Tick... Tick... Tick... (5 page)

 

Mike Wallace decided in
1955
that he belonged in Murrow's profession; little more than a year later, he was hosting
Night Beat
on NBC's New York affiliate. The show was an hour-long interview at
11
:
00
P.M.
four nights a week, in which Wallace honed the in-your-face questioning style that would become his trademark. He loved hitting celebrities with provocative questions or, more often, provocative statements that they were invited to contradict. The first question Wallace asked on his first show (with New York's liberal Democratic mayor, Robert F. Wagner) was, “How do you feel when the
Herald Tribune
calls you a do-nothing mayor?” (Wallace's Republican leanings have since been well established.)

It only got more interesting. “Mrs. Roosevelt, I think you will agree,” he said one night to Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “that a good many people hated your husband.” Given no room to move, Mrs. Roosevelt—and the audience at home—had little choice but to agree. Audiences loved Wallace's confrontational style; it caught on so fast that less than six months later, ABC hired him away to do a half-hour version of
Night Beat
for a national audience on Sunday nights. He quickly became a force to be reckoned with; comedians like Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner were doing parodies of Wallace, and major critics were writing essays about his impact on the medium. “In a very real sense [Wallace] is a pioneer in electronic journalism of substance,” wrote the influential
New York Times
television critic Jack Gould. “He has shown how through the instrument of the TV close-up millions of set owners can gain a new insight into people and how and why they think as they do.” But the forward-looking Gould also warned: “By building carefully on a sound journalistic foundation he could achieve a lasting place in national TV; his present risk is that by pushing too hard he may prove to be only a fleeting fad.”

Gould's cautionary came true one year later, when ratings declined and Wallace's flagging show lost its sponsors, and the network rescinded its pledge to keep him on the air once a week in prime time. Wallace took
Night Beat
to Channel
13
(then a small independent station in New York). By
1961
, it had fizzled completely.

In
1962
, as his once-burgeoning career seemed to be settling into decline, Wallace was hit with a personal tragedy that would alter his career forever: the death of Peter, his oldest son. A
19
-year-old Yale sophomore, Peter had been reported lost by friends while on summer vacation in Greece. Wallace went in search of him and finally found his body
50
feet below the ledge of a mountain where he had apparently fallen during a hike. The death devastated Wallace, forcing him into some deep soul-searching. Ultimately, with the encouragement of wife number three, a Haitian beauty named Lorraine Perigord, whom he'd met on vacation in Puerto Rico and married in
1955
, Wallace disavowed entertainment programming entirely, committing himself to a career in serious journalism instead. “It's the only kind of work that makes you happy,” Wallace recalled his wife saying after he told her of his decision. He wrote letters to the heads of the news divisions at ABC, NBC, and CBS, and in March
1963
, he received an offer from Richard Salant at CBS to join his staff as a reporter. Late that summer, after bouncing around the network for a few months in various capacities, Wallace was chosen to be the host of
The CBS Morning News,
a new venture that faced the challenge of competing with NBC's far more successful
Today Show.

After three years, Wallace left the morning show and moved to a general-assignment reporting position for Cronkite's evening newscast; this took him briefly to Vietnam and the Middle East. By
1968
, when he agreed to sign on to Hewitt's new show, he had yet to achieve the success he craved. It was expected that he'd play second banana in the new arrangement, this time to Harry Reasoner.

 

Reasoner had been at CBS since the mid-
1950
s, when he arrived as one of the first writers hired by the nascent network news division, after brief stints as a reporter and drama critic for the
Minneapolis Times,
and later as a local TV news director. Before that he'd taken a stab at novel writing: in
1946
, at the age of
23
, he published
Tell Me About Women.

At CBS News, Reasoner's wry wit and laconic delivery caught on immediately; within a few years he became one of the network's most dependable reporters, dispatched at a moment's notice to places like Little Rock, Arkansas, where in
1958
he provided distinguished coverage of the school desegregation case. He hosted a network morning show called
Calendar
from
1961
to
1963
; replaced by Wallace, Reasoner returned to the daily news beat, reviving his reputation as one of the network's brightest stars. By
1967
, he was the anchorman of CBS's Sunday night newscast and the chief substitute for Walter Cronkite on the
CBS Evening News
—not to mention the boyfriend of movie star Angie Dickinson.

The rap on Reasoner—which he went to little effort to shake—was that he was lazy. He loved long lunches at Le Biarritz, a French bistro a couple of blocks from CBS, where he downed martinis before returning to the office for a nap. Between his marriage, his girlfriend, and his passion for food and drink, Reasoner simply didn't have time to devote to forging a future. His prodigious talents as a writer, reporter, and raconteur were keeping him afloat; in those days, such gifts were worth more than the cut of one's jaw line or even the number of reporting trips to foreign capitals.

Those talents were reflected at the end of a typical Sunday night newscast in March
1964
, when he capped the news of the day with a bit of quintessential Reasoner drollery: “Elizabeth Taylor, the American actress, and Richard Burton, the Welsh actor, were married today in Montreal. They met two years ago while working on the movie
Cleopatra
in Rome and have been good friends ever since.” Pause. “That's the news. This is Harry Reasoner, CBS News. Good night.”

Reasoner was always considered good enough to keep skating by, but his options—beyond the anchorman's job—were limited. Reasoner and Hewitt were both far enough from the top that they needed each other, more perhaps than either wanted to admit. Each thought he was doing the other a favor, agreeing to merge talents on a venture that seemed certain to fail.

Chapter 4

The Symphony of the Real World

“Good evening, this is
60 Minutes,
” Harry Reasoner said into the camera, then paused for a beat as though startled himself by the sound of it.

Mike Wallace sat stiff and motionless to Reasoner's right, as Reasoner continued: “It's a kind of a magazine for television, which means it has the flexibility and diversity of a magazine, adapted to broadcast journalism.” It was
10
:
00
P.M.
on Tuesday, September
24
,
1968
; perhaps
13
million Americans were watching as TV history was getting made. By the standards of
1968
television ratings, when hit shows routinely attracted
30
million viewers, it was a dismal performance. The sole sponsor of the first episode of
60 Minutes
was Alpo, “the all-meat dog food!”

Over on ABC that night, more Americans were watching
That's Life!
with Robert Morse, a musical comedy series with guest stars George Burns and Tony Randall; everybody else tuned in for Rock Hudson in
Blindfold,
the NBC Tuesday night movie. The debut of
60 Minutes
wasn't helped much by its own CBS lead-in, the leaden debut of
The Doris Day Show,
in which the former film star played a widow who returns to her family ranch with her two young sons.

Perhaps Hewitt's years in purgatory had given him the stimulus to rush recklessly into the unknown; the opening moments of
60 Minutes
were not the work of a producer who understood the power of finding (rather than manufacturing) drama. Nor was much of what immediately followed. Reasoner segued to the show's first report, a look inside the hotel rooms of presidential candidates Nixon and Humphrey from that summer's political conventions. The story had been Wallace's idea, and Hewitt loved it. But the footage wasn't particularly groundbreaking or even all that revealing. Still, it struck viewers as entertaining to see these two powerful men behind closed doors, in a way that hadn't been shown before, and in a backhanded way it ended up revealing something of the show's intended personality. This wasn't the stuff of a documentary (it was far too inconsequential for that) but it made for far more interesting viewing than a typical campaign piece on the evening news. It was followed by some interstitial and odd humor from two silhouetted commentators.

Up next were three prominent European thinkers of the period —Malcolm Muggeridge of England, Luigi Barzini of Italy, and Peter Van Zahn of West Germany—who weighed in portentously with their thoughts on the American presidential campaign. (Humorist Art Buchwald then offered an American perspective.) The show's third piece, a Mike Wallace interview with Attorney General Ramsey Clark, was executed in the tough-guy mode of the former
Night Beat
host, though this time in the context of a broader story about the police. Gruff and confrontational, Wallace tried to provoke Clark, but the laconic Texan calmly held his ground.

 

W
ALLACE
: I think Dick Gregory has said that today's cop is yesterday's nigger. Do you understand that?

C
LARK
: Yes, I understand that, and it's, you know, you've got to be able to recognize wisdom and truth where you find it.

 

Next came a bizarre vignette about the recent violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, again presented by those two silhouetted figures—written by Andy Rooney, and given voice by him and the show's senior producer, Palmer Williams.

 

F
IRST
S
ILHOUETTE
: I know how the cops feel.

S
ECOND
S
ILHOUETTE
: Not being a cop, you can't possibly know how they feel.

F
IRST
: Not being me, how do you know whether I know how the cops feel?

S
ECOND
: Not being me, how do you know whether I know how you know or not?

F
IRST
: Thank you.

S
ECOND
: Thank you.

 

This was followed by
Why Man Creates,
a short film from Saul Bass and commissioned by Kaiser Aluminum, after which Wallace and Reasoner returned for some self-promotional chat.

W
ALLACE
: And there you have our first
60 Minutes
broadcast. Looking back, it had quite a range, as the problems and interests of our lives have quite a range. Our perception of reality roams, in a given day, from the light to the heavy, from warmth to menace, and if this broadcast does what we hope it will do, it will report reality.

Reasoner followed with a statement of odd, homespun media philosophy, perhaps the product of Rooney's typewriter:

 

R
EASONER
: The reality, as we have suggested, is various; the symphony of the real world is not a monotone. This doesn't necessarily mean you have to mix it up all in one broadcast, but it seems to us that the idea of a flexible attitude has its attractions. All art is the rearrangement of previous perceptions, and we don't claim this is anything more than that, or even that journalism is an art, for that matter. But we do think this is sort of a new approach. We realize, of course, that new approaches are not always instantly accepted. . . .

W
ALLACE
: We'll see. I'm Mike Wallace.

R
EASONER
: We will indeed. I'm Harry Reasoner.
60 Minutes
will be back two weeks from tonight.

 

The reviews were mixed. “The stories were dated,” said
Variety,
“and the magazine format, lifted from print, pretentious.” As for its prospects,
Variety
concluded: “If it had been a newspaper, it would not have sold many copies.”

The
New York Times
was kinder, calling it “something television has long needed,” and said the first episode “explored only a few of the many possibilities open to an imaginative editor.” Confirming the very point of Hewitt's concept, the review added: “Not all the segments were of equal interest, but one doesn't expect that in a magazine.”

60 Minutes
brought in low ratings, but CBS was happy enough to let it continue. It cost far less to produce than a drama show and offered the network a new show to add to the luster of the news division, still a point of pride for CBS chairman William Paley. And for the time being it was filling space.

At the beginning, the show operated with a skeleton staff: Each correspondent had three producers, and the management team consisted only of Hewitt and Palmer Williams, a CBS News producer brought in to run the mechanics of the show. Hewitt lacked any interest in the tedium of budgets and schedules and meetings; that became Williams's job. He preferred to make decisions on the way to the men's room—or
in
the men's room—and since the only women working on
60 Minutes
were secretaries, that didn't impede the process much. Williams had been brought to CBS in
1951
by Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly to help produce
See It Now,
after having produced documentaries for, among others, the legendary theater producer John Houseman. The two men worked side by side from the first day of work on
60 Minutes
, but they were fundamentally different; Hewitt aspired to an upper-class lifestyle and fancy friends, while Williams lived downtown in Greenwich Village and wore his bohemian tastes proudly. Like Wallace and Reasoner, they made an oddly perfect match.

By the second episode Hewitt already seemed to be finding the show's voice—an amalgam of Hildy and Hollywood. He offered what by any standard would be viewed as a piece of sensational tabloid journalism: the first of two parts of a Mike Wallace investigation into the secret development of biological weapons, including anthrax. With shots of an ominous building and tanks and, of course, Wallace's highly theatrical delivery underscoring it all as he stood on-camera wearing a scary-looking protective uniform, it screamed to the audience that danger lurked around every corner.

W
ALLACE
: In wars of the future one breath could mean instant death. An invisible odorless cloud could be lethal. The uniform I'm wearing was especially designed to protect a man against nerve gas. The mask protects against both gas and biological agents. If chemical and biological weapons are used in wars of the future, a man will have to have a uniform like this just to stay alive in order to fight.

Wallace tempered neither the tone of his writing nor the timber of his voice as he reported in grim detail the dangers of these toxic substances. In doing so he foretold not only the frightening future of chemical weapons, but also the plan of
60 Minutes
to get noticed at any cost, by delivering stories that begged, even demanded, to be watched.

In that second episode, Wallace also sat down with Richard Nixon, the Republican presidential candidate, who would within a month win the presidency and offer Wallace a job as his press secretary. In that conversation, Wallace would create another ingredient that set
60 Minutes
apart: the newsmaker interview with gravitas. With his Republican leanings and known kinship with Nixon, Wallace used his seductive powers as an interviewer to draw out the inner Nixon. His patented methods still provoked his subject to respond with his own version of the truth, as happened with this telling exchange about Nixon's failed
1960
candidacy for the presidency:

 

W
ALLACE
: There are those who suggest you were awed, almost overawed by Jack Kennedy's money, social grace, position.

N
IXON
: Oh, I don't buy that. . . . Believe me, when you've gone through the fires of having to work your way through school, of having to fight campaigns with no money, of having to do it all on your own, you come out a pretty strong man and you're not in awe of anybody.

W
ALLACE
: There's been so much talk in recent years of style and of charisma. No one suggests that either you or your opponent, Hubert Humphrey, have a good deal of it. Have you given no thought to this aspect of campaigning and of leading?

N
IXON
: Well, when style and charisma connotes the idea of contriving, of public relations, I don't buy it at all. As I look back on the history of this country, some of our great leaders would not have been perhaps great television personalities, but they were great presidents because of what they stood for. . . . The most important thing about a public man is not whether he's loved or disliked but whether he's respected. And I hope to restore respect to the presidency at all levels by my conduct.

 

Once again, the show's ending and references to the next episode captured the quickly evolving nature of
60 Minutes
—not to mention the differences in style between Reasoner and Wallace.

 

W
ALLACE
: And we'll have Part Two of that exclusive look that began tonight into the world of chemical and biological warfare.

R
EASONER
: And other wonders, some perhaps as yet undreamed of.

 

For Wallace and Hewitt, this vastly improved second broadcast demonstrated their real potential as a television team—Hewitt in the screening room in New York, Wallace out in the field. Hewitt was begging for glitz from his correspondents, and Wallace understood how to provide it. He gathered the raw information; Hewitt packaged it for maximum impact. Unlike the plodding pilot, the second episode revealed the promise of real collaboration; it showed the symmetry of their thinking and the common thread that linked them.

 

“Tick . . . tick . . . tick . . .” was a sound nowhere to be found in the opening credits of
60 Minutes
on its first two episodes. Most of the discussions about the show's opening focused on creating the look of a magazine cover—known as “The Book”—as a backdrop. The show's director, Arthur Bloom, added the image of a Minerva stopwatch to the opening credits of episode
3
, on October
22
,
1968
. (Hewitt has often claimed, incorrectly, that the ticking clock was heard over the closing credits in the first two episodes. “I keep telling him it's not true,” Bloom said in May
2004
.) After that, Bloom inserted the tick—which was, in fact, the sound of a grandfather clock he had found at a New York sound studio—in between pieces. A few episodes later, a swankier Heuer stopwatch replaced the Minerva. For years, the stopwatch posed significant technical difficulties. The clock had to be filmed in real time; during that process the watch would sometimes fall off its stand, or someone would forget to wind it, causing it to stop prematurely. In the late
1970
s, it was replaced by an Aristo, which remains the template for the current stopwatch.