- Hi, I'm Hermene Hartman, and I wanna welcome you to N'DIGO STUDIO.

I am so excited today because we've got an exclusive interview with a legend, a legend of broadcast journalism.

He's written a book.

He's got a fabulous voice.

And you have seen him shape the news for Chicago as he has witnessed history as he has given you the news.

-I see history as a series of stories "MUSIC" It was the sixties!

When a new culture usherd in free love drugs and protest.

That many thought would change the world.

I measured history by covering trials.

of the century.

Conspiracy seven.

Serial killers like Ricard Speck, And Charles Benson.

Angela Davis.... And when 25 bodies were discovered.

Buried in a peach orchid In /Yuba City California.

Chernobyl blew the roof off A nuclear power plant.

Poaching was pushing African Wild life toward extinction.

And Muhammad Ali revealed he Did have Parkinson disease.

After onehundred seventy five thousand punches.

to the head Before they were history, they were stories Stories that I covered.

He's the face you've trusted for decades, and he's the voice you've heard while anchoring the news here in Chicago and also nationally.

He narrates national stories and has presented some of America's most impactful documentaries, 500 to be exact and still counting.

He is Mr.

Bill Kurtis.

N'digo Studio, N'digo Studio Funding for this program has been provided by Illinois Student Assistance Commission, Community Trust.

CineCity Studios, Lamborghinis Chicago, Gold Coast and Downers Grove.

Commonwealth Edison and Broadway Chicago - Bill, thank you for being with us.

But thank you for writing the book, "Whirlwind".

- Oh, it is my pleasure and honor to be here and to talk about it.

- All mine.

So let's talk about your career.

Your career started with radio.

- It did.

- KIND in Independence, Kansas.

Tell us about starting in radio and how you got to TV in the first place.

- It was the only radio station in town.

When I was 16, I went down and got a work license, and then started probably the best three years of experience that I ever got.

- Three years in radio.

- Yeah, yes.

You know, I was in high school and had a nice mentor, the general manager.

And every time we'd make a mistake, we'd hear it.

He lived in an apartment at the end of the hall and knew.

On the floor with the radio, we'd hear that door slam.

"Oh, here he comes and he's gonna chew us out."

But he was a sweet guy.

Learned everything from queuing up records to Rippon reading newscasts.

And what you do is you get the nervousness out.

You have to get experience somewhere.

And so you get to be a friend of the microphone and the situation.

- Then you went to television as a weather reporter.

And on your first day on the job, you covered the worst tornado ever.

And five words really launched that career.

- Well, you're very wise to pick those up.

Five words.

- Give me those words.

- For God's sake, take cover.

- All right, now you learned something, too, with that.

You said that you crossed the line between being objective and being personal.

But because you said that, you probably saved lives.

- Had a lot of people call in, write in saying, "You did save my life."

Because I had to get people into the basement.

I had um... I was studying for the bar.

I went to law school, I had just graduated.

And I had worked through the TV station part-time job.

We all have to have it.

A friend asked me to fill in for him on the six o'clock news.

I did.

Seven o'clock rolls around.

The general manager said, "Well, why don't you stay?

"We have some high winds coming in from K State "in Manhattan, Kansas."

So I did and heard this radio cut in, in the studio and broadcast.

And it said, "A tornado on the ground.

"It's big, and it's on the western edge of the city."

Now, we don't immediately go on the air with an alert or alarm.

We wanna confirm that.

Because they usually go up, dissipate.

Well, it did not.

So the second one said, "It's wiped out the Huntington Apartment Complex, "200 luxury apartments just built."

So I drew a line between those two points, and they pointed exactly to the Capitol Building in Topeka in Kansas.

And the law school, the whole university there, and, you know, residences and shopping malls, churches, the stuff that a city is made of.

And I knew that I was standing in the place the place at the time where what I said was going to mean life and death, and so give it the word, 26 years old, looking right in the camera.

I thought about cussing, crying.

Hysteria was welling up because suddenly the pressure of having to tell the truth now, you can't run away from it, your feet are in concrete, from the gut.

"For God's sake, take cover."

And I think the sincerity got through.

Honesty.

And yes.

- You just said, you were a lawyer.

You were studying for the bar, you passed the bar.

You had even signed up for a law firm.

- [Bill] Yes, I had.

- So you had to make some choices between lawyer and news.

And news?

How did you go through that decision making, go through that process for me?

You go to law school for 3 years.

and you say, "Hey, you know, I've done all this time.

"Maybe I ought to be a lawyer."

But I've also got 10 years experience from my early radio days to part-time TV in TV.

And it was 1966.

And you could see that network television, especially news, was just growing, just beginning.

Edward R. Murrow had come outta World War II.

But they were still very influential in radio.

- And- - Walter Cronkite.

- Walter Cronkite had started.

And I thought, thought, thought, really was working on it and decided, "Well, I'll practice law."

And so I accepted a job with a trial firm.

And they had me pegged as a good trial lawyer.

And all of a sudden, the tornado comes through and I realize what a responsibility it could be.

A broadcaster, what you say can affect people's lives, sometimes life and death.

So I said, "Sorry, law.

"I'm not gonna do you at this time," and decided to stay in broadcasting.

- It caught your attention.

- Sent my tape out.

WBBM-TV here in Chicago hired me.

John Medit.

And within 3 months then, I was leaving the devastated.

city of Topeka.

I mean, eight out of ten, classroom buildings were destroyed and down to the ground.

It was from the tornado.

From the tornado.

And it took him 30 years really to build it back.

But I was pulling a U-Haul trailer behind a rambler and my wife and child in there and headed for the Emerald City.

She'll tell you of Chicago.

And the funny thing is that I had experience in radio and, you know, kind of minor experience in TV, but, um, not a lot.

- So I walked into the studio, in the newsroom at Channel 2.

And they said, "Well, you're a lawyer.

"Why don't you cover this case."

-To those who were around Lester, in 1966.

The hunt for Richard Speck is remembered like Pearl Harbor Or the Kennedy assassination.

An unforgettable moment In time.

People stayed home, they were afraid to go outside.

It was basic police leg work That finally paid off, And the help of a tiny witness To the killing of eight young women.

The one student nurse speck missed!

- This was your first story.

This was your first case.

This was the Richard Speck story.

- Richard Speck.

- A serial killer.

- Yeah.

And so I covered that through the trial of six months.

And it was quite a baptism.

- But you were the only lawyer, only reporter lawyer, only lawyer reporter in the courtroom.

So you had an edge.

- Yes, I did.

You're wise; you're a wise lady.

You picked that up.

And I walked in as the reporter, you know, standing.

I was the new guy.

Didn't know anybody.

But I knew the law, and I knew something had to change.

- That was that experience.

- And it was, you know, here is a guy who had paralyzed a city.

The entire population was scared to death.

- So let's tell that story.

trial out of the city.

So tell, let's tell that story, because everybody's not going to know what we're talking about.

- He got a tip that these student nurses were without security, living in an apartment away from the bar where all the Merchant Marine people just hung out.

So one night, he was high on drugs and he went over and climbed into the apartment through a window that was open and waited, waited like a snake, while each one came home.

And as they came through the door, he would grab them and ask them for money or something like that, and then kill them one by one.

- Killed each one of 'em.

- Well, what he did not know was that this young girl, Corazon, was hiding under the bed, saw the whole thing.

So he put her in an apartment and kept her secret for a year, 24-hour police protecting her.

And she walked in the day of the trial, and he said, "Is the man who committed these crimes sitting here?"

"Yes, he is."

"Who is it?"

She points a finger at Richard Speck and said, "That is the man."

Then walked over to him almost to within arm's length.

Very, very dramatic.

Not that the trial was filled with the reporters because there were a couple other things that happened, that only the lawyers would appreciate.

But I did.

One, two, landmark cases happened, were handed down right in the middle just as the trial was beginning.

I mean, here was maybe one of the great mass murderer trials.

certainly one of the trials of the century, and it could be blown apart by one.

Ever heard of the Miranda rules?

You, what you say, may be held against you.

Now, you'll find it in every television.

So, well, that came from the Supreme Court.

And in the research, I went back and I said, did Spec get his Miranda warning?

I don't think he did.

But nobody cared because they wanted to kill him so badly.

And then there was a fair trial, free trial, a fair trial press issue, also handed down by the Supreme Court, where a trial in Cleveland was just really tried in the newspapers, and they called it a Roman holiday that was jeopardizing the innocence.

Not that he was innocent, but you know, a fair trial.

And so we can't do that anymore.

Well, that had also had an opportunity to blow it apart.

And I made friends with Bill Martin, also young.

Yeah, about my age, who is the prosecutor.

And we got through it, nonetheless.

Uh, and frankly, uh, Spec was going to be found guilty, uh, and they wanted to kill him right now.

forget the trial.

- As you have covered, and you talk about this and you give this perspective in the book, covering the news for you was also a first account of history.

You talk about the riots in Chicago after Dr.

King's death.

And what was that like for you?

'Cause you had some dangerous moments with that.

- Yes, the news came down in the evening.

I was in the newsroom.

- This was April 4th, 1968.

- So we'd better look out because all hell is going to break loose.

And sure enough, in the morning... - It did.

- We got in a crew car and drove into the West Side on Madison.

And it was when people were being released from their jobs and told to go home.

But broadcasting kind of abdicated its responsibility and did not give a warning.

Hey, you're driving into mobs.

These mobs are pulling drivers and people outta their cars and beating them.

In addition to setting fire along medicine, and I'll never forget that.

You know, I saw the very first fires start.

You know, young men with kerosene, they'd splash it on the door and then they'd light it.

And these old houses, Chicago, essentially it's history, went up.

And 20 blocks straight on Madison and 20 on Roosevelt Road and 20 on 63rd Street, it was a city on fire.

You were actually in the car watching, covering, filming.

- Yes, I was sitting in the back seat and my cameraman was in the front.

and a large chunk of concrete came through, hit him, knocked him out, and we had to get out of essentially the mobs that were beginning together around us.

This is kind of amazing.

That was in April when King was shot.

Then just a month, a little over a month, Bobby Kennedy was shot in LA.

- June 5, 1968.

- And then almost within a month, we had the four days of August for the Democratic National Convention when 10,000 demonstrators come to town.

But this is also interesting.

They did call out, they pressed the button.

President Johnson and Mayor Daley said, "We need some help."

11,000 cops were on duty in Chicago.

7,000 federal troops were standing by out at O'Hare.

5,000 National Guard were on duty along Michigan Avenue and 1,000 Secret Service here and there.

So we're no strangers to having federal troops.

In the famous intersection confrontation at Balbo and Michigan where the police had a single line stretching across Michigan Avenue, I was in the top of a car looking down literally this close.

You'd be interested in this.

The Poor People's March.

- In Washington?

- No, right here.

They were in a parade.

They had a permit.

And they were riding in a wagon.

And they wanted to get to the International Amphitheater 40 blocks away.

And so the police let them through.

But the demonstrators thought, "Oh, well, they're letting us all through "and we're gonna go to the Amphitheater."

But the police then closed the line.

Suddenly, you have the tension and pressure of the 10,000 demonstrators pushing against a single line of policemen.

Police, who were young, they were not trained in crowd control.

And they had, they say "a chip on their shoulder."

No, what they felt was... Sorry, I go back.

And that's what you need to do when you write a memoir.

I can see it all over again.

"This is our city.

"You've come to our city."

- To destroy.

- Yeah.

"And you think you're gonna get away with it."

They went in and they cleared... I'm sorry.

- No, no, no.

- 10,000 people in 15 minutes, in 15 minutes.

A friend of mine for "Time Magazine" was in the Hilton.

A friend of mine for Time Magazine was in the Hilton.

It was right in front of the Hilton.

And he saw what I did not see, which were 200 police reinforcements moving up Balbo and pushing into, and the protesters recoiling, which put the pressure on the police line there.

So to this day, I'm not sure who was, you know, responsible for that confrontation.

Were the police just tired of it and clearing, or were the demonstrators?

- You've covered history.

And I think one of the stories that you covered as a reporter, you can change, you can bring about change.

You brought about legislation, not only change but legislation.

And that was with the story about Agent Orange.

What is the effect of Agent Orange- - This is often the case with investigative reporting.

We ran into a wall almost immediately.

Maude DeVictor was my whistleblower working for the VA's rigid office here.

And she gave me, sent over a list of 12 veterans who were complaining of symptoms that the doctors didn't know what to do.

I saw it, and I had done the defoliant story years earlier.

So I kind of knew that if these complaints were real, it was biological and chemical warfare that we were using and probably innocently affected our own troops.

And now, the reason it took a lawyer's work and a lot of work was that there were 40 years of research that farmers had been using this to take away the trees and the brush.

And they said, "Well, it's harmless to humans, "so we can do anything we want."

Well, we were getting something different.

We were getting the GIs who were in the jungle and saying, "Well, you know, we saw it dripping.

"It's supposed to work in two weeks, "you know, to make the leaves fall off the trees.

"We saw it working in an hour "and it was dripping off and down until we were all, "you know, saturated with it.

"And then we began having these diseases."

And came back and one after another proved that, I mean to me, something was wrong.

So on the one hand, I've got what happens almost in every investigative report, a body of work that says one thing.

But I've got anecdotal evidence that says another.

So I worked, and Dow Chemical Company sent out five lawyers.

(Bill chuckles) And they were gonna kick my ass.

Young lawyer.

And so they go through their case, strong case.

And I said, "You say you have evidence that it's harmless.

"Do you have evidence that it was not harmless?"

Not harmless meant that they had actually done the testing on its effect on human beings.

- Where are we today, Bill, with news?

What's our news coverage today?

What's the media landscape today?

Social media, artificial intelligence.

- Where are we?

- Nobody knows.

That's an easy way out, but nobody knows.

The old networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, have all been attacked by the administration.

And let me use CBS, my old home, as an example.

Paramount wanted to buy CBS.

CBS wanted to sell at $16 billion, something like that.

But they had this little nugget of truth called news.

And so, you know, they had to deal with that.

Because the news guys, they're not gonna sell themselves to anybody to come through.

So there was a compromise.

And the compromise with the buyer was that, "Okay, we'll sell it.

"But there's going to be a bias monitor "that looks over every newscast, "every story of '60 Minutes,' the best."

- Every newscast?

- Well, yes.

To see if it meets MAGA's requirements.

- So freedom of the press is gone.

Interpretation freedom of the press, perception of... What do we call it?

- [Bill] You know, freedom, we wanna be independent.

- But you never had that?

- No, no, we never did.

- That's not norm, that's something new.

- And the reason you want independence is that... Thomas Jefferson didn't like reporters, who does, who were telling him what they're not doing right.

But he knew that to have a democracy where the power is in the hands of the people, where do they get their information?

- It's gotta be the press.

- The press.

So he wrote in the First Amendment, "freedom of the press, freedom of speech."

And without that, we're in bad trouble.

- Bill Kurtis, you've had a fabulous career.

You've told us wonderful stories.

You've brought change and truth.

And for me personally, and I don't know if you know it, you've been a mentor.

As I read your book, I teared up a couple of times.

Because I saw something.

Warner Saunders kept telling me this, and I didn't get it.

He kept saying, "You are duplicating TV news and newsprint "in a new way.

"Because you know TV and you can write."

My publisher's page was Walter.

It was the Opinionated something.

But that cover story was the persistence.

I'm persistent.

I think I learned that from you.

And I thank you.

- We'll cry through it together.

- We'll cry together.

We'll go for lunch and Donna can go with us and we'll just have our tears.

But thank you so much.

And "Whirlwind" is a book you should read.

It's a contemporary history.

But if you are in journalism, it's a must.

I told your wife, I told Donna, "I've got some friends at Northwestern.

"That book needs to be in their reading material."

Absolutely.

Thank you.

- I want you to stay with this.

Because you've got talent, and we need you.

We need people like you.

Because this is the best interview in pitching a book that I've run across.

- Thank you.

Thank you.

We gotta tell these stories, but we gotta tell the truth.

That's why I started N'DIGO.

The stories on Black people were so bad.

And it's like, everybody's a criminal, everybody comes from this crazy household, nobody's got an education.

It was like, "Where are the people I know?"

And you helped me with that.

And I don't think you even know it.

Do you remember the story we did of you when you went to Africa?

You know, that was an N'DIGO story.

- Was it really?

- Mm-hmm.

- Wow.

- I gotta find that paper for you.

- Please, please.

- Thank you, Bill Kurtis.

- That's in the book.

- It's in the book.

I read it in the book and it triggered.

I said, "Oh, we wrote about that."

- I know.

- Thank you.

- Well, thank you.

- Thank you.

I'm Hermene Hartman with N'DIGO STUDIO with Bill Kurtis.

And he said keep doing what we're doing, and we will.

For more information on this program, follow us on social media.

Funding for this program has been provided by Illinois Student Assistance Commission.

Community trust.

CineCity Studios.

Lamborghini Chicago Gold Coast and Downers Grove.

Commonwealth, Edison and Broadway Chicago.

"MUSIC".

NIDGO Studio.