Tell Me a Story: Fifty Years and 60 Minutes in Television

By 1966 and 1967, I was already starting to think about a new type of personal journalism. The documentaries-CBS Reports, NBC White Paper and ABC Close Up - all seemed to be the voice of the corporation, and I didn't believe people were interested in hearing from a corporation. They were like newspaper editorials, I thought. Do people really care about the "voice of the newspaper"? They want to read the reporting and the columnists, not the editorials.

There was the one-hour format for what amounted to the long form in broadcast journalism, and an hour seemed too long for the personal journalism that was beginning to form in my mind-journalism that might be both compelling and entertaining.

Entertaining? Wasn't that a dirty word when used in connection with the news? Not to me.

I had entered the television age in the era of news as a public service and spent my TV adolescence serving that cause. But I had begun to realize in the '60s that TV news was going to have to pay its own way. Otherwise, it was going to disappear into the sinkhole called The Sunday Afternoon Ghetto, where documentaries and discussion shows could do no harm to the Jackie Gleasons and Lucille Balls who paid the bills and made CBS Television the entertainment conglomerate it had become.

At the same time, Ed Murrow was beginning to realize the same thing-that his and Fred Friendly's See It Now program was not getting the respect from the corporate brass they thought it deserved and that in some markets it was being preempted by Amos 'n Andy.

What to do about it? The only way Murrow could give them a show that could hold its own against the best the other networks could throw at it would be to get into the ratings game - a game he had roundly condemned as beneath serious journalists. But if we were going to please the corporation-and that was something he knew quite a bit about because he was a member of the CBS hierarchy for a while-it meant playing the game.

Going with the flow was what it was, but it was the only way to "make it" with the people he worked for and the only way to put the kind of money in his pocket that would take care of his wife, Janet, and their son Casey after he was gone. The broadcast he agreed to do was called Person to Person, and it concerned itself each week with visiting the homes of famous people.

We who worked on Ed's prestigious Sunday afternoon broadcast, See It Now, soon saw the public gravitating to Person to Person in the kind of numbers that frequently put it in the top ten while we languished in the cellar.

It was John Horne, the TV critic of the New York Herald Tribune, who coined the phrases "high Murrow" and "low Murrow" to distinguish between the two broadcasts.

Oh my God, I thought. That's the answer. Why not put them together in one broadcast and reap the benefits of being both prestigious and popular? For the first time, there could be a way for a television show to feed the network's soul and, simultaneously, its pocketbook. We could look into Marilyn Monroe's closet so long as we looked into Robert Oppenheimer's laboratory, too. We could make the news entertaining without compromising our integrity.

That, in essence, was the genesis of 60 Minutes.

It could be like the old Life magazine, I thought-a family friend in the home of millions of Americans each week, serious and lighthearted in the same issue. The ads didn't interrupt the stories in Life: You'd have a story for a few pages, then some ads, then another story. We could do the same thing on television, each reporter telling a complete story without interruption, then the commercial break. If we split the public-affairs hours into three parts to deal with the viewers' short attention span-not to mention my own-and made it personal journalism in which a reporter takes the viewer along with him on the story, I was willing to bet that we could take informational programming out of the ratings cellar.

I began to tell people at the network about my notion of an hour-long program combining "high Murrow" and "low Murrow." Fred Friendly thought it was a terrible idea, but I was undeterred and kept working on refining and improving the concept. A short time later, Friendly had a run-in with the top network management over their reluctance to preempt afternoon soap operas to carry the Fulbright hearings, in which the Senate probed the conduct of and the whys and wherefores of our presence in Vietnam. Following Friendly's resignation as president of CBS News, Richard S. Salant, who came from the legal department, took over. So I wrote a note to him, asking him why in the hundreds of prime-time minutes of make-believe that CBS beamed into American living rooms each week, the network couldn't find "60 minutes" of prime time to air some reality, produced with the same flair that the entertainment division had become famous for.

Salant, hardly overwhelmed by or even vaguely interested in what I had proposed, told CBS News Vice President Bill Leonard that it was a lousy idea. "That's funny," Leonard said. "That's exactly what Friendly said." Believe it or not, that is how 60 Minutes got born. Because anything Friendly was against, Salant was for-even if it meant turning over a prime time hour each week to me, about whom he felt, at best, lukewarm.

In early 1968, Salant reluctantly put his seal of approval on my proposed broadcast, which took its title from the phrase in my memo, "60 minutes of prime time."

"What kind of stories do you want to do?" he asked me.

"Good stories, interesting and arresting stories," I told him. I couldn't come up with anything more specific than that, except to say that we would do three a week, with style and wit, each edited down to a manageable twelve to fifteen minutes to deal with the viewers' attention span.

We still had to make a pilot, but Salant initially balked at the cost-$25,000, which was a paltry sum in television even then. But a savvy woman named Ellen McCloy intervened. She was the daughter of John J. McCloy, one of the "wise men" who helped to shape the post-World War II order, and she had recently started work at CBS as an assistant to Salant. Ellen called, told me she loved the idea and said she would talk Salant into going along with the money. And she did.

In the early days of television, there was an hour-long weekly series called Four Star Playhouse, in which Dick Powell, Ida Lupino, David Niven and Charles Boyer formed a repertory company and each week played different parts. Any one of them could play anything. It gave me the idea that maybe I could do the same thing with reporters, and cover the world that way. In effect, they would be a repertory company of freelance journalists, each dedicated to his or her story, but there would be no star out front, no master of ceremonies, no Ed Sullivan introducing the acts.

But my rep company started with a cast of only one-Harry Reasoner. He was a superb writer, personable, one of CBS's most accomplished correspondents who, I thought, could sort of publish his notes on air and take people along on his story. He had for a long while been on the CBS Morning News and was now on general assignment, not doing anything very exciting, just covering stories the way he had done for the CBS Evening News back when I was producing it. I approached him and he agreed to give the pilot a shot. As he recalled: "When Hewitt told me about this idea he had for a television magazine, I figured what the hell, I wasn't doing anything very exciting at the time and even if it didn't get on the air-and it probably wouldn't-I didn't have anything to lose. Besides, I owed him one for our early days together on the Doug Edwards news. It wasn't going to have much effect on my career one way or the other to do a pilot, so I said yes." With so little money for the pilot, all I could do was to cannibalize existing film from documentaries that were in the CBS library. For instance, a ten-minute piece on Bobby Kennedy taking his kids skiing was taken from an hour we had done on him. Another story we called "Two Faces of Black America" (Ed Brooke, then a Republican senator from Massachusetts, and Stokely Carmichael, one of the founders of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC) were taken from an hour broadcast we had done on the two of them.

When the lights came up in the screening room after Salant, Leonard and Bob Chandler, Leonard's assistant, had viewed the pilot, Salant and Leonard seemed pleased. Chandler had a feeling it wasn't quite right. "Wouldn't it be a better broadcast," he asked, "if you paired Reasoner with another correspondent, à la Huntley and Brinkley?"

"Like who," I said belligerently, guarding my turf.

"Like Mike Wallace," Chandler said.

Holy shit, I thought, what an idea. They could be the real start of my rep company. Reasoner and Wallace were made for each other.

Were they ever! Good guy, bad guy. The guy you love, the guy who makes you quake. Wallace had developed a tough-guy reputation over the years, going back to a show called Night Beat, in which he would take on anyone and ask the questions no one else had the guts to ask. He was someone I knew people would be interested in hearing from.

Mike is, quite frankly, the best thing that ever happened to a television set - certainly the best thing that every happened to my television set. He's a tiger, the kind of journalist who comes along once in a lifetime, and he hasn't lost a step along the way. He also brings out the best of everyone who works with him, which is a rare quality, especially in the television business.

Like every other genius, he can sometimes be his own worst enemy, although there are moments when it's clear he thinks that honor belongs to me. Almost twenty years after we started working together, I would learn what a rough time Mike was going through, fighting depression. At 60 Minutes today, he is affectionately known as the Depression Poster Boy. But Mike Wallace not only licked his debilitating depression, he also devoted a good portion of his life to helping others lick it.

I'd better stop right now before someone accuses me of ass-kissing, but it's hard for me to say enough about Mike Wallace. He's the tough-as-nails newsman who is a soft touch when it comes to helping colleagues and perfect strangers cope with a disease he fought successfully. There's a Yiddish word for what Mike is. Mike's a mensch.

Back in the late '60s, though, I didn't know for sure whether Mike really took the offer to be on 60 Minutes seriously. He was so sure he was going to be CBS's next White House correspondent that he figured he could tell me anything because he could always get out of it later when his glamour job came through. So he told me yes. Mike got into the act as an afterthought-probably the most fortuitous afterthought that ever came my way or his.

same conversation. He'll record a narration and invariably ask: How was it, kid? (Mike calls everybody "kid." I think he called his father "kid.") For more than three decades, I've given him the same answer: "I'll give you an A. Want to try again and see if you can get an A-plus?" He always does-and he always gets an A-plus.

Reasoner set the tone on our first broadcast, September 24, 1968, letting our audience know that this was a new form for television. "The symphony of the real world is not a monotone and while this does not mean you have to mix it all up in one broadcast, it seems to us that the idea of a flexible attitude has its attractions," Harry began. "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."

The new approach intentionally abjured music. If there was a forerunner to the TV newsmagazine format, it was the old newsreel, The March of Time, which ran in movie theaters during the 1930s and '40s. But the clips were done with music, which can be used to make editorial points as effectively as words, or they can convey a mood: When CBS Reports, the famed documentary series, used Aaron Copeland's "Appalachian Spring" as its theme music, it said to the audience that this is very serious business indeed. It was the series trademark.

We didn't want to editorialize, but we did want some sound, arresting enough to bring people in from the kitchen. And how to do it came at the end of our first broadcast in the form of a ticking stopwatch. I said, "Wait a minute, why are we wasting the ticking clock at the end?" After that, we put it at the beginning and it became our trademark.

We began in the 10-11 P.M. time slot, every other Tuesday, alternating with documentaries and opposite the top-rated ABC series Marcus Welby, M.D. Normally, if you didn't make it with the audience, it was thirteen weeks and out, never to return. But because Tuesday night at ten had been put aside for news and documentaries, and you could survive in that spot if you got good press, even though you got lousy numbers-which we did-could this kind of program keep its head above water in a sea of Jackie Gleasons, Lucille Balls and Arthur Godfreys? No one really thought it could, but us. And there were times when even we had our doubts. What I wanted as much as to be good was to be different, to take viewers to places they hadn't been before and never would have had a chance to go to if it weren't for us-like Richard Nixon's hotel suite the night he watched himself being nominated the Republican candidate for president. What I remember most about that story was that when the voting was over and Nixon had the nomination and he and his cronies were congratulating one another, Pat Nixon sat in the corner completely ignored. Nobody said a word to her. Nixon never went up to her, kissed her or put his arm around her. I happened to mention the Pat Nixon incident to Hubert Humphrey a couple of weeks later, before we filmed him on his nomination night. The night Humphrey got the Democratic nomination, his wife, Muriel, was at the convention hall and not in the room with him. The moment Hubert became the nominee, he got up from his seat, walked to the television set and kissed Muriel's picture on the screen. Do I think that what I told him about the Nixon was why he did it? I don't have a doubt about it.

Within a few weeks of our premiere, I could start to breathe easier, because right off the bat we were a critical success. Even though our share of the audience was pitifully low, 60 Minutes was something the right people liked, and that was something the network brass liked. As long as we stayed in the Tuesday 10-11 spot and in effect stayed out of their hair, we were good for at least a year. I faced my first crisis less than two months later, soon after the presidential election. Nixon had defeated Humphrey-the kiss proved not to be a decisive issue-and the new president-elect offered Mike Wallace the job of White House press secretary. Mike was intrigued and flattered, as anyone would be, but I told him, "That doesn't make any sense. You don't want to go from being Mike Wallace to being a press secretary, even a White House press secretary. It's the kind of job a nobody takes so he can become a somebody." I don't know if that's what convinced Mike to stick with 60 Minutes, but shortly after that conversation he told the Nixon people thanks but no thanks.

I was so glad he did, and 60 Minutes was on its way.

How 60 Minutes went from just another horse in the stable to being Secretariat is something I have never been able to explain. I have said on occasion that we were successful because we generated a lot of psychic energy rubbing off on each other. And for reasons I can't explain, we are able to transmit that psychic energy through the tube every week. Is that really it? Or is that a lot of mumbo jumbo to answer a question that none of us really knows the answer to. I don't know the answer to that one, either. What I do know is that without Palmer Williams at my side as my number two during the early years and Phil Scheffler at my side now as my number two, I think this ship may have foundered. (You mean the horse is now a ship?) Palmer Williams was the good steady hand on the tiller who got us out of the harbor, and Phil Scheffler is the steady hand who keeps us on course. Palmer knew more about more things than anyone I ever knew in my life-a virtual walking encyclopedia.

He was the guy Murrow and Friendly had depended on to keep his cool when things were falling apart-film that got lost en route to the editing room, a temperamental correspondent blowing his top, keeping Murrow from taking a swing at Friendly and vice-versa. In essence, he was part our play doctor and part our resident psychiatrist. The roof's caving in? Call Palmer; he can fix anything.

Every enterprise needs a Palmer Williams-someone who knows where all the bodies are buried, who knows how to convince you that what you're about to do is something you're going to regret later, and actually points you in the right direction when you lose your way. I can't recount all of the many times Palmer saved us from ourselves, but it's safe to say that without him there, we wouldn't still be here, thirty-three years later.