This is the second part of a two-part article. Read the first part.
The success of “60 Minutes,” the most widely watched non-entertainment series in television history, is often attributed to its investigative portions, and especially to the hard-hitting, inquisitorial approach of Mike Wallace, who has been with the show since its début, on the CBS network, in the fall of 1968. Wallace, to whom no cow is sacred (he once chastised CBS itself for treating television critics to junkets), said not long ago, in a rare moment of self-doubt, “Investigative reporting raises serious questions”—one of which, he went on, was “Is it right to confront reluctant witnesses with camera and microphone?” Whether it is or not, the public appears to like it: Wallace is more given to confrontation than any of his colleagues on the program, and in a recent year he got much more mail than any of the others. Even the relatively blasé members of the “60 Minutes” staff, viewing one of Wallace’s sorties for the first time at an in-house screening, are apt to get carried away and utter cries of approbation and encouragement, as bullring aficionados might urge on a favorite home-town matador.
In the view of Palmer Williams, who recently retired after thirty-one years with CBS, the last fourteen of them as deputy to Don Hewitt, the founding father and continuing generalissimo of “60 Minutes,” the ideal components of the current version of the show—occupying an hour on Sunday evening—are one Mr. Nice Guy episode, one Mr. Fun Guy, and one Mr. Bad Guy. The program’s regular correspondents—Wallace, Morley Safer, Harry Reasoner, and Ed Bradley (who took Dan Rather’s place this past season when Rather attempted to become Mr. Cronkite)—are not strictly typecast. Anyone of them can, on any given program, take telling potshots at a chosen target. Wallace, though, is more often than the others the heavy artillery. When Russell Baker, in one of his syndicated columns, fantasized about his home’s being besieged by “60 Minutes” while he was trying to toast a piece of bread, he was given a fairly rough time by, seriatim, Reasoner, Safer, and Rather, but it was Wallace alone who accused him point-blank of being a toaster batterer.
“60 Minutes” has been accused of picking on little people—sometimes with hidden cameras—who, unlike Baker, can’t strike back. One of the program’s twenty-three full-time producers, Al Wasserman, who began making documentary films in 1946, says, “I don’t mind our being tough on people when it’s deserved. Bullying people is something else again. Sometimes there’s a fine line between the two. I think it’s rare that little people are persecuted on it. When we’re tough, it’s usually because we have the research to back us up, and we’re being tough on what people represent rather than on them as individuals.”
Not always. When Morley Safer, who is most frequently a Mr. Nice Guy, did a where-are-they-now story in 1977 on the young woman whose weeping photograph at the Kent State massacre more than six years earlier had made her pictorially famous, one of the questions he asked her was “How old were you when you first accepted money for sex?” A much more characteristic Safer piece was an extravagantly eulogistic one about another woman—a black Chicago schoolteacher named Marva Collins, who in a makeshift school in her home was introducing ghetto children to classic literature ordinarily alien to the neighborhood curriculum. Thanks to “60 Minutes,” Mrs. Collins, whose achievements would later be criticized as overblown, became a national celebrity (she was able to rent a building with space for classes from kindergarten through the sixth grade), and an independent television producer embarked on an account of her career. Truth may not always be stranger than fiction, but it would appear sometimes to be stronger. When the dramatized story of Mrs. Collins’ life and work was presented—also on the CBS network—last December, as a Hallmark Hall of Fame special, it hardly caused a ripple, coming in a sorry fifty-second among seventy-one prime-time programs receiving ratings that week.
Of the one hundred and five episodes shown for the first time on “60 Minutes” in its 1979-80 season, twenty involved exposures of one swindle or another. “A con man doesn’t think he’s made it till he’s been on ‘60 Minutes,’ ” Safer says. At least one con man is known to have made it without being on the show. Some six years ago, Hewitt was approached by a journalist, seemingly of impeccable character, and an acquaintance of his, a chap who claimed he’d been a teamster and a prison mate of Jimmy Hoffa’s. The journalist’s acquaintance also knew where Hoffa’s body was encased in cement in the ocean off the Florida coast. For ten thousand dollars, in cash, “60 Minutes” could have exclusive rights to the story. Money in hand, the journalist and his informant left for Florida, and Hewitt dispatched a camera crew to the South for a rendezvous at a motel. The “60 Minutes” delegation had barely checked in when it learned that the intermediary had phoned New York with the news that his acquaintance had absconded with the money in the middle of the night. Hewitt has been leery of checkbook journalism ever since.
To expose alleged flaws in the social fabric, “60 Minutes” has more than once engaged in its own version of underhandedness, though never yet on the sweeping scale of, say, the F.B.I. In order to demonstrate how easy it is to obtain fraudulent credentials, the program had one of its researchers make the rounds of various agencies. In no time at all, with a camera crew trailing discreetly in her wake, she had obtained a birth certificate, a Social Security card, a driver’s license, a food-stamp card, and a passport, none in her own name. With such solid identification documents, she had no trouble persuading shopkeepers to accept worthless checks for more than six hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise. (Some time after that, “60 Minutes” was advised by the widow of a man who’d stolen a million dollars and fled with his loot to Central America that he had used ten aliases and had learned how to get documentation for them from watching the show.) To demonstrate frauds in the Medicaid program, “60 Minutes” set up a phony clinic in a Chicago storefront, and entrapped rascals who represented medical laboratories and offered kickbacks to doctors and clinics. The proprietors of “60 Minutes” regard the show as a sort of national ombudsman, and they justify such duplicities on the ground of pro bono publico. Still, there have been qualms. Andy Rooney, a kind of latter-day Will Rogers, who has been associated with the program, on and off, from the outset, said not long ago, “I think ‘60 Minutes’ has skirted close to ethical impropriety. I occasionally produce segments for the show, and one of them concerned a large government grant to a university out West that was studying the ecological impact of a proposed resort development. I went out there, and I mocked the ridiculously high-flying reports of some academic sociologists who were anti-government and anti-bureaucracy but had nonetheless gladly taken some nine hundred thousand dollars of federal money, and they came out looking just terrible. It was an accurate piece, and an honest one, but I destroyed those guys. I felt bad about it afterward. We could have made it softer on them than we did.”
Rooney also believes that “60 Minutes,” even though it is under the aegis of CBS News, sometimes comes perilously close to the edge of entertainment. “The division between news and entertainment is sometimes a very narrow one,” he says. “It’s like two guys on a camping trip sleeping together in the same pup tent and being careful not to touch each other lest they become suspect.” Hewitt, of whom it has been said that his genius lies in making reality seem fictional, prefers a bowling analogy. He speaks of approaching the line that separates news from show business and making sure that one’s toe never crosses it. “I’d be the last to deny that ‘60 Minutes’ has a certain theatricality,” Hewitt says. “If adding a dash of theatricality without diminishing the integrity of our reporting is a necessary ingredient to make the transmission of information more palatable, I don’t see anything wrong with that. But if you overdramatize you lose your integrity.” Even the best bowlers—occasionally on television—now and then overstep their line and foul. So does “60 Minutes.” But it can, and periodically does, confess its own fallibility. In a Reasoner story about a nuclear electricity-generating plant that the Illinois Power Company was building, the program said that the company was asking the state’s Commerce Commission for a substantial rate increase to pay for the plant and that the staff of the commission had recommended that the increase be denied. But, as “60 Minutes” later contritely conceded on the air, half of the increase that the company had asked for was unrelated to the plant’s construction costs, and, further, a few members of the staff of the commission had opposed only that part of the increase that was related to the construction costs.
For all the program’s intrusiveness into other people’s business, in the nearly fourteen years of its existence none of its field operatives has been physically hurt while flushing game. Usually, when an emissary is regarded as objectionably nosy not much more happens than a yell—at, say, Mike Wallace—of “Get the hell out of here before I throw you out!” If the quarry yells it on camera, so much the better. In Europe last summer to produce a piece on Switzerland, Wasserman did a program on the youth gangs that were roiling that nation’s traditional tranquillity. He and a film crew went to a youth center in Zurich, and a group of young people there tied them up, covered them with red, white, and black paint, poured ketchup over them, and destroyed their film. Such is the éclat of “60 Minutes” even in parts of Europe, however, that a Swiss with a videotape machine was on hand to record the Americans recording their story; and as a result Wasserman, once he had got himself unbound and tidied up, was able to phone New York and tell a colleague that he thought the footage of the assault was available to CBS for a not unreasonable fee.
Success—half a dozen Emmy awards in 1980, another six in 1981—begets envy, and envy begets criticism. “60 Minutes” has acquired plenty of both. It has been accused of being superficial—of harassing petty miscreants and avoiding big issues. “What about Poland, El Salvador, nuclear armaments, coal miners, abortion, E.R.A., Atlanta murders, James Watt, Puerto Rico, and South Africa?” an irate woman wrote in not long ago. “Is there really no public interest in these issues? Come on!” Palmer Williams has a prodigious memory, and he was able to remind his colleagues offhand that within the last few years they had tackled two-thirds of the subjects on that list—all except the E.R.A. (they had begun one on that but abandoned it), the Atlanta murders, and South Africa—and would have taken on South Africa if that choosy country had let them in. “Some people refuse to believe that we’re not under constant corporate pressure to lay off certain subjects because of our sponsors,” says Philip Scheffler, who has succeeded Williams as the program’s senior producer. “That’s pure hogwash. We don’t even know in advance who our sponsors are going to be from week to week. The only bone the network throws to sponsors is that if we’re doing a piece on, say, the malefactions of the automobile industry the order of commercials may be changed around so that one for a motor company doesn’t appear directly before or after our attack.”
Whenever the question of the program’s dodging issues comes up, Hewitt retorts that “60 Minutes” is less interested in issues than in their effect on individuals. Thus, the program’s way of dealing with invasions of privacy was, first, to obtain from a California couple all their cancelled checks and credit-card records covering a one-year span, along with their bank statements. Then Scheffler, the producer of that segment, gave all the documents to a private detective in New York and asked him to construct solely on the basis of that evidence as full a description as possible of the couple and their life style. The premise was that a government agency, if so inclined, could probably also obtain access to this information, and that the banks involved would not necessarily tell the people concerned that they had furnished it. “It was eerie,” Scheffler says. “Our detective came up with the damnedest picture of those people you could imagine, including the kind of liquor they drank and how much. He even deduced, correctly, that the husband had once been convicted of a traffic violation while driving another woman’s car. We called the piece ‘None of Your Damned Business’ and presented invasion of privacy in a way that people could understand. "
Around CBS, “60 Minutes” is sometimes called the Candy Factory, because, in the opinion of its boosters, week after week it serves up an assortment of sweets, enticingly varied, like a sampler box of chocolates with surprises on every layer. In the opinion of some of its detractors outside the network, the factory manufactures an overabundance of sourballs. Critics argue, sometimes heatedly, that the producers of the show often edit their material (what journalists do not?) to emphasize points they want to make, and that of all the material they collect while pursuing a subject they often use (as most journalists do) merely what they judge to be the most dramatic. They have been charged with creating drama, moreover, where it did not inherently exist. A member of Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s staff once contended that while Wallace was doing a piece on the second-class status of Arabs in Israel his sound man encouraged an Arab boy to throw a stone at an Israeli military vehicle, in the hope of provoking retaliation. (Wallace vigorously denies that either he or any member of his crew was a party to any such shenanigans.)
Wallace and Begin had already had a bristling dispute on camera.
“How can you ask me these questions?” the Prime Minister demanded.
“I’m a journalist,” said Wallace. “You don’t have to answer them.”
Williams produced a Scotch-whiskey story last season. (He is a thorough researcher. While the piece was still far from distilled, a guest at his New York house asked for a Scotch-and-soda, and was offered a choice of ten brands his host had been studying.) In Scotland on a preliminary reconnaissance, Williams learned that some trade unionists were thinking of going down to England and picketing a golf tournament, because it was going to be sponsored by Suntory, and because Scottish distillery workers were angry that large quantities of their pure malt whiskey were being shipped to Japan for blending instead of being processed at home. Williams asked a labor leader if there really was going to be a visible protest.
“We’ll picket if you’re there with cameras,” Williams was told.
“If you’ll picket, I’ll be there,” he said.
They did and he was.
Another time, a “60 Minutes” crew was in Turkey, doing a piece on narcotics. The film they brought back showed some police racing down a street, leaping out of their vehicles, and, at the precise spot where they stopped, digging up a sidewalk. Presto!—they uncovered a cache of drugs. It was all too pat. The scene almost had to have been rehearsed. When Hewitt examined the pictures in a screening room, he was convinced of that. But after some deliberation (he deliberates fast; it took only a few seconds) he decided to use the sequence notwithstanding: the cops were real, the drugs were real, and that the flinging of the one upon the other might have been a trifle staged only enhanced the drama of the discovery.
The most blistering attacks on the program’s authenticity and probity have been delivered by an archconservative group in Washington called Accuracy in Media, which likes to be called aim and has a bright-red target on the first page of a semi-monthly bulletin it puts out, seething with indignation. “60 Minutes” is one of aim’s favorite targets, as evidenced by such headlines in its publication as “ ‘60 minutes’ aids iran’s militants,” “ ‘60 minutes’ pushes pot legalization,” and “you can’t trust dan rather.” In early March of 1980, by way of background to the hostage crisis, which was then entering its fifth month, Wallace devoted a “60 Minutes” episode to American support for the Shah’s regime, including savak, the secret police that had extensively engaged in torture of political prisoners. Wallace wanted his audience to understand Iranian hatred of the United States. aim said, “The theme of this widely viewed CBS News program was that the terrorists who hold our diplomats prisoner and the Ayatollah Khomeini are right. . . . It was as if ‘60 Minutes’ had infused new life into their dangerous drama. If so, the hostages can thank Mike Wallace for helping to prolong their agony.” aim was delighted when the Illinois Power Company took umbrage at Reasoner’s account of its nuclear-power-plant troubles and made a videotape of its own entitled “ ‘60 Minutes’/Our Reply,” nearly three thousand copies of which have been distributed in this country and abroad.
And then there have been lawsuits. The surprise, considering the accusatory nature of so much of the show, is that there haven’t been more of them; “60 Minutes” spawns only a few each year. Just as the program is frequently urged merely to proclaim its intention of doing a story about some perceived injustice—the theory being that the threat will produce swift ameliorative action—so persons and organizations distressed by their perception of ill treatment on the show threaten to hale it into court, hoping thereby to get at least an abject on-air apology. Few such threats are followed up, though sometimes things are taken a stage further, as in the case of a Pasadena, California, institution called the Worldwide Church of God, whose leader bought full-page newspaper ads (“Why, Mike Wallace, did you not tell the plain truth?”) to vent his spleen. One municipal official in Wyoming initiated a sixty-three-million-dollar suit after Dan Rather suggested that, inter alia, the official condoned prostitution; but the plaintiff did not pursue the matter very far, and ended up by asking Rather for a reference in the course of seeking another job. When “60 Minutes” did a story on some individuals who had been indicted for fraud in connection with the granting of franchises, the defendants’ attorneys demanded access to the show’s outtakes—the film it shot but never used—and other materials in the hope that these might bolster the defense. The request went in due course to the Court of Appeals, which decreed that the network had to furnish to the District Court judge who was presiding over the case only those materials that might impeach the testimony of prosecution witnesses.
So far, “60 Minutes” has never lost a lawsuit. One that is still pending, and that has been in litigation since 1974, involves a retired Army officer—Lieutenant Colonel Anthony B. Herbert, a much-decorated veteran of Korea and Vietnam. The producer of some of Wallace’s more bruising episodes, Barry Lando, planned originally to present Colonel Herbert as a hero. But in the course of his research Lando came to think of Herbert’s glitter as somewhat tarnished, and he emerged in a different light. Colonel Herbert was miffed. He sued Lando, Wallace, CBS, and the publisher of an article by Lando about Herbert for forty-five million dollars. That dispute reached the Supreme Court, which in 1979, in a Herbert v. Lando decision that could have long-term repercussions for journalists in all media, decreed by a six-to-three vote that a public figure seeking to establish malice has the right to inquire into the state of mind of anyone who has allegedly defamed him. Wallace has estimated—CBS lawyers will neither confirm nor deny the amount—that the network has already spent somewhere between three and four million dollars defending this one suit alone. Whatever the exact outlay, CBS would probably be less sanguine about having had to part with it if in the last several years “60 Minutes” had not provided the network with nearly a hundred million dollars annually in advertising revenue. “We give ‘60 Minutes’ a lot of leeway,” one of the network’s lawyers said recently. “After all, there are those great ratings.”
The first show of the season just ended scored a highly commendable Nielsen rating of 20.6, which meant, according to the arithmetic peculiar to television, that it was seen in nearly seventeen million households by thirty-one million people. That was an especially unusual achievement, because the program was a very special one: an entire hour devoted to an examination of “60 Minutes” itself and its ethics, aptly called “Looking at ‘60 Minutes.’ ” Probably no other panel show in television history has drawn that kind of crowd. Don Hewitt appeared on the program in the nattily dressed flesh, and among the panelists recruited to quiz him were Herbert Schmertz, the Mobil vice-president in charge of that company’s extensive corporate advertising, and Robert Greene, an editor of Newsday and a past president of the organization known as Investigative Reporters and Editors. aim was not invited. That such large numbers of people would sit through a whole hour of a discussion of journalistic ethics may have been attributable less to any profound national interest in the subject than to an unshakable interest in “60 Minutes” itself. There was a discussion of the feature on fake I.D.s—a Wallace-Lando concoction that they had undertaken, it came out, with the encouragement of the director of the United States Passport Office—and another panelist, the Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, remarked, “You’re saying that in the pursuit of deceit, deceit is O.K. That as journalists we have the right to use untruths because we are going for a greater truth.” Still another panelist—Eugene Patterson, the editor of the St. Petersburg, Florida, Times—had misgivings about that. “If this becomes the standard for news coverage in America, for television and print journalism, then we have set a standard that young reporters are going to follow,” he said, “and misrepresenting oneself, misleading, camouflaging one’s identity will become a way of life, whereas we supposedly stand for different virtues.”
Toward the end of that hour, the television commentator Jeff Greenfield, whom “60 Minutes” had drafted as moderator for the occasion, asked Schmertz, the Mobil man, “Why does any company talk to ‘60 Minutes’?” and Schmertz replied, “First of all, some people think that they’re the ones that are gonna beat the system, whatever that system may be. On occasion, I’ve believed that, not necessarily successfully. Secondly, frequently you say, well, they’re going to do the story anyway and if I don’t participate I’m gonna look worse than if I do participate, so I have to participate and do the best I can.” Mike Wallace, the only one of the show’s regular correspondents to take part in the colloquy, then asked Schmertz, without a trace of truculence, why he had joined those proceedings. The oil man said, “Well, I felt that this was a very important show. To my mind, this is a landmark show for ‘60 Minutes,’ Mike. The fact that ‘60 Minutes’ is eager to have . . . these kinds of things, I think, is an amazing development. It’s a landmark, and I think you’re gonna see more of it. And you all are to be congratulated for doing this show.”
Greenfield, who then drew one of the program’s few on-air laughs by interjecting, “Well, that’ll get on,” had said earlier, “If I, as a sometime media critic, hired a camera crew to infiltrate and put a camera in the offices of ‘60 Minutes’ to show how you guys got a story and you found out, I really don’t think that you would accept this as an investigative entrepreneurial reporter. I think you guys would hit the ceiling. . . . You go in to cover a story, it’s your camera, it’s your microphone, it’s your producer, and ultimately it’s Don Hewitt, you, and whoever else is responsible. You guys decide what gets on the air, and I guess the question is: How would you like it done to you? How would you like somebody to point a camera at you that you didn’t know was there, confront you with embarrassing material, perhaps about a life you once led or something you once did?”
Wallace, who more recently participated in an hour-and-a-half-long “CBS Reports” documentary on Vietnam that came in for so much criticism that the network spent six weeks investigating the probity of its own program, rejoined, “I wouldn’t like it,” and he scored one of the program’s few other laughs by adding, “Which is why I lead a life beyond reproach.”
Avisitor who managed, with or without camera, to get by the uniformed guards who patrol the flanks of the “60 Minutes” offices, above a Ford dealership on West Fifty-seventh Street, would find himself in a swirl of amiable chaos. Although there is a central blackboard neatly listing all the stories completed and in progress (an investigative reporter from a rival network would certainly relish a squint at that), the over-all atmosphere is one of unrelieved disorganization. “We don’t have meetings around here,” Hewitt once said. “If you have meetings, your show looks like a meeting.” (There is a sheet, called “Insights,” that purports to disclose where everybody connected with the program is each week, but it is less than infallible; it has been known to place a correspondent in Angola when he was having lunch down the street.) What Hewitt and his collaborators do have is corridor confrontations. All hands are in constant motion. Everyone is on a first-name basis with everyone else, and most of the time everyone appears to be shouting simultaneously up or down a hallway that Don or Phil or Morley or Harry or whoever has a phone call. To be in one’s own office when a call comes in is, it appears, to lose face. (If Hewitt, a man of untrammelled enthusiasms, happens to be in his office, looking at a piece of videotape, one may hear him shouting “Great! Great!”—which is what he says about almost everything he looks at until he decides to change it or to throw it away.) Some visitors who have penetrated the perimeter have expressed wonder that these manic peripatetics can contrive to come up every Sunday with any kind of show at all.
Most one-hour drama programs on television cost between five hundred thousand and a million dollars to put on the air. “60 Minutes” costs about three hundred thousand, exclusive of reruns. “If you had to buy our show from an independent producer, like Norman Lear or the Mary Tyler Moore organization, the price would be astronomical,” Williams has said. “60 Minutes” has only seventy or so full-time employees. (It shares some camera crews with other CBS News offshoots), of whom eighteen are film editors and twenty-three are producers. When David Brinkley was running “NBC Magazine,” he said that on his program producers were not going to run the show; reporters were going to make their own decisions. That attitude may have been one reason that “NBC Magazine” never got off the floor. “60 Minutes” is emphatically a producers’ show. “The producers are the unsung heroes of ‘60 Minutes,’ ” Wallace says. “It’s only a small oversimplification to say that they are the dray horses and the correspondents the show horses of the team.”
A “60 Minutes” correspondent will deal with twenty-five or thirty topics a year, and will seldom devote as long as two weeks to any one of them. A “60 Minutes” producer will deal with six or seven, sometimes spending two or three months on a single one. Jeanne Solomon, a producer based in London, maintains that one of the chief problems she and her fellow-producers come up against is how to corral a correspondent—she used to produce for Rather and now works with Bradley—for enough of his precious time to get a piece completed. “You have to book these guys like opera singers,” she says. “Sometimes you almost have to call up a subject you’ve been working with and say, ‘You’re going to have to miss your mother’s funeral Thursday, because my correspondent is going to be in town and is going back to New York Friday in order to make it to Fiji over the weekend.’ ” Long before a correspondent arrives, his producer may have finished three-quarters or more of a piece in which he will ultimately seem to be the protagonist. Occasionally, by design or by accident, a producer may put together an entire story with no correspondent even in the vicinity. William McClure, who, like Solomon, works out of London, was in Poland last December, paving the way for a Harry Reasoner story, when martial law was declared. Reasoner couldn’t get in. McClure got out with a batch of film he had already shot about the tense situation there by switching his exposed film into cans marked “Unexposed.”
Of the twenty-three full-time staff producers (Hewitt and Williams have taken a whack at producing, from time to time, to keep their hand in), seventeen are stationed in New York, two in Washington, and three in London, while Barry Lando, a leading agent in the Wallace Bureau of Investigation (Lando once carried a forged Cézanne, a copy of a painting that had been stolen from the Chicago Art Institute some months earlier, from New York to Montreal, by way of proving how easy it was to spirit purloined art across international borders), lives in Paris. “Producers are the be-all and end-all of everything that happens on this show,” Williams has said. “They are twenty-three skilled entrepreneurs, who do a great deal of research—we have only eight researchers, for all of them—and collar people for interviews and arrange schedules and beat their correspondents over the head all year long. Good camera crews and good editors improve pieces, but it is the producer who does the donkey work at every level, and it’s his neck that’s out. If his cast—and that includes his big-name correspondent—doesn’t perform up to expectations, it’s a blot on the producer’s escutcheon.”
The four producers based in Europe profess to have a harder time of it than their domestic counterparts, because “60 Minutes” is generally less well known abroad than it is at home. Safer and his man in London, John Tiffin, went to southern Africa some months back for a story about Sun City, the Vegas-like gambling and sex resort to which God-fearing Afrikaners flock in the never-never land of Bophuthatswana. Sun City books high-priced night-club acts. Frank Sinatra had just left. The Osmonds had just arrived. A South African public-relations man who appeared to be in charge of things gave the “60 Minutes” contingent short shrift until one Osmond sibling, spotting Safer, asked him for his autograph.
The producers have had varied backgrounds. Tiffin, McClure, and Greg Cooke were once cameramen, Joseph Wershba was a newspaper reporter. Wasserman came out of documentary films, Martin Phillips and Suzanne St. Pierre out of research. At the moment, “60 Minutes” has five women producers. “Five women isn’t parity,” says Miss St. Pierre (who is also Mrs. Eric Sevareid), “but it isn’t tokenism, either.” Even so, the program has been criticized from time to time as a predominantly male bastion, or club. (It has its clubby aspect: there always seems to be a backgammon game going on in some producer’s office in New York, and the rattle of dice mingles with the cries of “Don!” or “Phil!” as some harried secretary—all the secretaries are female—tries to summon her superior to his desk phone.) Every time there has been a vacancy in the cast of correspondents, and especially when Rather left for the Evening News, there has been talk of engaging a woman—Barbara Walters and Hewitt’s wife, Marilyn Berger, have been among those mentioned—to redress the program’s sexual skew. The CBS hierarchy may have felt that in choosing Ed Bradley, who is black, to replace Rather, it was satisfying the equal-opportunity demands of at least one often put-upon faction.
Rather had never been characterized as either a Mr. Tough Guy or a Mr. Nice Guy; the principal sobriquet he had picked up was a snide one—Gunga Dan—bestowed on him by some armchair disparagers after he made a plucky eleven-day hike into the hills of war-torn Afghanistan. “I don’t know how to classify myself,” Bradley said soon after he was picked for the team. “Somebody once called me a utility player, and I regarded that as a high compliment. Nobody in this business does what Mike does as well as he does it, but I guess I can knock down a door and browbeat somebody if I have to. If I have a strength, it’s the ability to get people to talk. I’m a good listener. When you listen well, people tend to talk more. Mike is great at that. A person will give him an incomplete answer, and Mike won’t say anything, and the other guy will rush to fill the silence. Or Mike will persuade him to with nothing more than an ‘And?’ or a ‘But?’ ”
Bradley, a now forty-two-year-old graduate of Cheyney State College, in Pennsylvania, had never worked with Hewitt, or Wallace, until all three of them were assigned to the 1976 Presidential Conventions. “I’d majored in elementary education at Cheyney State,” Bradley says, “and I hadn’t taken any courses in journalism. Working alongside Mike was like taking Advanced Journalism 907.” By then, Bradley was hardly a neophyte. He had been stationed on three continents for CBS News since joining the network, in 1967, and had been aboard one of the last helicopters to leave Saigon when the United States decamped. Later, he had done a documentary on Vietnamese boat people for “CBS Reports,” and, because that show had a much tinier audience than “60 Minutes,” Hewitt had reused some of his footage. Toward the end of 1979, Bradley heard that he was being considered for “60 Minutes,” but he wasn’t sure he wanted the job if it was proffered. Then on March 7, 1980, he decided he did. He typed “Go for the gold” on a sheet of paper. A few days later, he was tapped. He now has that homemade fortune cookie impaled on his office bulletin board, not far from a gargantuan letter signed by all the pupils in a third-grade class of the Fernbrook School, in Randolph, New Jersey. Their teacher, Elena Mastroianni, had written Bradley a fan letter about a story he had reported on the Sunday Night News, which he anchored for several years before joining “60 Minutes,” and he had replied, and she suggested to her students that they write to Bradley, this time at six-foot length, to tell him all about their gerbils, Pumpkin and Rascal, and particularly to let him know that Pumpkin had had five babies and had eaten two of them. “We learned what the word cannibalism means,” the third-graders reported. As a onetime elementary-education major, Bradley was impressed.
The recently retired president of CBS News, William A. Leonard, never ceased to wonder at Don Hewitt’s unfettered enthusiasm. “There is a Peter Pan quality about him,” Leonard says. “After fourteen years, he keeps sailing in through the window every morning.” Bradley was diffident at first about working for this whirling sprite. “I had heard that Don could be difficult to get along with,” he says, “but after a while I could see his genius—those marvellous bursts of energy, those machine-gun-like explosions.” Hewitt is a precisionist. He and Bradley once spent five minutes in a cutting room solemnly debating whether the word “each,” in a story about teen-age crime, sounded better than “every.” (Hewitt also said at one point, “Leave out that ‘twelve tons of guns.’ I don’t know if anybody knows what twelve tons is.”) Later, Hewitt told a bystander, “In television you can’t edit something till you hear it. I rarely look at the pictures when I’m editing a piece. I just listen. There are those who say I do too much dramatic coaching, but what I’m really doing is just editing writing. It’s the pauses and inflections I listen for as much as anything. They’re the punctuation. They’re what commas and semicolons are in print.” Confident as he is of his own editorial judgment, Hewitt likes to have it reinforced by people whose opinions he believes might be germane. For example, when he is about to scrutinize a piece that one of his producers has done on a theme dating back a generation or so—a Bradley recapitulation, for instance, of the saga of Rudolf Hess—Hewitt, who is fifty-nine, solicits the reactions of a couple of members of his staff who were born well after the Second World War was over, and to whom Hess is a name that, if it is familiar at all, is out of ancient history.
Once Hewitt, perhaps seconded by a secretary or a switchboard operator, has given a piece his imprimatur, it is shown to a CBS vice-president, Roger Colloff, who is a non-practicing lawyer with gilt-edged historical credentials—an M.A. in history from Yale—and who puts the News Division’s stamp of approval on every portion of “60 Minutes” before it is broadcast. Colloff considers it a testimonial to the program’s universal appeal that his ten-year-old daughter often used to sit through it with him at home when she could have slipped upstairs and tuned in Walt Disney on NBC. “In the tradition of commercial advertising, it’s atypical for anything to last as long as fourteen years,” he says. “Yet with ‘60 Minutes’ you have something that people go on and on watching and talking about and writing letters to.” In 1980, nearly seventy per cent of the mail that the CBS News Division got about its programs was about “60 Minutes”—almost a hundred thousand letters that year. (Quite a few of these receive no acknowledgment beyond a printed reply from the Director of Audience Services of the CBS/Broadcast Group, which reads, “Our 60 minutes staff receives many requests for assistance in personal matters. Much as they would like to be of help to the members of our audience, we regret to say that it is not possible to provide such a service. The primary function of 60 minutes is to report on topical subjects of newsworthy importance; its staff must therefore concentrate its efforts and resources on the preparation of material for on-the-air use. Although we cannot help you, we hope that you will find assistance through other avenues.”) In that same year, while Walter Cronkite was presiding over the Evening News, Mike Wallace got much more mail—those who wrote to praise or to blame were about evenly divided—than Cronkite did. One reason that “60 Minutes” attracts so much correspondence, of course, is that the program, like Commentary and Penthouse, makes some of its mail public. The hope of having some forty million people listen to one’s eulogy or invective is a powerful epistolary goad.
A Harry Reasoner show called “Bloody Ivory,” about the slaughter of Kenyan elephants for their tusks, prompted a ten-year-old boy to write (conceivably with parental assistance), “When I grow up I am planning on trying to save some of the elephants, but now I don’t know if I can. I think if people don’t do something by the time I grow up, there won’t be any elephants left to save.” A fifteen-year-old girl wrote (probably without guidance but perhaps with tongue in cheek), “After seeing Harry Reasoner’s report on the killing of elephants for their precious ivory, I realized I’m as guilty as all the rest. I have decided to change soaps.” An adult woman sent along a check for twenty-five dollars made out to “Endangered Species,” which may have eventually been cashed, though several months after it arrived it was still languishing unprocessed in a heap of correspondence on Palmer Williams’ desk, not far from a fancily inscribed canoe paddle that somebody had mailed him years earlier in a fruitless attempt to pique his interest in a story about calligraphy.
“The public perceives us as an institution that keeps telling it, ‘This is the truth—let the chips fall where they may,’ ” Williams once said. “We get letters all the time saying, ‘Even if you can’t do a story on corruption in our town, wouldn’t you please just call the Mayor and say you’re thinking of doing one? That could help us.’ ” A characteristic letter may begin, “Dear Sirs: No doubt you receive many letters touting ‘great’ ideas.” They do. During one recent week, suggestions drifted in from a Maryland physician who wanted it known that doctors were inadequately trained to treat alcoholics; from a Seattle lawyer who hoped that the program would rally to the cause of a man who he said was imprisoned on a false rape charge; from a Texas realtor recounting a dastardly mortgage swindle; from an Ohio father lamenting that he couldn’t visit his children, who had been awarded to his ex-wife in a custody battle; from a Colorado billboard proprietor complaining that he had lost twenty-one signs and considerable income because of his state’s compliance with the Federal Highway Beautification Act; from a California woman outraged that she had been fired from a costume-making job because she was allergic to lint; from a Virginia teacher of Spanish who was sore because her class had found twenty-seven mistakes in a Spanish-language booklet distributed by the Postal Service to warn Hispanics against mail fraud; and from a New Mexico woman perplexed at having been told at a department store that she couldn’t buy some plants she coveted because they were going to be thrown away for a tax credit. “I have never heard of anything so wasteful in my entire life,” she sputtered.
If to insiders it is the producers who keep “60 Minutes” ticking away, to the general public it is the correspondents—Hewitt likes to call them his tigers—who tell the time. Asked once what he and the other reporters were like behind the scenes, Safer said, “Harry and I are the ones who smoke, the ones who drink, and the ones who read.” Safer, who is generally regarded as the most literary of the crew, insists on writing practically every word he utters on camera. By contrast, Rather once said that he had as little to do with composing his scripts as King James had with translating the Bible. Trying to define the correspondents in family terms, an observer once called Safer the educated cousin, Rather the rough-and-tumble brother-in-law, Reasoner the jovial old uncle, Bradley the younger brother back from school, and Wallace the incorrigible kid next door who will probably never grow up. The correspondents do share one trait: they all enjoy participating actively—sometimes vigorously, sometimes even riskily—in whatever story they are reporting. “I like pieces where I do things,” Reasoner says. His audiences have been able to observe him zooming through the air with (before their recent fatal crash) the Air Force stunt fliers called the Thunderbirds; gunning his engine at a training school for police-car drivers; perched on an outrigger canoe in the Philippine Sea; vainly swinging a bat at cannonball pitches hurled past him by a woman softball wizard; shooting pool against a hustler (on being asked why he had appeared on the show, Reasoner’s antagonist said, “So I could say hello to all the people that I have—I shouldn’t say robbed, but I will”); and sampling Swiss wines with Craig Claiborne. Reasoner was lucky in that last one; he didn’t have to stand up until the cameras shut down. Once, Reasoner carried participation beyond the demands of performance. He had done a piece on the doping of race horses with Butazolidin, a drug that could inspire drooping, lethargic animals to prance and sprint. Just afterward, he strained a muscle while pulling on a new pair of boots. A doctor gave him a prescription that, when Reasoner had it filled, turned out to be bute. In a few hours, he was frolicking like a colt.
Week in and week out, “60 Minutes” audiences have come to expect to see Rather skin diving or playing basketball, Bradley in the open gondola of an ascending balloon, Safer at the wheel of a racing car, Wallace playing middling tennis with Johnny Carson or pitting himself against some East German running enthusiasts. Once, when Reasoner was doing a story on panhandlers, Wallace materialized at the very end and said, “Pardon me, sir, I-I wonder if you could let me have a hundred dollars for lunch at ‘21’?” and Reasoner retorted, “Why don’t you get a decent job, like me?” That was supposed to be funny, of course. As a rule, the correspondents do not compete, jestingly or otherwise, on air. They have had their petty offstage rivalries, inevitably, but these are seldom more pronounced than the disagreements that might crop up among members of a team that has made it to the World Series or the Super Bowl. When Reasoner had a memoir published last October 1st, with a substantial advance sale, Wallace couldn’t resist stopping by the author’s office the next morning to report that he’d just seen the book on a remainder table at Barnes & Noble. Watching Morley Safer watch “60 Minutes” one Sunday evening, an acquaintance noticed that when an episode of Safer’s came on, with which the correspondent was obviously familiar, he put on his glasses and leaned forward; when a Wallace episode, which Safer hadn’t seen before, came on, he leaned back and took his glasses off. Once, in a feature about Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., then the head of the National Urban League, Wallace was portrayed asking some black people on a busy street corner in Brooklyn if they’d ever heard of Jordan. Not altogether surprisingly, half of them hadn’t. On a subsequent program, Rather read—with what appeared to be singular glee—a letter from a viewer who said he’d asked ten people if they’d ever heard of Mike Wallace; three had, six hadn’t, and one thought he’d ridden Pleasant Colony in the Belmont Stakes.
Some months ago, Palmer Williams, in a farewell sortie as a producer, was in Edinburgh on his Scotch-whiskey piece. Reasoner was slated to meet him there one night, after taking the Concorde from New York to London. His flight was diverted from Heathrow to Gatwick. He could have caught a British Caledonian flight from Gatwick to Edinburgh, but there wouldn’t have been time for him to retrieve his luggage, so he holed up overnight at a hotel. Somebody asked Williams (this was before Bradley had come aboard) what the other correspondents might have done in similar circumstances. “Mike would have abandoned his bags and jumped on British Caledonian,” he said. “Morley would have either taken a train north or phoned John Tiffin to come out from London and fetch him and on the way to London he’d have berated John for the foul-up. Dan would have waited for his luggage and chartered a Learjet to Scotland.” Once, Rather had had a date to interview the Prime Minister of Malta, but owing to some airline crisis or other had arrived at Valletta while his luggage remained in Italy. He had nothing fit to wear, so the then manager of the CBS News bureau in Rome, Patricia Bernie, had indeed chartered a plane to deliver his gear. It cost five thousand dollars. When a CBS vice-president later asked Palmer Williams to explain that expense-account item, Williams told him, “You don’t want to know about it.” A producer on a less highly rated show might never have got away with it.
Except in July, when all concerned usually take a month off—Safer in a Spanish retreat without a television set—the correspondents are in frenetic transit. Wallace was standing in a chemical dump near Stockton, California, when he learned he could have an audience with Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. He didn’t have his passport with him. He picked it up in London, after a flight over the Pole, from his secretary, who had ferried it across the Atlantic for him. Once, Rather popped into a telephone booth to call Hewitt in New York, and when Hewitt asked where he was phoning from Rather popped his head out and asked a passerby. The passerby gave him an odd look and said, “The Atlanta airport.” When Reasoner heard about it, he remarked, “That would have been a fairly good guess without asking. One or another of us is almost always at the Atlanta airport.”
Recently, when Rather was musing on his nostalgia for “60 Minutes,” he said, “What I don’t miss is the travel. My last year on the show, I must have spent eight or nine months on the road. It wasn’t until I moved to the Evening News that I realized how tired I was from hanging around some airport at eleven-fifteen at night wondering when there would be a flight to Salt Lake City or Damascus, or wherever it was I was supposed to be next. Sometimes I would regard it as an accomplishment merely to get to my destination—and that could be dangerous, because I was expected to bring back some good material, not simply my intact body. Just before I left the show, Don was talking to a few of us about possible successors, and the key question we asked about every man or woman whose name cropped up was about durability. The job requires a kind of peasant stamina.” Bradley may have got the nod in part because he had been overheard saying, “I don’t mind sleeping on floors. Sometimes that’s fun. I always prefer a table or a bench to plain ground, though, especially when the ground is muddy.” Safer has spent so much of the last decade in rented beds around the globe that he has turned his enforced incarceration into a hobby. He has had an exhibition of paintings he has done on a single theme—the interiors of motel rooms. Reasoner, for his part, collects what he calls damning-with-faint-praise signs; his whole week was brightened when, one rainy evening in Glasgow, he espied “english cooking at its best.”
Hewitt’s stable of producers and correspondents provides him with about a hundred new stories a year. Inasmuch as three of these are usually broadcast every week (whole hours have been devoted only to cancer, heroin, international terrorism, gun control, and “Looking at ‘60 Minutes’ ”), and the program comes on fifty-two times a year, there is a considerable annual shortfall of material. In late April, May, and June, accordingly, only one new piece is usually presented each Sunday; the two others are reruns. In July and August, the entire program is made up of repeats. “It would be ideal for us to be thrown off the air for two months every year and to come back in the fall with a brand-new lineup,” Williams said shortly before his retirement. “In the early days, we could count on being preëmpted every so often by ‘The Wizard of Oz’ or some such thing. But we became such a striking commercial success that we could never get any air time off. Our audiences are so loyal by now that they don’t seem to care what we put on; they’re evidently willing to sit through things they’ve seen at least once before.” (A letter that came in after a rerun of “Bloody Ivory” went, “Your story produced the same effect on me as the last time you showed it. I cried.”) Sometimes viewers see pieces more than twice. A story on Gibraltar that was initially broadcast in December, 1972, was resurrected in January, 1976, and again in May, 1980; for all anybody knows, it may turn up, Orwellianly, two years hence. When Williams and Reasoner were preparing their Scotch-whiskey opus in October of last year, the correspondent wanted to put the age of one distillery, accurately, at a hundred and fifty-six years. The producer demurred; he suggested that Reasoner use a round number, since the piece would probably be shown again in the future.
Reruns can create problems. In 1969, Williams produced a feature on an Englishman who had mysteriously disappeared during a round-the-world single-handed sailing race. Reasoner was the narrator. By the time the piece was scheduled for reuse, Reasoner, who would eventually return, like a rerun, had long since departed for ABC, and Rather had arrived. A new soundtrack was made, with Rather reading Reasoner’s lines. Just before Reasoner left, he’d had an interview with Federico Fellini, which hadn’t yet been run at all. To salvage that piece, Safer’s voice was substituted. Nobody seemed bothered—Fellini’s own reaction is unknown—even though one unmistakable Reasoner laugh had to be left in the Safer version, because it coincided with a picture of Fellini that couldn’t be snipped without destroying a crucial sequence.
One of the places outside the United States where “60 Minutes” has been shown in its entirety is Tel Aviv, where an enterprising showman bought the right to screen it in a hotel. Some Israelis wanted to see the program partly so that they could gaze at events—civilian casualties in Lebanon, say—that their censors ban from indigenous television. Colonel Muammar Qaddafi once arranged to watch a “60 Minutes” account of life in Libya, via satellite, at the same moment that it came on the air in the United States, even though the program was broadcast at two in the morning his time and though he couldn’t have much relished what he saw and heard. Abroad and at home, on networks and on local channels, there has been a plethora of imitations of “60 Minutes,” but none have attained more than modest ratings. Hewitt and his cohorts have also been vexed by impostors, who believe they can obtain access to an individual or a company by feigning an affiliation with the program. A sheriff in Texas once phoned New York to check on the authenticity of a camera crew that was at the Mexican border filming an immigration story for, the sheriff thought he’d been told, “60 Minutes.” Hewitt took the call in Williams’ office, where he was watching Scheffler play backgammon. Somebody yelled at somebody to look at the central blackboard. There was nothing on it, or in the latest “Insights” bulletin, that appeared to relate to the Mexican border The sheriff, on being so informed, was about to clap the camera crew behind bars when its director got to the phone and explained that they were from a CBS-owned station in Chicago and that the contretemps was a misunderstanding. “I told them we were doing a ‘60 Minutes’ type of show,” he said. Hewitt let him off with a warning.
In September of last year, the CBS network itself, with more than a little fanfare, launched a half-hour program that resembled “60 Minutes” in some ways. Called “Up to the Minute” and running five days a week, it featured, a week at a stretch, Ed Bradley, Harry Reasoner, Morley Safer, and Mike Wallace. As a further come-on, Bob Keeshan, who as Captain Kangaroo had his own robust following, showed up for a minute or so. The reporter sat in a studio and chatted with assorted panelists about issues of the day—abortion, school busing, nuclear proliferation. He never left his chair. The show was a flop. Halfway through a fifteen-week run, the producer of “Up to the Minute” received notice that the program would not be renewed. Why a program with four proved stars doing much the sort of thing they were widely acclaimed for doing should have fared so miserably may be attributable in part to its sedentary nature. Hewitt’s tigers didn’t prowl or pounce. They didn’t participate. Even so, the quick demise of “Up to the Minute” puzzled a lot of people. The longevity (perhaps immortality—who knows?) of “60 Minutes” has puzzled people, too, not least Don Hewitt. “I don’t really have any idea why people watch us,” he says. “Maybe it’s because they like the show. Maybe it’s because they just think they ought to watch it. I don’t understand it at all.” ♦
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