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  WALLACE: We’ll see. I’m Mike Wallace.

  REASONER: 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.

  WALLACE: 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:

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

  NIXON: 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.

  WALLACE: 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?

  NIXON: 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.

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

  REASONER: 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 1970s, it was replaced by an Aristo, which remains the template for the current stopwatch.

  Through the fall of 1968, Wallace and Reasoner traveled around the world in pursuit of stories no one else was doing, or wanted to do. They were trying to figure out how to navigate this brave new world with only one rule to guide them: Make Hewitt happy.

  The stories from the early part of that first season rarely rank among those described as classic 60 Minutes pieces. Hewitt still couldn’t settle on a format for the show or the kinds of stories he wanted. The policy over how to deal with breaking news seemed to shift from week to week. After no news in the first two episodes, for example, the third episode included commentary on that week’s wedding between Jacqueline Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis. The “humorous” interludes of the two silhouettes continued as an interstitial device, even though they were rarely amusing.

  The meat of the broadcast continued to come from Wallace. This heated Ping-Pong match between Wallace and third-party presidential candidate George Wallace proved the high point of episode 3:

  GEORGE WALLACE: Let’s get off of race. I’m not a racist. If everybody’s a racist who’s been called one, you’re one. How do you explain your racism away? The Kerner Commission said tha
t you’re one and that’s a presidential report.

  MIKE WALLACE: Well, not me, you’re not speaking—

  GEORGE WALLACE: It said all the American people.

  MIKE WALLACE: Oh, I see what you mean.

  GEORGE WALLACE: You’re an American.

  MIKE WALLACE: Yes.

  GEORGE WALLACE: Well, that got you.

  MIKE WALLACE: Touché.

  GEORGE WALLACE: Touché.

  The fourth episode included a wrap-up of that week’s election, which put Richard Nixon into the White House, and a profile of football star Joe Namath. In the shows to follow, it was clear 60 Minutes hadn’t yet found an identity. Interviews with politicians alternated with such softballs as a Reasoner profile of New York Times food critic Craig Claiborne.

  Perhaps the most successful single feature was Reasoner’s reading of viewers’ letters to the show; it provided a nice episode ender and gave the two men a chance to relax in front of the camera, while gradually building a bond with each other and the audience. Based on the mail read on episode 4, it was working:

  REASONER: A fan at the University of Tennessee wrote: “60 Minutes is wonderful. Does this mean that it will be dropped in a few weeks?” And lastly, this from a student at Catholic University: “Tell Mike Wallace if he continues to imitate David Brinkley he ought to go to NBC. I understand they have a vacancy.” 60 Minutes returns two weeks from tonight. Good night, Mike.

  WALLACE: Good night, Chet.

  On Christmas Eve, 1968, Hewitt went for timing over substance. It included the first essay by Andy Rooney—“What Christ Looked Like,” read by Reasoner—and was followed by the talking silhouettes—now known as Ipso and Facto, but still not very funny. The episode also included two contemporary icons: a Wallace visit to Martin Luther King Jr.’s family and Reasoner’s interview with the widow of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Perhaps the stories sacrificed weight for emotion, but in Hewitt’s view, anything that seemed like it would connect the viewer to the broadcast was a good thing—even if the numbers rarely reflected an audience upsurge. Hewitt continued to trust his impulses as he always had, but in the absence of overt viewer interest it wasn’t easy to figure out what worked and what didn’t.

  Part of what held 60 Minutes back was the continuing technology constraints of television, which in 1968 remained relatively primitive. Videotape was still not in wide use, and Hewitt preferred the look of film, anyway—and there was no way for him to get film produced, processed, and ready for air without at least 24 hours’ lead time. This meant that it was almost impossible for 60 Minutes to cover breaking news stories, and worse, that the show might never have the feel of immediacy fantasized in its planning stages. Hewitt had little passion for “evergreens,” those stories capable of sitting around for months with no news peg to justify their existence. He wanted stories hot off the press, Hildy style.

  As fall turned to winter, 60 Minutes began to find a hint of its own voice and a way to incorporate ongoing events into the show’s weekly format. On the episode that aired on January 21, 1969 (only the show’s ninth), Reasoner and Wallace illustrated the battle between Israel and Lebanon by telling the story from both sides in one week, with pieces from each correspondent. It may not have redefined TV news, but it was the kind of presentation that might eventually set 60 Minutes apart from other news shows: the nightly newscasts rarely had room for conceptual thinking like that.

  And from the beginning, the pieces had another distinguishing feature that reflected Hewitt’s cinematic style: they showcased the correspondent as star. Reasoner and Wallace turned up front and center in early stories, often incorporating their own movements and reporting into the narrative. No one watching 60 Minutes, even in the first season, would have had a moment’s doubt about who was doing the reporting behind these pieces—it was Reasoner and Wallace, right? The viewers at home didn’t have to trouble themselves with the disillusioning truth—which was that behind-the-scenes producers did the vast majority of the reporting, while the correspondents swooped in at the last minute to film the on-air interviews. This was a format made to order for a former actor like Wallace or a correspondent like Reasoner, who preferred to leave the heavy lifting to others.

  This also left considerable room for humor, such as Wallace’s introduction to a Reasoner piece about the Jack Daniel’s distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee, in which he made strong allusions to his costar’s affection for liquor:

  WALLACE: I think you can understand that as journalists who cover any and everything, there are certain stories that appeal to us more than others. Harry Reasoner has been working on a story for some time now. I don’t believe that in all the years I’ve known Harry, I have ever seen him devote himself to a story more completely and with more apparent pleasure. Herewith that report.

  On February 4, 1969, Reasoner weighed in with “Cottage For Sale,” a typically laconic ramble that showed a glimpse of what the show could deliver, while defining the incalculable value of an on-site correspondent to pose pertinent and provocative questions. Essentially an interview with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the piece included this memorable interchange with the one-time monarch, who was now selling his French cottage years after having so famously abdicated the throne.

  REASONER: How old were you, then, when you became king?

  THE DUKE OF WINDSOR: Forty-two.

  REASONER: And you were king for—

  WINDSOR: Ten months.

  REASONER: Is that long enough to be king?

  WINDSOR: No.

  Two weeks later, though, 60 Minutes was back to its mix of the profound and the predictable, including a report about heavy snowstorms in the Northeast; a timely interview by Mike Wallace of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the 23-year-old French student-rebel; and a piece by CBS sports reporter Heywood Hale Broun about the high cost of skiing, the kind of fluff one imagines being ordered up by some high-level CBS executive who’d recently been to Aspen and found himself horrified at the bill. The inclusion of Broun also showed a lack of fidelity to the show’s basic concept of using only its full-time stars; while Broun had an on-screen persona perfected by years on the evening news, his presence on 60 Minutes did nothing to enhance the show’s intended point of view.

  By the spring, as the show settled into a biweekly rhythm, its stories began to feel more in line with Hewitt’s grand idea. The April 1, 1969, broadcast included stories about infants born addicted to heroin, Texas billionaire H. L. Hunt, and fatherless German war babies. Wallace, in particular, was hitting his stride, with his interviews demonstrating a refreshingly pointed style. His Hunt interview elicited responses unlike any heard elsewhere on prime-time television.

  WALLACE: Give us a horseback guess as to how much H. L. Hunt is worth.

  HUNT: Well, it would be so—so misleading no one would believe it, so let’s don’t.

  WALLACE: What do you mean—why misleading?

  HUNT: Well, you see, they talk about that I have an income of a million dollars a week.

  WALLACE: Yes.

  HUNT: And that is a lot of percent erroneous.

  WALLACE: Is it erroneous? It’s bigger or smaller than that?

  HUNT: As far as I know, I would starve to death with an income of a million dollars a week.

  Hewitt sometimes ran out of original material in those early episodes. Two weeks later, 60 Minutes included another short film by Saul Bass, alongside a freelance interview done for British television with Teddy Roosevelt’s oldest daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, now 85 years old. A livelier, homemade May 13, 1969, report focused on young American draft resisters who moved to Canada. During the final episode of the first season of 60 Minutes on June 24, 1969, a look at the slow, steady sinking of Venice into the sea was sensationally (though perhaps with some prescience) called “The Death of Venice.”

  Hewitt, as always, wanted headlines. From his earliest days in television Hewitt knew and respected the capacity of print to promote the cause. For all of television’s supposed powe
r, its impact couldn’t be quantified by the size of its audience. He wanted to see the impact of his stories on the front page of the newspaper, with copious coverage of his show and its ambitious agenda. He craved reviews and praise but would just as soon settle for controversy and outrage—either produced headlines. It frustrated Hewitt that, for its first year, the show generated hardly any press at all.

  But the mere existence of 60 Minutes on the CBS schedule in the fall of 1969 for a second season somehow seemed to make the show more newsworthy—and perhaps its survival was itself amazing, considering how few people watched it. The show ranked 83rd out of 103 prime-time shows that season. But the network still had nothing more noteworthy to put in the Tuesday 10:00 P.M. slot, and this season ABC had developed a new medical drama with Robert Young that looked like it might work, a little something called Marcus Welby, M.D.

  Repeating his first-season pattern, Hewitt launched the second year of 60 Minutes with a yawn-inducing episode that tried too hard to attract attention—which in itself showed Hewitt’s apparent bias toward Wallace, despite Reasoner’s seniority.

  The show opened with a Wallace investigation into a battle over valuable Alaskan land, which ended with Wallace reading a stanza from a Carl Sandburg poem. A piece followed about Moscow at night; then came another Wallace report about a soldier confined to a sweatshop at Camp Pendleton (based on a story previously published in The Nation), and, finally, a Reasoner story on racial discrimination by labor unions. But this time the show played better with the newspaper boys. “A varied TV magazine, as it were,” the New York Times raved, “with almost limitless potentialities in electronic journalism.”