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Among other things, that night marked the beginning of the end for “Point-Counterpoint” on
60 Minutes
. Hewitt later claimed that the feature—which had begun in the early
1970
s with Nicholas Von Hoffman and had grown into a regular (and, at times, tedious) closer to the show—had already run its course when
Saturday Night Live
skewered it. It is true that the parody segment lasted through the end of the current
SNL
season, which repeated the “Jane, you ignorant slut” joke several more times before Aykroyd and Curtin left the cast in the spring of
1979
. And it is also true that a few months after that (in September
1979
) it was announced that Alexander was quitting her position on
60 Minutes
after a fight with Hewitt over salary. She claimed in the
New York Times
that Hewitt refused to raise her weekly $
600
fee for appearing on television's top-rated show. Hewitt countered that Alexander had demanded a raise to $
1
,
500
a week. “I never disagreed with Shana and her strong support of the proposition that men and women should get equal pay for equal work,” Hewitt told the
Times
, “but when she demanded two and a half times what Jack [Kilpatrick] received, I had to say no.” Alexander denied having asked for that much, and insisted she sought a raise for Kirkpatrick as well. It was a chance for Hewitt to simultaneously get rid of Alexander and make himself look like the wronged party.

In the fall of
1979
, with the show now so totally in the spotlight (what greater badge of status as a cultural icon could there be than to be regularly parodied on
Saturday Night Live
?) Hewitt knew he had the leverage to expand and deepen his territory more than ever before. It didn't hurt that his old friend Bill Leonard—who more than anyone else at CBS News was responsible for getting
60 Minutes
on the air back in
1968
—was about to replace Dick Salant. Hewitt was ready to add yet another correspondent to the mix. It wasn't enough to have Reasoner back; he wanted someone young, fresh, and different to enliven the mix. He was ready to cast another star, and this time he didn't need any advice about who to pick. The perfect performer for
60 Minutes
was already working at CBS News, and Hewitt couldn't wait to hire him; he had to hurry, though, because the man he had in mind had a tendency to get bored and restless.

 

In
1971
, just as
60 Minutes
was moving to Sunday nights, Ed Bradley moved to Paris, leaving behind a perfectly respectable job as a reporter for WCBS News radio in New York. It was just the kind of move you'd expect from Bradley, who cared far more about being happy than being famous. He loved music, especially jazz. He probably loved music more than journalism, which is how he ended up hanging around Paris without a job or an income for quite a while, hanging out in smoky bars and enjoying the moment with the kind of calm and contentment a man like Hewitt would never understand. But eventually, of course, the money ran out, and—Paris being an expensive city for an impoverished and unemployed
29
-year-old—Bradley wandered into the CBS radio office in Paris to see if they might need a stringer. He didn't want a full-time job, though—just enough work to pay the bills and stay as long as possible. And somehow, as had always been the case for Bradley, things worked out better than he expected. It wasn't long before he landed on television for CBS; eventually the news division asked him to go to Vietnam as a contract assignment reporter, at a salary of $
20
,
000
a year. He wasn't thrilled about the money—it was half what he'd been making in radio—but he took it anyway, and it turned out to be a canny career move. Bradley covered Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos before CBS brought him to Washington in
1974
.

The move proved frustrating. Bradley didn't like being the new guy in the Washington bureau, getting lousy assignments that no one else wanted, so he took a month off from work and went to Canada to ski; afterward he drove across Canada to Windsor and then to Detroit, to visit his father. Along the way he formulated a plan for what came next: Go back and give this your best shot. Don't put any time frame on it. If it's not working, you'll know it's not working. And be careful with your money. You'll still be on contract (to CBS News), you'll have to ride out the contract. Then you can quit CBS News forever.

A fortuitously timed return trip to Cambodia in the winter of
1975
rendered all that moot. The Khmer Rouge had started their annual dry-season offensive, and many said that this time they would at last succeed in toppling the American-supported government led by President Lon Nol. Bradley jumped on Pan Am Flight
1
from New York to Southeast Asia and arrived in the midst of chaos and breaking news stories everywhere he looked. In February, Bradley was on hand to report the successful overthrow of the government of Cambodia, followed in April by the fall of Saigon—and was evacuated from both places by military helicopter. For
24
eventful hours, Bradley was the only TV journalist on the scene to gather first-person reports of the Saigon evacuation.

Bradley returned to the United States a network news star and quickly advanced to the front of the line for plum Washington assignments. He began the
1976
presidential campaign covering Democratic Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana and finished as a reporter on the Jimmy Carter campaign. It was during that campaign that he made the acquaintance of
Rolling Stone
reporter Hunter S. Thompson, who invited Bradley to come with him to cover the Florida primary. He turned that assignment into a job covering the Carter White House for the next two years, and his acquaintance with Thompson became a lifelong friendship.

But even at the pinnacle of broadcasting, Bradley grew restless. It seemed a part of his nature to want to escape the confinement of a full-time job; no matter how golden the handcuffs, he still felt imprisoned by the demands of deadlines. By
1978
he had gotten himself transferred to a job held only three years earlier by Dan Rather—chief correspondent for
CBS Reports.
It was an escape to the world of hour-long documentaries and the freedom he'd been wanting for so long.

It was a good gig for Bradley. He relished the chance to do documentaries on subjects of his own choosing, and over most of the next two years, his broadcasts earned him attention as both a thoughtful journalist and a smooth-talking on-air personality. Even by the late
1970
s, black reporters remained a small minority in television news, and in blunt Q-ratings terms, even fewer were in the same league as Ed Bradley. His handsome face and perfectly modulated voice made him a natural, and an obvious choice for job openings. It was around this time that Bradley got married, briefly, to Rita Coolidge's sister, Priscilla; he'd been married once before, in the early
1960
s.

Thrilled with his new job, Bradley did hours on the boat people in Cambodia, the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, the Central Intelligence Agency, and a two-hour show on the impact of
Brown v. Board of Education
. But eventually Bradley started to notice that CBS wasn't giving the show any more time slots; he soon had his eye on the door yet again, this time looking across the street from his office at CBS News—where the staff of
60 Minutes
had set up shop in a nondescript office building that housed a car dealership on the ground floor.

 

A year earlier, in July
1978
, Walter Cronkite had gone to the office of newly appointed CBS News president Bill Leonard and dropped a bit of unexpected—and unwelcome—news on the new boss.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” Leonard asked his biggest star performer. “Is everything all right?”

“Well . . . well, Bill, actually, there's one little thing,” Cronkite said.

“Go right ahead, Walter.” Leonard already knew that whatever it was, it wasn't going to be little.

“Well,” Cronkite said, “I want to give up the
Evening News.
” After registering the shock on Leonard's face and explaining how the weight of the show had become unbearable after nearly two decades as anchorman, Cronkite had concluded, “I'd be a damn fool not to quit while I'm ahead.” It was a decision Cronkite would live to regret, particularly once CBS News froze him out of a future on-air role in network news coverage. (Now
87
years old, he most recently hosted a political special for MTV.)

Cronkite's contract kept him in the job until his sixty-fifth birthday in
1981
, but Leonard understood that he needed to move quickly and decisively to find a successor. One crucial reason: Leonard wasn't the only news president in town shopping for an anchor. With Reasoner's departure from ABC and the debacle of the Barbara Walters pairing, Roone Arledge was looking for someone with well-established credibility to be the new face of ABC News, and he was obviously willing to pay for it. Just about everyone in the business knew the face he had in mind: Dan Rather's.

Until just recently, CBS insiders had voiced a decided preference for Washington correspondent Roger Mudd as Cronkite's successor; had Arledge not started waving a lot of money around, Mudd might have gotten the job. But Arledge, who suspected that the promise of a bigger paycheck might entice Rather to leave
60 Minutes
(where he earned $
300
,
000
a year) and CBS for the chance to anchor his own nightly newscast, put a $
2
.
2
million annual salary on the table, prompting a heated round of negotiations between CBS and ABC through Rather's tough-talking agent, Richard Leibner.

The price was not insignificant—$
22
million over
10
years and the eventual loss of Roger Mudd—but Leonard finally paid it on the morning of February
18
,
1980
, at which point Dan Rather prepared to leave
60 Minutes
for the seat behind the most trusted desk in America.

Hewitt, ever the pragmatist, didn't devote much time to bemoaning the loss of his star, having already picked Ed Bradley to take his place. Besides, he knew that in a few months—well before Rather was set to bolt—
60 Minutes
would air a piece that would likely be remembered, far more than any single nightly newscast could, as a defining moment in the history of the show and of Rather's career.

Chapter 12

I Never Saw the Knife

Gunga Dan was born on the night of April
6
,
1980
. To the single-minded Dan Rather, the image of the correspondent swaddled in a blanket and a knit cap and being smuggled into war-torn Afghanistan was intended to give this difficult and complicated story a human dimension for Americans unconcerned about a small country under attack. But in typical Rather fashion, “Inside Afghanistan” quickly became more about Rather than about the horrors he was reporting, whether by accident or by design.

It all began in late December
1979
, two days after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Soon after Christmas, Rather went into Hewitt's office—they were the only two people left at
60 Minutes
that night, by Rather's account in
The Camera Always Blinks Twice
—and proposed going to Afghanistan to report on the war. “Forget it,” Hewitt said, making it perfectly clear to Rather that he wasn't all that interested in Afghanistan.

“Come on,” Hewitt told his reporter. “It's New Year's. Go home. Enjoy the holidays.”

But Rather pressed repeatedly to go, despite the huge expense and great difficulty involved. In January he dispatched his producer Andrew Lack to Pakistan to find intermediaries who might take them across the border. In late February, shortly after signing his contract to take over the
Evening News
, he traveled to Pakistan to meet up with Lack and begin their journey into the heart of war. Because of the story's exorbitant cost—estimated at twice the $
45
,
000
budgeted for a typical
60 Minutes
story—they decided not to let CBS management in on their plans. Rather, Lack, and a camera crew entered Afghanistan the only way possible—under cover, on foot, and dressed in native garb. Almost immediately the story they hoped they'd find revealed itself: the Soviets were indeed using napalm and gas to kill innocent civilians in a brutal war effort. The story, gruesome and dramatic, was everything Rather could wish for.

But by any standard of reporting, it was a difficult one to get. At times, the crew had no option but to sleep together in a single room or on the roadside, often for just a few hours. They'd walk, then rest for
10
minutes of every hour; after six hours of walking they would stop to sleep for four hours. At all times, one of them remained awake to keep watch. Every so often, Lack and Rather would take a sip from a flask of Kentucky whiskey Rather had brought along. They walked through rice paddies and past old opium poppy fields in a perilous search for witnesses to the atrocities alleged against the Soviets. They crossed the Kabul River by holding onto flotation devices fashioned from the inflated bellies of dead cows and water buffalo. Some of the crew contracted dysentery; gradually their food supplies dwindled to nothing.

Toward the end of the trip, as Rather and his producer realized they would need some additional shots for cutaways, Rather suggested he outfit himself with a turban. One of their guides put a turban on Dan's head to ready him for a shot, until Lack got a good look at him and vetoed the idea—“afraid I would make an ass of myself,” Rather later recalled.

Lack—a talented producer who had been rescued from an advertising job in
1976
to work on
Who's Who
—took the raw footage from the trip and turned the experience into a compelling story, with Rather and the CBS cameras as the eyes and ears of the Western world. But running throughout the piece was an awareness that perhaps this method of reporting would prove suspect to a cynical American audience—hence this somewhat defensive introduction read by Mike Wallace and written by Hewitt himself. From the beginning of the show in
1968
through his retirement in June
2004
, Hewitt claims to have written every opening “tease” for
60 Minutes
—the brief introductions that lead into the show itself and highlight its most dramatic elements.

 

W
ALLACE
: If you want to know what's going on in Afghanistan, there's only one way: you go in yourself. And there's only one way for an American to do that: make contact with a rebel group just over the border in Pakistan, disguise yourself as a native, and let the rebels smuggle you into their country. That's exactly what Dan Rather did to cover the war Afghan rebels like these are waging in their country against the Soviet invaders.

The number of refugees from that war is staggering. Rather says the roads leading out of the country are choked with them. But then you leave the roads and start up into the mountains. Somewhere up in these hills, there's a ridge looking down on a Soviet emplacement. It'll be dark by the time you get there, and you'll be out of breath from the climb. But up on that ridge, Dan Rather found the war he came to cover.

Through an interpreter, Rather interviewed a white-bearded guerrilla fighter known as Yassini—who lived, as Rather said, “on the run, moving from mountain hideouts through tiny villages of straw and mud huts to the opium fields that often provide him and his men cover from the Russian aircraft that circle continuously.” Yassini stood in for all the witnesses Rather and Lack had met and interviewed.

R
ATHER
(to the interpreter)
: Has he seen any napalm?

N
ABY
(interpreter for Yassini)
: Yes. You mean the one that throws down fire on us?

R
ATHER
: Yes.

N
ABY
: Yes. They also use gas, yes . . .

R
ATHER
(to a doctor with Yassini)
: He's absolutely sure it was some sort of gas?

N
ABY
: He says what I can be sure of is that there was a smell, and then when—when that happened, we were all unconscious for about half an hour.

 

The piece contained many such stirring interviews, and dramatic news—news perhaps even to the American government, which was ill-informed about the events inside Afghanistan. But the extent to which Rather himself dominated the images of “Inside Afghanistan” was unprecedented, even for a program designed to showcase the further adventures of Mike, Morley, Harry, and Dan. The reaction was nothing like he'd hoped it would be.

Tom Shales, the
Washington Post
TV critic, eviscerated the piece and Rather in his day-after review, with the memorable moniker “Gunga Dan” contained in the review's headline and the following lead:

Your assignment, Dan, should you agree to accept it, is to penetrate the Afghanistan border, gain the confidence of resistance fighters there, let your beard grow a few days, wear a funny hat, and file a story for
60 Minutes
that will have Roone Arledge absolutely chartreuse with envy. . . .

We may never know precisely how dauntless Don Hewitt, producer of
60 Minutes
, and daring Dan Rather, crown prince of network news, plotted the slightly sensational Afghanistan war repost seen on CBS last night. But the result was in the best and worst ways typical of the program and its enterprise: punchy, crunchy, highly dramatic, and essentially uninformative.

Except that, yes, we knew something about the war against the invading Soviet troops before
60 Minutes
, but, and this is important, did we know how the war was affecting Dan Rather?

The
Post
critic went on to describe Rather's outfit as something out of
Dr. Zhivago
. “Vanessa Redgrave wearing the same outfit would have been welcomed at any chic party in Europe,” Shales wrote. “Somehow one got the feeling that this was not so much Dan Rather as Stuart Whitman playing Dan Rather. Or Dan Rather playing Stuart Whitman playing Dan Rather. Perhaps it's all part of the New Reality.” Shales concluded by wondering “whether Murrow is smiling down approvingly or spinning in his grave.”

 

Murrow might also have been a bit skeptical in the summer of
1980
, when for the first time Hewitt and CBS dared to rerun old segments of
60 Minutes
instead of producing new ones. The notion of news as something with rerun value was yet another pioneering Hewitt idea and, as usual, one that sparked controversy. CBS justified it as a practical development, giving the producers and correspondents a chance to take time off. “They're like good racehorses,” Hewitt explained, giving his tiger metaphor a brief break. “They just have to be rested.”

As was often the case, Hewitt's old nemesis Fred Friendly surfaced in high dudgeon over the idea. “These are important, complicated times,” Friendly told Tony Schwartz in the
New York Times
. “How can the highest-rated and best news show on television put on a rerun of an interview with Johnny Carson, or a story about panhandling, when there is so much going on in the world?” When Schwartz pointed out to Friendly that his own
CBS Reports
had run repeats during the early
1960
s, Friendly replied, “I don't hold myself up as a model of virtue,” adding that “I would hope we've made some progress in twenty years.” One area in which there had apparently been no progress during that same
20
years was in the relationship between Friendly and Hewitt.

 

It was a van, ordinary in all respects and unlikely to be noticed by anyone, unless you were looking at it carefully enough to have your curiosity piqued by the drapes over the back windows, and colored gel over the sides. On the roof of the van was a sign that said Emergency Service, and it was hoped (by
60 Minutes
cameraman Wade Bingham and producer Marion Goldin) that would be enough to keep the police from disturbing the journalists inside, who were there on a mission: to photograph a Los Angeles physician as he walked from a parking lot to the clinic where he worked. The physician in question was being investigated for Medicaid fraud—which, in light of the success of the
1976
“Clinic on Morse Avenue” piece, made him perfect fodder for a team working for Mike Wallace. It was Bingham's job to shoot film without the doctor realizing it, as part of an October
1979
exposé undertaken in a manner
60 Minutes
had practically invented—the hidden-camera investigation.

With the ascent of Wallace wannabe Geraldo Rivera on ABC's
20/
20
, the hidden camera and “Mike jumping out of closets” (as Morley Safer referred to the technique) wasn't quite as fresh as it had been three years earlier. But Bingham, who had become something of an expert in such matters, continued to strive for fresh angles and techniques, hiding cameras in all manner of containers. He'd used large women's pocketbooks, schoolbags, and suitcases, all of which had to be soundproofed to obscure the noise a film camera made when it was turned on. Plus Bingham would typically have to cut a hole in the side of the bag, big enough for the lens to poke through. Despite his experience, it was still a shady new world for Bingham, who'd come to
60 Minutes
after a distinguished career shooting stories all over the world for CBS, from Pakistan to Hawaii to Tokyo. He'd been brought back to New York by no less a figure than Edward R. Murrow and later shot film for Hewitt on documentaries that included that famous hour with Frank Sinatra in
1965
.

The “gotcha!” technique had been refined by Wallace, his producers, and cameramen since the Medicaid kickback piece. In May
1977
, an investigation into child pornography had taken producer Barry Lando and cameraman Larry Travis undercover into a Los Angeles pornography store, acting like customers in search of kiddie porn. Examining movies being sold under the counter, Travis (his camera buried inside a shoulder bag) filmed this exchange:

 

C
LERK
: This is Lulu. Beautiful.

L
ANDO
: How old is she?

C
LERK
: Thirteen.

L
ANDO
: Thirteen?

C
LERK
: Uh-huh.

 

It was juicy stuff, even though Travis had been forced to go outside every so often and reload his small hand-held camera, which couldn't hold more than
30
seconds of film.

By
1979
the technology had advanced to the point where Bingham could shoot extensively to get the shot he wanted. And by the time “Edward Rubin, M.D.” aired on October
21
,
1979
, how-we-got-that-picture had become the story; Wallace seemed almost as interested in telling the viewers about the subterfuge as he was in explaining the allegations against the doctor: complicated charges, including the possibility that he'd received cash payments from patients as well as reimbursements from MediCal (the California version of Medicaid) and that he was getting back part of the fees for x-rays and other tests he'd ordered. Wallace did a series of interviews with Rubin's detractors, then set up shop in front of Rubin's clinic, with this narration over the footage shot by Bingham.