Between You and Me (28 page)

The reedited version of our story was built around the stockpile of leaked documents that Bergman had assembled, and we aired it on November 12, 1995. Even in its emasculated form, it was a powerful indictment of the tobacco industry. But in my on-camera open, I pointed out that the story would have been far more powerful if we had been able to include my interview with the first whistle-blower to

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come forth from the executive suite of a major tobacco firm. I then reported the legal concern that prevented us from airing the Wigand interview, and noted that “we are not allowed even to mention his name or the name of the company he worked for.” At the end of the program, I came back on-camera and made the following statement:

“A footnote to the controversy about the tobacco piece you saw at the beginning of the hour tonight. We at 60 Minutes—and that’s about a hundred of us who turn out this broadcast each week—are proud of working here and at CBS News, and so we were dismayed that the management at CBS had seen fit to give in to perceived threats of legal action against us by a tobacco-industry giant. We’ve broadcast many such investigative pieces down the years, and we want to be able to continue. We lost out, only to some degree, on this one, but we haven’t the slightest doubt that we’ll be able to continue the 60 Minutes tradition of reporting such pieces in the future without fear or favor.”

Although the expression of dismay was measured and restrained, I thought it was forceful enough to make the point that we were seriously at odds with our corporate superiors. However, it wasn’t forceful enough to satisfy Bergman, who had turned on me as well. He felt my presence on the revised version gave it a legitimacy it did not deserve, and that by agreeing to take part in the broadcast, I was betraying him and Wigand and the story we had done. In his eyes, I was lumped in with Hewitt and the others who had caved in to the CBS

management.

Unfortunately, Bergman was running out of colleagues to alienate. Although I sympathized with his frustration and anger, he went way overboard in his caustic criticisms of Hewitt and others, including me. Hewitt spread the word around the shop that because of his disloyalty, Bergman could no longer be entrusted with important as-

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signments, and several 60 Minutes staffers, taking their cue from the boss, began to distance themselves from him. Acutely aware that he was being consigned to limbo (at least for the time being), Bergman concluded that as long as Hewitt was running the show, he would be treated as a pariah at 60 Minutes. Hence, no one was surprised by his decision two months later to leave the broadcast.

Another casualty of that internal quarrel was my close relationship with Hewitt. There is no doubt that the two producers who had the most positive and enduring impact on my career were Ted Yates, during the early years, and Don Hewitt, during his long reign at 60

Minutes. I am eternally indebted to him for the way he reached out to me back in 1968 when he was preparing to launch his innovative magazine program. Over the years he and I shared a special bond, in large part because I have the happy distinction of being the only correspondent who has worked on 60 Minutes every year since its in-ception. (In the spring of 2005, I completed my thirty-sixth season on the show.) Nor can it be denied that we’ve had our share of scraps and squabbles. Some of the memos we exchanged from time to time bristled with sharply worded complaints, and rejoinders no less pungent. But none of our disagreements was serious enough to cause permanent damage until the rift over the Wigand interview. That dispute ruptured our long-standing bond in ways that could not be repaired. I could never forgive Hewitt for not standing up to the corporate muzzling that had trashed the First Amendment and dishonored the strong tradition of fearless reporting that had long been our trademark at 60 Minutes. Although we patched things up on the surface and continued to work together with some degree of harmony, I could no longer view him with the respect, much less the affection, that I once had felt so profoundly.

My public criticism of CBS management was not confined to the

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remarks I made at the end of the broadcast that Sunday night. The next day I accepted an invitation to appear on The Charlie Rose Show. Joining me was my on-air colleague Morley Safer, who has been a member of the 60 Minutes family almost as long as I have. He and I were in basic agreement on the Wigand issue, and conspicuous by their absence were three key CBS people who did not agree with us: Ellen Kaden, Eric Ober, and Don Hewitt all declined invitations to join us on Rose’s show. The main point I made was that by caving in to the dictates of CBS management, “we were simply dead wrong.”

Taking a shot directly at Larry Tisch, I accused him of having “tar-nished” a great network.

Others added their voices to the chorus of disapproval. In an editorial that ran under the headline “Self-Censorship at CBS,” The New York Times had this to say: “The most troubling part of CBS’s decision is that it was made not by news executives but by corporate officers who may have their minds on money rather than public service these days.” It then referred specifically to the imminent $5.4 billion sale of CBS to Westinghouse. The editorial also accused us of betraying the legacy of Edward R. Murrow, and you can imagine how much we enjoyed reading that.

A few days later, the New York Daily News ran a story on the controversy in which Jeffrey Wigand was outed by name as the whistle-blower whose identity we were not allowed to reveal. (To this day, I have no idea where that leak came from.) In late November, Wigand provided a deposition to lawyers who were involved in a Mississippi civil action against tobacco manufacturers, and that led the way to the payoff on my hunch that at some point, my interview with Wigand would be aired on 60 Minutes. Thanks to a large assist from The Wall Street Journal, we were able to open our broadcast in early February 1996 with the full story on Wigand. After running through

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the necessary background in my on-camera introduction, I told our viewers:

“But now things have changed. Last week The Wall Street Journal got hold of and published a confidential deposition Wigand gave ina Mississippi case, a November depositionthat repeated many of the charges he made to us last August. And while a lawsuit is still a possibility, not putting Jeffrey Wigand’s story on 60 Minutes no longer is.”

And that, by any decent law of logic, should have been that, except this was a controversy that refused to die. In the spring of 1996, Vanity Fair published a lengthy article by Marie Brenner on the Wigand saga that was called “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”

Three years later, Hollywood released a film called The Insider, based on the magazine piece. In both the article and the movie, the most appropriate title for the CBS portion of the story would have been

“The Gospel According to Lowell Bergman.”

In both the print and film versions, Bergman was portrayed as the lone CBS knight in shining armor who was not intimidated by the fire-breathing dragons who ruled the evil corporate empire. As for the rest of us at CBS News who had been involved in the story, we were depicted, for the most part, as venal or craven wretches who had no business calling ourselves journalists. Yes, I’m exaggerating, but I truly believe that the movie, in particular, was seriously skewed in that direction. No one should have been surprised by those distor-tions, because the primary CBS source for both the magazine piece and the film was Bergman.

For all its inaccuracies, The Insider had its compelling moments, in large part because of the performances by the actors in the three principal parts. For what it’s worth, I thought Russell Crowe was su-perb in the role of Jeffrey Wigand. But even though Al Pacino played

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a very good Al Pacino, I didn’t recognize much of Lowell Bergman in his rendition. As for Christopher Plummer’s performance, let me just say that it’s not the worst thing in the world to see yourself portrayed on the silver screen by a handsome and urbane Canadian who has been hailed as the most gifted classical actor in North America. I may not know that much about how they make movies in Hollywood, but I do know enough to recognize typecasting when I see it.

Jeffrey Wigand paid a heavy price for his defiance of his former bosses at Brown & Williamson. Even before he made the decision to blow the whistle on them, he and his family were subjected to all kinds of harassment, including telephone calls threatening physical harm. “Leave tobacco alone or else you’ll find your kids hurt” was the message of one such call. After Wigand was publicly identified as the primary source for the tobacco story we broadcast in November 1995, B&W retained a high-octane PR firm that promptly launched a nasty smear campaign to besmirch both Wigand’s professional reputation and his personal character. One of the casualties of all these pressure tactics was his marriage, which ended in divorce in 1996.

And, following through on its threat, B&W did sue Wigand for violat-ing the confidentiality agreement.

Then the tide began to turn in Wigand’s favor. For one thing, the lawsuit against him was dismissed as part of a sweeping multistate settlement that grew out of the Mississippi civil action against the tobacco industry. Thus liberated from those legal restraints, Wigand became—in the best sense—a poster boy for the anti-smoking movement. The brave stand he took against his former employer encouraged other tobacco insiders to come forward and blow their own whistles. Each new revelation bolstered the already vigorous campaign being waged against the industry in courtrooms and state legislatures throughout the country.

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In recent years, Wigand has focused most of his energies on

“Smoke-Free Kids,” a nonprofit organization he founded to counter the industry’s longtime strategy to “hook them young and hook them for life,” as he put it. As a certified expert on the addictive power of cigarettes, he understands better than most that working to establish a generation of smoke-free teenagers is the best hope for achieving the goal of a smoke-free society.

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S h i r l e y M a c L a i n e

AND NOW WE GO TO the back of the book, to mostly less serious matters, stuff that’s intended to be entertaining, even gos-sipy, the kind of interview I’ve done down the years with some regularity—more, perhaps, with women than with men—people the television audience flocks to, the spice of life. And I cannot think of a better way to introduce these valentines than to shine a spotlight on an actress I truly adore, Shirley MacLaine.

I identify her as an actress, and properly so, but when I first saw Shirley on the Broadway stage back in 1954, it was her dancing more than her acting that I was drawn to. She began that year as a nineteen-B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

year-old chorus gypsy who bounced around from one musical to another. She was in the chorus line of The Pajama Game when it opened in May 1954 and, in addition, was understudy to Carol Haney, the dancing star of the show, which became one of that season’s biggest hits.

What happened next was like something out of a Damon Runyon fable about the Great White Way. When Haney fractured her ankle, MacLaine stepped into the role and made the leap from obscurity to instant stardom. Soon, she was on her way to Hollywood.

Over the next several years, she became a familiar figure on our movie screens, where she displayed a special knack for playing young women with “loose” morals. In Some Came Running, she was a pathetic floozy who had a hopeless crush on a war hero played by Frank Sinatra. In The Apartment, she was an elevator operator in a Manhattan office building who had an affair with a married insurance executive. And in Irma la Douce, she was a Parisian prostitute who enjoyed her work far too much to suit her jealous boyfriend. For each of these performances, MacLaine received an Academy Award nomination.

Also by this time, the early 1960s, her younger brother, Warren Beatty, had followed her to Hollywood and was building his own brilliant career as an actor and director. (The family surname was Beaty, with one T, when they were growing up in Richmond, Virginia.) Working in Some Came Running brought MacLaine into Frank Sinatra’s raucous orbit, and she had the distinction of becoming the only female member of his notorious Rat Pack. “I was sort of their mascot,” she would later recall. Partly because of her close association with that exuberant frat-boy clique, whose members included such Sinatra cronies as Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Peter Lawford, she acquired a reputation for being a carefree spirit, even a bit of a “kook,” a term very much in vogue in those days. Although MacLaine was married at the time, she rarely saw her husband, a

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businessman who preferred to live and work in Tokyo, and she didn’t let her marital status cramp her frolicsome lifestyle. According to those who knew her well, she loved to party on the fast tracks that ran through Hollywood and Vegas, and she had no qualms about burning her candles at all available ends.

In the late 1960s, MacLaine brought her movie-star clout into the political arena, where she became a crusader for various liberal causes.

She worked on Senator Robert Kennedy’s insurgent campaign for the presidency in 1968, and was a delegate at that year’s Democratic convention, the one that sparked the bloody confrontations on the streets of Chicago between antiwar demonstrators and the police. Four years later, she was once again a Democratic delegate, this time as an ardent supporter of the party’s nominee, Senator George McGovern.