Speaker Plural. OK, I’m going to try in the instance where it’s appropriate to cut myself out so you can kind of feed me back my question so I can do myself.
Speaker I’d appreciate it when it’s appropriate. If we get into a dialogue, it’s OK. I’ll take it up in a reversal. Will you help me do some reversals of me afterwards? Sure. Could you tell me the story about when?
Speaker I’m a sort of OK, OK, because I tell you the story about what about when you and Don went to the LBJ ranch post his presidency, you were there to tape. It was in 1971, a 60 Minutes piece. You had a certain ride in a white Lincoln convertible, as you recall.
Speaker You tell me that story, please.
Speaker President Johnson, Lyndon Johnson was driving his white convertible, and I have no idea whether he meant it this way or not, but it seemed to us that it worked out the president, President Johnson, was driving his Lincoln, was it? Yes. President Johnson was driving his Lincoln convertible white and showing us about the paternalists and all of the artifacts around the area and so forth.
Speaker And all of a sudden he came to stop and he said that candy wrapper, that candy wrapper over there, Hewat, when you go out and get it.
Speaker And Don said, What’s that?
Speaker Mr. President, I said the candy wrapper, let’s get it for you.
Speaker And yes, sir, Mr. President said he would go to the back seat. He was sitting with me, and I’m not telling the story very well. I’m going to do it. Let’s start again. OK, OK, we’re driving. We’re driving with Lyndon Johnson in his start.
Speaker You can even start off by saying anything he wants. He gets you in the morning and he wants to show you the ranch. I mean, that’s why Don said it. He said he came in. You all sort of unexpected and he said, come on, I want to show you around. So maybe you want to start out that way, OK?
Speaker After a miserable night on the ranch when we couldn’t sleep because the generator, we were in a bedroom or a large close to the generator and there were the Beatles around. Anyway, in the morning, Lyndon Johnson said, come on, I’m going to show you the ranch. I’m going to show you the personalities. I’m going to show you where I came from, my home.
Speaker And so we got into his white Lincoln convertible and he was driving around and he and I, as I remember, were in the backseat of the convertible. And I forget maybe a cameraman was up front with with Lyndon Johnson.
Speaker In any case, all of a sudden he comes to a stop and he says that that candy wrapper over there by the side of the road, you would pick it up.
Speaker And he said, when you say, Mr. President, don’t pick up the candy wrapper.
Speaker Oh, yes, sir, Mr. President. So you would get us out of the car and he goes over and he picks it up and he sticks it in a receptacle by the side of the road. Meantime, Lyndon Johnson is driving off not fast, but five miles an hour. That’s all there is. Hewitt running after the convertible. I tell you, it was the funniest sight I have ever seen him in. Now, I later was led to believe that he Johnson was telling Hubert, look, I’m the boss. I don’t fool with me. As far as I’m concerned. You can you can be a candy wrapper picker upper.
Speaker Yes, it seemed to be a moment when he was putting Don in his place, there was a second aspect to the story that Don mentioned, where you really saved the day after this sort of sound and light show that LBJ did was at the same event. He did a sound and light show of the birth, of the birth, of the birth of a baby.
Speaker Oh, yes, yes, yes. Don said it was the worst thing he’d ever seen. And you save the day.
Speaker And I said, oh, that’s a lovely story, Mr. President. That is a lovely story. And he thought he couldn’t believe that. I had said it laughed not so that Lyndon Johnson couldn’t hear it. Another thing that happened down there in the library. We were done and I wanted him to talk about Vietnam, I mean, after all, that’s part a big part of the of the Johnson presidency. And and so, Don and I said, look, you’ve got to talk about you’ve got to talk about Vietnam, Mr. President. Now, there’s an empty exhibit area downstairs.
Speaker He said that’s where the that’s where it’s got to be Lyndon Johnson. That’s where it’s going to be about all that stuff about Vietnam.
Speaker I said, well, and Hewitt says, you got to talk about it, talk about Vietnam. I mean, great society’s fine politics and so forth. But I tell you something.
Speaker So Johnson says Johnson says eventually, look, God dammit, I’m not going to talk about Vietnam, I talked for hours to Walter Cronkite about Vietnam on the pieces that I’ve done with him. I talk to hours, talk to. Come on, I’ll get started. I don’t worry. I’m not worried. Whatever you want, you get up, walk in again, start again. This is fine, OK? We were walking around the library and we came across an empty display case and I said, what’s what’s that got to be for? This is not on camera yet. We were just walking around and the president says, well, now that’s where the Vietnam thing is going to be. And I said, oh, well, we’ve got to talk about that. And Don was there, too, and said, oh, sure, Mr. President, you got to talk about Vietnam. I mean, great societies, phone politics and all of that stuff in Vietnam.
Speaker I talked to Walter Cronkite for hours and hours about that. I’m not going to say a damn word about. Let’s move on.
Speaker So I said I said, Mr. Mr President, let us reason together, which is of course, the Johnson line, and he he looked at me like I was a hair in my soup. And he looked at me like I was a hairy so and so finally we came to a stop here. It was the president of the United States, the former president. And I turned to him and I said, Mr. President, about this Vietnam thing. And he was just there. He couldn’t believe what then happened, and this is something you can’t use anyway. I said, Mr. President, first time I ever really saw you in action was at a luncheon for some women at the Waldorf Astoria when you were vice president and you began to talk about being a Southerner, Southern, Southwestern, or the way you are. All of a sudden you began to talk about race. And I thought to myself, this is an extraordinary individual, this man who was talking about race in this candid fashion and how you are for and we shall overcome.
Speaker This is before you said we shall overcome. But that’s what you were saying. And then along came the Vietnam War and the Vietnam War fucked you, Mr. President. And as a result, you fucked the country. Well, Hewitt, he couldn’t leave, and so he turned and went down the stairs, leaving me where the president and the president looked at me as though I was I had lost my mind.
Speaker He turned around and left. We came downstairs later and there we were in front of the empty Vietnam exhibit and all of a sudden Lyndon Johnson. Launches into this extraordinary. Two minute piece about Vietnam. And he wrapped it all up. In an extraordinary way, which, of course, we put on the air and then said that satisfy the son of a bitch and he turned around, walked away, and Hewat was ecstatic.
Speaker Why, that’s the most amazing part of the story. Why do you say I can’t use it? I’m just curious, why would I be able to use that?
Speaker Because of the because of the fox?
Speaker Yeah, I think I have I think I have some place here exactly what he said. Really? Yeah.
Speaker That that is an amazing story. Did you so your idea there was to get him sort of angry enough so that he would was that the sort of idea of it to sort of confront him on a kind of weakness of his so that he would kind of fight back?
Speaker No, this was not on camera. I know, but this was not on camera, I was trying to say I’m trying to say to the president, come on, what? We’re talking about the Lyndon Johnson Library. How can we talk about the Lyndon Johnson Library before it opens and say there was an empty display case about Vietnam and the president refused to talk about Vietnam?
Speaker He was going to look like a damn fool and so are we. And that’s why I finally said and it’s the truth when I saw him at the Waldorf Astoria, I think it was a UJA luncheon and he was talking to a bunch of women and he was eloquent on the subject of race. Vice President Southerner’s South-Western man. I didn’t know really. And I was so moved by it and I understood so much that I had heard about the the heart and the soul and the depth and the manipulation of this man. And I wanted some of that about Vietnam. I wanted to talk to him about Vietnam. What happened also at that time was I had forgotten they were testing that was that there was a. A truck, that was another thing that happened then there was a sound truck downstairs and we were testing our mikes and so they could hear everything in the sound truck that was going on upstairs with Hugh Johnson Wallace. And after everybody walked away and I’m left there by myself, coming up the stairs were two people who had been in the soundtrack for the whole exchange, Lady Bird Johnson and Liz Carpenter. And they looked at me as though.
Speaker Who’s crazy? Why did I leave? Why did I walk away?
Speaker Don does not like confrontation. Don doesn’t like the Don Flea’s concentrations.
Speaker He is concentration. You mean confrontation? Good concentration. Now, Don flees confrontations. He has not the slightest interest in confronting. I’m quite serious about even when we get into a fight and he and he’ll leave the room when he gets angry, he will not fight except the screaming. Yeah, he has fled the screening room to really the oh, yes, when Don gets angry at me in the screening room and I know this is true with Marley, who lives next door, he will just get up and and. And I confess, I try to beat him a little bit. It’s a joy to beat him and to see how far you can push him, because you know how much he hates confrontation, because I know how much he hates confrontations or because I love him and because sometimes he’s wrong. And when he gets in his genius mode and it’s absolutely certain that he’s right, it’s part of the it’s part of the 30 years together was the Equador screening that we saw typical of what really happens at a screening?
Speaker I forget the Equador screening. They all blend. I forget the Equador screening screen. I forget the Equador screening. They all blend one into another. They’re their exercises in.
Speaker Mano a mano. From time to time, and and the correspondent and the producer are really up against the board of directors. I mean, there’s Hewat and there’s Sheffler and there’s Howard and and Lieberthal and Cartagena and some and and some of these people are unwilling sometimes to take on UAT. I mean, he’s the boss. So what you’ve got to do is if you really have a conviction, it’s to stand your ground. And and that’s that’s when the blood hits the floor. Really does.
Speaker It is very interesting because I asked about several producers. I said, isn’t it? I mean, how do you get to a point where you lose track of what you want? Because the the power of what’s coming at you is so definite, it must be hard to hold on to your own ideas of what you think is right under these conditions.
Speaker Mm hmm. Oh, true. I mean, I know it is true. It is true. Look. Sometimes you just don’t look in 30 years, there have been all kinds of ups and downs and all kinds of relationships here in this shop, and the same is true with the Hewat Wallace relationship. And sometimes you say all the that it’s just not worth it. It really is not worth it. OK, give it to him. It’s going to make him happy. Give it to him. But sometimes in an editorial discussion, you say, I’m not going to give it to him. He’s dead wrong here. He thinks he’s right. He has said it over and over and over. And the fact that you repeat it, Don, doesn’t necessarily make it so. And so you just gotta stand your ground. And he understands it and respects it. He doesn’t he doesn’t hold a grudge. He really doesn’t hold a grudge. And. There are some difficult moments down the years, but I think basically there’s a mutual respect and a deep affection we have for each other.
Speaker I’m sure that’s absolutely true. When you are when Don first approached you and asked you to join 60 Minutes in 1968, what was his reputation?
Speaker He was out of work when he approached me in 68, I’m serious, he was because his reputation was he was a of he had done extraordinary things already in television. But along came Fred Friendly and Fred Friendly thought that Don wasn’t serious enough to do the evening news. And I mean, Fred Friendly had the weight of the world on his shoulders. And and Don was the seat of the Pants City editor or whatever. And and Don was really fighting for his professional existence at that moment. It’s hard to to believe this in retrospect, but he was in an office about the size of this one by himself, one helper, and trying to come up with notions for four shows for television broadcasts. And what happened was, I mean, he would do specials from time to time, but he didn’t have a series.
Speaker He did specials because he was known as being brilliant with live television. Is that correct?
Speaker Oh, he’s yeah. He’s always been brilliant with live television and he has always been brilliant with live television, what you see on the air. But what you see in the control room, I mean, he is directing the symphony orchestra and he is playing every leading role. And I mean, he he he absolutely adored being at the center of attention in that control room. And it wouldn’t have made it wouldn’t have it would have been a joke were he not so damn good at getting the best out of everybody from that control room, the best out of all of the correspondents on the floor or in the room at the conventions.
Speaker Speaking of the conventions and where people didn’t take him that seriously, he he stole another reporter’s notebook. Is that is that a I read it in San Francisco.
Speaker The story goes that he wanted to get an NBC playbook. You know, we were in these were the days when the three networks and really NBC and CBS were in contention, one with the other to get the story and to get the story behind the story at those conventions, which were not just cut and dried affairs the way they are today. These were serious, serious battles between the two, particularly the two giants of television news.
Speaker And if you won the convention, if more people paid attention to you, your network in the convention, then that meant that your evening news was going to win. From then on, all of the prestige was going to go to you. So Hewitt decided that he was going to steal an NBC playbook, the secret strategy, NBC’s secret strategy. And I and he did. And of course, it wasn’t worth anything, but he was embarrassed by it when it was pointed out, I think he was going to throw it out the window or something of that sort. But he’s always been that kind of a competitor. He is that kind of a competitor. He the the version of Hewitt that you see today is mild. It really is. It’s a Tea Party compared to the bash that there used to be around him.
Speaker So as a result of that, I mean, he really did have his wrist slap, so to speak, Denty. And he was sort of demoted to documentaries is how the story kind of goes that correct or not? You know something? I don’t know. OK, but OK, here he is. And he’s coming up with this idea for 60 Minutes. He has no series. He’s sort of ad hoc by himself. You, meanwhile, have been offered an incredible position to work for Nixon. At the same time, you know, the choice, the decision?
Speaker Well, the choice was he came over to my house on a Sunday afternoon to talk about something that I had no idea about. And I thought, sure, you’re going to get an hour. There wasn’t a name for it at that time. It was going to be in our magazine broadcast and Reznor Harry was going to be the original anchor of it. And they decided that that might be too nice to not plan, but they needed somebody to play the black hat against Harry’s white hat. And he told me that they had decided, I don’t know who they were. I guess it was Bill Leonard, but it wasn’t Dixieland up. Now that they decided that, would I be interested because they would like me to do it. And I was very skeptical of it because first of all, I didn’t think it was going to go anyplace. To our Tuesday night, 10:00 against against the NBC Tuesday night movie and Marcus Welby, and, you know, it’ll be on the air for 13 weeks and out. And I had been offered the job as as Nixon’s press secretary. And I had really, by that time turned it down. Had you? Oh, sure. Because I, I had turned it down for the reason that I had wanted so much to come to work as a CBS News correspondent. And I had worked at it for some time and given up everything else to become it. And I was told by Richard Hottelet, Dick Hottelet, I should be careful about giving it up because of Nixon. We’re not to be elected and I might not get my job back here. And I paid attention. And also Frank Stanton, who was at that time, was really running the operation under Bill Paley, suggested that maybe he wasn’t sure I would get my job back. Having said all that.
Speaker Inasmuch as I.
Speaker Oh, then then then I have to get then I had to make up my mind about the following.
Speaker Did I want to go to Washington where I had never lived and worked there? I want to go to Washington, conceivably, as the CBS White House correspondent, or that I want to go to work on this new thing called 60 Minutes. That was a tough that was a tough choice because I wasn’t certain that I was going to get it and I wasn’t certain that Nixon was going to win, although I had a hunch it was going to win.
Speaker Was there an option for you to be the White House correspondent for CBS also? Yeah. Oh, I didn’t know that you had three options.
Speaker Well, no, no, not at the same time that this option that the press secretary happened in March. I’d just gotten out of the hospital a little procedure and I was offered the job. Then Hewitt came in. And I was covering I was covering Richard Nixon at the time when we had gotten along pretty well. Nixon and I knew Hewitt, but not in any real close way. And and he had he had we had had a couple of run ins. He used to kid me about the fact that I did commercials for Parliament cigarettes and suggest, oh, this is the man who going to be the measure, the missile gap and so forth. Oh, sure. And so when he showed up at my place saying, we would like you to do this new magazine show, I was really quite flattered and and surprised. And did I want to say, did I want to stay and take a chance that Nixon was going to be elected and then take the chance that I would be nominated and nominated, that I would be named White House correspondent? Or did I want to go with Don? And Don is a very persuasive fellow. Don Hewitt, in full cry is irresistible. And he kept telling me about how I would have an opportunity to do the to do the old interviews that I used to do on Night Beat in the Mike Wallace interview. Years gone by and he’s a hell of a salesman. And so I cast my lot with Don Hewitt. And imagine if I’d gone to Washington as the press secretary to Richard Nixon.
Speaker I often wonder, I mean, having covered Watergate, I just always wondered what might have happened to you.
Speaker Yeah, I finally I finally wrote him a letter. Nixon. Yeah. Saying effectively, look, I’m not very good at putting a good face on bad facts. And I’m sure there would be some bad facts and I would have to cover for you’d be wise not to. And besides, I don’t know, Washington and I declined.
Speaker Your life might have been very different. Very different. It’s one of the ironies that you were the one who covered really Watergate. Yeah. And as Chuck Colson said with the person, we’ll talk about that a little bit later.
Speaker Hold it down.
Speaker Nakata. Jack, yeah, hold it down a little bit.
Speaker Don, Don had this may not be something you could address, but I think it’s something that’s rather interesting. Don had this very romantic notion about the foreign correspondent, the guy in the trench coat, the guy going off to the war, his vision of this and the reality of traveling all over the place, doing doing all those things. You want to comment on that? Hmm, no. OK. When and how did you first discovered we did this off camera, but I need to do it with you on camera, when and how did you first discover that you had this amazing voice?
Speaker I began in high school, but talking about the Louisianian story, I’m talking about the migrant migrant from the South. Yeah. Was the one in high school all of a sudden I had a speech teacher by the name of Louise Hand, and she was a maiden lady who invited me to her apartment on a Saturday. I must have been, I don’t know, 14 at the time. And she said, Myron, my name. She said, Myron, I’m going to teach you how to produce a sound. And I said, all fine and good. And she put her hand on my belly and her hand on my back. And I didn’t know what the dickens was going on. And I was quite embarrassed by all of it. And she said, all right, I bring it up from here. It doesn’t come from here. It starts here with birth control. And I’ve never forgotten it. I really have never forgotten. And I’ve always been grateful to Louise Hannan for having set me on the path.
Speaker And so you discover that you really had this talent as a result of that? I mean, I had a voice. A voice. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Um, I’m trying to reflect on some of the changes that have happened over the years at 60 Minutes. It seemed to begin as a sort of fledgling show and it had to find its voice. I mean, what is your sort of take on the changes?
Speaker I mean, over this period of 30 years, we did he would put together a pilot for 60 Minutes and most of it was done with Reasoner doing the lead ins. And I was getting some of the lead in material. But these were all pieces that various other correspondents had done. The fact of the matter is that Hewitt’s notion was just that it was going to be a magazine and a picture magazine. He used to talk about Look magazine, not life for some reason, but Look magazine mainly as I remember it. And the fact is that the that the character of an enterprise like 60 Minutes finds its way as it goes back. Then, CBS News CBS overall was making so much money and CBS News was such a. Back then, CBS News back then, CBS was making so much money that they had the opportunity to put an hour on Tuesday night at 10:00, figuring they’re never going to get an audience and maybe even put it on sustaining that means without commercials. And they had the time then to let a broadcaster develop itself. And we didn’t really have a good idea of what it was that we were going to do. We found out as we went Harry Reasoner, and there was nobody better. What you saw was what you got with Harry was Middle America. He was the heart and the and the mind and the soul of middle America. I was this tough guy who had who had come out of confrontational interviews and asking the irreverent of the abrasive question. So it was a good mix. But but there wasn’t a real I mean, that wasn’t enough for the broadcast. And what happened over a period of the first two or three years was that we were finding our way. And that meant that we would finish out of 100 shows a week. We would finish maybe eighty fifth or 90 second or something of that sort. We got good notices, but no audience to speak of truly. Then Harry went away. He went over to ABC because Walter Cronkite was not going to be hit by a truck. He decided he was going to be the Cronkite replacement as a result of which he said, I’m out of here. The people, the people who decided on on Morley coming were Don and Bill Leonard. They decided that Morley should come aboard. And Morley and I had been pals from before, not close pals, because he’d been overseas most of the time. But we liked each other, knew each other. But suddenly we had to re evaluate. We rebalance the broadcast because he he was not Harry.
Speaker And that is when, you know.
Speaker Well, that’s when, um. Yeah, one, two, three, four or five, good, morally so. Molly came aboard and he wasn’t Harry Reasoner, he had a whole different flavor. There’s a certain elegance about Molly in a different kind of writing and so forth. But there was nothing compelling anymore, really, about him or me. And then suddenly what happened?
Speaker Watergate came along and because there were no other broadcasts, none that had the time to devote to some of the cast of characters of Watergate except 60 Minutes, it sounds strange in retrospect to say that there was no Nightline, there were no other real big magazine broadcasts. I had a relationship with all of the people in the Nixon administration, Richard Nixon and Colson, Haldeman, Erlichman, the whole crowd, John Mitchell. And so as a result, we began to do I began to do interviews about Watergate with the entire top cast of characters that suddenly I mean, these things hit the front pages all across America. And and gave a certain, hey, what are these folks doing, how come this is on 60 Minutes and what is this, 60 Minutes? We still were not really toward the top at all of the ratings and then came along the 73 war, the Yom Kippur War, in which suddenly you didn’t have gas to go anyplace on Sunday afternoon, Sunday evening, you didn’t have the gas to drive to grandma’s. You were stuck at home with your television set and you began to look around.
Speaker And that is where for the first time, suddenly 60 Minutes became a staple. And and you can see on the charts that the ratings of 60 Minutes just went like that beginning in 73.
Speaker That’s very interesting. I forgot about the I forgot about the gas. I forgot about.
Speaker Yeah, I because I was I was going to ask you and I want to go back about talk a little bit about the specific of Watergate. But was it a coincidence that it was shortly after Watergate? I think it was seventy six that you actually got your Sunday night, seven o’clock permanent spot. Was that a coincidence or was that a direct result of how well you did with Watergate and fame? And also more people began to watch because, as you said, the Gulf, the crisis, oil crisis was a combination of those things.
Speaker It was was a combination of all all of the above.
Speaker We were on six o’clock on Sunday nights and we were when we heard that we were going on at six o’clock on Sunday night, we decided that was the death knell. When I say we everybody in the shop figured, what are they trying to do? Get rid of us, put us in the so-called Sunday afternoon ghetto, the late afternoon on Sunday, when you do good things, public affairs broadcasts that nobody watches. Well, people were beginning to watch partially because of Watergate, partially because of the fact of the gas crisis, so that you had no place to go on Sundays at six o’clock because you couldn’t get in your car. And then some good research done by a fellow by the name of Dixieland who ran CBS News at the time and a man name of Oscar Katz, who was the he was the director of research. And it was he, Oscar, Oscar Katz, who said, you know something, because of the fact that because of an understanding among the networks that kind of entente among the networks, that you’re only at seven o’clock at night, you’re only going to be permitted to put on a child, a children’s show or a news show. Let’s try it there. And suddenly in no time, we came up and we finished number one, I guess for the first time during the 70s. No one of our all broadcasts, I thought was 1980. But that’s a comedy. I thought it was, too. But but Don says that in the 70s, the 80s, in the 90s, we’ve been number one, not all that time.
Speaker In any case, what’s interesting is that the very first 60 minute program. Had a piece on Richard Nixon during the primary in the during the convention, during the convention excuse me, during the convention, Haldeman was there, Erlichman was there.
Speaker They were all in the room. Do you remember that piece? Of course I had because of it back to me, because I’d like to use that clip.
Speaker And I want to understood because I had developed a relationship with Richard Nixon prior because I’d covered Richard Nixon in 67 and 68. And he had offered me the job as press secretary, but we still were friendly. I asked if we might cover him and his family in their suite at the hotel in Miami during the nomination process and to my huge surprise, they said yes. So there we were with Mr. and Mrs. Nixon and the kids and Rosemary Woods and the group. The now, this, of course, was long before Watergate, and it was extraordinary for back then.
Speaker That’s 30 years ago to see the man being nominated and to watch him watching himself being nominated and the relationship between between Nixon and David Eisenhower and Rosey Woods and Mrs. Nixon sitting like this and so forth.
Speaker And and it was quite a sight. It really was. It was a coup.
Speaker It’s a quite aside, it’s also quite a comment and have different 60 Minutes was then because you weren’t in the actual piece, you’re not in the room with them. It is a cameraman doing the reporting that you have set up. And I’d like you to comment about that, because that was a different way of doing a 60 minute piece at that time.
Speaker We were trying to do anything we can. We were trying to do anything we could at that time. Really, we were experimenting. We were trying to find out what worked and what didn’t work. We were buying pieces from outside on that very first broadcast beyond the the Nixon family watching themselves being nominated. There was a piece by Saul Bass called Why Man Creates.
Speaker And there wasn’t there a piece by about Ramsey Clark and and cops? I remember he said that I believe it was he said a couple of [Unrecognized]. The cops are what he said. The public is antagonistic toward the cops the same way they’re antagonistic in a racial way toward [Unrecognized]. I don’t know if that was in the piece itself. There was that. And then, of course, and then, of course, Harry followed that up with visiting with Hubert Humphrey as he was being nominated to.
Speaker There were a lot of things that were almost a little bit like see it now where you would, for instance, Northern Ireland, for instance, Israel in Northern Ireland, you were on one side.
Speaker Reasoners was on the other side.
Speaker Yes, Israel. You were in Israel. Reasoner was in Palestine or vice versa. I mean, it was switching back and forth. I mean, that idea, which was really an outgrowth to see it now, as least as far as it seemed to me, was that no idea.
Speaker We did we didn’t think about it. We didn’t think about it as being an outgrowth of see it now.
Speaker We were really a very small band of brothers and sisters back then, truly. And we would sit around and talk about what we might be able to do and that he would, as always, had I nothing good ever came out of a meeting. We don’t have meetings. Maybe conceivably we will have meetings at the urinal in the men’s room, which is true. But forget meetings, but we’d sit around and talk about what we wanted to do.
Speaker And so Harry and I talked about he would go to the Lebanon side and I would go to the Israeli side or he would go in Nigeria, he would go to one side and I would go during the civil war. And the same thing is true with in Ireland, Northern Ireland and.
Speaker And what the hell?
Speaker Oh, the cat. And in Northern Ireland, the Catholics and Protestants, and he would he would take one side note. These were just we were trying to find our way at the time and we could do anything that we wanted to do because nobody was complaining bitterly about money back then because CBS was awash in it. And besides, we never could travel first class. We had to go in the back of the bus, so to speak, in the economy class. You know what we hated back then? The camera crews could go first class. They had it in their union contract and the cameraman would send peanuts and an occasional drink back to us to to Reznor and me and then to Safer and me in steerage. And then finally, it was a big there was a big revolt. By this time, Dan Rather had joined us and we said, hey. We went we went in to see Hewitt and we said. Listen, we’re going to quit unless you get us first class transportation. We were on airplanes, for Pete’s sake, two-thirds of our lives, and so he went to bat for us. That was a little mutiny. And we finally got first class travel.
Speaker Interesting. You also, as the correspondents weren’t in a lot of programs as much as you are today. I mean, they weren’t is driven by the correspondents. There were a lot of them.
Speaker Oh, no, no, no. That was not true. No, I don’t know what you’ve seen, but I know. Well, back in those days, there were only two of us, first Harry and me and then mullion. And we would have to do up to thirty five, thirty seven pieces a year each. And you were I mean, you never, never, never stopped working. So perhaps we weren’t as in each of the pieces to the degree that we are today. But but Safer. Always loved to be in safer. You used to love to appear on camera in stand up or walking toward camera or.
Speaker I used to say maybe I should do that. I mean, he’s he’s he’s on camera all the time and I’m. And you didn’t like that much, right. It’s always been a little competition for turf here. Absolutely.
Speaker So let’s see where I was just going to ask you another little thing about the two cameras, there’s a little bit of a discussion. A lot of people have given me different pieces of information. And you may not even have a correct memory of this.
Speaker I know what this is all about. You’re talking about reverse shot. Yes, four years as an economy measure. You have a camera looking at me right now. You’ve got no other cameras looking at you. Do you know that’s what we used to do? We used to have one camera because it was half as expensive. And then that camera would turn around and look at you, the questioner, and we would re ask the question on what was called reverses. And there was a well, he didn’t he didn’t ask the question the same way on the reverse or his eyebrow was up here when it should have been down there or it wasn’t exactly the same flavor or whatever. And besides which, it was a pain in the back to have to really ask the questions all over again after he got through with an hour’s interview. So, again, mutiny, we said we’ve got to have two cameras.
Speaker I see. So that’s that’s the fourth version of the story I’m hearing, though. That’s the true version. What’s the what other versions of you heard? Well, the versions that I heard was one that Paly suggested it because he didn’t like the fact bullshit, the one that Westmorland that that because of the Westmoreland case that there was some bullshit. OK, and actually this is the and then I heard one London saying, oh, they started doing that at the very beginning, you know, because so many of the producers were very was this was the story. OK, honest. OK, let’s just mention something about the producer here.
Speaker What is the importance of the producer on the show, The Producers. The producers are the real.
Speaker Reporters, researchers of this broadcast, and they have been since the beginning, look, it’s only sensible if you turn out who used to be 35 or 37 pieces a year. If you turn out now each of the individual correspondents, 25 or 23 pieces a year, you couldn’t possibly do the reporting. So what you have are producers and associate producers, researchers who do a lot of the reporting. Now, that doesn’t mean that the correspondents are just stick figures who come in and ask a couple of questions and fly on to the next destination. You work with your car, with your producer. The correspondent works with his or her producer very closely. But they are it’s a real collaboration. This is the face, if you will. God help us. That’s on camera. And the producer is the is the person behind the scenes. But the but the the contribution that’s that’s too meager a word.
Speaker The role of the producer is just as important and in some degree more important, in a strange way than the correspondent you see on the air.
Speaker It seems that you had certain producers who’ve been with this program for a long time. There’s some of them that are still here. Is it hard to keep producers working for 60 Minutes? Is it a hard place to have a producer remain for a long time and be happy?
Speaker I don’t think so. Producers. Down the years I worked with a producer by the name of Barry Landau, who I think came in the second year of the broadcast, and he and Barry and I helped to make the investigative piece, which eventually became the hallmark of 60 Minutes.
Speaker We were there. We were the people that really confirmed the role of the investigative piece on on 60 Minutes, a woman name of Marion Golden, also who both of them were working out of Washington at the time, had it not an equally, but had a very important role.
Speaker And for a while, I mean, that was that was the story of 60 Minutes, the investigations and the hard interviews that we did. A fellow by the name of Lowell Bergman, Lowell Bergman, is a superb reporter, just as Barry Lando is a superb reporter and Bergman has sources, FBI. I was about to say CIA doesn’t really have CIA. He has sources all over America, some foreign sources as well. But those are the things that made the difference in the early days. And up and until right now, each of those individuals has left 60 Minutes to go off on their own within the last couple of years. And inasmuch as both of them worked for me at that is that was a big sacrifice to make because they came up with a lot of the notions for the pieces that we do. It’s their sources that realized that they were going to get airtime for their gripes, leaks, notions of what makes a good story on 60 Minutes. And they had confidence in Landow. They had confidence in Lowell Bergman.
Speaker Must be hard for me. A lot of people compare the relationship between a correspondent and a producer, almost like a marriage.
Speaker It is a little bit like a marriage. I think it was I think it was Eric Sevareid who compared the relationship of a correspondent and a producer to that of a dog with a tree. The but that is not so. Occasionally it’s the other way around. And on 60 Minutes, you really work in concert with this. I mean, I cannot tell you how. I cannot tell you how important it is to understand that it is a collaboration. The producer and the correspondent, we get the we get the ink, the coverage and the money because of our good looks, obviously. And and the producers who are also very well recompensed get a little angry about it.
Speaker Speaking of getting angry about it, you did have one meeting that Barry Landau told me what he said was the very beginning, that he called a meeting and it was about trying to get the producers to have the voice over that comes on during the book, say this story as reported by and apparently you remember this meeting.
Speaker No, he must have had that meeting with Hewitt walked out. Hewitt walked out. I believe it. I just wonder if you could tell me the story. No, no, I won’t remember it at all. No, I would not know. There was there was at the beginning. At the beginning. At the beginning of the broadcast. If you take a look at some of the there was no talk about the producer at all. It was just on camera with the title of the piece. And then after a while, it became quite apparent and I don’t blame them that the producers who were doing so much of the reporting, they needed a byline and they got a byline and they deserved a byline. I’m going to make trouble here. Now, there is insufficient byline attention. It seems to be paid to the editors, the tape editors, the film editors back in the old days because they have so much to do with what is on that screen. What you’re doing now, you have an associate producer and you’re going to have you have an editor and the editors, if they are good and most of them around here are good, have an immense amount to do with what finally comes up on that screen.
Speaker Yeah, that’s why I began, by the way, I was a film editor. Oh, really? Yeah. Started. Um.
Speaker Let’s see what is your litmus test for what is your litmus test for keeping my litmus test for producer witnesses? Isn’t litmus tests élite? Ammu, I have any responsibility as a litmus test.
Speaker You have to.
Speaker Curiosity, curiosity, background, hunger.
Speaker For the story. The desire to stay late and come in early. You know something?
Speaker There are more and more female producers on 60 Minutes, and one of the reasons is they’re hungry. They are hungrier than men are. They want to achieve what their male superiors have achieved before them. And so you look very carefully at female producers. One does, because you know that they’re going to work like the dickens. How many do you have females now traditionally down the years? I’m trying to think, Marilyn Golden, I’ve mentioned I have a woman by the name of Abby Pogrebin right now. A lot of the associate producers are female. That’s all I just have one full producer out of four. I have only four producers and only one out of four at the moment.
Speaker Um, we heard from Joe Lightish that sometimes you call Don. We’re talking about this place being a competitive place because you’ll call down at eleven thirty at night to verbally give him a blue sheet and an important story.
Speaker Or I used to do that. Sure. We all look we have what is known as the blue sheet, which is I put my dibs on that story. I want that story. And I don’t want any of the other folks up and down this line to get that story. Well, actually, the blue sheet began back in the days of the Cronkite news when the Cronkite News and 60 Minutes were competing for the same story. And finally, I forget who it was. Some executives said there’s only one way to do it. Put in it. I don’t I have no idea how the word sheet or how it came to be a blue sheets on a white piece of paper of the blue sheet said. Dibs on the story now. When when some story is breaking and you want to get to do the interview that everybody else wants to do when there’s competition among three or four or five people in their shop, the guy who gets the flu shot first is going to get the story back then. There’s no doubt about it. I would I would call it 11 o’clock at night. I’d call it three o’clock in the morning. But this doesn’t go on very much anymore.
Speaker Yeah, although the people run into the very Landow used to be used to put his blue sheet on everything, everything, and then he’d hold on to it for six months at the people in London have been peddling that bullshit.
Speaker The fact of the matter is, everybody blue sheets too much and they want to hold on to it, myself included, because you say in three months this is or in four months, I want to have that to be able to do so. You blue sheets. And finally, we had a self limiting blue sheet notion put together saying after six months, if you haven’t acted on your blue sheet, it’s dead. It’s open, open season to the rest of the correspondence.
Speaker It’s a funny little place. It’s like it’s got these five siblings and all these cousins around kind of competing for daddy’s attention.
Speaker Yeah, all the competition used to be much worse. Really? Yeah. Why? Because above the competition used to be much worse. There was competition. There wasn’t a lot there wasn’t a lot of competition between Reznor and me. We got along exceedingly well. The and he did a different kind of piece. I mean he did essays and and mores and back of the book stories mainly. And so that left me to do the other stuff when Seyffer came in. I mean, his background had been mainly hard stuff, Vietnam and Africa and and so and there was a lot of competition involved there for the reason that he came to New York where he had never worked before, and he was up against somebody who had always had been here for a lot of years and was better known to some of the sources around town.
Speaker So that got to be a little difficult from time to time, but.
Speaker Then rather came. And I was responsible to a certain degree to get to get rather, because we were all we were exhausted, we were really pooped, safer or not.
Speaker And and.
Speaker He used to say, well, all right, let’s get Dan Rather figuring, you know, he he he had come up from Washington and it was no longer covering the White House and he was going to be on CBS reports and they thought that maybe he would do well for a third person on 60 Minutes. But they but they didn’t want to just mix up safer or they didn’t want to enlarge safer. And Wallace, because we were doing pretty well. And they figured when they mentioned rather that I would say particularly, no, we don’t want him. No, no. Finally, my wife called Bill Leonard, not Hewitt, but Bill Leonard, who was his boss and said Mike needs help. And because we were exhausted and you were never home. And so finally. They said, all right, rather.
Speaker Figuring I’d turn it down, I know I would love to see down, and surprisingly, the three of us worked very, very well. We’re all competitive, but very, very well together.
Speaker Um, speaking of techniques, and I was thinking of Dan Rather, one of the first pieces that you did with Barry Lando was called kiddie porn. Mm hmm.
Speaker I think he’s he said that it was the first time that you had actually used a hidden camera, doesn’t it?
Speaker I don’t think it was. But anyway, I just wondered what your memory of my was. My well, my memory of kiddie porn is only when it’s a long, long time ago. I mean, it was out in California and we walked into a kiddie porn salesman who was a really sleazy guy, but but not the hidden camera, I think started in Chicago.
Speaker Because we did two or three or four of them back then in the either the late 60s or the very early 70s on Medicaid fraud about.
Speaker Mistaken, I did not mistake that false I.D. That was later. Was it really? That was later. Well, maybe kiddie porn. Was I out change.
Speaker OK, quick question. Does Tom Foster the competition around here?
Speaker He did Don foster the competition? Yeah. He like the creative tension. I think that they used to say Ben Bradlee did that at The Washington Post, the creative tension between Reznor and Wallace. But he struck out because there wasn’t much creative. He’d rather like the creative tension between Safer and Wallace and then to have rather and safer. And yeah, he likes that because and he was right. Makes everybody work a little bit harder. I’m going to beat that son of a gun. I’m going to get that story.
Speaker It’s actually the very quality that sometimes people say that the producers actually can’t take around here because they’re not they’re not around me, no. Oh, around done around that he he doesn’t give them enough credit. He’s always kind of putting them in their place, saying, oh, we don’t have the right producers here. We don’t you know, these people aren’t. He doesn’t say that. He doesn’t know. The executive producer seems to be a little bit of an ambivalent title for what Don would actually does. What do you think would be a more appropriate title for Don?
Speaker Executive producer is whatever you want it to be. He is play doctor. He is reporter. He is Booker. He is cheerleader. He has an innate sense most of the time. Most of the time, he has an innate sense of how to take this part from this big this piece of the beginning of a story and put it back over here and move something around. And all of a sudden. A story that was six out of 10 suddenly becomes an eight or nine out of 10, he’s got an extraordinary editorial. Touch. He almost seems to have a photographic memory. He did, he’s getting older now. But he really did. He had an absolutely photographic memory. I mean, you talked to him about pieces that were that were 20 years old. He he remembers. Lines out of some of these pieces, and he used to. Now, when he sits down in the editing room, he has the script in front of him. And sometimes I get annoyed at him because he’s looking at the script instead of at the picture. And they want to say and I tell him, so, Don, it’s up there. Stop looking at the at the script because you’re looking at the picture at the same time. But in the old days, he used to sit there in that control. In the old days, he used to sit there in that screening room without a script. The piece would play through and he’d say, OK, now let’s go back when it was over. Now let’s go back to and he would have an absolute photographic memory of everything that he had seen and say, I want this there and that here it’s it’s and we used to work seven days a week back then, about 10 hours a 10, 12 hours a day sometimes, really, and have a ball doing it.
Speaker And we would and we would tape it. Around five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, so that and it had to go on within, you know, at seven o’clock on Sunday afternoon out of here and everybody work around the clock every day. And as and and the excitement around here, the pride and the fun, when suddenly we began to move up and people began to pay attention.
Speaker It was extraordinary. It must have been there must have been the day that you all got became number one the first time, was it. Oh.
Speaker Incredible celebration. High fives. High fives. So we just went through several questions here. People joke all the time about Dan’s attention span. Oh, he’s not doesn’t have a kid you don’t get in the first 30 seconds and for six seconds you’ve lost him. I’m not so sure about that.
Speaker Don has a tendency sometimes, yes.
Speaker Yeah, yeah, Don has Don has a tendency sometimes to say about 10 seconds and yeah, yeah, I understand. I’ve got it now. Go ahead. He’s impatient in that way. And frequently he does get it. Sometimes he misses it. And it’s hard. Don. Hold it a second, Wajib, for Pete’s sake. Wait a minute. Let me make the point. Let me. And he’ll look properly chastened for a moment and then go back to what he was doing. But if that’s if that’s a handicap, hasn’t done much damage around here, on the contrary, it’s that lack of attention span and that enthusiasm and that and that sense of discovery. It’s amazing, really, and he will listen to people, not just the producers and the and the associates and the researchers, he will listen to everybody. We got about 100 people on this floor and he is interested in what all of them have to say.
Speaker Yeah, it is interesting, um, I think he’s got an I personally don’t think that his attention span is shorter. I think he’s got incredible focus.
Speaker Well, he’s got incredible focus because you’re doing an hour and a half about Don Hewitt, for Christ’s sake. And he’s being very, very, uh, forgiving with you. And I don’t blame him. I mean, he’s. Why not? Why don’t you blame him? Oh, come on. He’s got you know, this is going to be a valentine to American masters. You are your mind. Believe me, he has a short attention span, but he he seems to operate pretty well despite that.
Speaker Could you talk about Don, survival, a a survivor? I mean, he has survived here three regimes at CVS. Um, Granat, you’ve had a very successful program, but there must be something else that goes on that gives him this kind of a a kind of a savvy to be able to survive the, uh, the politics of network television.
Speaker That’s an essay and I mean, that’s really not an easy answer.
Speaker Well, they will no longer answer, I don’t understand, and I’d like to at least understand it well.
Speaker Don has always been ambitious. All of that, and he has always been and he defers, believe it or not, to power.
Speaker He does above him. He’s not a maverick. He’s not a. What he’s told go, he goes. It’s not that he’s a company man, but he pays attention to topower. Um.
Speaker He sometimes. Over the years has run into trouble with the presidents of CBS News. For reasons that I do not fully understand, he insolent had a little bit of a falling out, he and Friendly had a little bit of a falling out. Um. I’m not I I’m not going to be very helpful with this.
Speaker And the scientists and lawyers here and I know David.
Speaker We have to believe you’ll tell me the truth. I’m not no, I don’t think I’m not sure. I’ll ask him. Some people say he’s a brilliant promoter. You know, that he.
Speaker What do you mean? Some people say. He is a brilliant promoter. And and there’s nothing pejorative about that. He he does the promos for this broadcast each week and he works on. Well, if that promo is on the air, on other broadcasts on CBS, let’s say half a dozen or eight or 10 times in the two or three days before the Sun broadcast, that means that millions of people are going to be drawn to tune in. And he works hard on those promos and they’re wonderful. I listened to them and I say, hey, I’m going to tune in and see that he’s very good at it.
Speaker He also does something that I think is very, very shrewd, if someone criticizes him about something, he will then take that criticism and he’ll turn it into a soundbite saying, I’ve done this. You know, he feeds it back.
Speaker He he takes you know, he’ll if someone wants to criticize him for, let’s say, running television, you know, now you talk to him and he’ll say, I’m the first one to admit that I have ruined TV news. Do you know what I mean? There’s something about this kind of shrewd, a shrewd, a shrewd aspect to it. You know what I mean? This is not pejorative. This is just try to understand it. You may not agree with me, it’s something I’ve noticed.
Speaker Well, I may be so, but I have noticed. I mean, he’s in his 70s now and we’ve been together working shoulder to shoulder for 30 years. He’s he’s a much changed man.
Speaker In the sense that he is a much more responsible, is a more responsible journalist, he’s a more responsible figure in the world of television news. He wants to leave behind not just 60 Minutes, but he wants to leave behind a sense that 60 Minutes has done something special in television news because it has kept its standards high. He it’s not that he. It’s not respectful of work that is done other places and other magazine broadcasts, for instance, but he knows. That this has been a special broadcast and that this has made an extraordinary contribution. I mean, I’m a little, uh, I feel like. Foolish saying this in a sense, but this this broadcast has made a special contribution to television journalism, there’s no doubt about it. He is proud of that. And he’s also looking toward history now. And I talk about Bill Clinton wanting to leave a legacy here. It wants to leave a legacy that’s beyond just 60 Minutes. It’s talking to the controversies that surround television news and and journalism in general today.
Speaker And he has I mean, actually, 60 Minutes has impacted upon what TV journalism is today. I mean, they have they have created for generations to come the standard of what should be TV journalism. Some people think that there’s a you know, that that 60 Minutes falls into the because it’s become so people oriented. Meaning that it is. Become where the emotion is an important aspect of the story that often misses out on stories where.
Speaker Port, you know what, I’m I know exactly 60 Minutes is not a 60 Minutes is not a broadcast about issues. It is a broadcast about issues, but it tells stories. You have an issue that you want to talk about, whether it’s the death penalty or racial antagonisms or political scurrilous doings, fine, but not as an issue. We’ll talk about it in the context of telling a story. And that is why people sometimes look down their nose and they say, well, it’s a kind of morality play and. You’re darn right it is. What are we trying to do? We’re trying to expose to America. What are at the top things that are at the top of the American agenda, but we want to do it in a way that’s interesting so that all of a sudden the people who are watching are watching like this instead of sitting back and watching like that. They are. They’re drawn to the people on the screen.
Speaker And it began well, it’s a good point and certainly began I was thinking about Watergate again, because if you did something just about political cover up, it would have been entirely different if you didn’t know, um. If let’s see where I’m at here. Oh, it’s not going to be like that. She’s. I’ll get back to Don for a second. In the early days, Don, direct, you mean direct? Well, I’ve seen him with new correspondence come on the program. He directs them in the booth. He helps.
Speaker Not very much. No, no. I, uh. I was a pro beforehand.
Speaker OK, forget about this, OK? Do you have a sense of what’s Don’s favorite kind of story?
Speaker I think the Don’s favorite kind of story is what he calls the holy shit story. Shit, I didn’t know that. That’s really his favorite kind of story and and it covers all kinds of it covers controversy. It covers exposition about something scientific. It’s. It’s a voyage of discovery, the story that says that will make the audience say.
Speaker I’ll be damned. I didn’t know that, hmm. It’s nice.
Speaker Um, I was thinking about the Frank Sinatra moment with his favorite let us be Frank Sinatra program. Well, it’s one of his favorites.
Speaker And really, is it? Yes. I never. Hugh Hewitt loves to go in and watch the. Year after year, Hewitt goes into the screening room by himself with a copy of the Frank Sinatra profile and he watches it and everybody knew that comes here has to come and sit with with Hewitt and watch it with him. I must have watched that damned.
Speaker And it’s very good. It is very good. But I must have watched that Sinatra program, I don’t know, certainly a dozen times with Don. And he he said, now, wait a minute. See what’s coming up now. Have you watched the Sinatra program?
Speaker I have it twice. Twice. Oh my. Why do you think he’s so in love with it?
Speaker Well, first of all, no one’s ever done a Sinatra piece except him. Well, no one’s ever done Erlichman like you have either. No, no, it’s not Sinatra. Come on. I noticed that on the bulletin board outside of a outside, that he has two versions for this scenario, albeit one that’s eleven minutes another that’s 12, 40 or something of that sort. I would I’ve not seen those. I’d like to see what those.
Speaker So would I like to be here when it crashes. I’d like to be here the weekend that happens. Um, Dan will be in his. Element. Yes. OK, we’re going to back up here for a second and we’re going to talk a little bit about a couple of things about Watergate specifically. It seemed that it was the moment that this is sort of the tough interview came about when you went into those interviews, did you have no one, any rules?
Speaker You mean ground rules, yeah. Never had a ground rule with anybody that I talked to about Watergate ever, ever were there.
Speaker Did you have to submit questions? Never, never. And was there the notion of payment?
Speaker Yeah, there were two. They were never any ground rules going in to what we were going to talk about in any of those Watergate interviews, and no questions were submitted ahead of time with any of those interviews. There were two times when money exchanged hands and Dixieland, who was one of the most who was one of the poorest of the poor on that score, had to obviously OK it and as far as I’m concerned, I’ll. It is OK under certain circumstances. Gordon Liddy. Wanted very much or we wanted very much to talk to Gordon Liddy. And he demanded and he got fifteen thousand dollars and the rationale that was given and as far as I’m concerned, it was made perfect sense, the rationale that was given when our betters said, OK, give them the fifteen thousand dollars that if he were to write his memoir. He would have he would get paid for a memoir. The other time that we paid was. Uh. A lot harder than the other time we paid with Bob Haldeman. This was not a 60 Minutes piece. This was a CBS reports piece. And Haldeman got one hundred thousand dollars for it. And he really stole it because he told us, I’ll never forget. We were in the Hay Adams Hotel across the street from the White House in Washington, and he had just come from the courtroom and we were going to have dinner together.
Speaker Marion Golden and Gordon Manning and Hugh White had nothing to do with this. And and the husband said, you know something? He was the weirdest man, meaning Nixon ever to live in that in that house. And when we heard that we’d forget, oh, we really have it pay paperman one hundred, uh. He never delivered. He never delivered. He never delivered.
Speaker Um, speaking of Erlichman, I mean, what was it like sitting across this man? I mean, I’ve seen the clip and he’s sweating. He looks guilty as sin. When you were when you were sitting there, did you know when did you know you had him?
Speaker So we knew all along that we had him because we knew sufficient about the background of John Erlichman by that time and of the whole Watergate business. Goldin was the producer of that one. And we came in and sat down and he came in without any I mean, most of them come in with aides and chauffeurs and bodyguards. And he came by himself and I don’t know what in the dickens he thought was going to happen.
Speaker He had no notion that we knew as much about him. And that wonderful and I say wonderful long question that he listened to. And then said. Is there a question in there somewhere?
Speaker Told the whole story, told the whole story in a strange way of Watergate, of everything that went on.
Speaker A lot of drama that was.
Speaker It really was a drama and also seeing it today, just as an aside, for people who have lived through like Gabby’s age, it’s extraordinary for them to look at these tapes.
Speaker And that’s and hold on. Having seen that demand that the one thousand dollars which he got from Dixieland and he was going to turn it on me, he was going to act like the willing witness until the cameras went on. And then I fished and fished and fished and never caught nothing.
Speaker Was that one of the worst sort of experiences an interview had?
Speaker Yeah, really? Yes, for the reason that so many people were on our case about paying money, you know, checkbook journalism, I think the checkbook journalism makes absolute sense. And I think the dawn does do under certain circumstances. You don’t pay for a story, but for a memoir, you’re darn right you pay for a memoir. And there’s nothing wrong with it, you pay for a memoir, if it’s in a book, you pay for a memoir, if it’s in a magazine piece.
Speaker But I thought that after this I mean, shortly after this, the Jimmy Hoffa situation arose, I came about where Don also gave some money to somebody for a program that, uh, didn’t didn’t didn’t quite materialize, shall we say. But I thought after that, you no longer give money for interviews. Am I wrong?
Speaker I don’t think we give money for interviews. No, no, no. I mean, what are you going to do? Give, give? Ten thousand or one hundred thousand dollars to O.J. Simpson. Or to Webb Hubbell or to.
Speaker Colson, Colson, I believe, said that he went to prison because Mike Wallace interviewed him.
Speaker He went to No. In the cold and in the cold and interview, he was sitting beside Senator Harold Hughes. In Hughes’s playroom basement in Washington, and I confront him, he’s you know, he’s now come clean, he says. And I asked him something to the effect of whether he has apologized to some of the people that he did in. This was at a time when he said I’d walk over my grandmother to protect Richard Nixon or whatever. And and he had really done damage, personal damage to people with some of the things that he did. And I asked him whether he had apologized to people.
Speaker And he said no.
Speaker And then when he then and Harold Hughes and I asked him for an apology and I asked him for a witness that he’d done the wrong thing. And Howard Hughes leaned over and patted Colson’s knee and said, Mike, he’s just a baby in Christ. Colson, having come to I should have said this earlier. He’s sitting with Howard Hughes in his he’s sitting with Howard Hughes in his basement, in his playroom, and he has just. Come to Christ, he’s he’s born again, he’s born again, and I asked him, well, if you’re sincere in this. Born again. Then don’t you have to make a witness? Don’t you have to clear your conscience of everything? Don’t you have to apologize to people? Don’t you have to tell what you did wrong? And he didn’t know what to do with it, and that’s when how old he was and how he leaned over and said, Mike, he’s just a baby in Christ. And Coalson in his in his book said that. That particular he said himself that particular thing led him to understand himself better and led him to understand what he had to do. And the fact of the matter is that is his prison fellowship and reconciliation group that he now has been with through the years. A lot of skeptics and cynics said he was not sincere. Apparently, he’s been sincere about that.
Speaker Gordon Liddy, Don was there. Yeah, I think he describes in his book the first meeting with Liddy and his attitude that he was sort of some Nazi like Obama said, Sieg Heil, were you ever surprised by the real person? I mean, was.
Speaker No, no, no, no. But what you saw with Liddy was what you got.
Speaker Not that he was a Nazi, I mean, he he he would play a German marching songs, Hitlerian, German marching songs around the house, he’s he was full of himself and.
Speaker Dramatised himself, it was a wonderful interview.
Speaker It was, um, in August 4th, nineteen seventy four, there was the expletive deleted newspaper. You did a piece on The Washington Post, you remember it was this the private lives of public people. This was where you interviewed Bradley? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought it was called that expletive deleted newspaper. I thought that was the title. Yeah, well, that was about. Yes. Yes. And it was a wonderful, wonderful interview. And you asked Ben Bradlee, you said some people say that you were the prosecutor, judge and jury investigator, prosecutor, judge and jury. Do you see yourself that way?
Speaker I think to some degree, early on in 60 Minutes, we did feel ourselves to be investigator, prosecutor.
Speaker Judge and jury, yeah, and it was it was foolishness, but we were the only ones out there at the time we were really in television, of course, Woodward and Bernstein were doing something different. But for some reason, for some reason, nobody else. Was doing television interviews with some of the other co-conspirators and we were doing a lot of them and they were getting an immense amount of coverage. And as I said, Nightline was not on the air back then, they are the magazine shows were not on the air back then. So we were the only time we were the only broadcast with enough time to do some of this stuff back then.
Speaker You know, it sort of brings me to a sort of idea of do you ever feel as a result of that, there were times where you went too far?
Speaker No, not with not with Watergate, no. But I meant in 60 minutes any other story I was on.
Speaker It’s it’s hard it’s hard to go too far on 60 Minutes because there are so many failsafes along the way. You bring back a piece that you and the producer are very happy with, but then it goes through so many screenings before it gets on the air with with Hewitt and and Sheffler and and Howard and Carter, Gayner and Lieberthal and so forth and the lawyers and so forth, that it really is difficult to get a piece through that isn’t fair. One occasion, hooker, chemical company, Time of Love Canal, and when I looked at the damn thing on the air, I thought to myself, how in the world did we ever let this get by? It was so obviously overkill. It was so obviously hitting this guy and hitting him again. And he said, yeah, you’re right, you’re right. I did something wrong and we’d go after him again. It’s that kind of thing that you look back at. In in sorrow.
Speaker The peace on Haig that you did hate Haig and Alexander Haig. Oh, yes, yes. I mean, he was somebody who was brought in basically after I mean, he wasn’t really talking about the peace out in California, the peace that was done during the right when he came into Nixon’s administration.
Speaker It’s done, uh, exactly when it was done and you were asking him basically about the tapes, you’re asking and basically did you feel that he had the information at that time because he turned out to be someone who really was not involved in the cover up? Is or am I wrong, really? Well, I don’t know.
Speaker I mean, I don’t know. I find it difficult to remember him directly. I was astonished. Well, let me put it this way. He’s never indicted for anything. Oh, no. Right. Absolutely right. No, this was this was the broadcast. A couple of things happened on that particular broadcast. First of all, Nicholas Van Hoffman was doing what Andy Rooney does now. I mean, he was at the end of the broadcast and and I remember so well that he he had a piece on Nick von Hoffman did something about Nixon being something like the rat that you find in the kitchen and you want to drop into the trash can or something. And that was the end of Nick Hoffman, Negahban Hoffman on on CBS and on 60 Minutes II. You got me. I don’t know. What happened was we did an interview with Alexander Haig at the time of impeachment, possibility and tapes and so forth. And they were out on the West Coast. We were out there in the West Coast and and did it with him. And then I forget exactly what it happened overnight and the story moved ahead. And so we called Haig and said, you’re going to look like a damn fool because you’ve said things that have been proved dead wrong. So why don’t you come on down on Sunday? And sure enough, all of a sudden, the chopper came from from wherever it was, where the Nixon headquarters were, the chopper came and landed in the parking lot at Television City out in California, in Los Angeles. He went in and redid the interview and we put it on the air that night. Yeah, what was it? And it hit the front page of, I think, Bob Woodward. Right. Ran a front page story about it in The Washington Post the next day.
Speaker I don’t remember quite well enough to know what was the difference between what you know, something I forget. I forget. Interesting to see. OK, why did 60 Minutes go so hard at this industry?
Speaker Why did 60 Minutes go so hard at the tobacco industry? Because the tobacco industry had lied to the American public for such a long time and we had the goods on them. And and that’s what we do best. That’s what a reporter likes to do best when he has a story like the one that we had with Jeff Wigand. My Lord, that was an important story.
Speaker And unfortunately, one of the biggest scandals, shall we say, to hit 60 Minutes over the 30 years that you all have been in business. It was the case of Jeffrey White in the show not airing in its entirety at the beginning.
Speaker It was inexcusable for the case. It was inexcusable for CBS to decline to put this piece on the air to begin with with Jeffrey Wigand and Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company, because we had the story cold. And the only reason that it was not broadcast was pure and simple money. Well, it’s it’s it’s CBS money, and I can understand that. But that had never come up in any way in 30, 35 years that I’ve been at CBS News. All of a sudden what happened was.
Speaker That we were told by our lawyers over in Blakroc that we had induced the breaking of a confidentiality agreement, we had induced the breaking of the agreement between Jeff Weigand and the Brown and Williamson tobacco company, or at least that that would be the accusation that it would go into a courtroom in Kentucky because that’s where their headquarters were and that we were chances are we were going to lose in Kentucky because that’s a big tobacco state. And in order to appeal, you’ve got to put up under Kentucky law, we were told you got to put up one tenth of the of the body of the suit. And our chief counsel said that she believed that it could go to 10 or 15 billion dollars, the body of the suit. Therefore, we would have to put up CBS would a billion or a billion and a half dollars in bond.
Speaker Well, you think obviously damn seriously about that. And then having said that, we said we’ve got it cold. We know that it’s true, the lawyers who work with 60 Minutes all the time say we’re clean, it’s been carefully vetted by those lawyers. So the only reason that we’re doing this. Is because. Well, later on, it turned out that the. There was a negotiation going on between Westinghouse Broadcasting and CBS and. Obviously, Westinghouse didn’t want to buy into a potential huge billion dollar lawsuit, so that was, I’m sure, one of the reasons, although they wouldn’t acknowledge it at the time, it turned out later on that CBS or at least the the Loews Corporation, the Lorillard Tobacco Corporation, owned by Loews Corporation and Larry Tisch, were negotiating for some brands with the people from Brown and Williamson. Lorillard was talking about buying some brands. So it was all circled around with nastiness. And and that’s the first time and the only time that Don and Hewitt and I only done that. We had a serious, lasting disagreement. He was on the company side and Lowell Bergman and I and a couple of others here were not we were very lonely here. We couldn’t we couldn’t tell the rest of the crowd here too much because a lot of it was secret. And we didn’t want what we had to be getting out and turning up in other places as a result of which there was a struggle. And we lost the struggle until all of a sudden The Wall Street Journal got hold of a sealed deposition that Jeffrey Weigand had given in a Mississippi court case about the same subject. And once they published that sealed deposition, they were afraid to do it. Then our management said, well, the cancer was any more broadcasted.
Speaker I think that there’s a couple of things that sort of struck me about about the whole thing, and after speaking to Lowell and Barry, actually they both they both said Barry had no kind of this story at all.
Speaker No, he was not part of the story. But he did say that he had dinner with you in, I believe, Washington and later at New York. And he said, hey, look, this is your reputation at stake. Why don’t you stand up and say, I’m Mike Wallace. I’ve got a reputation that this piece goes on air or I’m walking. I’ll work for someone else. I’ve made enough money. I don’t need this. I came to CBS with the idea of being a serious reporter, and you are stripping away that possibility of doing so in this instance.
Speaker I thought very seriously when people asked why I didn’t quit, I thought very seriously of quitting at that time. And for some reason I believed and I used to say it around here, we’re going to get that piece on the air. If I’m outside, that piece would never. Would never have gotten on the air, period, so I was going to say, you either fight from the outside or you stay on the inside and fight from the inside. And it was the very fact that we stayed that finally got it on the air.
Speaker Well, but isn’t it true also that, Don, when he realized that that you were right and that someone else might do the story, I mean, didn’t he then want the story to go on the air to.
Speaker Well, let’s go back, let’s talk about Dawn’s role in this whole thing, because I am truly a little perplexed about it. Why didn’t Don support, even though Don didn’t support LOL and me at the beginning?
Speaker I think because he wasn’t sure of the story, I will, by the way, ask him for sure. I will ask him. So, yeah, Don didn’t, Don didn’t support LOL and me on on the story at the beginning because I think that he wasn’t sure whether we really had it cold.
Speaker He also, I must say, was persuaded by the company. And by Eric Ober, who was then the president of CBS News, who was also skeptical about whether we really had the goods in the story, that maybe, maybe it was going to be too foolhardy. There was a totally different leadership at this company at this time when Dick Clark was here or Fred Friendly was here or Bill Leonard was here, I believe, even than Gordon Salter when they were here. They would have been no question that piece would have been broadcast. But for some reason. Under under the Turkish regime and with the chief counsel that we had and with and with the president of the CBS News division that we had and and with the president of CBS that we had at the time, they were scared of it. They were I’ve never gotten inside their heads.
Speaker Chief counsel of this company has never talked to me since to this day, she’s the only one that’s still here, isn’t she? I don’t know if we can publicize any of this go on the air, but they made a good deal of money from that merger. Who, Ellen Cadden, Ellen Kaiden?
Speaker Yeah, I don’t think I don’t know that she’s not going to let me do it anyway, but, um, from what I understand also is that the implications of this incident are pretty great. We’re living in a world where there are more large corporations who control media. Um, the notion of conflict of interest is this is not going to be the first time that we are all going to face that dilemma. What is the implication of this case for the future of broadcast journalism?
Speaker Uh.
Speaker I don’t know that. Let me let me work on this. It’s not an easy no, it’s quite serious about it and it’s something that’s on everyone’s mind. Everyone I’ve spoken to, it is the thing that is most. You want to take a second look?
Speaker I hoped I hoped that we were going to be able to make law by putting this on the air. What does that mean? That means that put it on the air. Let them sue. Let them sue for breaking a confidentiality agreement.
Speaker A confidentiality agreement should keep. The Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corp. in business to kill people.
Speaker Not to tell the truth, not to let the American public in on what has what was going on at BMW and Philip Morris and RJR and Ligget and so forth, a confidentiality agreement is more important than the public health of America’s citizens. It doesn’t make any damn fool sense at all. That’s what I wanted to do, was to was to put the piece on the air, let them sue, then go to court and then say it in the courtroom. Hey, which which is more what is the sanctity of a of a confidentiality agreement? When to break that confidentiality agreement means to save potentially 400000 lives a year. Am I to some degree, I guess I’m overstating it. What is the sanctity?
Speaker What should be the sanctity of a confidentiality agreement if by breaking that confidentiality agreement and telling the truth about tobacco and the killer aspects of tobacco?
Speaker We’ll save. Who knows how many lives? I cannot believe that any court and I take it all the way to the Supreme Court that any court would have come down against us on the on the business of breaking the confidentiality agreement. We didn’t break the confidentiality agreement. What their charge was that we induced the breaking of the confidentiality agreement between Jeff Weygand and his and BMW.
Speaker Now, I’m sure that this was your argument to CBS, to Don at that period of time.
Speaker They did not want to hear that argument, but management didn’t want to hear that argument.
Speaker There was never any of this kind of candid discussion about all of that, you know, even between you and Don. Don didn’t want to hear it at the time. He just didn’t want to hear. So this is he found reasons. Ordinarily, when you have a hell of a story, you want to find reasons to put it on the air, Don was finding reasons.
Speaker Not to put it on. He was that frightened of it. Talk to him. Do you think? In retrospect, had you said. I don’t care, I disagree with you and I’m going to leave as a result of it.
Speaker Do you not believe after the money that you have earned with Don Dunwood for this company over a period of 30 years, which is approximately something I mean, it’s some astronomical sum. I don’t know exactly to try to get something like one hundred and twenty million dollars a year, times 30. And that’s probably very modest.
Speaker No, I just that that’s hyperbole. OK, the amount of money that you all have done, Don likes to say that we’ve made a billion dollars over a period of 30 years and that. I think that’s hyperbole, too, but nonetheless, it’s been a very lucrative operation for CBS.
Speaker There must be something I don’t understand about it because I don’t understand how you could have not taken the power that you had and understood that you had power and see what would have happened had you walked away from it.
Speaker First of all. I really do believe I really do believe that I would have walked away and they would have said, well, it’s a pity when he was getting old anyway, and it was a business decision that we took.
Speaker This was this was a different CBS. This was not the CBS or Palely Stanton, etc., this was a different CBS, and they would have been they were saying fine.
Speaker So long as and I must say I didn’t think about it in quite this disciplined away, what I thought to myself, well, I genuinely believed was stay here and lo also stay here and we’re going to get this damn thing on the air. And fortunately, that’s what happened.
Speaker The low, Lo said, felt like he was hanging by his nails. He became a folk identi law, became a fall guy. Yeah, with whom? With 60 Minutes.
Speaker Not with 60 Minutes. With certain people at 60 Minutes. Yeah. And with John.
Speaker That’s what I mean. Yeah. Why Don. Why down that way. Turlough. Why did he.
Speaker LOL, you’ve talked a lot. Yes. Have you talked to Don about this? No. I look forward to seeing what you get.
Speaker But I have talked a lot.
Speaker Yeah, I mean, the guy next door going to talk to the next thing I want to ask is Charlie Rose. Why did you ask Morley to come with you and Charlie Rose? I didn’t grow up without telling him the entire story. It’s something I don’t understand.
Speaker I was leaving this office, putting on my coat. Do you want to come? Where are you going? Charlie Rose, come on over. That was it. We’re in the car on the way over. He knew nothing about this tobacco story, basically. Why? Because it was not talked about here. Why, because we don’t talk about each other’s stories back in the old days, Reznor and I and a certain degree safer and I back in the old days, we’d see each other’s pieces before they went on the air. And we were we’d even be invited to comment on pieces before. We don’t know. None of us know what the other guy is doing now. And particularly with that story, we didn’t want a lot of talk, lol, and I didn’t want a lot of talk about it as you can. I’m sure you can understand. Mind you, there was a history here. Philip Morris had sued the ABC, which was also in the business of selling out to the Disney company. And Philip Morris demanded an apology, which they got from ABC. And they also demanded that they were that the lawfully used that the legal fees that Philip Morris had to be had had to spend in their suit would be reimbursed by ABC. There was a history here, say, like blackmail. So any safer you’re in the car with safer? Well, think about it. Well, yeah.
Speaker Molly and I, Molly and I are in the car on the way, going over and we talk a little bit about it, but he knew nothing of the fact. He had no idea that we had worked with Weigand on a Philip Morris story that had absolutely nothing to do with the BMW story. And and it was 14, 15 months prior. He had no notion that we had paid twelve thousand dollars.
Speaker I believe it was for his work expert witness work on that Philip Morris story, which was later leaked. By somebody inside the shop to The Wall Street Journal, he knew none of this stuff and he felt that I had hung him out to dry. Well, my lord, if I was going to hang him out to dry, well, why would I invite him over? The the fact of the matter is that there was just I mean, Molly didn’t know, frankly, what he was talking about. There’s an awkward position, it was an awkward position, sure, but no one was I mean, he wasn’t he wasn’t embarrassed. He felt himself embarrassed, but there was nothing embarrassing for him. He I shouldn’t be getting all excited again.
Speaker No, no, no. But it’s just it’s interesting because, I mean, sure, it’s interesting.
Speaker It’s an interesting sort of comment on how frightened everybody was, the fact that the secrecy was so, so tight that the left and the right hand to know everybody, everybody up and down.
Speaker This, what you might call it, was against us. They were absolutely. They didn’t know they didn’t know what we had. And and things were going along swimmingly and we were doing quite well, and who needs a public fight? Who needs dirty laundry? You ask about. You ask about what?
Speaker Effect.
Speaker You ask about what effect it has on. Television journalism, it has the effect you need strong, honest, upright management, forget those words, gutsy management who understand that they’re going to that they’re going to the mat for you. You got hold of a story. And no matter who it hurts your broadcast, that story, that’s what 60 Minutes has made name.
Speaker And that’s what’s so shocking about it all.
Speaker And that is exactly what I said.
Speaker To Hewitt and to all of the others that were late to the game.
Speaker And morally, who has I mean, some quote that I read about morally, morally wrote this fax, basically, and he sent it to everybody at 60 Minutes that basically said he didn’t believe you.
Speaker All right. Correct. What was the effect of that?
Speaker You can imagine? I’m sure you talked a little about it. Lollards very bitter about it, very bitter about it, and lolled still bitter about the fact that that Seyffer has never apologized to him for it.
Speaker That’s right. And the DA wanted to fire. And you were kind enough to call him and warn him. So he decided to quit first. That’s what he said.
Speaker I don’t that I don’t remember anything that’s that, but I know I remember when I remember I remember is that we came in the next morning and there were already apologies on the desk of everybody here from from Seyfert. Oh, really on. Yeah. Had he known, he wouldn’t have and so forth, really?
Speaker Yeah. Anyway, he did.
Speaker I didn’t know that he apologized to everyone after that, but he explained. I see himself to everyone that he ran an apology to The Wall Street Journal and the Charlie Rose.
Speaker According to Bergman, this was the first time the general counsel had ever come into the news division in the middle of the reporting process.
Speaker Has that ever happened before? Well, I’ll tell you something, I found my dealings with the general counsel, Ellen Kaiden, prior to that time had been first rate. She’s smart, capable, savvy, honest, straightforward. And we had one particular dust up on a Henry Kissinger story in which she couldn’t have been more supportive. Kissinger, who was a member of the board of CBS, was threatening to sue. He was represented by Lloyd Cutler. And there was all all kinds of talk about about suing, because what we were doing in that particular piece was to show how occasionally what when a former secretary of state sets up a business called Secretary of State Associates and he is now talking about China or Indonesia or other countries, and he’s acting as if not a lobbyist, at least a client. He has countries whose clients. All we’re saying is there should be out in the open. And if you’ll take a look at The Washington Post today, ever since that happened at the bottom of the Kissinger pieces that run in The Washington Post today, it says Kissinger Associates represents countries and so forth.
Speaker Yes, I haven’t seen that because I will take a look at it in the censored version of the story that ran in November 12th, the first year ever since. Yes, I call it the censored version. The footnote is the strongest moment in the program to me. And then you said we had 60 Minutes. And, you know, that represents about 100 of us turn off the show every week. At that point, even though you did this footnote, no one still here really knew the entire score did that. Right.
Speaker And to the. That footnote that you’re talking about ran only with the permission of Peter Lund, who was the president of CBS. I said, Peter, if you’re going to give us this, this. Sanitized version, you’ve got to permit us to broadcast the sanitized version of this tobacco piece on the air, then give me an opportunity to make a personal statement at the end.
Speaker And we negotiated the statement, but he finally gave me permission to do it, which I thought was absolutely first rate and upfront lot happens to be a hell of a man.
Speaker Well, it’s true. I was sort of surprised after all that’s going on. They would have, um. But were you really that confident at 60 miles, 60 Minutes that the staff and the family would recover? I mean, you sort of give the impression there. I mean, that you’re saying something that, you know, you hope you’re hope that this will be a thing of the past, that you’ll be able to air this problem. Did you really have that kind of optimism at that moment?
Speaker I had the optimism to know that everybody on this floor, everybody on this floor, and I’m not just talking about the people on the air have enough confidence in 60 Minutes in Hewitt and in what we’ve been doing for at that time. Twenty six or seven or eight years prior, that it was going to come back when they knew all the facts.
Speaker Of course, it was the next day that you went to Charlie Rose and it was the next day that this whole thing sort of broke up with morally.
Speaker Will you remember these chronologies much better than I?
Speaker Well, it’s because I’ve just recently did that what was done done wasn’t happy with you going on, Charlie Rose, if I recall.
Speaker I mean, he didn’t know, I guess, that we were going on, Charlie. I don’t know that he knew ahead of time that we were going on Charlie Rose. And because I made the decision to do it last minute, I mean, Charlie said, we got a good story going here. Why don’t we see if we can get Wallace to to come on over? And to his surprise. I did. And I asked Morley to come along with me walking here the next morning.
Speaker You see, Don, you know, Don obviously knows all about it by now.
Speaker Unhappy, unhappy as could be.
Speaker Silence.
Speaker I forget that there was so much unpleasantness between him and me at that time that it was just another.
Speaker I mean, this didn’t happen over a period of three days or a week or a month, this went on for some time.
Speaker Yes, the thing that kind of comes around. Is that you would said in an interview, a TV guide, I think, was April nineteen ninety six after it had aired the minutes, tobacco story went on the air zip. All the windows were open. It was a fresh air balloon to two minutes. Is that true?
Speaker Yes. Yes. Is it that simple? It was that simple. I think that everybody look, people here were in most people here in the shop or in the dark about the story until it broadcast when they saw it and they saw how how carefully and how thoroughly and how accurately it was done. Then they said, well, at 60 Minutes, sure, we’ve we’ve we’ve put it on the air and and. It took it took almost no time. Took a little time for you and me to patch it up, and it is utterly patched up, but and the reason I talk about it now is because I think it’s an interesting, more than interesting. And I think it’s a I think it’s vital that there’s the background of this story in the context of the broadcast that we’re doing about that you’re doing about Don Hewitt, that the story be told? I think so, too.
Speaker I was curious. I was curious to know whether our lawyers were right, that was this going to put us out of business and should we not be doing this? Why? I called Lou Dobbs, who was not a close friend of mine by any means. But I know and from CNN, it was the business guy there. And I said, Lou, and I told him the bare outlines of the story and about the business of the confidentiality agreement and said, would you talk to your lawyers over there and see what their opinion is of it and whether they would put the thing on the air despite the confidentiality agreement?
Speaker And he called me back in 24 hours and he said, give us the story. We’ll we’ll put it on the air. Our lawyers tell me that would be happy to put it on the air despite the confidentiality agreement. And so I go back to Don and I say, listen, Lou, don’t you talk about Lou Dobbs. What are you talking to Dobbs about? You tell him you’re telling the opposition, Don. Cool. I’m just trying to find out what another lawyer feels about this, despite what our own lawyers are telling us. Well, you shouldn’t be doing that.
Speaker What would have happened if you gave the story to someone else?
Speaker What would have happened if I had given the story to someone else and they had put it on the air and gotten the response that that that Don would cut his throat? Well, makes makes certain this is the only time we’ve had all kinds of arguments. This is the only time that we had an argument that it was as basic as this one in 30 years.
Speaker How did you stop law from not giving this story to someone else who worked here?
Speaker He worked with me and I kept he was he was always interested in perhaps doing that and going elsewhere with the story.
Speaker And I said, lol, lol, cool it. We’re going to stay here and we’re going to get the story on the air and we.
Speaker Did you have confidentiality agreements here too, don’t you.
Speaker If I do, I’m unaware of it. Really. Yeah, maybe I do. I have no idea.
Speaker It’s quite a it’s quite apparent that I’m breaking the confidentiality agreement at this moment. If I do.
Speaker Well it does. It makes me sort of wonder about the future of news and all these companies. Oh, no, no, no, no. Don’t don’t worry about the would you have the stomach to tackle a story like this again? And would you have the support of your news organization or would you sit there the whole time and think, if I tackle somebody who is a whistleblower in a big corporation, what is going to be the consequences for 60 Minutes?
Speaker For me, for the producer, neither I nor Don nor anybody on this floor would have the slightest doubt about going after the kind of story that this tobacco story.
Speaker We would do it like that. And we’ve always done this. We’ve always done this down the years. There was something special about this tobacco story and the business of Westinghouse, Brown and Williamson confidentiality agreement, other brands and the leadership of the company. And by that, I’m talking about the top leadership, the company at the time.
Speaker Let’s compare this to what happened with Colonel Herbert story way back in the early days. Tell me about that famous big lawsuit for 60 Minutes, famous big lawsuit for 60 Minutes.
Speaker Anthony Herberts was Anthony Herbert, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Herbert, one of the bravest men in the history of the U.S. Army, much decorated and so forth, and was over in Vietnam and accused his superiors, in effect, of condoning war.
Speaker He was not condoning war crimes. What was it?
Speaker Was it was he basically killing civilians? I recall wasn’t it wasn’t killing civilians.
Speaker Yeah, but but but but but of course, I think I have some information. They went after him. I’m trying to figure, you know what?
Speaker You don’t have to repeat the story because I know of it. Let’s talk about just let’s just talk about the fact that he then was furious and that he was you know, that’s just about the lawsuit that entailed and how and how low was low excuse me. Berry was there was a court case that was trying to say that that what was going on in the editorial process in one’s head became the court had a right to know what it was all about. That’s isn’t that what the lawsuit was? Yes, Debbie. Yes. And that there was a slant felt that it was important enough to the First Amendment to fight this and to take it as far as it would go. Am I right? OK, and so that was wrong. And that in my estimation, he turned out to be wrong, but in principle, do you know what I mean? Yeah.
Speaker So I guess it’s going to be fairly complicated to try and, you know, to get this in. Let’s just let’s try to think really simple. Let’s stop for a second. Let’s just try to think of together a simple matter. Roll it. But if it doesn’t work, we’ll do something else.
Speaker Yeah, that’s what I like about you.
Speaker Early on, 60 Minutes, major sponsor, Ford Motor Company, major sponsor. It was spending something like five million dollars a year. I think this was sixty nine or seventy on on 60 Minutes.
Speaker And we got hold of a whistleblower from the Ford Motor Company who had retired engineer who had documents proving that in the case of a Ford Pinto exploding gas tank, you know, suddenly caught on fire, that the Ford Motor Company was willing to take a certain number of exploding tanks. And the Pinto, instead of reengineering the whole car or taking the car out of circulation for a while, they would take these suits and pay them off because it was going to be cheaper, in effect, cheaper, in fact, to do that than to take the whole thing apart. And so they they settled a lot of these lawsuits. And we have the documents. I expected I was astonished. That somebody. Because back in those days, you know, the president of CBS News, excellent. I was curious to see what his reaction was. He said and major sponsor, he said, of course, we’re going to tell the story, of course we are. And but you’re going to you’re going to see if you can’t get the Ford people to talk to you about all of this. To my amazement, the Ford people came on and talked about it. I mean, they tried to put the best face on that, that they could, but they they couldn’t do much about it because we had the documents. Then we put it on the air. No objection from Blakroc support from out. The president of CBS News. Naturally, the Ford Motor Company didn’t sponsor the night we did the piece. Two weeks later, the Ford Motor Company was back with us and has been a sponsor of 60 Minutes ever since. And Don and all this, Don, was 100 percent with us every bit of the way on that. And the Iran file. The Iran file, the Iran file. This is a story that Landow and I did, which was which dealt with the hostages and and what was going on at the time in Iran. And we had learned certain things that were indeed taking place and had taken place. And all of a sudden the call came to us about maybe not wanting to broadcast it because it would be conceivably not in the best interest of the United States. And naturally, Don and Barry Lando and said, you know, foolishness.
Speaker Finally, it wound up I think it was Lloyd Cutler for Jimmy Carter, who had called Bill Leonard, who was the president of CBS News at the time. And finally, Jimmy Carter himself called and said it would not be in the best interests of the United States to put this on the air. Well, why wasn’t it going to be? It was going to be an embarrassment, there’s no doubt about it. Piece went on the air despite the call of the president to the president of CBS News and the pressure that was put on Don and me. And can you imagine and it really, really did great damage to the guy. I mean, it was just an effort to cover their backsides. And they didn’t want this piece on the air. The White House did.
Speaker So I guess the real difference is money. People are willing to stand up for what’s right when there’s no money involved.
Speaker But certainly in the tobacco case, it was money, it was the money, the merger or the sale of CBS. And how much of the relationship of Lorillard Company trying to buy some BMW brands were concerned? I simply do not know. OK, I have one last little story. I just want to mention the Temple Mount. Yeah, Don, go ahead, please. Barry and I in particular over the years, have done stories which have succeeded in getting us labeled itself hating Jews because we try to tell stories about what goes on in Israel as we do in other places.
Speaker Finally comes the story of the Temple Mount massacre. And we had it called and Don was bored with hearing about Israel, Israel, Israel, anti-Israel stuff. He he would look at me and say, you got another anti-Israel story. This isn’t an anti-Israel story.
Speaker This is a story about about that that is being misapprehended because the Israeli Defense Forces, the Israeli police got out of hand. He said, well, I don’t believe it. Let me see it.
Speaker He saw it. And he said, well, you’ve got it covered. We got to put it on the air. Larry Tisch, who was a big Israeli nick. And and and seriously, I mean, he genuinely committed to it. You mean a Zionist? Yeah. Yeah, he’s a Zionist and didn’t want to find fault or have us find fault. And I had had conversations with Mr. Tesche about this prior to that time. I was not particularly happy to see this piece on the air piece went on the air.
Speaker Rock was not happy with it and they weren’t happy with it until about six months later, there was an investigation in front of an Israeli judge who effectively came to the same conclusion as the 60 Minutes piece for the first time in the history of the Anti Defamation League, the ADL, which had labeled us in an unpleasant way for putting the piece on the air. Abe Foxman wrote me a letter and saying that you may want to put this one on the air, too. We apologize. You were right. We were wrong. So Don and I have been shoulder to shoulder to shoulder down through the years. Only one that we really had a falling apart on that lasted for some months was the tobacco story or have been in the trenches together.
Speaker Although Barry also tells me that after the Temple Mount story, he put a moratorium on YouTube covering Israel for a while.
Speaker Not true. Not true. Not true. OK, do we have a back to Don first? Do we have a story that most clearly sums up this contradictory man?
Speaker And I don’t think it’s unfair to call my contradictory he’s a contradictory man, I don’t have a story that would sum him up. No, no, you don’t sum up, Don. You don’t sum up. Don, I don’t have a story that someone sums up all the contradictions in. Don, you have a favorite Don story.
Speaker Alicia hejab story, but let’s let Ed Bradley tell that story. OK. You don’t know about that. No, but I’ll find out. Oh, this is OK. I’m going to interview him this afternoon, so I guess. Yeah. So I’ll find out about it. Well, let me know. OK, let me just begin in great shape, Shehab. He comes in Ed Bradley comes into Don and says, Don, I’ve decided to change my name. Oh, I have heard. It’s a great story. Well, then, you know, I know the story, but I’ve seen it on television, unfortunately, so I don’t want to use it. OK, I want to use what I’ve seen. Don Stewart, a downstair we haven’t haven’t seen together. I haven’t seen yet. Um, you can actually stop for a second when we think about this, your stepmother.
Speaker Included it for me, how long Don had been single in this process. OK, how long have you been single? A couple of years, but he had also had two other marriages. Oh, I know. I know that. But he had also had a girl on the way. Oh, that one I didn’t, OK. It also had a girl. You could at least you could at least sort of color the story with a little bit more about Don as as as who he is.
Speaker Of course you can my come on, I mean, Don has already gone done down the years where if I were to tell who Don has always had and he’s not alone, it’s always had an eye for the ladies and he’s been married now, I guess his third time. And and I had a good friend, name of Marilyn Berger, who worked at the Washington Post, covid Henry Kissinger. Very good reporter. And who was also here in New York covering the United Nations. And she was single and Don was single. And he had been single for a little while. And he was going to Washington. And I said, you know something, why don’t you why don’t you call Marilyn Berger? Because she’s attractive and she’s smart and so forth and so forth and, you know, take her out to dinner or whatever. She said, OK, what’s your number? And I so he goes to Washington and has dinner with her. And the next day and the next day he calls me and he said, oh, forget it. She’s you know, she works too hard and she’s, you know, in with that Washington crowd. And she said she’s attractive and all of that. But, you know, not for me. I said, well, OK, what are you going to do tonight? He said, well, I’m going to have another date with Marilyn, but, you know, I’m really not looking forward to it. So the next morning, I got another call from Don and he says, well, I got to tell you, you were right. I said, What do you mean, I was right? He said, well, here, here’s the phone.
Speaker And the two of them, the two of them were in this act together and they haven’t been out of it for I don’t know how long they’ve been married.
Speaker Six years, huh? 17 years. Is it 17 years now?
Speaker You and dad must have really been I mean, talking about men with women, I mean, the two of you as young men must have just been unbeatable around here.
Speaker That’s not for this. I mean, you must have been.
Speaker And how do we have anything else you want to do, anything else personal? I’m not going I don’t know if it is either, but is I think seriously, anything else personal that you can say about Don? I mean, when you were friends, when you Don, I’ll tell you one thing about.
Speaker I have never seen Don dissolve, so as he has dissolved lately, he takes lunch hours with his grandson, his grandson, and I’m a little self-conscious telling the story because the camera man who’s shooting me right now is the father of his grandson and his adored daughter, Lisa. And but Don has never paid much attention to that kind of thing. He takes lunch hours to drive about, what is it, 10 miles, about 10 miles north of here, dad, to have lunch with his grandson. This is utterly unlike Hewitt. Hewitt is not a he doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve. He doesn’t he’s very private fellow, believe it or not.
Speaker He’s very kind, you wouldn’t know it because he doesn’t he doesn’t wear that on his sleeve, too, but he he cares about the people in the shop. And I’m not talking about the so-called big shots. I’m talking about the people, the editors and the camera people and and the, you know, people. He’s he’s very, very kind and and cannot he cannot say anything nasty about anybody. He can’t he cannot bear. To be mean to somebody.
Speaker Now, as for all the fucking that he did down the way, OK, I actually wondered if he was he appears to be one of the guys, you know, and there’s one of the guys he appears to be.
Speaker But I wonder about that. You know, if you see is what you get, that kind of thing.
Speaker But.
Speaker He loves to play poker. We used to play poker here in the shop five, six, seven o’clock. Now we’re sitting around the table, Sheffler Hewat safer me. Cutthroat.
Speaker And he loves, you know, Deuce’s and one eyed Jacks, wild, you know, sort of a wild poker game, although I must say we’ve not we’ve not done it recently because Marillyn want him home.
