Speaker If I don’t ask you to say your name on camera, the editor is going to kill me. So would you start out by introducing yourself, please? Jeanne Langley. And if you would say Jeanne Langley and not the whole Jeanne Sullivan Langley, I’d prefer to be known as Jeanne Langley. That is what your subtitle will say then. Absolutely. There is some sound coming and it’s actually what it is. It’s the intercounty. It will stop in a second. Oh, it’s ABC News Flash.
Speaker World War Three broke out, but OK, I guess I want to really begin in a very sort of simple way, I’d like to know how you came to 60 Minutes.
Speaker I was a student at London University and I appeared on a CBS program, which is how I discovered that CBS existed. The program was a town meeting of the world and the moderator was Charles Collingwood. And I was a student sitting in a studio in London interviewing Ronald Reagan, who was then the governor of California and Robert Kennedy. And having done that, I wanted I was looking for a job in journalism and I came along to CBS on a temporary vacation job. I came for three weeks and I’ve been here 30 years.
Speaker That is a wonderful story. I didn’t realize it. Now, was this a program that you were doing for the university?
Speaker No. So. Regimes want to. I’m sorry, am I talking too softly and just pulling them up to 60 minutes from.
Speaker And Rick, I was a student at London University and was asked to appear on the CBS program, which is how I discovered CBS existed. The program was done meeting of the world. The moderator was Charles Collingwood, and a bunch of students sat in a studio in London and asked questions of Ronald Reagan, who was in California, and Robert Kennedy in New York. The idea being, I think at that time that they were showing off the new technology of a three way satellite transmission. So having discovered CBS existed and I was interested in journalism, I asked for a job and they said, you can come along, fill in for someone in the summer. So I came for three weeks and I’ve now been here 30 years.
Speaker That’s a wonderful story. So you actually I’m wondering, did you know anything about Don Hewitt when you came to 60 Minutes at all?
Speaker I had met him briefly when he was producing executive producing a documentary called Don’t Count the Candles with Lord Snowdon. So I had met him briefly. And shortly afterwards, 60 Minutes began. What was your impression of him? What was he like as this young man producing in London?
Speaker He was very decisive because you use his name to say, don’t write, you know. So if I want to take out my question, we know who you’re talking about.
Speaker He.
Speaker Don has always been the same, I’ve never found him any different.
Speaker He’s been the same since the first day I met him and he never seems to get any older and he doesn’t seem to let up on his enthusiasm. He was extremely enthusiastic, noisy, scary, full of all kinds of crazy ideas, which people then often shut down. And he’s good natured enough not to mind when they shoot his ideas down and he just says OK, and moves on to the next crazy idea.
Speaker Did you know that he was called Mr. Television and that he had directed all these sort of major live events for CBS? You may have known that.
Speaker Not really. No, no. I came I was very aware when I came to CBS that I was coming in to accompany the Ed Murrow Company and the lift the legends and the myths of Ed Murrow. And of course, many of them our boys were still here in Europe at that time. So I did meet them. But Don, no, I really only got to know him at 60 Minutes.
Speaker Really. Do you remember the day of the first broadcast back in nineteen sixty eight, the reviews were anything from New York? You have any recollection of what that day was like?
Speaker No. One of the problems, of course, in being an outpost is we don’t get the acclaim or the criticism. The following day after the show, we just come into the office as usual. No one seen it, not even our mothers. And no one is there to say you did a great job or I thought that piece last night was terrible.
Speaker That’s very interesting. That’s very interesting.
Speaker You know, the office in New York feels like one big family. I mean, it’s more like a mom pie shop than it is like some corporate headquarters. Do you all feel like the distant distant cousins or the disenfranchised siblings or I mean, how how do you feel in relation to that?
Speaker A colonial outpost? Sometimes, yeah. But I think sometimes in New York, they feel outsiders, too. We’re very individual. It seems to me that we all work very separately. Are there a colleague, a producer next door, another one next door there? Sometimes they come in. They could be in Israel, they could be in Moscow. I don’t know where they are or they could walk down the hall.
Speaker It’s true how much was done involved in the early stories.
Speaker That you truly recall.
Speaker I think perhaps in the early days, he was more involved in the production. He would occasionally go out on location with a producer. I think perhaps he was more involved in sharing the research and deciding which way the story should go, really. But later on, of course, here he is very he is not involved in the production or the research in any way at all. He waits until it gets to the screening room.
Speaker I guess what I’m asking is, unless you a particular example in the early days of him going out on production with you. Once the first time that you went on vacation and was there, right?
Speaker I think he he would enjoy going out on a production if it was a good location, if it was the summer and it was Europe. We knew that we might get a visit from Don and he would say, I think I’ll come along. And I think it had a lot more to do with him coming to Europe in the summer than necessarily being very involved in the story.
Speaker Right. Did you have screenings? I mean, did you have done you with screenings the way you do today where he looks at the piece with fresh eyes for the first time? Was that was that happening at the very beginning of the program in 1960? Yes, it was. Yes. I know that you were an associate producer, so I don’t know if you were involved.
Speaker I wasn’t involved. So I’m not sure that from my recollection, the screenings have always existed.
Speaker Right.
Speaker During the early days, do you want to describe what an associate producer did before the Internet and before the computer and what your job really entailed and how you found stories?
Speaker And the job has become in some ways more easier because of technology in the early days, you could sit in the office and I just ask you to start off by saying the job of an associate producer so that I have some indication in the early days of 60 Minutes, the job of an associate producer was in many ways more difficult than it is today. Logistically speaking, you could happily sit in an office and spend five hours waiting to get through to Moscow. You had to book the call through the operator. Nowadays, you go straight through. As easy as calling down the street, booking hotel rooms was always more complicated. It seems in those days, hotels were never available. There were probably fewer, fewer of them. And it was just more complicated getting from A to B.. What about the research, though? The research? I remember in the very early days walking around the corner to the BBC who had a press clippings department with whom we had an arrangement and I would walk in and ask for their file on a particular subject. They would hand me a brown manila envelope full of the original newspaper clippings, and you would carefully go through those make notes in longhand in their library and return their file. Nowadays, you just plug into your computer and there it all is. Right.
Speaker I would imagine that you spent a lot of time on a library. Did you have any I talking to Bill Maclure and you were talking about the program that was called Danny the Red. Were Mike Wallace interviewed and he said that you were the associate producer. I don’t know if you recall too much about this program, do you?
Speaker Yes, a little bit. We we shot the program down the road in Frankfort. The best thing I can remember about it was that Danny, who was a great talker, faced with Mike Wallace, the interviewer seemed to go on and on and on. And in those days, we had a wonderful French sound recordist who did not speak English. So he used to have to sit through these lengthy interviews in English. And poor man, he got very bored. And I remember on this occasion he fell fast asleep while I was watching the program.
Speaker And it seemed to me one of the first times that I had seen Mike Wallace do was something that he became quite famous for, which is to do a very sort of biting interview. And at one point he turns down the road. He said, you are a very arrogant young man. Was that part of what you had in mind would happen between Mike Wallace and Danny?
Speaker The or was this total serendipity?
Speaker I’m sorry, in what sense did a lot of people say we don’t want to step on it? Sorry, I didn’t quite understand the question here is that fine?
Speaker It’s disappeared. I guess.
Speaker Everything was falling apart the same time, what I’m getting at it and may not be true, I’m just I guess what I’m wondering is, as the associate producer, did you have this inkling that if you put this explosive character, Danny the Red, in a room with Mike Wallace, you were going to get an explosive interchange between these two people?
Speaker It was such early days and Mike’s reputation for exploding on 60 Minutes, I don’t think had been fully established by that time. So this was perhaps one of the early examples of it.
Speaker It worked, I think, because Danny was quite capable of giving as much as as I said you can as much as as as Mike gave him, he was able to cope with Mike. And I think that he enjoyed it. There were no hard feelings. And I think it worked because Mike clearly stimulated him into being perhaps more outrageous than he would have been with someone else.
Speaker It’s very interesting because also it was done was done with one camera.
Speaker Yes, I can’t recall it was it was it was done with one camera for sure.
Speaker I guess you were shooting it over, weren’t you? Yes, I think you both can. You can. You can. I’ll tell you the truth. Norman was shooting it and it was done with one camera and the and I’m not gonna use me, but I’d like you sort of feedback me because it’s true. What’s interesting is that you couldn’t cut this. In other words, what happened between them happened, you know, it was like live television. That’s what happened between us. And there was basically it’s basically a two shot between the two of them when this kind of sort of tough interchange takes place.
Speaker And it was it’s very interesting to see what do I want you to say. I just mentioned the fact that it was one camera and that that what happened, you covered it as it was a documentary sort of unrolling before your eyes. I think that’s maybe the best way to sort something like that. It’s hard for me to say that because I would have thought, is this true? I wasn’t sure what was on Wallace else would have been on second camera.
Speaker He wouldn’t have missed it. There was one thing she wasn’t OK. And then I would have done the reverse. We would have had to do the reverse. And then the reverses would have been reconstruction. Well, I’m sure that I agree that I don’t want to say no, no, no, no, no. I don’t want to say that.
Speaker It looks to me like one camera interview, but. You produced your first piece in nineteen seventy six on Mrs. Sadaat, how did you make the transition to producer?
Speaker I was working as an associate producer and I believe that I was going to go to Egypt as an associate producer. But at the last minute, Morley Safer very kindly said he was prepared to trust me and I could go and produce it myself. So it was all arranged at the last moment. That was not in any way official. It was entirely because of Morley’s confidence that I was able to do it. And it was an appropriate piece in a way. I’m glad it was a good piece to begin with. She was very cooperative. She was a lovely lady.
Speaker And I don’t say that about too many people we work with. And I enjoyed the experience.
Speaker Did you?
Speaker It was a kind of wonderful, candid view you mentioned to me, I’ll I’ll feed back to you what you said the other day. It was a wonderful thing. It was a wonderfully candid view of this first lady, sort of a revolutionary of her time during the women’s movement. I thought it was very interesting that as one of the few women producers at 60 Minutes at the time, I wondered if Morley had this in the back of my mind that you would have a kind of rapport with her that would make the make the piece work better than I could ask him to this. But it make the piece work better.
Speaker I think it was and is deliberations that I think it was simply the opportunity that his European producer was in Israel producing the segment of Mrs. Rabin. And so in some ways, it was convenient for me to be researching and working on the Egyptian side of the story at the same time. What was unusual about her?
Speaker What was unusual, I think, was that here was a woman, an Egyptian woman, who had grown up in a fairly traditional family, although indeed her mother was English, who had married this extraordinary man, Anwar Sadat, at the age of 15. And one might have supposed that would have been the last we would have seen of her, that a woman without the traditional education would have disappeared into the home and not played a public role. And I’m not quite sure now at what point she decided that she would play a public role in the affairs of Egypt and go out of her way to help women there. But she certainly did. And she did it in a very effective way. She wasn’t the rabble rousing feminist. She couldn’t have been she wouldn’t have got away with it if she tried. But in her own way, she did achieve a great deal there. And I did admire her. Yes, I mean, she seemed like the right woman for the right time, and she she handled him very well. He was not an easy man. We had one sequence where they’re in the garden together. I thought he was never going to appear. We kept asking her, we want to see you with your husband. And finally, one Friday morning. He appeared in the garden and you could see they had a very close relationship, but he can’t have been an easy man to live with and I admired her for that. Was it difficult for you all to deal with? We saw him for such a short time and while he was there, she produced the piece and got rid of him as quickly as possible. It’s actually a very nice moment, though, in the film. Yes, it’s very nice when there’s a certain charm. And she sort of cajoles him. She’s cajoling him and hanging on his arm and just making sure that he does behave himself. Do you remember the screening of this of this piece or of your first piece? No, perhaps I blocked it out. What is the screening experience generally like? It’s a heart stopping moment. You’ve been sitting working on a program for weeks, sometimes it’s been in preparation for months. You have no idea how Diane is going to react to it because he doesn’t know what you’ve been doing. I think he likes the surprise of seeing it for the first time. And so you go into a screening room or I used to know I sit in London and wait for the call. And it is nerve racking because even when you know the piece is interesting, you are never quite sure which way Don is going to jump. You usually get a good idea after about 30 seconds because he’s made up his mind after seeing the first 30 seconds. Really? Yes. And how do you know that? Because he’s yelling his head off. Either shouting this is great or this is terrible.
Speaker Do you have a favorite place to sit in the screening room at the back?
Speaker Why do you do there so you can see his reaction or at least you can see the back of his head and you can see him if he jumps up and down. Absolutely.
Speaker I was just thinking about was the first screening the Mrs. ADP’s, that you were surprised? I really can’t remember right.
Speaker It ask me about it here in London. I don’t go to the screenings. I leave Ed to fend for the peace.
Speaker And so I am sitting here waiting for the call or sometimes sitting at home because inevitably, if they’re screening at five o’clock in the afternoon, I get a call at 10:00 or 11:00 at night.
Speaker So it’s usually quite a painful evening and then the call usually lasts about a minute at the most, is it usually from Ed or from Di Ed course refers to warn me and then Don comes on and says what changes he wants? And usually the best thing I find is if he he has a lot of changes, it’s a good idea to sleep on it. I like to sleep on it and let him sleep on it and think about them. And often, of course, they’re very good ideas and only improve the peace. But if there are a couple of ideas that we think are not going to work, I come into the office the next day and wait for his early morning call because Don doesn’t sleep and Dawn wakes at five o’clock in the morning and finds he’s got no one to talk to. His wife is asleep and I’m sure she doesn’t want to hear from him at that time. So who can he call? And he calls London. And so here we are at ten o’clock in the morning and we get an early morning call from dawn and that’s a good time. Sometimes he calls just for a chat because he can’t sleep. Sometimes he’s calling in response to the screaming he saw the day before. And that’s a wonderful time to discuss with him. We do have that advantage here in London. We can discuss with him the changes that he asked to be made. And he’s at his most mellow at that time. And we can say to him, look, you don’t really want us to put the end at the beginning and the beginning at the end. Do you and sometimes sometimes he might just say, we’ll try it. And if it doesn’t work, leave it.
Speaker That’s that is wonderful. Just kidding myself up here. I’m just kind of curious. This may seem like a very.
Speaker You said something. Let’s talk about Dan’s role in the stories. You have a tremendous amount of freedom, especially being a producer. Let’s talk about the freedom and Dan’s role within that context.
Speaker Also, the freedom we have here is virtually to go to anywhere in the world and for Don, the executive producer, not to know where we are. A few years ago, my father was staying at my apartment and he answered the phone to Don Hewitt and I was in Paris and my father was very concerned that my boss did not know where I was. And he said, are you sure you should be going to these places without him knowing, without checking with him? And I said, OK, doesn’t matter. Don’t worry, it’s fine. A month ago, Don, I was in Kazakhstan. Don called my husband at home and he said she’s in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is in Central Asia, a former country of the Soviet Union. And there was a pause, I gather, and I said, where?
Speaker And then he said, OK.
Speaker So, no, he doesn’t know where we are, but you see, the interesting thing is that although he hasn’t a clue where his producers may be.
Speaker He is always with us. We take along on location this invisible presence called Don Hewitt and all the time we say to ourselves, will Don understand the story? Will he like this character? Will he understand his English? What should we do to make Don interested in the stories?
Speaker So you see all the time, right from the very beginning, the inception of it. Yes. We are making the stories for Don.
Speaker What is Don’s taste? What is the character that would like, for instance, start from the beginning, that sense?
Speaker He would say he’s Mr. Everyman, but I think he undersells himself, I think Don has a very good appraisal of events in the world and I think he wants to hear about them.
Speaker He is interested in people who have a story to tell. He also doesn’t like I think he can spot phoneys. Sometimes he can take an instant dislike to a character, he can spot phonies. He likes people who are sincere in what they say and.
Speaker What what is the kind of story that he wouldn’t like?
Speaker There’s only one story, one story in all these years that Don refused to let me make, and that was a story about female circumcision.
Speaker In Africa, in Africa.
Speaker He said, we have enough problems in the United States, no one wants to hear about those kind of problems in Africa. I suspect the reason for his refusal was a lot more fundamental. He’s a very squeamish man, and I think he couldn’t begin to think about what it really entailed.
Speaker How did you discover the squeamish man?
Speaker I think it must have been when we were doing drug stories and he got very squeamish when he saw needles going in arms, we’ve done other medical stories, surgery, and we I think we learned early on, not too many needles, not too much blood.
Speaker Thank you. Otherwise, Dawn won’t be able to watch the piece.
Speaker Don, as we all know, is going to be seven is seventy five years old.
Speaker Who is going to be his successor?
Speaker I have never heard Don talk about it. I think that he’s a little like Queen Elizabeth, the first who also refused to talk about her successor. I just hope that his doctors know what to do when the time comes. And that is they’ve got to keep him alive at all costs.
Speaker They put him in aspic anything but keep him alive because we love him. And I don’t think anyone could contemplate six minutes without Don Hewitt.
Speaker That’s wonderful. I’m going to try one other, Protarchus. What you said yesterday was so funny. I’m going to refresh your memory, which is that you hope the dark of darkness, even if he’s in a coma, keep him alive so that when the press calls you and they ask you how Don’s doing, your organists say, just because I just think that he gets so delicious and he’ll love the idea of of the press kind of keeping after him, although what you said is beautiful and maybe that’ll be more sincere and better.
Speaker But let’s try and let’s try. You said it. I think you said it was like you compare compared to the Soviet Union. Yes. The doctor either braconnier for the old Soviet leader. Yeah, exactly. All right.
Speaker Maybe I should ask the question. I just find it funny.
Speaker I thought I just hope that when that time comes, Dawn’s doctors know what is expected of them, and that is they have to keep him alive at all costs, a bit like the old Soviet leaders, Brezhnev, that they must, even if he’s in a coma, never declare him dead because and we’ll keep going like the Kremlin did. And when people call, we’ll say he’s just fine because we couldn’t live without him.
Speaker I’m going to ask a question just like this as a pick up point for anything. What would you all do if anything happened to Don?
Speaker It’s the one question we ask a lot of questions at 60 Minutes. I think it’s the one question that none of us ever ask.
Speaker Yeah.
Speaker Let’s talk a little bit about the mercurial nature of Don. I mean, people say he’s a man of contradictions. Do you have any comment on his contradictory, as we put it this way? Leslie said when she got Leslie Stahl said when she got to 60 Minutes, she tried desperately to figure out, this is how you do a story for Diane. You do this, you do that thing. And she did everything absolutely perfectly. She walked into the screening room and he threw every rule out of the book and he said, no, no, no, no. In this instance, you do that and everybody talks about him as a man of tremendous contradictions, who you can kind of really get a hold of.
Speaker No, you can’t have a guest on. And I’ve tried to do that over the years and say this is the way Don would ed piece and then he proves you wrong. One of his great rules was never open a piece with stock footage. It’s tired. People have seen it before. Who wants to see it? Never open a piece with stock footage. And I remember a couple of years ago, I deliberately didn’t open the piece with the stock footage and I buried it somewhere in the middle. And what did Don do? Open the piece with the stock footage?
Speaker Do you remember what the piece was? No, but we’ll find it afterwards. Yeah, we’ll find a good job, right? No, no, that’s all right. I remember what it was.
Speaker Don, you know, for another thing that no one has really talked about is Don as a. Political survivor, he has survived three different regimes, so to speak, at CBS.
Speaker Do you have any insight into Don as the survivor and a kind of very changing corporate environment?
Speaker I think probably because no executive has ever want to tangle with Don, he has run his own show so successfully. That no one would dream, I think, of criticizing him. And besides, they probably don’t want to be yelled at, so they steer clear.
Speaker Yeah, I wonder what the truth is to really that’s between you and I.
Speaker I really wonder how he is, because I’m sure that when Larry genuinely just the success of 60 Minutes, that who would who would want to mess with that?
Speaker Well, Larry Tisch certainly wouldn’t mind messing with my messing with Don man. So it’s not just that. And no one wants to cancel us. Very successful, financially successful show besides on all other levels based on word of the story. We’ve talked about or maybe we should talk about some kind of it’s been brought to my attention that one of the restrictions or things that Don isn’t too fond of is a story in which people do not speak English terribly well. And I would imagine being in the London bureau, it is quite difficult for you because after all, your backyard is a whole world where English isn’t the first language. How how do you deal with that?
Speaker It is a problem.
Speaker I can understand why he doesn’t really want to hear foreign language interviews unless the very important ones, because language is communication and you do lose something if you’re interviewing someone in a foreign language, there’s no question. So we go out of our way to find people who can speak English one. Sometimes we go too far and realize that it’s not going to work. We interviewed an Italian doctor once and we he assured us he could speak English and he was happy to do the interview in English. And his English was so terrible. And we knew that Don wouldn’t understand a word of what he said, that we actually faded down his English and put a voice over. So that was where we were trying too hard to put the interview into English. But sometimes if the material is powerful enough, then it doesn’t matter what people are speaking. And an example of that was Semipalatinsk, the people who lived around the old Soviet nuclear test site, none of them spoke English. I don’t think I think there were three words of English, apart from Ed Bradley as commentary in that story. But it worked because the story was powerful and the characters were so interesting.
Speaker So you can do foreign language interviews if you choose them carefully in a situation like that.
Speaker If you don’t mind me saying we all live in fear of nuclear power, nuclear fallout, so that the human story behind it does transcend all languages.
Speaker And yes, the story transcended the place where it happened and and was of interest and was the only place it was a unique place to study the type of radiation that these people had been subjected to.
Speaker Having said that, by the way, I think there were an awful lot of people, interesting people in the world who should have been on 60 Minutes but haven’t because they don’t speak English in the same regard.
Speaker It must be difficult for the correspondent who wants to make some kind of contact with people, and particularly in a foreign country, so that there’s some kind of rapport, and yet if you don’t share a language, it’s very difficult. Now, how does someone like Ed Bradley overcome that? And do you want to give me an example? I’m trying to set up the thing for you to repeat for the guys.
Speaker I think that a rapport with people comes much more isn’t just a question of speaking to them in their own language. When we were in Semipalatinsk, we visited a cancer hospital, a children’s cancer hospital.
Speaker And dad has this ability to empathize with people, particularly people who are sick or who are bereaved or have suffered in some way. And he in this hospital started to play with the children. We were waiting to shoot something. And quite spontaneously in the hall of the hospital, he got down on the ground and played with these kids. He couldn’t speak because they couldn’t speak English, and yet he got home with them famously. In fact, the little boy that he was playing with afterwards said he reminded him of his father and these people had never seen foreigners before. And I think that gives you an example of just how Ed does have a rapport with all kinds of people. And there was this sick kid, didn’t see him as a foreigner, didn’t see him as a black American, saw him as his dad.
Speaker It’s also probably without putting words into your mouth. It’s probably also a way in which the audience, the American audience, can identify with the correspondent dealing with a foreign situation because.
Speaker I’m not saying it gracefully, but if you want to say it gracefully, I think that’s probably true. Let me put it this way. The foreign story has a specific a very particular role. I can imagine that in the foreign story, the correspondents role is almost more important. Do you think so? And if so, why? In a foreign story?
Speaker Yes, I think it is. Perhaps because people need to relate to something. And if they see the correspondent whom they know in a foreign place, they are seeing it through his eyes. And so I think it’s more important, perhaps, to use the correspondent in the situation when they are aboard besides you, them halfway around the world. You want to get your money back.
Speaker It’s true. I’ve been trying to reflect over some of the changes in 60 minutes over the last 30 years. Do you feel that I mean, the form, the change, the style.
Speaker Can you comment on on any of the the idea that at the beginning there were there was a particular length to the show, the fact that the extreme close up wasn’t used as I’m giving you some examples of things that I looked at and you couldn’t agree or disagree or comment on them, the fact that the beginning seemed like mini documentaries, where today they feel like they fit within a more formalized format of a television program. The correspondent wasn’t as prevalent in the early days.
Speaker How is that? How has 60 Minutes changed over the last 30 years?
Speaker I find I find it hard to comment on that, I would simply say that there has been no new edict, nothing has been handed down. If you notice those changes, then those changes are evolutionary. No one ever sent a memo and said, use the correspondent more or you need to do it in this kind of format. I suppose it’s just evolved. It’s been a very long time. And that’s a little bit like Leni Riefenstahl saying that if she edited Triumph of the Will today, she’d make it shorter. And I suppose we all respond to that kind of thing.
Speaker And that’s probably true. When the correspondent when did the correspondents become stars? When do they become stars? Did they when did they? When did the course that when did the correspondence become stars?
Speaker Household names, you see, I’m the wrong person to ask about that because, of course, in Europe or the rest of the world, they are not household names. And so we don’t we don’t see them in quite that way. OK.
Speaker Let’s then talk about something that I think you do know quite well, which is the relationship between the producer and the correspondent. People compare this to a marriage and 60 Minutes marriage divorce. Can you talk to me a little bit about what this relationship is like and use your own experience as an example?
Speaker I think it is a kind of marriage whereby you get to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and sometimes you don’t need to say things because you know which way you’re going to react. I know, for example, when Ed arrives in Kazakhstan, first of all, I know he will arrive and he will have done his homework. He will have read everything that we have sent him and he will have a feel about the story. And we don’t spend a lot of time talking about the story. And he knows, I think, that if we’re doing this interview, I thought had a reason why we’re doing that interview and what we hope to get from it. So it helps really to work with someone for a long time, because when you’re working in foreign countries, there are so many other things to worry about that you want the operation to be quite smooth.
Speaker And it is if you know each other, what do each of you bring to the film is a collaborative process. Television is a collaborative process. What do you and Ed specifically bring to a story?
Speaker I bring a lot of research, I mean, my background as a researcher, I’m a historian by training, so I would go on researching until the cows come home if I could.
Speaker And then I know there’s a moment when you have to stop, consolidate and say, look, this is what we need to shoot and we need to do it now. And who hasn’t spent as long as I have on the story comes in, I think, with a fresh eye and can cut through all the fascinating but ultimately irrelevant detail which will never see the light of day and will have a very clear focus of what we’re doing.
Speaker It’s interesting. Have you worked with other correspondents, just briefly, just briefly?
Speaker OK, I will tell you one story about Mike Wallace and the foreign language problem. I just thought of it. Sometimes doing foreign language interviews can be very frustrating because it is difficult to get a rapport and interchange between the correspondent and the interview subject, and even as brilliant an interviewer as Mike Wallace once came to grief with Professor, I’m sorry, start again.
Speaker Once as brilliant an interviewer as Mike Wallace came to grief in Syria with President Assad because President Assad talked the interview, I think lasted five hours and he gave answers to the questions, which some of them went on for 45 minutes.
Speaker And because you can’t talk because Mike was not talking directly to the president, he couldn’t interrupt. So we were kind of sandbagged. And we ended up with a five hour interview with these incredibly long answers, and it was very difficult to edit and I don’t think at the end of five hours, Mike felt he’d ask what he wanted to ask anyway. So and that was because it was foreign language. So they can be difficult to pull off.
Speaker Very frustrating. Yes, very frustrating. That must have been a nightmare in the editing room. Yes, it was. It was. Wow. Did you ever work with her reason just once, one time. Do you have any? I mean, I’m dying to include him somehow this program. I mean, I haven’t been able to find a way into it. Do you have any particular telling her story?
Speaker No, I don’t really I didn’t really know him well.
Speaker We talked about how did you and Ed get paired together and how did this happen when Dan Rather left?
Speaker I had been working with Dan and was Dan’s producer in Europe. And Ed took over Dan’s position on 60 Minutes. So inherited me.
Speaker See, I think now we talked about the strengths and how we worked together. What are some of the difficulties and what are the sort of weaknesses of the relationship?
Speaker Um.
Speaker A weakness is that I can only have him for a short period of time, and that is it, unlike in the States when I’m sure producers, I’m sure they all say they don’t get the correspondents for long enough. But in the States, they do have a chance to go back a second time, perhaps set up another interview of the ones they did on a story. We’re not working. They can perhaps set up one and and fly him down to Washington. I can’t get him to go back to Kazakhstan. I can’t really get him to go anywhere on a foreign story other than once and once only. So you have to make sure that you have got everything in place for those three or four days that he’s on the ground. And that can be very difficult because then you’re you’re spending more time organizing the logistics and telling people to miss their mother’s funeral because Ed is in town for only a day and so on. And sometimes a few days later you say, we wish we’d done.
Speaker And so it becomes an organizational headache rather than a journalistic enterprise. Hmm. I can imagine. We have to go.
Speaker Has Ed changed a great deal, I mean, he started out as a war correspondent, I mean, he said he was in Washington for about a year. He changed quite a bit over these last 15 years and is a 60 Minutes correspondent.
Speaker I mean, to me, he hasn’t changed that much. No, he’s perhaps become more confident, he’s perhaps become more comfortable in what he does. But I think for all of us and he would agree, it doesn’t get any easier. You would hope or think after so many years ago that we developed a formula and that we could just say, OK, here we go again. And yet every time there seems it seems to be always fraught with difficulty every time we do a story. And it’s as if it’s the first you’ve ever done. I guess that’s what keeps it a challenge.
Speaker Absolutely. As the 60 minute interview has become almost an institution in itself. Are there any surprises for you anymore by the answers, or are you so prepped in advance? You know exactly what to expect and you can give me? Or could you give me some example and people interviews, 60 minute interviews during a program that you were in the process of producing?
Speaker You always have to look out for what people perhaps have been prepared to tell you off camera, and I don’t mean off the record, I mean there on the record, but they are off camera and they have been happy to talk to you about it.
Speaker And no matter how many times you’ve spoken to them, you can still be surprised when the camera turns and they say something completely different. And it’s at moments like that that I can just feel and turning to look at me and say, that’s not what you said they were going to say. And that happens.
Speaker People do for a variety of reasons, sometimes say something completely different.
Speaker I suppose that can go in your favor against you, against your candidate.
Speaker And there are reasons for it. I mean, a psychiatrist and Kazakhstan, having told us that he’d been arrested and everything else chose at one moment to play the star, I think he was nervous of the authorities.
Speaker And so he didn’t want to be seen to be beating up on them. So he said he wasn’t arrested.
Speaker And what you do?
Speaker Well, we persevered and it’s obvious that he was. And if he doesn’t want to be seen to say it, we know that it was true. So we shall say it.
Speaker That is always an option, isn’t it? Yes.
Speaker Yes, I’m just trying to see if there’s anything I’ve missed here, I want to talk just a little bit about a couple stories that we haven’t talked about that you and I mentioned before. There was a fabulous program that you did call the men eun’s, and Don has talked a lot about the profile and he said, in fact, as one of the hardest programs to do because he doesn’t believe in just pointing the camera at. The artist or the celebrity, that has to be something different to tell the story, would you tell me about the making of the manual’s and what challenge you had and how you solved them? This is a beautiful piece.
Speaker It was most profiles can be quite a headache, getting the confidence of the person and arranging and they suddenly become very insecure and nervous and don’t want you to film this and don’t want you to film the other.
Speaker You’re probably having the same problem with Don right now, but that one was easy. And the reason it was easy was Diana Menuhin. And the way you saw her in that piece is the way she is. She is an extraordinary lady, very witty, very amusing, and that marvelous putdown of your hoodie that she has cultivated over the years. And she pursues that off camera as well. So it was a delight. And once we Yehudi if we’d had to negotiate with him, as she says he’s on cloud nine, he wouldn’t have shown up. He wouldn’t he’d have forgotten this from one week to the next. It would have been very difficult. But because she was such an old pro. she said, what is it you require? Fine. And me, we shot in Edinburgh, in London and the home in Switzerland, and she couldn’t have been more cooperative. And I guess that shows in the piece. I think if people just relax and have confidence in us, they may end up in a better piece.
Speaker But there was something quite special about it too, which was besides their personalities together, but was the choice of having them sit together during the interview with that plan, was that happenstance?
Speaker Was it?
Speaker Well, we did several. We did him on his own, her by herself, and then both of them together. But no, there is there is clearly a relationship between the two and they do spark each other off.
Speaker And I think perhaps he’s now reached the age where he. He’s the kind of straight guy and she does the jokes, but it works very well.
Speaker Oh, yeah. There are another couple of stories I’d like to sort of focus on for a second. 60 Minutes has done something that is start again. Over the 30 years, it has not been unusual for 60 Minutes to tackle journalism itself, correspondence journalism, both ethnically. Over the 30 years that 60 Minutes has produced it, been producing shows, it has not been unusual for them to tackle subjects on journalism. There has been a show that they did in the beginning that was on the ethics of journalism, and I realized that you produced two programs or two profiles, shall we say, on correspondents, CBS correspondents, one on George Polk and the other on Bob Simon. Can you tell me about. About them and about those particular shows and.
Speaker The the story that I produced on Bob Simon, his release from Baghdad, I mean, that was an example of a crash piece in London, although unusually it was a crash piece without Don. He remained in New York. I wish he hadn’t. I wish he’d come to London. The problem being that as we were editing it, he was on the phone to me every five minutes saying, when are you going to satellited? And I want it now. Where is it? Where is it? And to get to the point where I had to put the phone down on him and say, leave me alone. Otherwise I would never have finished it. But he was so anxious and enthusiastic that he was very quickly down in 24 hours.
Speaker And Simon and the crew were released, I think, from Baghdad on the Saturday, reached London Saturday evening, went straight into the hospital and flew over on Concorde that Saturday evening.
Speaker We did the interview Sunday morning, edited Sunday afternoon and satellited for inclusion in the show Sunday night. So that was a typical example of of a crash course in London. And it was it was interesting to do it in the sense that we were working with our own people. And at one stage I thought, here they are, 40 days and 40 nights in Baghdad and there they are in their pajamas in the hospital looking emaciated. And here we are with our cameras saying, you really have to hurry up because we have to do it now. There was a sense of intrusion about it.
Speaker And then I thought, well, no, they’re professionals, they can do it. And of course, they did at that time.
Speaker Was there any indication that Bob Simon would become a 60 minute correspondent?
Speaker No, to my knowledge, no.
Speaker But he gave such a good performance on there. Maybe that’s what secured it. No, I don’t I don’t know the background to that.
Speaker Yeah. Alstyne, I’m OK.
Speaker I don’t even know. I guess I want to know where he found the story. And how did you find Mr MacDonald and.
Speaker Don, you know, I told you he called me and he said, you got to see this piece and he just sat there and you showed me this story about that and he’s done the other one was, I don’t know, pronounce his last name, the opera singer Thomas Questro. Yes. Fact is, those two as.
Speaker Kind of.
Speaker There are different kind of peace, there’s sort of quintessentially English, and we haven’t talked about that as being brought to 60 Minutes. We talk about the foreign story. Yes, as yes.
Speaker You know, the Middle East and Asia and Russia and the EU. But right here in your own backyard, you bring something to bear. I’m not sure what I’d say about my Clarabelle, although. Well, that’s true. So we’re ready. OK.
Speaker The George Polk story, you produced that. Whose idea was that? That was John’s idea. That was John’s idea because there was a book written by a court in my town that was coming out called The George Polk Conspiracy. And he thought it would be a good idea if George Fox Network went to look into the matter. And it was a fascinating story to do and to go through the streets and the places that George Park had had traveled 40 years before and to actually meet the old communist leader who was still alive then in his eighties that Paul had sacrificed his life for. That was the big story of the day to meet with the communist leader, General Marcos, in the mountains. And that’s what he’d been trying to do when he was murdered and ended up in Salonica Bay. And there we were 40 years later interviewing this communist leader that, of course, no one could remember anything about. So it gave you a sense of the ephemeral ness of journalism, if you like.
Speaker But it was.
Speaker It was interesting to do it from that point of view, it sort of brought home to us, I suppose, what it was like for America’s boys.
Speaker Traveling and crossing Europe and doing the kind of stories that they did in those days.
Speaker Well, it also relates to what the foreign correspondent is doing even today with Bob Simon in the Gulf War. I mean, always the element of danger. Yeah, I’d like to take myself out of it. Let’s try to sort of. Let me let me say it better when you think about it as a reminder of what happened to Bob Simon.
Speaker Yes, I suppose it does 40 years apart. It is a correspondent being so engrossed in the story and getting the story that they often run into a great deal of danger.
Speaker Simon survived. I reckon he had about a one in five chance of getting shot, but he survived.
Speaker George Polk didn’t sort of metaphor about how far a correspondent will go to get the story and what the consequences, I guess, can be. The last thing I want to talk about was the sort of idiosyncratic English story that you, the London bureau, often brings to 60 Minutes. And I guess two examples of that might be the latest story called McLibel and the Thomas Quasthoff. That high cholesterol. Yes, the McLibel story and Thomas Quasthoff. Can you talk a little bit about those where you find them and will?
Speaker The McLibel story was very easy to find because it was all over the press here in Britain and it had gone on and on and on for seven years. All told, the trial lasted three years. And so we were aware of it. And as I read more and more about it, I just thought, this is such a delicious story. And I couldn’t quite believe that a multi national corporation like McDonald’s was taking on these two impoverished environmentalists. And in conjunction with that, I also read how McDonald’s were beating up on small sandwich bar owners like Mary Blair.
Speaker And then, lo and behold, Lord MacDonald came into the picture seething with rage that anyone called McDonald’s should be behaving in such a cavalier fashion. So I thought this was too good to miss. So we put the three elements together and flew it up to Scotland, to the Isle of Skye where. He ate at the real McDonald’s and spoke to Lord MacDonald, and that’s fun. I mean, that’s when it’s pure pleasure when you’re not worried about whether you’re going to get the story or not. I had met him in advance. I knew the sort of man he was and I knew that that would make a great sequence.
Speaker Did you also what was that spring like? What was the phone call like the day after?
Speaker That was that was a very short phone call. That’s just great.
Speaker I think he said, okay. The Thomas Quasthoff that was pronounced Thomas Quasthoff. Yes. Thomas Quasthoff.
Speaker I sometimes it takes us years to to do a six minute story in this case, not because we’re working on it all the time, but we discovered Thomas Quasthoff about two years ago and had all I had planned to to shoot it when he became ill and went into the hospital and he had to cancel the performance that we were all set up to shoot.
Speaker So we then went back to the story a year later. But we were we were nervous about that because he is a very sensitive person and he is not used to that sort of publicity. He has not given a lot of interviews or appeared in any documentary films. From our point of view. That was very good. It’s nice to find someone. Everyone does Pavarotti. But there’s a better sense of achievement in finding and doing someone like Thomas Questo. But we were nervous that he would feel sufficiently at ease in front of the cameras. He is a person who forgets about his disability when he sings, but he, we thought, might be a little easier when we asked him to talk to us or just be himself walking in the park or during rehearsals. And so it was a cliffhanger that he agreed and we did it.
Speaker What what put him at ease?
Speaker I think Ed largely put on disease and the program for the Tuesday was we are having lunch with Thomas Quasthoff. If it doesn’t work out, you can take Concorde that evening. If it works out, you stay for a few days. So that was the deal. And we had lunch with him and his mother and add it and assured him, I think, that he would be a sympathetic interviewer and that he would feel comfortable with him.
Speaker The way I guess that its talent really yes, shines.
Speaker Yes, well, I think that I have just about done everything that I was going to do that I can think of. I promise something anything that you feel that I should talk about, that I didn’t do that.
Speaker I I covered the things we talked about before, hadn’t we? I don’t know. I think so. But you want to take a quick look at me for a second?
Speaker OK, Tom, good morning.
Speaker What’s the this is not the shot, is it not? No.
Speaker Yes, Don, I’m here doing the interview for you, goddammit, this is when I told him to call.
Speaker They must have told you about Dan Rather. No. What does it tell me? OK.
Speaker I have been trying to find how did the famous trademark 60 minute extreme closeup develop, evolve?
Speaker I think it came from here in London here at 60 Minutes, we have a British cameraman who work with us, and they were used to doing this for documentary programs on British television and also people like John Tufan and Bill McClure, a former cameraman. They have great visual talent and they, I think, decided that this was what looked better. After all, you’re then looking into a person’s eyes. You’re not admiring their taste in flowers or setting rules. And that, I think, is where it started. We started to use it here and eventually it spread across the Atlantic.
Speaker What is the secret to Don success?
Speaker I personally think that if Don were a child today, he would be diagnosed as hyperactive and he would be put on medication and the world would have lost a great talent.
Speaker I think one of the secrets of his success is this hyperactivity and the personality and the nature that goes with hyperactivity.
Speaker He is able to cut through all the nonsense and put his finger on the magic moments, and he isn’t distracted by all the detail that distract the rest of us. Hmm.
Speaker That’s very interesting.
Speaker People say that he has a very limited attention span. I don’t think so at all. I think that in a way it’s limited. But he also has tunnel vision. Yes.
Speaker And I think that’s part of the syndrome.
Speaker I think that he give me back my question, because I don’t want to have me say that he please. Why don’t you start by saying he doesn’t really have people think he has a short attention span, but his attention the of. I think he I’m sorry, I forgot what I’m saying. We were saying that Don doesn’t really have people think that Don has a small attention span, but you were saying that that’s part of the syndrome. You were saying that they think he has issues. Yes. Let me get my breath.
Speaker Let’s take a breath and doesn’t have a short attention span.
Speaker In some ways, Don does have a short attention span. And sometimes you go to him and say, if I don’t get this idea across in three and a half seconds, forget it. But in other ways, his attention always seems to be focused on the important things. So while the rest of us are wandering around worrying about the immaterial things, Don is focused. And I think that is one of the secrets of his success.
Speaker I’m sorry when we’re asking for whatever kind of tunnel vision you were, I’m not sure.
Speaker I’m not sure where the tunnel reviews. Oh, I’m sorry. This is an American expression, isn’t it?
Speaker Well, it’s someone who walks around with blinders like you think with blinders is maybe a better example. It’s the horse that has the blinders here so that he’s never distracted by left or right. But then he only is. And I think the expression tunnel vision probably comes from if you imagine visually what you’re seeing.
Speaker Yes, it’s literally like that that kind of tunnel. We don’t have to say it that way. But I’d like to I’d like to get that in the film. And you and I seem to have a rapport about it better than anyone else I’ve spoken to. So I’d like to give it another shot. I’m going to let’s just try it again. I’m going to ask you I ask the same question again. People say that Don has a very short attention span. Do you feel that way?
Speaker What I’m trying to talk to him about an idea, and I failed because I’ve lost him after three and a half seconds.
Speaker Yes, I guess I do feel that way. But he doesn’t have a short attention span on the things that really matter. He has a kind of tunnel vision he can concentrate on when he’s cutting a piece. For example, he is completely involved in the editing and he isn’t distracted by the peripheral things that the rest of us get distracted by.
Speaker He goes straight to the heart of the matter.
Speaker You know, some people have talked about the fact that his lack of a short attention span also led to the kind of quickening pace of 60 Minutes, how that it has picked up its editorial pace over the years. I mean, the programs have gotten shorter and also they’ve gotten quicker. Did you experience that over the years that you have, the 30 years that you’ve worked here?
Speaker I think I think he reflected a very real need that people’s lives now are so much busier than they used to be.
Speaker I remember when we did a 60 Minutes piece about Leni Riefenstahl, who made the film for Hitler Triumph of the Will, which runs for three hours. And it was very amusing to talk to her because she said if she was making films today, she would make it shorter. And Don has reflected that need. I think people’s ability to sit down in the evening and watch a program on television is not a circumscribed by their lives, their commitments in a way that perhaps 20, 30 years ago they weren’t. People have more time then. So I think what he has done is, is is absolutely right.
Speaker It’s interesting because you refer to the fact that if someone has to watch an hour show, they have to make a very large commitment to their own busy schedule. And 60 Minutes. Are you saying then that one doesn’t have to commit to it? I mean, what exactly are you.
Speaker Yes, I think the thought of sitting down and watching three separate segments, if you don’t like one, you can skip out and make a phone call and come back. I don’t know whether people do that, but there isn’t the sense of, my God, I really just about one hour of my life to this program on nuclear radiation. Very few people may want to do that in the evening. They’ve had a hard day. They may be looking after their children and it’s too much to ask of them. We go to Kazakhstan and do a program about nuclear radiation and we tell the story for better or worse in 13, 40 minutes. And I would rather people learned about nuclear radiation in Kazakhstan than didn’t watch.
Speaker Talk about their program for a second. How did you find that story?
Speaker I can’t remember. It was an idea that was suggested by my editor. He had read about it in some magazine or other and we decided we would go there. It involved huge.
Speaker Can start again, sorry, excuse me, ask me the question, how did you find the story that you’re doing presently?
Speaker The oh, the president one. I’m sorry, which one do you want to go talking about? Oh, the press. Yes. The presumption is that we’re just talking I was talking about the nuclear radiation story, Semipalatinsk. Oh, I’m sorry. I was I was thinking that you that you referred to earlier tonight that was in Kurdistan. Yeah. Know they’re both in Kazakhstan. That’s why I was both in Kazakhstan. That’s why I was at Semipalatinsk is in the north of Kazakhstan. And it was the old Soviet nuclear test site. Right. That’s a present story. That’s yes. Let’s talk about that for a second. How do I find that story?
Speaker We saw a film on a documentary film on British television and decided that it was so compelling and powerful that it would be worth accepting it for 60 Minutes. We don’t often buy in pieces. Ed prefers to go there and do pieces himself, but this was one we could never have made ourselves. It was shot by a psychiatrist who was working in a youth corrective labor camp in Kazakhstan, one of the countries of the former Soviet Union. And it is for boys between the ages of 14 and 18, they have committed relatively minor offenses. One 14 year old is there because he stole some ice cream and the conditions are appalling. They are as bad as they were, one human rights activist told us, even worse than during Soviet times. And this psychiatrist managed to convince the authorities that he was making this video for research purposes. So, of course, he had an access that no professional journalists could have ever had. He made it over a period of two years. It took six months for the boys to get used to the cameras and forget that they were there. And we are excerpting some of these very powerful, very moving sequences. In addition, we went there ourselves and interviewed the psychiatrist who was arrested when he made this film public and lost his job. And we also looked interviewed some of the boys who had been released from the camp to hear about their experiences firsthand.
Speaker Hmm.
Speaker In this instance, was it were you or Ed in any kind of danger? I mean, in doing this program, did you have to be secretive about it? Were you able to do it in the sort of traditional 60 Minutes style, or did you have to sort of improvise new methods for covering a story like this?
Speaker We certainly didn’t. We needed visas and we certainly didn’t tell the authorities that that was the story that we were going to do. Otherwise we wouldn’t have got the visas. We also thought that it was important to see Ed outside the camp. And so we used a hidden camera, a small camera, not so much a hidden camera, let me say that. So right. Cameras where we also thought it was a good idea to see Ed outside the camp. So we used a small tourist camera, which is not a professional standard enough for us, and secretly filmed a piece to camera outside knowing that if they actually stopped us, we would have probably ended up if not in that camp.
Speaker And another one very similar. Were you I mean, I am rather surprised to hear how repressive this particular area is right now.
Speaker I mean, considering that the wall has gone down and that there have been elections in the Soviet Union, I mean, it sounds like nothing’s changed.
Speaker Is that well, if you remember that the new president of the Republic of Kazakhstan is the same person who was the communist boss under the Soviet times, then you realize that the personalities have not changed. You could, I think, describe the country as being authoritarian, whereas under Soviet rule it was clearly totalitarian. People are much freer there to criticize. They don’t get put in prison for perhaps criticizing the government any more, but they don’t get much further than that.
Speaker Don. Always has to sort of it seems like adages for what makes a good 60 Minutes. One is tell me a story and the other is tell me something I don’t know. What category does this fall into, how did you sort of sell him on the idea of this of this story?
Speaker Of the idea that one could see for the first time.
Speaker In conditions that are really quite troubling boys, and it doesn’t matter really that they are Kazakh boys, they could be any boys in a camp like this.
Speaker We have heard since socialism’s days of the Gulag Archipelago. And to think that in the 90s this is still going on, the Soviet Union is no longer but that there is a modern day gulag still in these countries. And I think that fascinated him. I’m sure it did.
Speaker When you were there, what did you think about done in relation to this story? Did you have any particular moment where you thought, Don, how is he going to be and how. You said he’s always with you. Yes. In this instance, was he with you in any way?
Speaker He was there, I thought, in terms of will he understand the psychiatrist? Will he understand his motivation?
Speaker What would done most? Ask him what is the question that Don would like to hear us ask him those sort of thoughts all the time. What was the question? I guess Don would have asked, why the hell did you risk your life and your career to do this?
Speaker Did you? Yes, we did. And am I going to hear what he said? I hope so. I know this is still in the process of being made. Are you planning on going back? No.
Speaker So the film where I want to refer to something else, there was are there other instances in which 60 Minutes has bought footage that was very rare that they found from independent filmmakers or from other places in the outside world over your 30 year career?
Speaker They have, but not ones that am qualified to talk about.
Speaker Let me just I want to sort of just just get this name mentioned or anything.
Speaker Just tell me what I know. I have I have to tell you and I have to be OK. There’s this thing that was called. Now, do you know why I’m crying? Yes. And it was a film was made in hell and there was no correspondence. And I know that you were brought in very peripherally. I can I’m going to ask the question again, and maybe you just refer back to them. I don’t think it’s dishonest.
Speaker I don’t know. 60 Minutes doesn’t often purchase footage from other people for for the making of their problems. But are there other instances over the 30 years that you recall where 60 Minutes did something similar to this?
Speaker Yes, it’s always been an option right from the very beginning. I remember way back there was a program that was made in Holland, again, by a psychiatrist who was treating a concentration camp survivor. And for years he had been unable to live with the experiences that he had suffered. And he was given treatment of LSD, I recall, and under the influence of the drug, he was able for the first time, he relived his experiences and he was able for the first time to unblock his feelings. And at one very emotional moment in the program, and this is where the title came from, he turns to the doctor and says, Now, do you know why I’m crying?
Speaker I, I wish that I had been there to to be at the screening when this was screened.
Speaker I and everybody it was a very it was a very strong and powerful piece. And it was largely due to Palmer Williams. He was the person who found it and edited it for 60 Minutes. And Palmer Williams, with whom Williams was the senior producer for many years. He was a collective memory and he was our collective conscience.
Speaker And he worked at it now before I believe he did. So he did.
Speaker I’m going to go back and I think I just sort of lost my way. But since we’re on the story of that, I guess we should at the same time then talk about the other story in.
Speaker Why can’t I keep on pronouncing the name as bad as Don Cursus or ecoterrorism?
Speaker No, no, no. Kurdistan. Oh, Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan. Yes, yes. So long as we’re on the subject.
Speaker Let us talk about the fact that, OK, this was not your first time in Kazakhstan, is that correct? Yeah, it wasn’t. I mean, the 60 Minutes expert on Kazakhstan.
Speaker You want to tell me about another experience?
Speaker That was a very sort of I think it was a very moving piece three years ago, sorry, three years ago, Ed Bradley and I went to Kazakhstan for the first time.
Speaker And that was a real adventure because we went up north to a to a town near the Mongolian border. Kazakhstan is a country and now an independent republic in Central Asia, once part of the Soviet Union.
Speaker And it had been for many years this particular place. We went to the former Soviet nuclear test site and for 20 years, the population in that area had been bombarded with radiation. In fact, the Soviets had quite deliberately, rather than evacuating the population, they have deliberately left them there in the villages around the test site in order to measure the effects of radiation so that they would know in the event of a nuclear war what might happen to their troops. And we visited those villages and saw the high level of cancer in the population, which has now stretched through three generations, and the terrible birth defects that have occurred there.
Speaker How did it relate to this story?
Speaker He was very moved by it. I complained when he first arrived at how far he had to travel. I think it took him 20 hours from New York to get there. So I was I was greeted by him walking very slowly down the hall in the hotel, saying to me, this had better be worth it.
Speaker But I think he very quickly realized that it was he had a natural rapport with. He always does. Ed Bradley has a natural rapport with people who are sick, bereaved or who have suffered in some way. And he brings out the best in them. And I remember we were in this cancer hospital for children and we were waiting to do something. We were waiting in the hall and there were the sick kids playing in the hall and had got down on his hands and knees and played with them. And you must remember that this was a closed city until the end of the Soviet era. They had never seen foreigners before. And we went in there and I remember this small boy thought Ed was very like his father and he did.
Speaker So he didn’t see him as a foreigner, a black American. This sick kid in Kazakhstan saw him like his father. And I think that sums up the the kind of rapport that it has with people all over the world.
Speaker Hmm. It’s very interesting. Yes, he does have that. I mean, it it’s very I never thought of it quite like that.
Speaker But it’s very, very interesting to go backwards now for a second.
Speaker You don’t mind. I have to find my way, though, for one second.
Speaker OK, under what circumstances? Just done you would come to the London office.
Speaker I mean, when he wants to get away from you, when you enter, what circumstances does down?
Speaker You would come to the London office when he wants to get out of New York. And so then he finds a very good reason and we’re all delighted to see him.
Speaker And what is he like in London? What does London mean to him?
Speaker I think London is a special place for him. You must ask him that. But we are aware that he was here during World War Two and so his memories go back that far. And you must ask him about some of those memories. So he enjoys himself here. He revisits his old haunts and does some shopping and enjoys himself, I think. Hmm.
Speaker I’m just going to do it. Let’s try this. I want to read back what you said to me. So when he comes here, you need to get out of New York. But he’s also like a little boy when he comes to. He’s like 19 years old when he was a war correspondent here, and he kind of runs around pretending that he were reliving it, but it’s just the idea of him sort of running around here and sort of remembering the time when he was a correspondent that he likes everything British. He’s almost like an Anglophile and he likes the clothes. He likes the libraries. He likes the wood. He yes. He likes you know, he had things made for his house here. I mean, I know it’s a little I’m feeding you something, but I know, you know, I’m just kind of I like to think I should say that, but I will say the bit about the book. Well, you could set it up and then I’ll talk to him about it. Yes. I mean, I’ll you know, I definitely will say about your hair a little.
Speaker Yeah, thanks. I will definitely talk to both. Sometimes in the film, it’s useful to sort of start here and then go there. OK, so when does Don come to London?
Speaker Don comes to London several times a year. He usually comes when he wants to get out of New York. I think he knows London very well. He was here during World War Two. And I think he comes back to remember the days when he was a 19 year old war correspondent here. And he has wonderful stories of that time, which you must ask him about.
Speaker I will. Does he come here to crash crash stories? I’m sorry? Yes. Does he come here also to crash stories? Yes.
Speaker And if so, what is it like when Don comes here to crash our lives and the officer turned upside down? When Don comes in to crash a story, he usually arrives about the Thursday before the Sunday show.
Speaker He again, though, leaves the producer and the correspondent to make the first cut. And then when that is done and he goes to work and it is one of the most educative experiences, I think, for anyone in television to watch. Don, Don, I’m sorry. It’s one of the most educative experiences in television to watch Don cut a piece. It’s a privilege to watch him. And I think we’ve all learned it’s really his brilliance, isn’t it?
Speaker Where were you during the Diana crisis? I mean, when Diana, unfortunately, Prince of Wales died. Yes. Where were you and what happened? The 60 Minutes? I was at home asleep that Sunday morning. And my younger son, I’m going to ask you to begin with mentioning Diana, so. Right. I don’t want. OK, you don’t mind. Yes. The day that Diana died, the morning after morning after the morning of the morning after was like we all found because I was here to sign off on about eight o’clock in the morning here. It was the morning when she died right after. Right after she died.
Speaker The morning after Diana died. I was at home Sunday morning, and my younger son called to me and said, Diana, your dad at that moment, it was about eight thirty in the morning.
Speaker So 430 New York time, three thirty New York Times. The phone rang and it was Don.
Speaker And his first words were, have you heard? And I left my son. And I said, yes, of course.
Speaker Amazing. I don’t remember. See, I was here, too. So I and I wasn’t quite working on the problem, so I don’t even know what happened. What do you do?
Speaker What did Don do? The whole 60 Minutes show that evening was, in fact, news, took it over to the evening news and Dan anchored it. And it was a whole special edition of 60 Minutes for the news. But I in London produced a piece with Jonathan Dimbleby, interviewed by Tom Fenton. So we came into the office and produced this piece. But generally speaking, it was not your usual 60 Minutes. I see.
