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  Meanwhile, Hewitt kept flooding his bosses with potential 60 Minutes story ideas. At one point, he even suggested a segment called “Good Idea!” based on having seen travelers at the Copenhagen airport using scooters to get around. “I thought, ‘What a good idea!’” Hewitt wrote. “And then I thought that all we’d have to do is film thirty seconds or so of people riding the scooters and label it this week’s GOOD IDEA!” Okay, so it wasn’t a good idea—but if you didn’t like it, he had several thousand more.

  Hewitt got the green light to make a rough pilot with Reasoner in early 1968, made up of edited portions of hour-long CBS documentaries, some never-used footage, and stale chunks of an old Charles Kuralt profile of Henry Ford. Hewitt showed it to everyone he could buttonhole in the hallway and drag into an editing room.

  When the lights came up after Hewitt finally showed the pilot to management, there was modest enthusiasm. “Pretty damn good,” Bill Leonard allowed. He looked over at Bob Chandler, a vice president working under Bill Leonard, who sat in on the screening.

  “Did you ever think about two guys?” Chandler said.

  “Yeah, like who?” Hewitt demanded.

  “Mike Wallace,” Chandler replied.

  At the time of Chandler’s suggestion, Mike Wallace wasn’t particularly hot; in fact, the 49-year-old reporter was far less successful than Reasoner, having been pushed aside by a management team that found him too abrasive to be a major player in the TV news business. He was a general-assignment reporter for the CBS Evening News, and as he covered the early stages of what looked like a long-shot Nixon presidential campaign, no one considered him as the Next Big Anything. Like Hewitt, Mike Wallace was desperate for a way back to the top.

  Hewitt immediately saw Chandler’s point: 60 Minutes might benefit from two hosts balancing off each other, a black hat–white hat arrangement that perfectly suited their sensibilities.

  One weekend that spring, Hewitt visited Wallace at his apartment to pitch the possibility of joining 60 Minutes. Wallace, then covering the early days of the Nixon presidential campaign, figured there was no harm in listening, even though he knew Hewitt had spent much of the last four years in purgatory and suspected CBS would never truly entrust an hour of its prime-time schedule to him. Besides, he didn’t like the show’s name: 60 Minutes sounded too pedestrian, Wallace thought. But Hewitt could not be deterred.

  “This is going to be a radical departure in both form and content,” he told Wallace, as recounted in Wallace’s memoir, Close Encounters. “Our documentaries are so damn stuffy. . . . Most subjects don’t deserve the full hour treatment we give them.” Hewitt barely seemed to be stopping for breath.

  “You know as well as I do,” he went on, “that television practically ignores what the newsmagazines call the back of the book—the arts and sciences and all that stuff. We’ll be going into those subjects, and there will be features and profiles of personalities from all walks of life. The idea is to strike a balance between those pieces and the more serious, conventional stories we’ll be doing. And Mike, listen to this: You’ll have a chance to do your long interviews again. How about that?”

  Wallace still wasn’t convinced, but he was willing to let Hewitt shoot a second pilot with Reasoner and him. They slapped it together quickly—this time using old footage from a documentary about Bobby Kennedy, showing the New York senator on a ski trip with his family. Wallace didn’t think very much of it; he later described it as a “banal pastiche of leftovers and outtakes from pieces that had already been on the air”—at least what he saw of it. He didn’t even bother to watch the whole thing.

  Wallace’s path to the crossroads of 60 Minutes couldn’t have differed more from Hewitt’s, yet somehow, he was just as anxiously in need of redemption. And so he figured, what the hell. He dropped off the Nixon campaign trail in August 1968 and went to work on Don Hewitt’s new show.

  Wallace and Hewitt both grew up in immigrant Jewish families, but that’s where the similarity ends. While Hewitt, the kid from New Rochelle with the New York accent, scraped his way into journalism through the service entrance, the smooth-talking Wallace sauntered in through the front door in middle age, his notable gifts as an interviewer and television performer already well established.

  Young Mike had shown an early interest in theater and spent summers at Interlochen, the fabled music and theater camp in upstate Michigan. By the time he started college at the University of Michigan in 1936, he’d suffered the ravages of teenage acne that he has referred to as disfiguring, though it never seemed to detract from people’s desire to look at him. Wallace emerged from college with a degree in broadcasting and got himself a radio job in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which led to a job in Detroit, then one in Chicago. By then he’d married college sweetheart Norma Kaplan and fathered two sons, Peter and Chris.

  In 1946, radio station WGN hired Wallace to host a celebrity-interview show called Famous Names, sponsored by Walgreens. That’s where he chatted one morning with an actress named Buff Cobb, who had come to town to appear in Noel Coward’s Private Lives. Wallace’s marriage to Norma Kaplan skidded to a halt as he began a relationship with Cobb that resulted not only in marriage number two but also a professional partnership on a radio show dreamed up by Wallace called The Chez Show, broadcast from a Chicago nightclub.

  In 1951, Wallace and Cobb packed up their lives and moved to New York and an afternoon television talk show on CBS called Mike and Buff. Built around the notion of the natural bickering between husband and wife, the show dwelled on the specific issues that faced a young married couple (Wallace was 33 when the show first aired). And it worked, at least for a while, allowing Wallace to adjust to a new medium, a new home, and the high-powered lifestyle that came with a network television show.

  But after three years CBS pulled the plug on Mike and Buff. At the same time it became clear that the on-air bickering was a bit too real; Wallace and Cobb ended their marriage soon after the show was canceled.

  That left Wallace at loose ends in the summer of 1954, until he auditioned for a Broadway show, got the gig, and embarked on yet another new career. He played the part of an art dealer in Reclining Figure, a comedy by Harry Kurnitz about an art collector who buys a forgery. In the New York Times, Brooks Atkinson noted that “Wallace does well with the part of a dealer who comes as close as possible to being on the level.” Not exactly a career-launching notice, but it led Wallace into a series of TV commercials. One in particular would come back to haunt him 40 years later as a crusading correspondent for 60 Minutes—hawking cigarettes for Philip Morris. He would later investigate the tobacco industry as part of a controversial segment about the addictive qualities of nicotine. “Where can you find a man’s kind of mildness except in today’s Philip Morris?” the suave Wallace asked, puffing smoothly on a cigarette. That became a trademark look for him, much as it had for the biggest star of network news at that moment, Edward R. Murrow.

  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-1950s, 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.

  WALLACE: I think Dick Gregory has said that today’s cop is yesterday’s nigger. Do you understand that?

  CLARK: 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 presente
d by those two silhouetted figures—written by Andy Rooney, and given voice by him and the show’s senior producer, Palmer Williams.

  FIRST SILHOUETTE: I know how the cops feel.

  SECOND SILHOUETTE: Not being a cop, you can’t possibly know how they feel.

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

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

  FIRST: Thank you.

  SECOND: 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.

  WALLACE: 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:

  REASONER: 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. . . .