line with that conception, when “60 Minutes” made its début, on September 24, 1968, Reasoner declared, “This is ‘60 Minutes.’ It’s a kind of a magazine for television, which means it has the flexibility and diversity of a magazine adapted to broadcast journalism.” He was heard only by the handful of people who had chosen not to get out of their chairs and switch to the flicks.
While getting that first show ready for presentation—it featured glimpses of Richard Nixon’s and Hubert Humphrey’s convention-hotel suites, and there was a comic cameo by Art Buchwald—Hewitt felt that he needed a supplementary reporter. Reasoner had a comfortable, old-shoe, or carpet-slipper, quality—he sometimes seems on air to be catnapping, and, indeed, once asserted off air that his ambition in life was to “sleep twenty-two hours a day, like a dog”—but the editor-in-chief wanted someone more abrasive to balance Reasoner’s soothing smoothness. And so Hewitt recruited Mike Wallace, who even then seemed to be the sort of fellow who might attend a high-school prom shod in spikes. During that première, Wallace became nearly poetic: “Our perception of reality roams, in a given day, from the light to the heavy, from warmth to menace, and if this broadcast does what we hope it will do, it will report reality.” Wallace now likes to refer to the early “60 Minutes” programs as “Mom-and-Pop shows,” and to say, “Harry was white hat, and I was black hat.” Wallace, who contends that in “60 Minutes” “I’ve got the best job in television journalism, bar none,” also contends that Reasoner, like him, has the ability to go for the jugular when that seems desirable, but he adds that when Reasoner does it he uses an electric shaver.
Wallace, who despite his widespread straight-razor reputation was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters by the University of Massachusetts in 1978, was no stranger to broadcasting when Hewitt sought him out. Born in 1918, he had gone to work for a Grand Rapids radio station in 1939 soon after receiving a modest B.A. from the University of Michigan. Aside from an appearance on Broadway in 1954 in the comedy “Reclining Figure” and a stint as a newspaper columnist, he had been a largely upright figure in radio and television for nearly thirty years. Today, the CBS correspondent Morton Dean calls Wallace “the engine that keeps ‘60 Minutes’ running.” When that vehicle was first being revved up, fourteen years ago, Wallace was by no means nationally prominent. The café singer Judy Wallace, on being asked in 1970 how she spelled her surname, would usually respond, “The way George does.” In time, she changed to “The way Mike does.” Reasoner, whose mother was Scottish, habitually recites the Gettysburg Address when a cameraman wants some footage of his lips moving but has no need of sound. When on other off-camera occasions Reasoner murmurs, “Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,” nobody thinks he is reciting poetry.
It sometimes surprises people that Mike Wallace, who is generally conceded to be the hungriest man-eater of all of Hewitt’s tigers, can also act the pussycat. Interviewing his longtime friend Buchwald on “60 Minutes” a couple of years ago, Wallace was as gentle as Howard Cosell chatting up Muhammad Ali, or Damon talking to Pythias. A careful man with a dollar (around the “60 Minutes” offices it is alleged that the only time Wallace ever bought his own cigarettes was when he got them for two or three dollars a carton while doing a piece on a black-market cigarette operation), he touched purringly on the subject of Buchwald’s astronomical income. Wallace asked, “How much does it all come to?” and when Buchwald parried with “I bet someone that’s what you’d start talking about, money” his friendly inquisitor dropped the interesting matter altogether. The closest that Wallace came during that particular interrogation to being tough was to say of Buchwald, “He never has a greater time than on a tennis court—not good, but earnest.”
That, of course, was not vintage Wallace. He can ask somebody “Where did you go to college?” and make it sound like an indictment. He may be the only person on earth in whose prosecutorial presence both the Shah of Iran and Ayatollah Khomeini have seemed to squirm. As “60 Minutes” has soared in audience ratings, so have Wallace’s arched eyebrows, reaching record heights of disbelief. His associates on the program affectionately call some of his contributions to it “the scam of the week,” and they chuckle fondly as they reminisce about his saying to an accountant who was purportedly mixed up in a cash-skimming scheme to avoid payment of taxes, “Look, between you and me . . . you do it, everybody does it,” and the flustered chap’s replying, for all the world to hear and see, “Yeah.”
Wallace, whose personal politics tend to be conservative but who while asking Nancy Reagan about welfare cutbacks can emulate a McGovern Democrat, does not visualize himself as Mr. Nasty. “You carve out your own style,” he says, “and it became quite apparent early on that I had a talent for and a yen to do a certain kind of story. So much the better that I’ve been successful at it, but when I think I’m doing too much of that sort of investigative thing I’ll turn to a Baryshnikov piece or a Buchwald. But as long as the work you do is fair and thorough and careful it seems to me there’s nothing wrong with being tough. Sure, I’m accused of entrapping people. I don’t have any police powers. Nobody’s ever been subpoenaed to go on the program. I did a piece once on a surgeon who let assistants perform operations his patients thought he was going to do, and there was a great hue and cry that we hadn’t levelled with the doctor about what we were looking for. Three weeks after the show went on, I was at the Cleveland airport, and across a waiting room I spotted the surgeon we’d supposedly maligned. I figured he’d at the very least ignore me, but instead he walked over and shook my hand and said, beaming, that since our exposé he’d got sixteen or seventeen new patients. You know, when it comes to being tough there’s heat for heat’s sake and heat for light’s sake. I like to believe that my advertised toughness is directed not at drama but at uncovering something that’s worth uncovering. If you’ve worked hard enough on your research, conceivably you can shed light on some fraud or malfeasance or miscarriage of justice that you wouldn’t uncover unless you did go at it pretty hard. If you’re doing a story on a phony doctor and you walk over to his office wall, as I did one time, and look at his so-called diplomas and say ‘Wait a minute, what are these institutions that these came from?’ that’s toughness with a purpose. A certain number of Americans have come to look upon ‘60 Minutes’—with reason, I honestly believe—as their ombudsman, shining a faithful light in some dark corners. And it’s my impression that our audience wants us to keep on doing that.”
In the early days of television news, CBS would sometimes have two of its correspondents cover different aspects of the same story—Edward R. Murrow, for instance, in Israel, and Howard K. Smith in Egypt. Hewitt liked that notion, and soon he had Wallace reporting the Protestant side of the struggle in Northern Ireland, and Reasoner the Catholic; Reasoner in Biafra during the Nigerian civil war, Wallace in Lagos; Wallace in Israel, Reasoner in Lebanon and Jordan. “Mike and I were scheduled to meet up at the Allenby Bridge,” Reasoner says, “coming from opposite directions, at ten o’clock one Friday morning, the year Joe Namath and the Jets won the Super Bowl. The Israelis wouldn’t let you photograph anything on your own side of the bridge, but my producer and I had been told you could shoot across it. Our idea was that my crew would shoot Mike, and his crew me. But Mike and his gang had heard you couldn’t do that, and they never turned up. They were probably playing tennis in Tel Aviv. I’d have felt much worse about the whole thing if I hadn’t won a bet from Mike on the football game.”
It was difficult, in 1969, for the still fledgling program to attract a steady audience. Because the CBS network hierarchy had what it perceived to be more important matters to contemplate, “60 Minutes” sometimes didn’t go on the air at all four weeks running. Not until December of that year was it presented two weeks in succession. In the fall of 1971, the network did decide to put it on at 6 p.m. on Sunday, but in the autumn months—at the start of the television season, when a regular audience might have been built up—it was often preëmpted by football games, which then stood much higher in the television pecking order. The future of “60 Minutes” was so uncertain that when Reasoner was invited to become the anchorman of the ABC Evening News he was glad to accept. (His contract with CBS was up for renegotiation, moreover, and that network didn’t appear to be overeager to meet his terms.) “I had long wanted a chance to anchor,” Reasoner says, “and even though I’d often substituted for Walter Cronkite when he was unavailable, there was little likelihood that he’d be run over by a truck, and no assurance that if he was I’d succeed him. So I became to the television news business what Andy Messersmith was to baseball. It was the first time a senior correspondent had jumped from one network to another simply for a new job and better pay.” Hewitt suspected that Reasoner would not be gone forever. After all, didn’t Harry continue, while he was off at ABC, to have his hair cut by a CBS barber?
To replace Reasoner, Hewitt reached out into the Canadian league and came up, in December, 1970, with Morley Safer. A thirty-nine-year-old alumnus of the University of Western Ontario, Safer had served his journalistic apprenticeship on small-town Canadian newspapers, and then worked for Reuters, and for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He had migrated to CBS News in 1964 and, after a stint in London, had been posted to Vietnam as head of the network’s Saigon bureau. (He bought a Bentley with his poker winnings there.) In 1967, because he had a Canadian passport, Safer was able to go to mainland China and come back with enough footage for an hour-long documentary on that still largely unexplored territory. Hewitt supervised the editing of “Morley Safer’s Red China Diary,” and they got acquainted. Hewitt’s interest in Safer perked up further when on November 10, 1970, Safer, by then back in London as CBS bureau chief, crossed the Channel following the death of Charles de Gaulle. The next day was November 11th, the anniversary of the end of the First World War, a day of both celebration and mourning. The Champs-Elysées was closed to traffic for the occasion. Safer strolled respectfully along the avenue, the Arc de Triomphe behind him and a camera crew in front of him, reading aloud from de Gaulle’s memoirs and pointing to historic places mentioned in them. CBS was impressed by the ingenuity of his coverage. William Leonard phoned Safer the following morning and asked him to take Reasoner’s place on “60 Minutes.” Safer demurred. He liked London. He had no reason to believe that there was much of a future for him, or anyone else, on Hewitt’s team. He finally accepted, but insisted that it be written into his contract that if “60 Minutes” fizzled he could have the London bureau back. Ten years later, he felt confident enough about the show’s durability to tear up the contract. Safer is acclaimed in inner “60 Minutes” circles not only as the program’s most consistently gifted writer—he is admired by his peers for once, in an income-tax story, having described some hookers as “industrious self-employed entrepreneurs”—but also as its paragon of ethics. Somebody he had done a piece on sent him a watch. Worried about keeping it, he phoned its manufacturer and, on learning that it was worth no more than a hundred dollars retail, stuck it in a desk drawer while trying to resolve his doubts. When he looked in the drawer the next day, the watch had been stolen. He was much relieved.
“Every program should have one sweetheart and one son of a bitch,” Safer asserted—half kiddingly—in an in-house film that was made about “60 Minutes” a while after he became Wallace’s co-correspondent. “Safer is witty. Wallace is crotchety.” Safer, he went on in jocular vein, smoked, drank, and chased girls; Wallace had only his memories. Wallace took it all with aplomb. The two were not really so strikingly dissimilar. When he is in the mood, Safer can be a fairly hard-nosed inquisitor himself, and a sardonic commentator. He once incurred the wrath of all serious aficionados of croquet by describing that sport as vicious. Safer’s investigative on-camera technique is a mite milder than Wallace’s—“I don’t want to probe, but . . .” is a characteristic Safer way of beginning to flay a captive victim but he can be forthrightly theatrical. In the course of a piece this past season on the Internal Revenue Service, in whose dread proximity “60 Minutes” correspondents never seem to flinch, an interviewee said to Safer, referring to a tax agent, “He took his finger and stuck it in my chest.” Safer reacted much as Wallace might have. He jabbed his finger at the man’s chest and said, trenchantly, “You mean he was doing that sort of thing?” Whether or not the gesture proved anybody’s culpability was moot, but it was the sort of performance that makes “60 Minutes” work.
The program has never fared as well in New York City as on the hustings. One reason may be that all its correspondents have come from somewhere else. Safer was born in Toronto; Reasoner in Dakota City, Iowa; Wallace in Brookline, Massachusetts; Ed Bradley, the newest tiger, in Philadelphia. (Bradley began working for CBS as a radio news reporter in New York in 1967. Later, he had been a correspondent for the network in Paris, Washington, and Vietnam.) Dan Rather, who joined up in late 1975, when Hewitt felt that Wallace and Safer were carrying too heavy a burden, hails from Wharton, Texas. While still a journalism undergraduate at Sam Houston State, in Huntsville, Texas, Rather did sports broadcasts and worked for the Associated Press there; and he stayed in Texas—working in newspapers, radio, and television—until he was in his early thirties. He moved to the Southwest bureau of CBS News in Dallas. In 1962, when President Kennedy was assassinated there the following year, Rather’s on-the-scene coverage won him instant national attention, and much more attention than he’d ever had before from the heads of his network. By 1964, they had made him their White House correspondent. He filled that post on and off for a decade, with side trips to London and Vietnam, and departed, voluntarily, after several spirited run-ins with the President whom to this day he describes—off camera, at any rate—as “the old unindicted co-conspirator.” Then there was a year making documentaries for “CBS Reports,” after which came the bid to join Safer and Wallace and expand Hewitt’s animal act into a three-tiger circus.
When, in 1980, a nation breathlessly waiting to learn who would step into Walter Cronkite’s shoes was informed that Rather would be the succeeding CBS anchorman the following year, he was naturally flattered. But he was loath to give up “60 Minutes.” He persuaded the network, at first, to let him stay with the show through half its 1981-82 season. Then the network persuaded him that, for one thing, such an overlap might prove awkward for his successor, Bradley, and that, for another, such double exposure could unduly tax even Rather’s established energy. So he bowed out. “I know it sounds corny,” Rather says, with uncommon diffidence for a Texan, “but I’ve been extraordinarily lucky. When I was at the White House, I thought I’d be lucky to hold that job long enough to put my kids partway through school. When I got to ‘60 Minutes,’ I thought I’d be lucky if the show just stayed around till the kids graduated. I missed the White House when I left it, and I missed ‘CBS Reports’ when I left that. Now I miss ‘60 Minutes,’ and I guess I miss that the most of all.” More than a year after that last move, Rather was still speaking of Hewitt and the others in the first person plural, and he watched the show every Sunday with the intensity of a onetime college football player rooting for his alma mater in a bowl game. “I jump from my chair and shout triumphantly when our pieces are particularly good,” he says, “and I go into a terrible sulk when they aren’t.”
Most long-running hit shows experience cast changes over the years—look at the orphans in “Annie.” Not long after the first Reasoner incarnation, Hewitt thought it would be diverting, and perhaps illuminating, to present, as a coda to his main selections, short debates between spokesmen for liberal and conservative views. Called “Point/Counterpoint,” this digestif featured Nicholas von Hoffman and, later, Shana Alexander to the left of center, James J. Kilpatrick to the right. The departure from the scene of “Point/Counterpoint” in 1979, by which time the adversaries had made just about all their points, left a gap, and Hewitt proceeded to fill it with Andy Rooney. Andrew A. Rooney, as he was chiefly known when he was merely a writer (an Army journalist in the Second World War, he was later the author of “The Story of The Stars and Stripes”), had been a friend and collaborator of Reasoner’s from way back, had come to “60 Minutes” with Reasoner, and left CBS shortly before Reasoner did. The contemporary Rooney, a comic philosopher whose aw-shucks style must be riveting, considering that a collection of his television reflections, “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney,” has been on the nonfiction best-seller lists, does not like to be thought of as an integral part of “60 Minutes”—just as a contributor to it. Hewitt and Reasoner and the rest of the crew have their offices at 555 West Fifty-seventh Street. Rooney insists on being quartered across the street, at 524 West, the main base of CBS’s news operations.
Aturning point in Rooney’s television career came in the early nineteen-sixties, when he was trying to convince Richard Salant that he should be given a chance to write and act out some essays. Salant, who was standing near a door, asked what sort of stuff he could do. “I can do anything,” said Rooney. “I can do doors.” He did an hour on doors, and he has since also done, in two or three minutes apiece, soap, corner druggists, candy bars, parking places, and magazine-subscription inserts. “It’s a good thing television doesn’t have commercials we could tear out,” Rooney said in that last one. “The living-room floor would be a mess.” One can get away with that sort of thing on a top-rated show.
One of Rooney’s first jobs with “60 Minutes” was as a writer and performer in a short-lived feature of the program called “Digressions.” “Two unidentified figures called Ipso and Facto, seen only in shadow, engaged in brief repartee. In February, 1969, for instance, following a segment in which Reasoner rather archly professed to be interested in buying the French-countryside estate of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, there ensued this colloquy:
That was all there was to it.
What made “Digressions” a relevant footnote to television history was less its inherent wit than that Rooney’s near-invisible accomplice was a one-time Borscht Belt actor named Palmer Williams. Until his retirement this spring, Williams was, next to Hewitt, the person most responsible for “60 Minutes.” He was Hewitt’s senior producer at the outset, later his managing editor, and always his alter ego. Off duty, they were as unalike as nuts and bolts. Hewitt patronizes fancy restaurants. Williams, whose grandfather, James Williams, once managed the Cleveland Indians, hardly ever wears a necktie, lives in Greenwich Village, and may be unknown to any maître d’hôtel north of Fourteenth Street. It is illustrative of their disparity that in nearly fourteen years of intimate, congenial, onerous association on the program they never once had dinner together after work.
CBS customarily gives any of its executives who survive thirty years in its employ a sterling-silver Tiffany tray. Williams, a native of Englewood, New Jersey, who went to Hollywood as a bit player instead of to college, got his tray last year. He would rather have had a gift certificate. Williams made Army films with Frank Capra and Garson Kanin (two of them won Academy Awards), and postwar government documentaries with Pare Lorentz. He joined CBS news in 1951, working alongside Hewitt on Murrow’s “See It Now.” Murrow has long been Williams’ idol; Williams was proud to have his “60 Minutes” office furnished with his hero’s desk, bookshelves, pen-and-pencil holder, and ashtray. Williams was visually oriented, and Murrow was a word man. Williams taught Murrow how to cope with pictures. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, Williams produced dozens of CBS documentaries, among them the return of Dwight D. Eisenhower to the beaches of Normandy on the twentieth anniversary of D Day.
Palmer Williams has been variously described by colleagues at “60 Minutes” as its linchpin, its cement, and (by Hewitt) its ringmaster. “ ‘60 Minutes’ couldn’t have existed without Palmer,” Wallace says. “At the beginning, already a television veteran, he knew everybody in the business—all the cameramen and film editors, and also all the airline schedules. He was the glue. The guy there day after day settling disputes, calming jealousies. The traffic cop. Moreover, he kept us focussed on hard stuff, issue-oriented stuff. He was the one who sensed all along that our most important franchise was investigating.” Philip Scheffler, an old-time “60 Minutes” producer, who has succeeded Williams as Hewitt’s second-in-command, calls his predecessor the program’s sounding board. “Palmer has an uncanny memory,” says Scheffler, who is also a thirty-year man, having come to the network as a copyboy in 1951 and worked his way up to a producer of the Evening News. “Somebody once asked me if ‘60 Minutes’ had ever done a story on such-and-such. I said I didn’t know—ask Palmer. So they did, and Palmer said, ‘Yes, Scheffler did it on such-and-such a date in 1974.’ ”
When Williams was abroad for “60 Minutes,” he always kept his watch on New York time, so he could be aware of what people back in the home office were doing, or were supposed to be doing, at any moment. Standing on a windswept Scottish moor one day, he surprised a companion by glancing at his wrist and saying, “Harry should be getting in a taxi just about now to head for the airport.” Reasoner is second to none in his admiration for Williams. “Palmer’s a unique man,” Reasoner says. “If I needed twenty thousand dollars in cash and two new camera crews in Tangier Tuesday morning, I’d ask Palmer and he’d say yes, and that would be that.” According to Morley Safer, “Anybody can handle the president of Exxon, but it takes a Palmer to deal with the second-string people who make things happen.” Dan Rather likens Williams, who has a ruddy complexion, snow-white hair, and a courtly mien, to a village priest. “Once, I was in a fallow period,” Rather says. “The bank of pieces I was supposed to have accumulated was low, and I wasn’t wild about the ones I was working on. Then Palmer came by and said, ‘I’ve been thinking. Why doesn’t Dan go to London for a while, where he’s done some good pieces, and get himself re-energized?’ Now, the rule of thumb at ‘60 Minutes’ is that you don’t take trips if your bank is low—you stay home and interview a congressman. But when I reminded Palmer of that he said, ‘Look, London’s your lucky city. Something’s bound to turn up.’ So I took off and went there, and came back with a couple of decent pieces and great peace of mind. That’s the sort of missionary work that Palmer would do. He soothed everybody and kept everybody going.” (Williams, despite his celebrated memory, has no recollection of the episode.) Williams’ ministerial manner helped douse a threatening conflagration last year when Wallace, on hearing that Safer planned to do a testy piece about Haiti, where Wallace’s wife has relatives, asked that the story be dropped. It was, but not until some sparks had flown around and singed Hewitt’s hair.
In December, 1975, not long after Rather boarded ship, CBS shifted “60 Minutes” to its 7 p.m. Sunday berth. Prime time—the evening hours that attract the largest number of television viewers—begins at seven and ends at eleven. Until 1975, the Federal Communications Commission restricted network programming to only three of those four hours. The F.C.C. wanted the hour between seven and eight reserved for the networks’ affiliated stations to devise their own programs. More often than not, they would put on local news from seven to seven-thirty and fill the remaining half hour with inexpensive canned game shows, interspersed with regional commercials. Then they would rejoin the network. In the fall of 1975, however, the commission expanded the hours of network broadcasting to four each evening (except Saturday) but on condition that the networks refrain from offering their affiliates anything that could be categorized as entertainment during the additional hour. Only children’s programs, documentaries, or public-affairs programs of a purportedly instructional nature would be authorized.
When “60 Minutes” moved into the seven-o’clock zone as the additional network-hour program, it had the public-affairs field all to itself. ABC was purveying shows such as “Swiss Family Robinson,” NBC “The Wonderful World of Disney.” That competition did not concern Hewitt and Williams as much as football. Professional-football games sometimes came on the CBS network at four, and about half the time they weren’t over by seven. The CBS brass considered them far more consequential than “60 Minutes.” If football ran over, “60 Minutes” would have to run short. Hewitt and Williams, during those uncertain fall and early-winter weeks, would despairingly prepare three versions of their show. On a typical Sunday, the briefest might be thirty-eight minutes long: if football got out of the way by seven-twenty-two, they could put on some sort of curtailed program. Williams, who would rather have been playing tennis, would sit grumpily at home Sunday afternoons looking at football, a stopwatch in one hand, a telephone near the other, so he could keep in touch with CBS Sports and also with Merri Lieberthal, his coördinating producer, who was up on West Fifty-seventh Street. (It is characteristic of how “60 Minutes” functions that when Lieberthal—whom Hewitt now calls “the Mommy of us all”—was a student at the University of Miami with a summer job at CBS and heard that Mike Wallace needed a secretary, she applied for the job and got it, though she was unacquainted with shorthand; since 1975, she has had her own office on Tiger Row. One ghastly morning a year or so ago, CBS mislaid its master tape of “60 Minutes,” though it did turn up before air time; ever since, Lieberthal has stashed away a duplicate, for emergency use.)
Williams became an expert at predicting when pro-football games would end. Stopwatch and phone at the ready, he would eagerly await the two-minute warning toward the close of a game—knowing, of course, that two minutes of playing time can amount to ten or more of actual time. Meanwhile, Hewitt kept beseeching his overseers at CBS to “bump the network”—that is, to let every prime-time show run its full length, starting whenever football stopped—but he was turned down. To do anything like that, he was informed, would mean that the eleven-o’clock news would have to be delayed, and the public would never stand for it.
Not long afterward, CBS statisticians made an astounding discovery: “60 Minutes” had become just as popular as football. That put everything in a different light. Now there was a sound commercial reason for bumping the network. From late 1976 on, accordingly, “60 Minutes” has been shown in its entirety whenever football finished up. In the world of television, “lead-ins” are important. Since “60 Minutes” had demonstrated its leadership quality, it could be expected to escort all the network programs following it—Archie Bunker and the rest—to higher ratings than they might otherwise have enjoyed on the evening that attracts more prime-time viewers than any other. “And nobody, to this day,” Palmer Williams says, “has ever been able to figure how it all came about.”
Andy Rooney, on the other hand, professes not to have been in the least surprised by the program’s surge to eminence. “There are five ways to titillate the public,” he says. “By talking about money or diet or sex or by drama or information. The one thing the television networks had never before seemed to comprehend was how big an appetite there was in this country for information.” Wallace, for his part, ascribes the success of “60 Minutes” to something that happened even before the program moved from six o’clock to seven. “I’m convinced that ‘60 Minutes’ got its first big nationwide audience because of the 1973 oil embargo,” he says. “Nobody had any gas for that Sunday-afternoon drive, and at six o’clock, when people were stuck at home and desperate for something to divert them, we came on.”
“One advantage we may have had over many other programs,” Williams conjectures, “is that we’ve seemed to appeal to all age groups. ‘Love Boat,’ somebody once told me, has to content itself with the eighteen-to-thirty-eight crowd, but we have this spread from retirees to school kids. Some of the latter, to be sure, frequently have to look at us, because their teachers assign us to them. We get letters from students who’ve missed a show begging us for a transcript so they can do their homework.” About ten per cent of the program’s audiences are believed to be under seventeen, conceivably because Hewitt, unlike many television impresarios, declines to pander to juveniles by, say, presenting in-depth interviews with Billy Joel or Kiss; he prefers Katharine Hepburn or Vladimir Horowitz. “60 Minutes” may appeal to at least part of every age group, but when it comes to economic categories there is some evidence that it has more blue-collar devotees than white-collar. Some years ago, Safer visited Lordstown, Ohio, for a story on the General Motors plant there. He dropped in at a United Automobile Workers meeting, where he was tendered full celebrity honors, complete with numerous requests for his autograph. His next stop was at a conference of high-level motor-industry executives, few of whom appeared ever to have heard of him or his program.
That wasn’t Safer’s only confrontation with the auto industry. On a subsequent occasion, Safer and Philip Scheffler went to Detroit to do a story on auto emissions. They hadn’t much wanted to do the story in the first place. Richard Salant had urged it upon Hewitt. “Morley and I really tried hard,” Scheffler said afterward. “We worked on the piece for two weeks, and then we cut what we had and showed it to Don, and he looked at it and said, ‘That’s the worst story I’ve ever seen in my life.’ Morley and I were so relieved we applauded. But Salant had wanted it, and he was running News. So we went back to Detroit and reshot, and Don said he thought that version was a little better, and he showed it to Bill Leonard, who was over us but not quite as far over as Salant, and Leonard thought that was terrible. So Morley and I gave up. But I was feeling bad about all the time and money we’d spent on it. I called the producers of the Morning News and said, ‘I can cut you a nice seven- or eight-minute piece on automobile emissions,’ and they said, ‘Fine.’ I did it in a day, and they put it on, and I figured I was a hero. I’d amortized the effort. Salant was out of town, and when he came back he looked at a list of what had been on the news, and he called Leonard and said, ‘What was Morley Safer doing on the Morning News?’ Bill said that that was the auto-emissions story—that it hadn’t been good enough for ‘60 Minutes.’ The upshot was that Salant sent around a memo saying, ‘I do not want the Morning News to be a dumping ground for “60 Minutes” rejects.’ ”
Whereas in the 1970-71 season, its third on the air, “60 Minutes” ranked one-hundred-and-first in prime-time ratings, and whereas by the 1975-76 season it still stood no higher than fifty-second, by November of 1978 it had climbed—for one week, at least—to first place. Over a fifteen-week period toward the end of the following year, “60 Minutes” was ranked first six times and finished lower than third only once. As president of CBS News in 1968, Salant had been lukewarm, even cool, about launching it. By the end of 1981—such are the vagaries of the television industry—he was vice-chairman of NBC. That network had thrown together “NBC Magazine” in an attempt to capitalize on the manifest magnetism of “60 Minutes.” Late that year, “Magazine,” pitted against ABC’s “Benson” and “Bosom Buddies” and CBS’s “The Dukes of Hazzard,” had just been rated sixty-ninth, among seventy-one prime-time programs. (It has since been scuttled.) “60 Minutes” had been rated first, and, according to Variety’s account of what Hewitt recently told an international broadcasting conference in Milan, it was earning its bemused network, which does not expect to make much money on the news, fifty million dollars a year. Salant proved himself a sporting loser. From his precarious aerie, he dispatched a telegram to Hewitt that read, “See, Don, I told you it would never work.” ♦
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