Tick... Tick... Tick... (23 page)

In the piece that finally aired that Sunday, Bergman focused less on the substance of Wigand's accusations than on how the tobacco industry had historically misled the public—Wigand, referred to only as “the insider,” was hidden, his voice disguised. Wallace had experienced a change of heart over management's position and expressed it with this new ending to the piece:

W
ALLACE
: We at
60 Minutes
—and that's about one 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 of 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.

The next night, Wallace was invited to appear on
Charlie Rose
to talk about the story. At the last minute he asked Morley Safer to tag along—a favor Safer came to regret. “The question of whether Mike and the producer induced this guy is out of the question,” Safer told Rose. “He wasn't paid, he wasn't threatened, he wasn't promised anything.” Safer later learned that Wigand had, in fact, previously been paid a consulting fee and fired off an angry memo to the entire staff retracting his comments.

The
Charlie Rose
appearance served to further divide an already fractured staff; it precipitated yet more conflict between Safer and Wallace—and Bergman—that might have otherwise been avoided. Safer came to believe that Bergman and Wallace had made a deal with Wigand that they shouldn't have, and his statement said as much. The
New York Times
editorialized against the show's handling of the story. None of the show's insiders seemed certain of anything about their positions except that they wished the entire mess would go away—Hewitt most of all. A few weeks later, Ed Bradley invited the correspondents to his Central Park West apartment for a private breakfast—without Hewitt—to try to bring an end to the divisions created by the story. Bradley told his colleagues that they had to stop going off in different directions. They were a splintered group, afraid the divisions created by the Wigand story would become permanent. Their efforts helped to restore order to the show, but some believed the wounds would never completely heal.

 

It was December
4
,
1995
, only
10
days before Hewitt's seventy-third birthday, but there appeared to be no immediate prospect of Mike Wallace wheeling in cake and champagne.

Hewitt was tense; his show had been shaken to its foundation by the media's incessant coverage of the Wigand story. He hated the ongoing portrayal of
60 Minutes
as having caved to corporate power. Ever since it landed on the front page of the
New York Times
, the Wigand story had been a nightmare for Hewitt. He had to defend the story publicly, again and again, even before it aired. Hewitt had fought relentlessly over the years to protect the reputation of his creation, but some stories he could not control, and this was one of them. At the same time, he had to maneuver delicately around the power structure at CBS, which issued his rather substantial paycheck.

When Hewitt got tense, he liked to write someone a memo. He might not ever send it, but the process helped him to crystallize his thoughts into a coherent form. Often he would show it around and get the opinion of others before sending it. So, early on this Monday morning, before anyone else arrived for work, Hewitt sat down at his desk and typed a memo to a man whose office was less than
50
yards away, and whom he had worked alongside every day of his professional life since
1968
.

In the letter—copies of which were sent to Eric Ober, the president of CBS News, and Peter Lund, the president of the CBS Broadcast Group—Hewitt described what he called the “obsessive nature” of the show's reporting on Wigand, which he said “caused us damage far in excess of any good that could have come to us” from airing the piece. Hewitt said that while
60 Minutes
“committed no glaring crimes against journalism,” he professed disappointment that the story led to “disclosure of information that was nobody's business but our own.”

He then cited Shakespeare's famous “admonition” (as he described it) from
King Lear
that “discretion is the better part of valor” and concluded that “until the right moment presents itself I would like to put the Jeffrey Wigand story on the back burner and get on with our business—which is reporting, not crusading
.
” It was signed: “Sincerely, Don.”

Hewitt had at last articulated a feeling that had consumed him since the beginning of this controversy. He measured the value of this story itself against the damage it had caused his creation,
60 Minutes,
and the answer was simple.

Kill the story.

In suggesting this, Hewitt's position ran counter to his star correspondent, Mike Wallace, as well as Wallace's longtime producer, Lowell Bergman—not to mention Hewitt's own public stance. This was Hildy Johnson quitting, after all—turning in his badge to Walter Burns. He knew journalists expected them to fight the corporate bosses to death over the Wigand story, not put it aside. But Hewitt cared deeply about his show and the epic divisions the battle had already created. He worried the wounds would show in his beloved broadcast. By stopping the fight now—by putting the Wigand story on the back burner and getting on with our business, as Hewitt put it—he believed there might be some chance
60 Minutes
could save itself.

 

In January, the
New York Daily News
identified Wigand by name as the
60 Minutes
source, and the
Wall Street Journal
then published a Wigand deposition that freed
60 Minutes
and CBS from any culpability in airing its interview. In late January, Wigand returned to New York for another
60 Minutes
interview; and on February
4
,
1996
, the show broadcast a two-part segment, “Jeffrey Wigand, Ph.D.,” that at last told the entire story as Bergman and Wallace originally intended to tell it.

 

At the end of
1999
,
The Insider
was at last set for release. This was the movie the
60 Minutes
crew had all dreaded, a semifictional account of the Wigand crisis based on Marie Brenner's exhaustive account in
Vanity Fair
and directed by Michael Mann. No one knew quite what to expect, particularly since the central character—the hero—was not Jeffrey Wigand but Lowell Bergman. He would soon come to represent the notion of the dashing
60 Minutes
producer, thanks to Al Pacino's performance and much to the chagrin of Hewitt and Wallace.

The movie came out in December
1999
, with Christopher Plummer as a reptilian Wallace and Philip Baker Hall as an ineffectual Don Hewitt. (“That's not an actor,” Hewitt became fond of saying. “That was a dormitory.”)

There was no way for
The Insider
to reopen old wounds, because they'd never healed to begin with. The battles between Wallace and Hewitt had escalated, becoming more volatile and personal than ever before. The movie left what many at
60 Minutes
consider a permanent stain on the show's reputation, only made worse by the movie's mediocre performance at the box office.

Without question,
The Insider
took liberties with the truth in representing Bergman as the one who quit CBS in moral high dudgeon at the end of the movie—perhaps Hewitt's most loudly voiced criticism of the film. Bergman had, in fact, remained at CBS long after the Wigand controversy and was hoping to become Jeffrey Fager's number two producer during the start-up of
60 Minutes II
, a scenario approved by Fager but ultimately blocked by Hewitt and Wallace.

Bergman now acknowledges that the movie misrepresents the truth in some respects. “I didn't like the way the movie ended, the way that they did it,” Bergman says. “I told them it was going to cause me trouble. That didn't change Michael Mann—it's his movie. He said, ‘You left
60 Minutes.
' I said, ‘Yeah, but it makes it look like I left CBS.' And so that's a criticism of the accuracy of the film, I'll grant it to them. But it's no more of a fiction than what's actually produced on
60 Minutes.
And presented by Don every week. His correspondents never make a mistake, never lose an argument; they never look like they need any help from anybody.”

Wallace describes Bergman's attitude as that of a producer frustrated with a lack of proper credit. “He always felt he didn't get enough attention,” Wallace says. “Which I can understand. I mean, come on. You do all the reporting and it says, ‘Produced by Lowell Bergman.'”

By the time
The Insider
came out, Hewitt had just turned
77
, and Wallace was
81
. For all their endless battling, they still relished the control they had over the institution they'd created together, and neither showed any sign of wanting to give it up or sharing a piece of it with the likes of Lowell Bergman or anyone else.

Chapter 20

The Tin Eye

Andrew Heyward may owe his longevity as president of CBS News in part to an act of loyalty performed for his then-boss Dan Rather on the night of September
11
,
1987
, one that forever cemented the bond between anchorman and producer. On that memorable night, it had been announced that a U.S. Open tennis semifinal match might run over into the
6
:
30
P.M.
time slot and delay the start of the evening news broadcast. Furious, the bullheaded Rather stormed off to call Howard Stringer, then president of CBS News, in protest. The game ended at
6
:
32
P.M.
; since Rather was not in the anchor chair, the entire CBS network went black.

While the
Evening News
's executive producer Tom Bettag (now executive producer of ABC's
Nightline
) tried to reason with Rather, senior producer Heyward—sitting in the control room in New York—was being strongly urged to press the button to broadcast a taped version of the opening of the evening news. That opening had been taped within the last hour, as a standard precaution against technical failure. “If Heyward had pushed the button, he would have done the right thing by CBS News but would have been Rather's lifelong enemy,” recalls a producer present that night. “Obviously, he made the right decision.”

Heyward had been an
Evening News
junkie his entire life. It surprised no one when he landed at CBS News. He'd grown up in New York as the son of an executive at UNICEF. After graduating from Harvard, he went directly into television journalism and produced the local newscast at Channel
5
in New York before moving to CBS News in
1984
, where he rose quickly through the ranks to become a producer for the evening news. In
1988
he became the original executive producer of the weekly newsmagazine
48 Hours
, with Rather as its anchor. The show's original format—an hour devoted to a single story—caught on and hastened Heyward's ascent. Even the failure of
Eye to Eye with Connie Chung,
launched in
1993
with Heyward in charge, didn't slow his progress.

In
1994
he took over as executive producer of the evening news, during the period of the experimental Rather-Chung evening newscast, and although the ratings never quite took off, it strengthened his alliance with Rather—then, as now, the
800
-pound gorilla of CBS News. When Eric Ober lost his job as head of CBS News at the end of
1995
—having presided over the ill-fated pairing of Rather and Chung, not to mention the Wigand episode—Heyward got the nod to replace him as president and has remained ever since.

Heyward was not someone you would expect to find running the news division of a network. He had the well-spoken manner of a college professor, or perhaps a psychologist. (In fact, he married the daughter of Dr. Willard Gaylin, a well-known psychiatry professor and medical ethicist at Columbia University.) But Westinghouse had just completed its acquisition of the network from Laurence Tisch, and perhaps that was what the new management of CBS was looking for.

Heyward's ascension came amid turmoil in the news division, and at
60 Minutes
in particular. The show was suffering from the deep divisions inflicted by the
1995
tobacco story. NBC News—under the leadership of president Andrew Lack, the former
60 Minutes
producer who had clashed with Hewitt as executive producer of
West
57th
—was about to challenge
60 Minutes
by putting on another edition of its
Dateline
NBC
broadcast up against it on Sunday nights at
7
. Asked by a reporter in January
1996
, right after taking the job, whether that counterprogramming might result in changes to the
60 Minutes
format to keep its audience, Heyward replied: “Anybody who would tinker with the most successful program in television history and say, ‘Uh-oh,
Dateline
is coming,' would be nuts.” Within four months,
60 Minutes
had nevertheless announced several changes, including new, hip commentators (Texas journalist Molly Ivins, humor writer P. J. O'Rourke, and acerbic black columnist Stanley Crouch) to complement Andy Rooney and a revised weekly format with an emphasis on breaking news. As with most attempts over the years to fiddle with the
60 Minutes
format, these lasted less than a season.

Heyward also reached out for young, good-looking new correspondents and respected, well-known commentators to shake up the status quo. From MTV he hired a correspondent named Alison Stewart to contribute youth-oriented stories. As commentators (to be used throughout the news division) he hired the former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley from the left and author and analyst Laura Ingraham from the right. He also brought in Christiane Amanpour, the CNN star, for part-time
60 Minutes
duty. “This is not your father's Oldsmobile,” an anonymous CBS News executive told the
New York Times
of Heyward's changes in May
1997
.

As it turned out, Heyward had one flaw in his otherwise stellar list of achievements, what colleagues jokingly referred to as his “tin eye”—his seeming inability to recruit to CBS anyone who might develop the stature or staying power of an existing network news star.

Heyward's first demonstration of the tin-eye problem came in the spring of
1997
when he lured Susan Molinari, then a Republican congresswoman from Staten Island, out of politics to cohost a new Saturday morning news and talk show—“a sort of
60 Minutes
meets
Rosie O'Donnell,
” as Molinari described it. The move came up for instant ridicule. Maureen Dowd parodied the move in a May
31
,
1997
Times
column written in Molinari's voice: “The only person at CBS who was really upset—she came at me one day in the cafeteria with an ice pick—was Laura Ingraham, who thought if Andy wanted a GOP blonde with no experience to star in this show, it should be her.” The reviews weren't particularly warm, either. “A television star was not born,”
New York Times
television critic Caryn James wrote in her morning-after review.

In June
1998
, less than a year later, it was announced that Molinari would be leaving. “I think she missed the political arena—not being in politics per se, but political commentary and analysis,” Heyward explained when Molinari left. “There's very little of that on a Saturday morning show.”

In March
1997
, Heyward announced his biggest move yet: he'd hired NBC
Today Show
star Bryant Gumbel with a five-year deal said to be worth at least $
5
million a year. Heyward desperately hoped the move would inject life into a news division in major decline. There was just one problem: no one knew what do to do with Gumbel once they had him. First Heyward handed him a newsmagazine called
Public Eye.
It launched in October
1997
and to most observers lacked a distinctive personality—a hybrid of
Nightline
and
Dateline
, with the ratings pull of neither. Production shut down in August
1998
.

Heyward was now stuck with a multimillion-dollar player with no important tasks to perform. The next idea he floated was to make Gumbel an integral part of something he'd been discussing with his bosses: a second edition of
60 Minutes.
It was a notion the network brass loved—to use the brand name of
60 Minutes
to launch another newsmagazine. It made perfect economic sense, but there was just one problem: selling the concept of
60 Minutes II
to Don Hewitt and the ornery, stubborn correspondents of
60 Minutes.

 

Leslie Moonves wanted it to happen, and that meant it probably would. To the CBS entertainment chief it was only logical—to spin the hugely successful franchise into a second show. It had already worked for NBC; by
1997
,
Dateline
had expanded to four nights and become highly profitable. But to Hewitt and the correspondents, it was nothing more than a misguided attempt by the network to diminish the value of the franchise by going “down market” with a
Dateline
clone. The immediate suspicion of the
60 Minutes
crew was that Moonves and his corporate cronies would do anything to squeeze another buck out of the news division, even at the risk of destroying the credibility built up over three decades by Hewitt and
60 Minutes.

Moonves went to a birthday lunch for Mike Wallace in the spring of
1997
and was a bit surprised when some of the correspondents used the occasion to corner him, furious about the plan. They continued to spill their venom at a series of meetings meant to mollify the angry stars. “All you guys want to do is use the brand.” Morley Safer fumed at Moonves. “And what you're going to do in the process is destroy it.” More nasty meetings followed; at one point the correspondents told Moonves that none of them would appear on his proposed new show. Then Hewitt and Wallace took their case upstairs to Moonves's boss, Mel Karmazin, making their adamant opposition painfully clear.

But Karmazin—a shrewd businessman who at that point held the title of chairman and chief executive of CBS—wasn't going to be told by anyone, even Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt, what he could or could not do. He was not, he said, going to override Heyward and Moonves. “We're putting on
60 Minutes II
whether you like it or not,” Karmazin reportedly said. “If I have to slap the title
60 Minutes II
across
The Nanny,
I'll do it, but you're going to have
60 Minutes II
.”

By late spring—after endless meetings, endless calls among the correspondents, and endless leaks to the press—the correspondents had a final meeting with Moonves and Heyward at Black Rock. As Safer recalls it, attempts at consensus went nowhere until, as it was breaking up, he said to the assembled executives: “Look, if you guys want to do another
60 Minutes,
you take the best producers you have at CBS News and the best correspondents you have at CBS News, you call that
60 Minutes II,
and I don't see a way we can argue with you. But at the top you need that kind of uncompromising guy to run the broadcast.” At which point, according to Safer, Hewitt stood behind Heyward, pointing at himself. (Hewitt denies ever having wanted to be in charge of the new show, and Heyward has no recollection that Hewitt ever wanted to run it.)

In any case, Heyward's choice was Jeffrey Fager, the former
60 Minutes
producer now running the CBS
Evening News.
Within weeks (and after a meeting that June in the
60 Minutes
screening room with Karmazin and the correspondents to help smooth things over) Fager was installed in the job as executive producer of
60 Minutes II
—and that battle, at least, was finally over.

CBS News was hoping to use the new show to anoint Mike Wallace's son, Chris, as his possible
60 Minutes
successor; he'd been a correspondent for ABC News for several years and bore a strong superficial resemblance to his father. But at the last minute, negotiations between the younger Wallace and CBS broke down when ABC News refused to let him out of his contract—a move, according to Mike Wallace and several other sources, that was engineered directly by Sawyer to spite her old
60 Minutes
antagonist.

Finally, Hewitt and his rattled tigers acquiesced (at least nominally) to a fate that was probably sealed before they ever protested it. When the official announcement of
60 Minutes II
was made at last in July
1997
, Hewitt declined to comment except to issue this statement: “I think that under Jeff Fager,
60 Minutes II
is a natural to be the second-best broadcast of its kind on television. Inasmuch as I can help, without shortchanging the first-best broadcast of its kind on television, I'm hoping to do that.”

 

Kathleen Willey had a story to tell, and she fit all the Hewitt standards of a perfect
60 Minutes
character. What could be more interesting than an attractive, well-spoken woman claiming to have been sexually harassed by the president of the United States?

In the context of Hewitt's own troubled history with the subject, of course, the notion of interviewing Kathleen Willey—and lending credence to her invasive, privacy-shattering charges against Bill Clinton—presented certain glaring ironies. Just as the Clinton scandal unfolded publicly, CBS was privately negotiating the settlement of a harassment charge against Hewitt by a former
60 Minutes
editor. But if anyone at CBS felt uncomfortable with the possible hypocrisy involved in the coverage of the growing Clinton scandal in the winter of
1998
, they did not speak up. And so when Michael Radutzky, Ed Bradley's producer, informed his bosses that he had nailed down an exclusive interview with the president's latest accuser, there was never any doubt that
60 Minutes
would run with the story.