Audition (40 page)

Our first encounter in the backyard of his small, two-bedroom house on the outskirts of Tel Aviv was not particularly friendly. He had really been forced into the interview by the rising international outcry over Israel’s seizure of a Lebanese passenger plane. The Israelis had been tipped off, erroneously, it turned out, that a wanted Palestinian terrorist was on board. Dayan saw no need to apologize. “We are not terrorists; we catch terrorists. When the terrorists stop, we’ll stop.” All those years ago, and Dayan’s words are still repeated in Israel today.

Of the innumerable people I’ve interviewed, Dayan was certainly one of the bluntest. His best, and occasionally worst, quality was that he didn’t care what anyone thought about him. I remember asking him something or other during the interview to which he responded: “That’s a silly question.” “Okay,” I charged back. “If you think that’s a silly question, why don’t you ask the right question, then answer it, and I’ll just sit here and we’ll be fine.” He didn’t expect that response from me. He laughed out loud, and that was the moment our friendship started. I also met his lovely second wife, Raquel, and we, too, became very fond of each other.

My interviews with Meir and Dayan garnered a lot of attention. Even Frank McGee gave me a grudging “Nice work,” which was a big deal coming from him. There was so much interest in Israel then, as now, and its ongoing struggle to survive. Less than two months after my visit, the country was at war again. The October war, as the Egyptians called it, or the Yom Kippur War, as the Israelis called it, saw Israel in great danger after a surprise joint attack by Syria and Egypt.

I followed the 1973 war closely, and was relieved when Israel recovered from the initial attack and repelled its Arab enemies. But Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan were held accountable for the loss of Israeli lives and severely criticized for not having anticipated the attack. Both of these giants in Israeli government resigned. (Mrs. Meir remained active politically but would not hold another government post; Dayan would return to the Israeli cabinet in 1977 as foreign minister under Prime Minister Menachem Begin.)

On the domestic early-morning television front, I was having my own little battle. Hardly history making but a field day for the media. CBS decided it was going to revamp the
CBS Morning News
to challenge
Today.
There had never been any real competition for NBC in the morning. But this time CBS decided to hire the young, good-looking, snappy, feature writer at the
Washington Post
, my old friend from the Persepolis days, Sally Quinn.

I liked Sally a lot and was sorry we were going to be competing, but the media was delighted and did its best to create a catfight between us.
New York
magazine ran a cover story with Sally sitting, legs crossed, on a pile of suitcases, and the cover line: “Good Morning. I’m Sally Quinn. CBS Brought Me Here to Make Trouble for Barbara Walters.”

At least the magazine printed the letter I’d written Sally when I’d heard of her new assignment. “CBS could not have made a better choice. I mean this in all sincerity and look forward to seeing you very often now that you’ll be in New York. I won’t be able to catch you on camera, but I hope we’ll get together off camera. For God’s sake, let’s avoid all those people in and out of the media who may try to create a feud between us. We like each other too much.” I signed it, “Much luck and affection.”

The truth was, however, that I was somewhat anxious because I knew what a good and witty reporter Sally was. I had enough trouble with McGee. I didn’t look forward to the daily comparison with Sally. She had a lot of contacts in Washington and qualities I didn’t have, the first three being blond hair, blue eyes, and youth. But CBS made the same mistake with Sally that NBC had made with Maureen O’Sullivan. The network assumed that a person who was wonderful being interviewed would be just as wonderful being the interviewer.

Sally’s debut in August 1973, teamed with a pleasant veteran newsman named Hughes Rudd, was not a great success. It was not Sally’s fault. Not only was she sick and feverish, she later said, but nobody at CBS ever gave her any directions. They just threw her on the air and expected her to soar. It was an all but impossible assignment.

The
CBS Morning News
did not make a dent in the ratings of the
Today
show, which by then was drawing close to four million viewers a day, a huge audience at the time. Instead of being anxious about competition from Sally, I began to feel sorry for her.

About three months after she started on CBS we were pitched against each other for our respective networks on one of the most colorful stories of the year. The occasion was Princess Anne’s wedding to Mark Phillips in London’s Westminster Abbey in November 1973. The lavish wedding of the only daughter of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip was the forerunner to Princess Diana’s wedding to Anne’s brother Prince Charles. There was the same pageantry, and royalty and political leaders attended from all over the world.

The
Today
show and the
CBS Morning News
both covered the wedding live, starting at 5:00 a.m. because of the five-hour time difference. It’s not that I am a saint, but by then I was really feeling compassion for Sally. She was struggling in London while I could still remember, from the time I covered the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales, much about the royal traditions. I knew who the major players were and who among the guests were the so-called lesser royals, the term used for those royal relatives who were further than tenth in line to the throne. I shared much of this information with Sally. A quick learner, she got through the wedding just fine. But Sally would last just another few months at CBS before leaving to return to the
Washington Post.
Not only did her career flourish there, she married the
Post
’s famous executive editor, Ben Bradlee. They are still happily together, and she and I are still great friends.

When I got back from London, everyone on the program was buzzing about Frank McGee, who had seemingly taken leave of his senses. He had plunged into a flagrant love affair with a young black production assistant named Mamye, and had left his wife to live with her. It was unbelievable. Frank had been married happily, or so we thought, for many years to his wife, Sue. He never took a trip for
Today
without her. She used to travel with him during the times he worked day and night at the political conventions. It seemed the most secure of marriages.

The only possible hint that it wasn’t, was when I heard that Frank and his wife used to drink something like a pitcher of martinis a night. Do you drink until you are practically blotto every night if you are really happy? Nevertheless, we who worked with Frank were mystified as to why Frank suddenly upped and left his wife for Mamye. Mamye, who had babysat for Frank and Sue’s grandchildren. Mamye, whom we all knew as fun, giggly, inefficient, and not even particularly pretty. How the drama stayed in-house and did not end up in the columns is beyond reckoning. But it didn’t. We all kept it a secret. Just try that today. In this day and age it would be front-page fodder for the tabloids, all over the Internet, and with ten-minute updates on cable news shows.

But although it was a secret, we were noticing some changes in Frank. In the past he would have his makeup applied and his silvery hair combed in the large dressing room with the rest of us. Now he insisted on having his own dressing room, even though the other room was small and cramped. There were rumors that his hair was falling out. His skin tone seemed paler.

Although he never said a word, we began to wonder if he was ill. But when a man is ill, isn’t that when he most wants to be with his long-faithful wife? Surely this was not the moment to run off with someone less than half his age. Or was it? It all seemed so crazy. But because Frank was more distant than ever, none of us were privy to his thoughts or feelings.

In the midst of all this drama my friend and agent, Lee Stevens, was negotiating my new three-year contract with NBC. It was September 1973, and with
Not for Women Only
now being syndicated in some eighty cities, Lee felt he was dealing from a position of strength. It turned out he was. He got me a substantial raise but was not interested just in getting more money for me. Lee put in the contract that if Frank were ever to leave the program, voluntarily or involuntarily, I was to have the title of cohost with whoever succeeded him.

It wasn’t surprising that no one at NBC questioned that clause. The brass doing the negotiations believed that Frank would be doing the program for years to come. Our ratings were solid, and he was only fifty-one. Therefore the chance that they might have to make me a permanent cohost must have seemed ridiculously slim, certainly not within the three years of the contract they were currently negotiating. So NBC included that clause. I signed off on the deal and continued to get my own interviews outside the studio. There were plenty of interviews to get.

A scandal of historic proportions was engulfing the Nixon White House in 1973. Watergate was in full bloom, and all the players in the daily headlines were in Washington. So, for much of that tumultuous time, was I.

Resignation in Washington. Victory in New York

T
HE PLACE TO BE
in the summer of 1973 was Washington. The place to stay was at the Watergate Hotel. The show to be on was the
Today
show.

The Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, otherwise known as the Senate Watergate Committee, was holding public hearings to investigate the mounting crisis for the Nixon administration and the president himself. One shoe was dropping after another.

What had begun the year before as a curious burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex had escalated into sensational charges of political spying, sabotage, wiretapping, burglary, and conspiracy. By the spring of 1973 the scandal had reached the highest echelons of Nixon’s inner circle: John Dean, the White House counsel, had been fired, and Nixon’s top staffers, including his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman—he who winked at me in China—had been forced to resign.

And now the Senate hearings.

I was free to be in Washington much of the summer. My little girl was with Lee, who had taken a summer house in Westhampton, Long Island. My parents and my sister were in Miami, and I spoke to them three times a week. My mother told me some disturbing news about my father. He seemed to be losing strength, she said, and slept most of the day. I felt that it was depression, but I didn’t know what I could do about it.

I was broadcasting from the NBC studio in Washington doing features and interviews while Frank anchored the program from New York. Between us we had all the major Watergate players on
Today.
Hardly a day passed when I didn’t interview a congressman, a senator, a constitutional lawyer, a pollster, or somebody knowledgeable about the crisis. With so many Washington interviews to do, the McGee edict that I couldn’t come in until the fourth question quietly went away. Frank did his interviews from New York and I did mine by remote from the NBC studio in Washington and it was quite a calm period between us. I’m sure he was happy that I’d been reassigned to Washington—somewhat like sending me to China.

Many of the journalists in town for the hearings were staying at the Watergate Hotel, and we gathered in the evening to compare notes. The old boys’ club finally had begun to accept me because I had good stories to swap from my morning interviews. (The nightly news programs did not do interviews back then.) The only other news program doing interviews, and taped at that, was
60 Minutes
, but that CBS program was only on once a week.
Today
was on five mornings a week, live, for two hours. It was a huge advantage.

For all of us in news, whether television or print, covering Watergate was one of the most interesting and exciting experiences you could have. The stars were the young
Washington Post
reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who kept breaking one Watergate story after another, but there was more than enough material for all of us. It was a riveting time, particularly for me because I knew Nixon. And the pincers were closing around him.

One bombshell followed another during the hearings, bringing the scandal closer and closer to the Oval Office—the testimony that Nixon had discussed the cover-up some thirty-five times with his counsel; the revelation that Nixon taped all his conversations and phone calls in the Oval Office; Nixon’s refusal to hand over the presidential recordings to the Senate Watergate Committee; the court-ordered (backed up by the Supreme Court) delivery of the tapes, which disclosed a mysterious eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap that was blamed on Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods.

It didn’t help Nixon when Spiro Agnew, his vice president, was forced to resign following charges of income tax evasion. (Nixon named Gerald Ford as Agnew’s replacement.) And it certainly did not help Nixon when the House Judiciary Committee started impeachment hearings in May 1974. I was again in Washington for the three months of those hearings. At their conclusion in July, I remember being with very close friends, Shirley and Dick Clurman. Dick, who was winding up a brilliant twenty-three-year career as a journalist and chief of correspondents at Time Inc., was a close friend of Leonard Garment, John Dean’s replacement as Nixon’s special counsel. The Clurmans, Garment, and I were watching the chair of the committee, Democratic Congressman Peter Rodino, preside over the vote that would send three articles of impeachment against Nixon when Len, who had a very dry sense of humor, said, “Come on, Peter. Sink to the occasion.” I loved the line and remember it to this day.

Soon afterward, along with the rest of the nation, I watched Richard Nixon resign, the first U.S. president ever to do so. Pat Nixon stood ghostlike behind her husband with their two daughters, Julie and Tricia. Julie, so close to her father, had begged him not to resign, but he had no option. It was Julie who admitted to me in a later interview that she was the one who had to tell her mother that her father was going to resign. For all the excitement and historical importance of the moment, it was also quite poignant.