Playboy Interview: "60 Minutes"

On Tuesday, September 24, 1968, 16 television seasons ago, CBS broadcast yet another documentary type of program. Of that first show, the reviewer for Daily Variety later wrote: "If it had been a newspaper, it would not have sold many copies. The stories were dated and the magazine format, lifted from print, pretentious. There were too many producers with too little imagination." The program was "60 Minutes," and before it was moved to a Sunday-evening time slot, it threatened to become just another well-intentioned CBS News program. Instead, it became a national institution.

As comfortable as a pair of old tasseled loafers, the insistent tick, tick, tick of its stop watch each week signals to an average 35,000,000 viewers that their guys--and now their gal--are on to something: Some wretched larceny will be exposed; some Government bumbling will be laid bare; some petty dictator will squirm.

From its uninspired beginning in 1968 through the spare Nielsen winters of the Seventies, the show endured--just barely. As late as 1975, it finished 52nd out of 65 in the ratings. But then it began to climb rapidly, helped by the decision in 1976 to "bump the network" (meaning that CBS' entire schedule would be pushed back in the event of a football runover); and by 1980, it found itself in the most improbable situation any newsdominated TV program had ever stumbled into: It was number one.

In the years since, swapping the top spot from week to week with the likes of "Dallas" and "Dynasty," "60 Minutes" has been firmly ensconced at the top, making headlines many Monday mornings with its stories and reportedly netting the network more than $60,000,000 a year--by far the most profitable continuous CBS broadcast ever.

Most observers would agree that it is the show's personality that is responsible for its continuing impact on American life. Not only has its format been widely imitated but other programs have sought--largely unsuccessfully--to produce the kind of chemistry evident in its on-air correspondents. That chemistry is not the hoked-up chatter that passes for chemistry at happy-talk local news stations. For, as strong as its reporting has been, as fortuitous as its time slot is, "60 Minutes" has had the advantage from the start of strong, vivid host/narrators who have become as familiar to American viewers as members of their family.

There was Harry Reasoner, the wry, acerbic uncle who delivered the goods journalistically but never appeared to take them--or himself--too seriously. There was Mike Wallace, the brilliant, sometimes nasty older brother whose relentless pursuit of the guilty (and the timid) became set pieces in the show. When Reasoner left, Morley Safer came aboard, and his combination of light, whimsically written pieces and often hardhitting dispatches made him a trusted younger brother. Then, for a spell, there was earnest, good ol' boy Dan Rather, who could give it to you with a straight drawl or dress up like an Afghani if it meant getting the story. Then came Ed Bradley, whose soft-spoken and often intensely personal reports made him the first black reporter to become a comfortable part of America's extended TV family. And, finally, Diane Sawyer, the most recent addition, the undeniably glamorous sister who went off to make good in a less traditional way than the boys did, then joined the family in the nation's living rooms.

In between its revealing interviews with the likes of the shah of Iran and the Ayatollah Khomeini and its exposés of wrongdoing in corporate board rooms and in Government bureaucracies, "60 Minutes" spun electronic journalism off in dozens of new directions--not all of them positive. Ambush journalism--the practice of catching someone unawares in the unpitying glare of the TV lights--became an "in" thing for local reporters trying to make names for themselves. Criticisms of "60 Minutes"' editing techniques, about what got left out and what was broadcast, began to arise. There were also questions asked about oversimplification, as very complex issues were, reduced to 12 or 14 minutes a segment.

There have been many other questions as well--about checkbook journalism, about celebrity journalism--enough, in fact, that we thought it time to attempt an unusual journalistic challenge: that of interviewing the correspondents and the creator of the show as a group, not merely as journalists pursuing private careers. It also meant including as first among equals Don Hewitt, the originator and boss of "60 Minutes," a man less well known to the public but celebrated, respected and, some would say, just a bit notorious among his peers in the profession.

For the task we chose free-lance journalistMorgan Strong,whose recent "Playboy Interview" with Lebanese war lord Walid Jumblatt (July 1984) gave him what we felt was the necessary stamina to track down five globetrotting journalists and a hyperenergetic producer. His six-year stint as an infantryman in the Marines didn't hurt, either.

It took him five months to complete the "Interview." Because of their schedules, the correspondents were almost never together. Thus, most of the interviews took place one on one, (though sometimes one correspondent would drop in on another's interview session) and were later edited by topic. The sessions took place just out of earshot of dozens of producers and researchers hard at work tracking down new stories and preparing background reports and questions for use by the correspondents. For the record, the "Playboy Interview" was conducted by one reporter, who prepared all his own questions and used a single tape recorder. Strong's report:

"Grilling Mike Wallace was a breeze. The assignment began with an interview with him at his home in Martha's Vineyard. Wallace, who had put off Playboy's requests before, was supposedly reluctant when it came to the other end of a microphone, and given his reputation as the toughest journalistic gunslinger in town, I expected trouble. But he couldn't have been more cooperative. Perhaps it was the setting: His vacation home, with a manicured lawn sloping down to a picturesque, yacht filled bay, is a tough place to be surly. His autobiography, 'Close Encounters,' had just come out to favorable reviews, and he had reupped with CBS for a reported $1,000,000 a year. The weather was nice, too.

"Next on our hit list was Don Hewitt, the energetic founder and producer of the show. My conversations with him (and subsequent ones with the other correspondents) took place on the ninth floor of the skyscraper across the street from the sprawling CBS Broadcast Center on West 57th Street in New York City. A vast warren of cubbyholes and spacious offices occupying nearly the entire floor, the nerve center for '60 Minutes' roughly corresponds to the hierarchy of the show itself: bright, airy offices with views of New York Harbor for Hewitt and the star correspondents; but for the producers, those often nameless people whom many credit with the show's imagination and solidity, a series of spare, cramped offices. That, as they say everywhere else, is showbiz.

"Speaking of nerve centers, the impression one gets of Hewitt, forever interrupting himself or jumping up to resolve a crisis, is of a combination of Edward R. Murrow and Mel Brooks--perhaps without the latter's level of high anxiety. With his tweedy look, he doesn't even dress like the CBS powerhouse he obviously is. I had been told that he had the attention span of a gnat, and though that was largely true, he obviously enjoyed this chance to alight from time to time and talk about his work at some length. In fact, when we first sat down to talk, we were chatting about similarities between the kinds of interviews Playboy does and the exhaustive profiles '60 Minutes' does, and Hewitt remarked, 'Yeah, I kind of wondered when you guys would get around to doing us.'

"Beyond Hewitt's office are the ones belonging to Wallace, Safer, Bradley and Reasoner. Sawyer's office, being prepared for her when I was there, has taken the space formerly allotted to Captain Kangaroo. That's showbiz, too.

"Although similar to the others in space and layout, Bradley's office is the most interesting--the sound of soft jazz is piped in continuously, and plants hang everywhere in an easy and cluttered atmosphere. Reasoner's office is filled to the ceiling with books and reminded me of a crusty judge's chambers. Safer's wall is adorned with the mangled propeller of an airplane that he cracked up once while attempting a take-off. Since Safer is not a pilot, he was unable to offer me any sort of rational explanation.

"Here's what I liked best: Although there were all sorts of electronic editing gadgets and screens scrolling text throughout the offices on the ninth floor, I noticed that by the desks of Hewitt and the three senior correspondents of'60 Minutes' were placed clunky old manual typewriters. It was comforting."

[Q] Playboy: Mike, as we understand it, when 60 Minutes was first being put together, Harry Reasoner was chosen as the sole anchor. Then came the idea of a second anchor. Do you think they chose you as Harry's opposite?

[A] Wallace: As Harry said, "humorless, unpleasant, uncivilized"--a complete contrast to this gentle and cultivated soul Reasoner. Yes, they certainly found their man in me.

[Q] Playboy: And now there is talk about the latest correspondent, Diane Sawyer, conceivably replacing the first, Reasoner----

[A] Wallace: Those stories about Reasoner's leaving the broadcast are simply not true. Harry just came through the best year he's had since he came to 60 Minutes. How that story got any circulation I have no idea. It's a disservice to Diane and to Harry and to 60 Minutes generally. I'm getting a little older and don't travel the way I used to.

[Q] Playboy: What can we conclude from that?

[A] Wallace: What will happen, and has been happening, is that I will begin to back off. That's one of the reasons Sawyer is aboard.

[Q] Playboy: Sounds like a retirement announcement to us. But before we talk more about retirement, Harry, do you remember it the way Mike does--that he was added to balance your more sophisticated image?

[A] Reasoner: It was news to me when Mike said in his book [Close Encounters] that the show was originally designed for me and then they brought him in. It was not clear to me at all at the time, and it was not clear to me that we were a good combination. Finally, it was also unclear what 60 Minutes was going to become. I remember that I went on substituting for Cronkite about 20 percent of the time and doing the Sunday-night news and specials and a lot of things. 60 Minutes was something that was on every Tuesday, sometimes.

[Q] Playboy: There was supposedly tension between you and Mike at first.

[A] Reasoner:Au contraire. I think Mike would agree--we became lovers almost immediately. [Laughter] Of course, there was immediately a substantial difference in style. Mike and I have argued this publicly, and it goes back to the old question "How do you get flies--with honey or with vinegar?" Mike gets a lot of flies with vinegar and I get just as many with honey. It's not a difference in intent or a difference in the goals of reporting; it's a difference in how you do it.

[Q] Playboy: Morley, you were the third one hired, and you've been quoted as saying, "Let's face it: We're not the four best reporters in the world; what we have going for us is [executive producer] Don Hewitt."

[A] Safer: Hewitt said this? [Laughter] Oh! I said this? [Laughter] Yeah, I think so. I think that's true. His talents are unique, to the extent that when you've got Don's attention, nothing else gets his attention. He just focuses. It may be difficult to get his attention sometimes. And he's terrifically loyal as a boss. You feel that you're not standing there ass-naked. And he believes in the broadcast; that's important. The show is also lucrative for all of us [laughs]. He would do anything to save is.

[Q] Playboy: Ed, we're trying to pin down the beginnings of 60 Minutes and determine who gets the credit or the blame. As the fourth of the present reporters hired, do you agree that Hewitt is 60 Minutes' main strength?

[A] Bradley: We're four different personalities--five now. We have different ways of approaching a story, different ideas; and, obviously, some of us do one thing better than the others. No one does better than Mike does at his type of story, and the same is true of Morley and Harry. But Hewitt is something else. You can go in to Hewitt with a piece that's in trouble, where there are elements of a good story but it's just not working, and he can take the thing and just say, "Ah, wait a minute, no, you don't want to start there; start with this and end with this." He knows what will work. When he is on, I have never seen anyone as good as he is. When he's off, he's terrible. And he has off days. But he has a remarkable amount of energy and good cheer. He kind of sets the tone around here, and that's his gift.

[Q] Playboy: Diane, we just left Mike Wallace, and he suggests that contrary to the rumors about your replacing Harry Rea-soner, it's Mike you'll be replacing in the long run. He has said he's going to "begin to back off."

[A] Sawyer: It was never true that I was going to replace Harry. But don't tell me that Mike is going to leave! I don't even want to hear that! I don't want to think about that! He can't leave! I'm going to have my teeth in his ankles [laughs] to prevent him from going out the door.

[Q] Playboy: Do you agree with Morley's assessment that Don Hewitt is 60 Minutes' not-so-secret weapon?

[A] Sawyer: Yes. The guiding, self-renewing, revitalizing genius.

[Q] Playboy: Now that you are working for Hewitt, what are your impressions of him?

[A] Sawyer: I thought I had been in the business a long time and I thought I had worked with a lot of people, and you come in sometimes thinking you're sort of smart. You know how to do a piece, and you get in that first screening with Hewitt, and he's trying to be very diplomatic. He says, "You know, I think we could make this a little better," and the next thing you know [laughs], the whole thing has been rearranged. And he's right, and you realize that he's operating on a level above any on which you've seen people operate.

[Q] Playboy: Don, among other nice things being said about you is that you invented the wheel in this television-news business; you are, or were, the Wunderkind of television. Let's talk about that for a bit.

[A] Hewitt: Isn't that awful? I guess at 62 I ought to stop being the Wunderkind of television, don't you think?

[Q] Playboy: That's what you were called in the late Forties.

[A] Hewitt: That's right. You know why? Because there wasn't much talent around. The real talent when I came here in 1948 was in the entertainment division. Sidney Lumet, Bobby Mulligan, Franklin Schaffner--they were directors here then. They all left and went to Hollywood. Schaffner was the last to go. We were codi-rectors on the Evening News, but he left for Hollywood and made Patton, Nicholas and Alexandra and Papillon.

[Q] Playboy: But you stayed and made a career in television news; some people credit you with bringing it out of the Stone Age.

[A] Hewitt: Like most things, that's exaggerated. Let me tell you a little, about myself to kind of explain it. When I was a kid, I went to the movies every Saturday, and for all of us kids, the people on the screen were our heroes. There were Tarzan and Tom Mix, and none of the kids knew which screen hero they wanted to be most. That was never my problem. When I walked out of the moviehouse, I knew I wanted to be either Julian Marsh, the director in 42nd Street, or Hildy Johnson, the reporter in The Front Page. And one day, along came television and, by God, I could be both of them!

[Q] Playboy: You were a journalist during World War Two, weren't you?

[A] Hewitt: I was a civilian war correspondent. I was all of 20 years old. I had the dubious distinction of being the youngest accredited war correspondent in the U. S. at that time--whatever that means.

[Q] Playboy: After the war, you were an editor for Acme News pictures. From there, you were hired by CBS and became a director. You got into the business of political coverage pretty early.

[A] Hewitt: Yeah, Douglas Edwards and I worked together at the 1948 Democratic Convention. I was an associate director. Ed Chester, then the head of the news division at CBS, tapped me to become the director and eventually the producer of CBS Evening News. The show was going to be on the air five nights a week for 15 minutes. In those days, people said you couldn't do the show five nights a week, because it was too complicated.

[Q] Playboy: You became the producer, a term you coined, which in effect meant that you were responsible for both the technical and the editorial direction of the show. It was unique at the time.

[A] Hewitt: Yeah, but it's a misnomer and never should have happened. Nobody should be called a producer in television news. We're all reporters. They call me an executive producer, but that's a dumb thing to call anybody. David Merrick is a producer. Darryl Zanuck was a producer. That's not what we are. But television decided to borrow the names and titles used in Hollywood and on Broadway, and somehow those titles became attached to the guys in the news division.

[Q] Playboy: Whatever the title, the job involved being in charge of both the technical and the editorial sides. Why both?

[A] Hewitt: I discovered that the technical had to complement the editorial, just as a good newspaper or a good magazine decides that a certain layout, a certain type face or the placement of pictures enhances the story. I realized that working with broadcasters' pauses and inflections, the way they look and sound, is to broadcasting what putting in commas and semicolons is to print editing. That's how you punctuate. We punctuate with inflections, with voice delivery, with visual elements. I grew up as a big fan of Life magazine. In fact, that's what 60 Minutes is--Life magazine on TV.

[Q] Playboy: Do you accept the credit--or the blame--for setting the style for TV news broadcasts, as reputed?

[A] Hewitt: I think that probably happened, because I was the only guy around who had the wit to realize that you had to put yourself in the place of a television viewer. Always--every piece I've ever looked at or look at today--I say to myself, "If I were a guy sitting at home, would I like this?" In the early days, I became obsessive about it. On the Doug Edwards broadcast, I would take brown paper and cut out figures and tape them to the screen and stalk around the room, saying, "If a guy is sitting 20 feet away, are those figures big enough?"

[Q] Playboy: Is it true you tried to get Douglas Edwards to learn Braille?

[A] Hewitt: Absolutely. I never understood why people laughed at that idea. Before they had TelePrompTers, guys had to look down at their scripts. It was a great idea!

[Q] Playboy: You also created the revolutionary two-projector shot, didn't you?

[A] Hewitt: Yeah, it was a little technical razzle-dazzle. Up to that point, there was a single sound system, so you couldn't break away, and editing was tough. Just one of those ideas. Someone else would have thought of it six months later.

[Q] Playboy: And didn't you invent the term anchor man?

"I know the trouble you can get yourself into doing an interview. There are no indiscreet questions, just indiscreet answers."

[A] Hewitt: I'm not sure if it was CBS chief Sig Mickelson or myself, but it came out of a conversation we had about our correspondents at the '52 Convention and how Cronkite would be the "anchor leg"--the best guy on a relay team being the anchor. It has nothing to do with boats, as people assume. But it's such a silly thing to call anybody--an anchor man! I love it when a local anchor man goes out on a story--you know what they call him? A "floating anchor." Isn't that terrific? I mean, it's such a fucking nutty business!

[Q] Playboy: Your early style was considered a little abrasive. You modeled yourself after your Front Page hero, scrambling after the scoop and causing a lot of distress at CBS.

[A] Hewitt: Sure, no doubt about it. I was a little abrasive when I came here. I guess I did rub a lot of people the wrong way. I look back at some of the things I did that I would never do again. I was young and stupid. I brought a different style to CBS News. [Laughs] I think people looked at me, to use Mike Wallace's favorite phrase, like a hair in their soup. I think that today if somebody came around and did under my aegis some of the things that I did, I'd throw him out the door.

[Q] Playboy: Your behavior in those days has been described as manic. You did some pretty bizarre things.

[A] Hewitt: Yeah, like throwing pencils through the control-room window. It started out a genuine frenzy and after a while, it became an act. When Mickelson was the head of CBS News, he'd call me around four o'clock and say he had visitors coming up to watch me direct Edwards with the News, and ask me to put on a show for them. And I would spin like a top and whirl like a dervish. I had a lot of nervous energy. [Laughs] But you grow up.

[Q] Playboy: Mike Wallace had a similar reputation as a maverick when he arrived, didn't he?

[A] Hewitt: Mike and I were both looked at as interlopers: How did these guys get into the club? We're both more dignified now. But I'll tell you one thing: I'm 62; Mike is, what--66 or 67? Mike and I can beat any kid in the house on any story, anywhere, any time.

[Q] Playboy: There was a period during the Sixties when you fell out of grace with CBS and were, in effect, exiled. Was that when you got the idea for 60 Minutes?

[A] Hewitt: That's right. And there wasn't much excitement about it, either. Richard Salant [then president of CBS News] says today, frankly, he thought it was a terrible idea.

[Q] Playboy: The curious thing is that when you came up with the idea, you were out of favor, Reasoner was having trouble and Wallace, as you said, was something of an outsider. It seems as if they gave it to the guys they didn't know what to do with.

[A] Hewitt: Right. Harry and I were out of favor. But Mike; they just didn't know what the hell to make of Mike. . . .

[Q] Playboy: Mike, in your book, you wrote that on those rare occasions when you are interviewed, you can see a gleam in the reporter's eye. Why the gleam?

[A] Wallace: It's a gleam that means, "OK, now it's your turn, buster."

[Q] Playboy: Yet it was relatively difficult to pin you down for an Interview. Have you, of all people, been shy?

[A] Wallace: Well, one thing is that you don't want to betray--betray may be the wrong word--you don't want to let people know what your politics are, if, indeed, you have politics. [Smiles] I also know the trouble you can get yourself into doing an interview. It's said that there are no indiscreet questions, just indiscreet answers.

[Q] Playboy: You developed your reputation as a tough reporter on the old Night Beat show, didn't you?

[A] Wallace: Yes. I had never really thought seriously about journalism as a career, because I felt that I didn't have sufficient background. I'd never really worked for a newspaper. My main experience was as a rip-and-read announcer on NBC radio in the Forties. In the middle Fifties, I decided that maybe television interviews were the kind of thing I'd want to do. So we put together a news department at channel five in New York.

[Q] Playboy: The set of Night Beat was a bit theatrical and intimidating, wasn't it?

[A] Wallace: The dark studio with two or three cameras and the glaring spotlight and the cigarette smoke and the close-ups of people's faces--things like that?

[Q] Playboy: Yes, some of the same effects you later used on 60 Minutes. Your best interviews are perceived to be those in which the subject is obviously uncomfortable, where you're grilling him.

[A] Wallace: You mean when the interviewee begins to sweat and squirm and so forth? Yes, that probably follows my having established a chemistry of confidentiality and relaxing the interviewee to the point where he thinks he can really level with me and suddenly says, "Hey, wait a minute. What have I done? Now I'm in trouble. Now I'm going to have to answer candidly and honestly. Well, perhaps I'd better come clean."

[Q] Playboy: You mention in your book that your little group would gleefully search for ways to deflate the pompous and the fatuous among your subjects.

[A] Wallace: Indeed, we did.

[Q] Playboy: Then was the point of the program to embarrass the subject?

[A] Wallace: The essence was not so much to deflate as to get at the truth. Really. I mean, it wasn't deflation for deflation's sake.

[Q] Playboy: But there were occasions when you went beyond what was reasonable, weren't there?

[A] Wallace: As in the interview I did with Al Capp? I had no argument with Capp going in. It didn't occur to me that there was going to be much there beyond a kind of self-drawn profile of this very inventive and funny comic-strip artist.

[Q] Playboy: But you effectively destroyed the guy oncamera, and you later regretted it.

[A] Wallace: I regretted it eventually, because, in effect, I caught him without his psychiatrist. I got caught up in the process in a strange way. He was sweating and uncomfortable, and he almost became a butterfly on a pin. But he was doing it to himself. He would say something outrageous, then almost apologize with this giggle. And when I called it to his attention, he began to fall apart oncamera. I think a little of it would have sufficed. Instead, I kept at it. But that was fairly early in Night Beat, when we were perhaps full of ourselves and probably enjoyed the spectacle more than we should have.

[Q] Playboy: That was the point we were making. Isn't that the sort of thing that made your reputation as more of an inquisitor than an interviewer?

[A] Wallace: Mind you, I think it was perfectly legitimate. But no, it's not something I would do today.

[Q] Playboy: After Night Beat and a stint at ABC News, you moved to channel 13 in New York, where you did the first half-hour evening news show in the country.

[A] Wallace: Yeah, long before the networks did it. The first half-hour network news show began in 1963, I believe. Our show lasted until the money ran out. It was a first-rate undertaking.

[Q] Playboy: What did you do after it folded?

[A] Wallace: There were a couple of years in which I was casting about, knowing what I wanted to do but not finding it easy.

[Q] Playboy: You did commercials then, didn't you?

[A] Wallace: I did cigarette commercials. I even did some used-car commercials.

[Q] Playboy: And you'd been in a Broadway play earlier.

[A] Wallace: Yes. I had done nearly 100 performances in a comedy called Reclining Figure. I played an art dealer. Then I hosted a talk-and-variety show in New York, complete with second banana. One nice thing is that a young unknown named Barbra Streisand made maybe 30 appearances that year. Someone at the station economically erased all the tapes.

[Q] Playboy: What happened after that?

[A] Wallace: I anchored the political conventions for Westinghouse and did the election coverage. I made a trip around the world for them, a week here, a week there. Hong Kong, Saigon, Nairobi and so forth.

[Q] Playboy: But you felt you were still floundering?

[A] Wallace: Yes. It wasn't until 15 years in the business that I figured out what I wanted to be. And by that time, I was close to 40. And then came the unfortunate accident to my son. That's when I figured, Well, let's take a year off and try to figure out who the dickens you are and what you really want to do.

[Q] Playboy: Your son's accidental death in Greece must have been a terrible blow.

[A] Wallace: [Quietly] Peter . . . Peter was a poet and an athlete. And he was going to be a writer. And I . . . his death was, as any father would understand . . . there is no way adequately to explain what that kind of loss means.

[Q] Playboy: Did his death compel you to sort things out?

[A] Wallace: Somehow, it did. Somehow, it contributed to that. My wife, Lorraine, had wanted me all along to get back into journalism; she'd been nudging me in a very supportive way to do it. After months of unemployment, Dick Salant of CBS called and offered me a job anchoring a New York newscast. I did that but also was a reporter. After more than 20 years, I was covering a beat, something most reporters do in their early 20s.

[Q] Playboy: So you were paying your dues all over again?

[A] Wallace: Oh! That was the single most useful thing, because I really was on probation. I don't mean just with the hierarchy. I was on probation with my colleagues in the newsroom, and I was on probation with myself.

[Q] Playboy: Was there any resentment among your colleagues because of your checkered career?

[A] Wallace: Some. Cronkite, whom I had known, couldn't have been more cordial. Harry Reasoner, because we were going to replace his Calendar news-feature show, resented me a little.

[Q] Playboy: So when you two co-anchored 60 Minutes, was there still some ill feeling?

[A] Wallace: It was patched up. Actually, it was patched up with everybody at the 1964 Republican Convention out in San Francisco. I hadn't been assigned to the floor. I was out there simply for the morning news. CBS was having a tough time against the opposition for ratings. They asked me if I wanted to go onto the floor and I said of course I did. I think people were surprised that I could work on the floor with a certain understanding. That really was the watershed as far as CBS was concerned. Later, I covered civil rights, Vietnam, all of it.

[Q] Playboy: And your sins were forgiven?

[A] Wallace: Yes. Strangely, no matter what you've done in the past, it all helps you eventually. That surely has been true in my case. Some of the things I had done along the way, which could hardly be classified as reporting, nonetheless gave me an understanding of how to handle myself on the air.

[Q] Playboy: And when 60 Minutes came along, you had an ideal sort of background.

[A] Wallace: Perfect, because it's the front and the back of the book. Regardless of whether we're doing a Horowitz or a Carson, or a Sadat or a Nixon, there is this variety of experience--including that foolish detour to Broadway for 100 performances.

[Q] Playboy: Harry, let's talk about your career. You describe your background as either well rounded or drifting.

[A] Reasoner: I've never resolved that question in my mind, either.

[Q] Playboy: Your background is similar to Mike's in that respect.

[A] Reasoner: Mike was well experienced in broadcasting long before I was [smiles]. But, yes, I expect that it is.

[Q] Playboy: You started as a broadcaster at KEYD in Minneapolis, where the commentaries you did at the end of your broadcasts received a lot of notice. Then you went to CBS in New York as a reporter contact, or, in reality, a cameraman's assistant--and for a dramatic cut in pay.

[A] Reasoner: Yes, I think every time I come to CBS, I take a 50 percent cut in pay. I have a Scotsman's instinct about these things. [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: That's where you first ran into Don Hewitt.

[A] Reasoner: Yeah, he was producing the Evening News with Douglas Edwards. In those days, since there were no television correspondents, the people on the assignment desk really got a chance to go out on stories. That's how I got to know Hewitt.

[Q] Playboy: He was regarded as the golden boy of television in those days. Did you pick up a lot working with him?

[A] Reasoner: Yeah, and vice versa.

[Q] Playboy: When you were working for Hewitt, there was a story that after you had gotten an exclusive interview with Nikita Khrushchev by posing as a deputy sheriff, someone asked you if you hadn't been worried about being arrested by the Secret Service. And you said----

[A] Reasoner: "I'm more afraid of Don Hewitt than I am of the Secret Service." Absolutely. It's true today. I wasn't afraid, just impressed with him.

[Q] Playboy: You were the first television reporter to be named a CBS correspondent. Until that time, there had been only radio correspondents.

[A] Reasoner: I think so. I was the first guy who didn't come out of World War Two or the Korean War or radio.

[Q] Playboy: Although you did spend time later covering Vietnam, as did the other male correspondents on 60 Minutes

[A] Reasoner: The only difference with me was that I was in Vietnam first, as an employee of the U.S. Government 20 years before those guys were there. Not all that long and not all that expertly, but I was not surprised by what I found when I went back.

[Q] Playboy: What conclusions did you draw from the experience?

[A] Reasoner: I was in agreement with Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur that it was idiotic to get involved, whatever the principles, whether they were good or not.

[Q] Playboy: In any case, you began doing a CBS network radio show out of New York in the early Sixties.

[A] Reasoner: I did a radio news show, or two of them a day, and I had never done radio before. I was a child of television--however difficult it may be to regard me as a child.

[Q] Playboy: Your television career took off after columnist Jack Gould wrote a glowing report about your radio broadcasts--in particular, those end pieces.

[A] Reasoner: Well, he just said he thought they were all well written.

[Q] Playboy: Do you still enjoy writing? Do you write all your own 60 Minutes pieces?

[A] Reasoner: Certainly not all of them. For instance, I think Morley, who is justifiably proud of his writing, has a different feeling about it. He enjoys writing; I enjoy having written. But Morley's young and he's getting more experience. [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: You mean you don't enjoy the process?

[A] Reasoner: The actual process is very difficult. And you have to do it alone and you think a drink would help, so it won't, so you can't. It's a very lonely, difficult process. I like to contemplate writing, and I like having done it. It's the actual process that bothers me.

[Q] Playboy: You said at the beginning that when you finally ended up at 60 Minutes, nobody really gave it much of a chance.

[A] Reasoner: I don't think we foresaw what it was going to become. I was there a little more than two years before I left for ABC. We were about 54th or 55th out of 64 in the ratings, some dismal thing. When I came back from ABC, having invoked my Barbara Walters clause----

[Q] Playboy: Which was?

[A] Reasoner: There was an oral agreement when they hired Barbara as co-anchor at ABC and they wanted me to agree to it. I said I would if they would cut two years off my contract. That was my Barbara Walters escape clause. With no disrespect to her, I thought the whole thing was a mistake and wanted to leave. She was the least of my problems.

[Q] Playboy: Actually, you didn't do badly at ABC for a time. Didn't the ratings of your newscast go up?

[A] Reasoner: Yeah. One of the things I resent is the talk in recent years about how much Roone Arledge has done for ABC News. Producer Elmer Lower, Howard K. Smith and I did that for ABC News. We brought up the ratings to a respectable third place, almost second some of the time. But then things went wrong. Lower retired and Fred Pierce took over, and he had, I think, the badly conceived idea of hiring Barbara Walters to team up with me.

[Q] Playboy: You went back to CBS after negotiating a pay cut and rejoined 60 Minutes. Did you find it changed? Was there any tension when you suddenly reappeared?

[A] Reasoner: As I frequently point out to Mike, in my first full year back, we became number one [laughs]. There weren't many changes. Don had retained his enthusiasm, the atmosphere was the same. When I came back, I was the fourth correspondent and had missed completely the period when they added the third correspondent, Dan Rather. When I came back, I suppose there was a period . . . not when I didn't get along with Mike but when there was a question of whether or not I still had the legs, as a baseball manager would say.

[Q] Playboy: Assertions that you are lazy have followed you most of your professional life. Are they undeserved?

[A] Reasoner: That kind of assertion, I think, has haunted me a good deal during my professional life. Obviously, I deny it; but it's very hard to deal with, because if you deny it, you recognize some basis for it.

[Q] Playboy: You can't protest too loudly?

[A] Reasoner: All I know is, when I left CBS for ABC, they had to find four people to replace me. The only denial I make is that, yes, I don't carry briefcases home for show. I don't work on airplanes, I don't try to do everybody else's job. I just try to do my own.

[Q] Playboy: Morley, you began your television career at the Canadian Broadcasting Company.

[A] Safer: Well, I began at newspapers before that, at Reuters. I was a reporter on the street at 19. Then I became the London correspondent for CBC, and CBS hired me from there. They kept me in London and then, after four or five months, they sent me to Vietnam.

[Q] Playboy: Morley Safer's war, as it was called, because of your hard-hitting pieces.

[A] Safer: Yeah, well, Morley Safer's war is first of all not true, and secondly, if true, it's a dubious distinction.

[Q] Playboy: Your reporting was decidedly antiwar. You managed to infuriate President Johnson at one point.

[A] Safer: I had some problems with Johnson; I had some problems with the Pentagon; I had some problems with the American mission in Vietnam. [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: You stayed in Vietnam for three years and then went back to London for CBS. Hewitt spotted you in 1970, when he was looking for a replacement for Reasoner. What were you doing that caught his eye?

[A] Safer: I was in the middle of burying DeGaulle. I got a call while I was feeding my report on the general's funeral by satellite to New York. Reasoner had just left, or announced he was going to leave, to go to ABC, for which I will be forever grateful, and they offered me the job.

[Q] Playboy: You, perhaps more than the others, had a tough time of it when you joined the show, right?

[A] Safer: Well, I was the new kid, with a lot of pressure, because we were trying something new. We were utterly unheard of. I was utterly a stranger to working in a head office. I guess from my earliest days in newspapers, I was always away from the brass. My staff, when I was abroad, consisted of me. The brass was 12 or 13 hours away. They could never find you, so you could deal with them on your own terms. Suddenly, I was surrounded by guys who were telling me what to do and watching me do what I did. And I was being hovered over all the time by these damn people.

[Q] Playboy: You had doubts that 60 Minutes would survive; wasn't part of the deal that if it folded, you would get your job in London back?

[A] Safer: There was one condition: that when it folded, I would get my old job back. The record of serious broadcasts was and is terrible. So I made certain that my future was going to be all right. I would go back to where I was going to be happy. I had never lived in New York or in the United States before.

[Q] Playboy: As the new guy, did you feel you were in battle with Mike over turf?

[A] Safer: Yeah, and I had never worked in a situation like this before. There is intense competition around here.

[Q] Playboy: And?

[A] Safer: Mike and my friendship--it's no secret--has undergone quite serious strains over the years but always sort of comes together again, as they say. We're a bit older. He's much older. [Laughs] And those things we fought over don't seem like the end of the world anymore.

[Q] Playboy: But as an independent-minded reporter, you must think it's fitting, in retrospect, that your career led you toward 60 Minutes.

[A] Safer: I've never used the word career. I mean, I woke up one day and I was a reporter; I woke up another day and I was a foreign correspondent. I woke up another day, I was one of two guys on a "prestigious" broadcast. I never planned anything; I never applied for anything. I was really very lucky.

[Q] Playboy: Ed, was it happenstance for you, too?

[A] Bradley: I ended up in journalism quite by accident, yes. I was a teacher moonlighting as a jazz disc jockey at a local radio station in Philadelphia--on top of calling play by plays for basketball games and reading news. By 1967, I had reached a point where I decided that I couldn't continue pursuing two careers full time. I'm not a desk person and I can't spend a lot of time in one room, so I decided to go with broadcasting and answered an ad for CBS in New York. I bagged the job.

[Q] Playboy: You didn't stay long, however.

[A] Bradley: I stayed about my limit, three and a half years.

[Q] Playboy: Then you went to Paris on a vacation, and your experience there had quite an effect on your career.

[A] Bradley: I decided that I was born to live in Paris. I mean, there were just no ifs, ands or buts. I absolutely fell in love with the city. I met some people there who turned me on to Paris, and it was a wonderful experience.

[Q] Playboy: You were lucky: You got a job with CBS network radio there.

[A] Bradley: Well, the CBS network had offered me a job before, but it was a desk job and not very much money at that, so I turned them down flat. But when they offered it to me again in Paris, I said, "Look, you don't understand: I quit because I want to travel." They said, "Come work for us; you'll travel first-class." I thought of that years later in the Huong Giang hotel in Hue, Vietnam, watching the bugs crawl up the wall and listening to hand grenades going off outside. It wasn't exactly the first-class they had promised. Anyway, I said thanks but no thanks.

[Q] Playboy: What made you decide it was what you wanted?

[A] Bradley: I was broke. I was looking at the possibilities, and they were slim and none--and slim was on his way out of town. So I took a job as a CBS stringer. It gave me a reasonable income. I mean, there were weeks when I made nothing. I lived on the Paris peace talks.

[Q] Playboy: You mean the Paris negotiations between the U.S. and Vietnam to end the war?

[A] Bradley: Yeah. The Paris peace talks were held about once a week. If they held the talks, I made the rent money. I remember once when the talks were suspended for 13 weeks and I got a check for $12.50. But I managed to survive. I made enough to afford a motorcycle, put clothes on my back and vacation on the Riviera.

[Q] Playboy: You don't seem to have been career driven anywhere along the line. You were concentrating on having a good time.

[A] Bradley: No, I wasn't career driven. I didn't go to Paris for a career. I went to Paris for my life. Being in a strange place, with a strange language, it was kind of--it was like taking an acid bath. I could cut through things and kind of figure out how I had gotten to where I was. That was important. I had a very complicated childhood, as I guess a lot of people have had, and Paris helped me sort it all out.

[Q] Playboy: You left after two years and went to work for CBS television in New York.

[A] Bradley: Again, accidental. I came back and reached another crossroads, as I had with teaching. I realized I couldn't continue as a stringer in Paris anymore. My ego wouldn't let me. I decided I was either going all the way in or getting out.

[Q] Playboy: You went all the way, all right--to Vietnam for CBS.

[A] Bradley: I'll tell you about that: Bob Little, the foreign editor at CBS, said, after I was formally hired, "You know, you really came back at a bad time; we're in the middle of an election campaign"--it was '72--"and we really have nothing domestically for you." And I said, "Bob, I'll tell you what; that's fine with me, because I don't want to live here. I would rather live in"--I tried to think of the worst place in the world--"Vietnam!" He looked at me and said, "Are you volunteering?"

[Q] Playboy: Were they having a hard time getting correspondents to volunteer?

[A] Bradley: I don't know. But I was pretty naïve. I wanted to be a war correspondent, and I thought I had to get to Vietnam before the war was over. That was when Kissinger had said peace was at hand. So I rushed out, and in one week, I was in Vietnam.

[Q] Playboy: You were nearly killed in Vietnam or, rather, in Cambodia.

[A] Bradley: Yes. I was nearly blown up, but in the end, it was a superficial wound, the kind you can walk away from and talk about later. What was a more emotional experience for me was spending some time with the Viet Cong in the jungle. It was while peace negotiations inside Vietnam were still going on. The kind of determination and dedication I found among the Viet Cong was just mind-boggling.

[Q] Playboy: If there is one thing you four men share, it's the Vietnam experience. Morley became famous for his opposition to the war, Mike was a supporter until he covered it, and Harry was against it, too. Did spending that time with Viet Cong turn you around?

[A] Bradley: Well, I went there opposed to the war. I was in this country during the antiwar demonstrations. I covered them for CBS radio in New York. So that made it very difficult for me to cover the war objectively, because, in conscience, I was opposed to it.

[Q] Playboy: When you came back from Vietnam, you covered the Carter campaign in 1976 and then became a Washington correspondent.

[A] Bradley: Yeah, CBS insisted I come back and promised me there was no such thing as a number-one or number-two correspondent. But that didn't prove to be the case.

[Q] Playboy: That was similar to the position in which you'd found yourself in Paris--effectively second string, in other words.

[A] Bradley: We had a senior correspondent. That's Bob Schieffer. And that means that he is the one who does the pieces for the Evening News. If there were a second piece, I would get on. Hell, that's no fun. Plus, I got into the same old thing: It was an office job. You go to the same place every day and check in. Now, people were saying, "Isn't it great? Your office is in the White House." But listen, I'm down in the basement in this little nook, in the back of the White House press room. And if Jimmy Carter jumps, I have to be there to say how high. But it's no great fun, and it wasn't the kind of work I wanted to do. Yes, I did want out.

[Q] Playboy: There have been assertions that you weren't too easy to get along with during your Washington tour, that you were abrasive and egocentric. Was it because you saw it as a second-string job?

[A] Bradley: I think so. I think I'm easy to get along with. I don't think I'm abrasive or egocentric. I think I have a healthy ego, but my problem in Washington was that there were too many bullshit assignments.

[Q] Playboy: Safer points out that when he came to 60 Minutes from Paris, after Vietnam, he faced a similar problem.

"To watch Wallace climb over seats to get to Nancy and Ronald Reagan--I love live television!"

[A] Bradley: I had always worked overseas for CBS, and I was my own boss. When I went out, I was the producer. So then to come back and have to report to a desk and get a good night before you could go--it was all a big change for me. I don't think anyone understood that. People didn't understand that I had not come up through the system, that I had made my own way.

[Q] Playboy: It was during the 1976 campaign and conventions that you met a couple of other guys who had made their own way--Hewitt and Wallace.

[A] Bradley: That was the first time I was exposed to Hewitt and the frenetic energy he has. He was in charge of the correspondents. When you see him turned on--I mean, it's amazing. He's just a live wire. You kind of sit back and, you know, watch. And then to see Wallace at work!

[Q] Playboy: You were impressed?

[A] Bradley: I was in awe. I was what they call a relief correspondent. We had two teams, and I was on the second team on the floor. I found that whenever I knew Wallace was getting ready to go onto the floor, I'd try to stay close and watch him. It was just amazing to see someone who is so--I tease him about his age--someone of his years! [Laughs] I call Mike "Pops" today. But to watch Wallace climb over seats to get to Nancy and Ronald Reagan--I love live television!

[Q] Playboy: In those last couple of years before you joined 60 Minutes, you anchored the Sunday Night News, the first black correspondent to do so.

[A] Bradley: It's a shame that that was so noteworthy. But it's indicative of what you have to go through in this country.

[Q] Playboy: You mean, because you are black, there is always the lurking suspicion that despite the fact that you've paid your dues and have the credentials, your race has helped your career?

[A] Bradley: I don't know. I don't know why the notion is advanced, whether it's because whenever reporters ask about it, they advance the notion.

[Q] Playboy: Certainly, when you went to 60 Minutes, it was said that getting a black reporter on the program was a good thing; until then, it had been a white, male club.

[A] Bradley: Reporters always mention that. I've never heard it from anyone at CBS. If it's true, CBS got a twofer: They got a minority and someone who's good. I've never given it much thought. I look at it this way: This is one of the top jobs at CBS. It is the premier broadcast of the network in terms of ratings and draw. I don't think CBS would do anything they thought would mess it up.

[Q] Playboy: Diane Sawyer is now the newest kid on the block. As the previous one, do you think she has the credentials to join you?

[A] Bradley: Yeah, I think so. Probably less than my colleagues, but who can match the years that Mike and Morley and Harry have? But given the experience that she has had, I think she's done a good job at every step. I remember her from Washington; her office was diagonally across the hall from mine. She was taking some heat for her Nixon affiliation, and I think we both felt like outcasts then.

[Q] Playboy: Diane, your road to television was rather indirect.

[A] Sawyer: I'm afraid my path to journalism was rather desultory. I had just got out of college in 1967 and I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was considering newspaper work when my father said, "Why don't you try TV?" So I started in Louisville, my home town. There were no women doing hard news on TV, and it occurred to me this might be a pioneering opportunity and an adventure.

[Q] Playboy: It was while you were doing news and weather for a local station that Bill Small, then the CBS Washington bureau chief, saw you, wasn't it? He later hired you for CBS.

[A] Sawyer: Well, he had seen my work on television. I had known him before, because he'd worked for CBS in Louisville and his children were in the class my mother taught.

[Q] Playboy: But first you moved to Washington, where you ended up working as a press aide for Richard Nixon, your job for the next eight years. Your association with the Nixon Administration wasn't to your advantage when you went to work for CBS, was it?

[A] Sawyer: I think it's safe to say it was not (continued on page 78) "60 Minutes" (continued from page 64) the best part of my résumé. [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: Would you have liked to omit it, to describe it as eight years with the Peace Corps?

[A] Sawyer: Yeah, eight years of Government work.

[Q] Playboy: But it did arouse some resentment, didn't it? Dan Rather, for one, objected to your being hired, didn't he?

[A] Sawyer: I really think that it was an objection on principle. I was the specific; his objection was to the general, which included me.

[Q] Playboy: Was there ever any demonstration of your colleagues' displeasure?

[A] Sawyer: Only things that appeared in gossip columns: "CBS News staffers express dismay" kind of thing. No one ever expressed their feelings directly to me. Most of the criticisms that became public were from unnamed sources. Dan Rather approached me and told me what he had said, so I didn't hear it from someone else, which was very kind of him.

[Q] Playboy: That antipathy changed while you were co-anchor for the CBS Morning News with Bill Kurtis in 1982. You did an interview with your former boss, Richard Nixon, and asked some pretty tough questions. Do you think that was when you shook off other people's doubts?

[A] Sawyer: I think that finally closed the chapter, but the antipathy had changed before that. The change was perhaps just by dint of familiarity and by the fact that I was given the CBS News equivalent of an initiation rite. We didn't have to dip our hands in spaghetti and be told foul, vile things--but I was sent out on every stakeout. It's the kind of thing that every new person goes through, a kind of survival of the fittest. Some former stars of local TV haven't appreciated it, but I was fortunate in that I had no expectations and extremely low confidence about my journalistic ability at a network level, because I had not done it for so long. So I was the one who was called in the middle of the night to go stand on freezing street corners for hours to stake people out. I chased people to get one sound bite for an insert in someone else's story. In fact, I think I hold the record for the longest stakeout.

[Q] Playboy: Where was that?

[A] Sawyer: In the lobby of the Madison Hotel in Washington, during the Mideast negotiations--from which assignment, by the way, I got a good number of business cards from men who did not believe I was there for any respectable purpose. Try protesting sometime that you're sitting in the lobby of a hotel, day in and day out, for journalistic reasons. [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: The contacts you made during the Nixon Administration must have been useful during the time you covered the State Department for CBS.

[A] Sawyer: Oh, they helped some. I'm not sure that whatever else I might have done in those years wouldn't have brought me friends and people to ask questions of.

[Q] Playboy: But you had met and dated Henry Kissinger during the time you spent in the Administration. He must have provided you with some contacts in the State Department.

[A] Sawyer: Well, no. I knew some people in the State Department, but remember, it had changed hands. I knew some people in the establishment in Washington, and they tend to pass in and out of jobs. So I knew people at State but not because of him.

[Q] Playboy: You've never covered foreign affairs, in the sense of being a foreign correspondent. Is that a handicap here?

[A] Sawyer: I would like to have done a couple of years overseas. Do I think it's a handicap? I'm not sure. I think not knowing about foreign affairs might be a handicap, but in the year I spent covering the State Department, I got the graduate course.

[Q] Playboy: There have been assertions in the press that your friendship with William Paley, the CBS chairman, and others, such as Kissinger, have been responsible for your rather rapid rise. The question raised is whether that rapid rise has been exclusively on your merits as a journalist. How do you respond?

[A] Sawyer: Whose question is that? Is that yours? You've seen me on the air; you've seen my work. I don't believe it's a question. I believe it's a manufactured question, because I'm a female and because it's titillating.

[Q] Playboy: It's not titillating to raise a question discussed elsewhere, most recently in a TV Guide article titled "Is Diane Sawyer Tough Enough for 60 Minutes?" The article implied that those friendships may have contributed to your success.

[A] Sawyer: [Smiles] It is a preposterous question! But it amuses me. The TV Guide article went on to say that those who know think it is preposterous, that I work hard.

[Q] Playboy: If you were doing an interview and a similar question were being asked in the press, would you not ask it?

[A] Sawyer: I might ask you how you felt about the fact that people asked you the question. I don't think I would ask it as a real question, unless I thought you were lousy at your job. The old "Some people say" routine: We know the tricks.

[Q] Playboy: Then clear it up once and for all.

[A] Sawyer: It's not true, of course. And let the record show that this entire exchange has been entirely through smiles.

[Q] Playboy: It will. Speaking of friends, you stayed with Nixon out of loyalty, as you've often explained. But as to those tough questions you asked him on your Morning News interview, hadn't they occurred to you while you were working for him?

[A] Sawyer: Well, I had worked with him on the Watergate part of his book. All of the factual questions had been asked. Some of my questions probed for emotional responses, for a sense of his own feelings, and they hadn't been asked, because they don't have to be asked when you're working closely with someone. A lot of time had passed, and I wanted to ask the questions that I thought the people in the audience would have asked. I think it's arguable that I did. I also wanted to see if there had been any changes in his state of mind since I had left. It wasn't a sudden transformation on my part.

[Q] Playboy: If you had those questions in your mind, why did you wait so long to leave Nixon's employ?

[A] Sawyer: Once I became immersed in the book, I was responsible for a significant section of it. I really felt I had a responsibility to see it through.

[Q] Playboy: How did you end up at 60 Minutes?

[A] Sawyer: My feeling that it was time to leave the Morning News was the prime mover in my arrival at 60 Minutes. It was Don's feeling that I should move, too. There was a lot of resistance at various executive levels at CBS toward doing it at this time. But keep in mind that Don had been talking about getting me on 60 Minutes during the period when the Morning News had increased its ratings monumentally.

[Q] Playboy: When did you meet Hewitt?

[A] Sawyer: I first met Don Hewitt, I think in any memorable sense, at the Democratic Convention four years ago. I covered the floor and he was the floor producer. That's the first time I remember working with him [laughs]--or experiencing him, which is not much different from meeting him.

[Q] Playboy: Were you tired of the Morning News?

[A] Sawyer: CBS made it clear they wanted me to be happy, and we agreed that my tenure on the Morning News should be a finite one. I had never thought I would stay for 13 or 14 years, as others have done. So when I had a sense that it was time to move on, I felt I could approach them and I did. There were a number of other things we talked about my doing, including reporting for the Evening News, which would have made me happy. But this is the Valhalla of TV.

[Q] Playboy: Your contract is reported to be in the neighborhood of $800,000 a year, which puts you near the top of the pay (continued on page 158) "60 Minutes" (continued from page 78) scale at 60 Minutes, higher than some of the other 60 Minutes correspondents. Is that true?

[A] Sawyer: I'm not going to tell you [smiles broadly].

[Q] Playboy: As the last aboard, are you somewhat in awe of these men? Their work is almost legendary.

[A] Sawyer: They have worked very hard to shatter any reverence I might have had for them. [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: They haven't overwhelmed you with solemn advice?

[A] Sawyer: Our group photo session was a combination of a convention of journalists and Animal House. [Laughs] It was the funniest hour I have spent in years, each of them topping the other. They were mainly assailing one another. They could have taken the show on the road. The four of them together! I wondered whether I had been brought in to be an audience, fresh fodder for their jokes. It was very funny.

[Q] Playboy: OK, Don, back to you. In a nutshell, what was the reason for 60 Minutes' success?

[A] Hewitt: They moved us to six o'clock Sunday. Nobody predicted anything more than a slight increase in audience. Then a programing genius by the name of Oscar Katz said, "Let's put it on at seven." I said, "That's ridiculous." Then, all of a sudden, we took off like a big-assed bird. But who really knows?

[A] Safer: It was the Sunday time slot. The adults took over control of the set from the kids, who had been watching Disney or whatever.

[A] Wallace: I think it had to do with the oil embargo. People had to stay home more, and what else was there to do on Sunday evenings?

[Q] Playboy: Harry, Mike seems to feel among other things that the oil embargo in the early Seventies helped.

[A] Reasoner: Oh, that's nonsense. I think the reason for 60 Minutes' success, for one thing, is that it obviously was an idea whose time had come--a cross between the Evening News and documentaries. Second, the fact that CBS finally made the commitment to give it a very good time in the week and to run it there regularly--football or not, whatever--to run the whole show. And third, it was the mixture of the correspondents. And I think that even though it didn't really happen until after I left, the rise of the program, I think I can say immodestly, part of its success was because of Don, Mike and me.

[A] Wallace: There was also the whole business of Watergate, and the latent thirst for that kind of reporting in America worked to our benefit. In addition, a good deal of our reporting back then, when we were not well known, was almost live. It was a kind of play-action journalism.

[Q] Playboy: What is play-action journalism?

[A] Wallace: You had cameras running, you'd research the story, you and the producer, but in the final analysis, you walked in and let the story develop in front of you.

[Q] Playboy: What's an example?

[A] Wallace: When we set up cameras inside the clinic on Morse Avenue. I think that was the first exposure of Medicaid fraud, certainly on television, and we didn't really plan it all out in advance. Then there was the story Barry Lando and I did on corporate perks at the Super Bowl.

[Q] Playboy: When you caught executives using company jets to fly to the Super Bowl? That was a spontaneous thing?

[A] Wallace: We were there to tell the story of how money spent ostensibly for business purposes was not infrequently spent by the company executives to entertain themselves. So we set up our cameras at the private-plane airport in New Orleans without knowing what would happen. We had a book with all the tail numbers of the various private jets used by corporations around the country, so we knew when the Rockwell plane or the CBS plane or whatever was coming in.

[Q] Playboy: And you caught a few?

[A] Wallace: It was fascinating to watch these corporate planes come in and suddenly hear over their radios that we were on the ground with our cameras--and zoom off into the wild blue yonder. I mean, plane after plane would circle, hoping our cameras would go away. Those were the salad days, when we began to make our reputation. I remember them well.

[Q] Playboy: Don, do you think CBS supported your early days for prestige alone or out of a sense of public duty?

[A] Hewitt: You know, I keep hearing that CBS stayed with 60 Minutes through a lot of rocky times. That's not the way it really was. It was that Stanton and Paley had set the tone: These are the kinds of broadcasts we should keep on doing, and one day, one of them will catch on and be popular, and this one did.

[Q] Playboy: The network brass gave you the best crews and a fairly substantial budget for a news program that was not profitable. Why?

[A] Hewitt: They gave us what we needed to do the job. They were running a news hour every Tuesday night opposite Marcus Welby, M.D., and it was going nowhere. They figured, What the hell--we'll run the news one Tuesday and the crazy idea Hewitt came up with the next. And at some point, people got interested in 60 Minutes and we took over. In those early days, nobody ever thought about ratings. Nobody in the news division ever knew what ratings were. We just knew we'd done a show and we went home. One day, somebody said, "You're number 30," and I said, "What the hell does that mean?"

[Q] Playboy: Really? No awareness?

[A] Hewitt: Over in Black Rock, CBS corporate headquarters, yeah. Never around here. When I was directing the Cronkite news, I knew vaguely that we had fewer people watching us than Huntley-Brinkley had. I just knew that they were more popular. I didn't know whether we had a 4.2 share and they a 6.2. I just knew that you couldn't do anything about it. . . . You know the biggest ingredient that goes into a successful broadcast?

[Q] Playboy: Tell us.

[A] Hewitt: Luck.

[Q] Playboy: Still, you make your own luck. One of your favorite expressions is getting people "into the tent."

[A] Hewitt: Sure! What would have happened if I'd started by calling our show a documentary program? We'd have gotten 15 percent of the audience. I remember once we did a show and called it CBS Reports: Illegal Aliens. I said, "No! Let's call it The Gonzales Brothers and run ads saying, 'Join the Feds tonight as they chase three wetbacks through the streets of L.A.' Let 'em think it's Kojak. What do you care what they think, as long as you get them into the tent?"

[Q] Playboy: Then what's the difference between that and a carnival pitchman's approach?

[A] Hewitt: I wouldn't be dishonest. Now, don't compromise your news judgment or your integrity when that broadcast is on. But I would make some compromises to get people into the tent.

[Q] Playboy: But you would package or merchandise the product? Add a little showbiz?

[A] Hewitt: Absolutely. What do you think the cover of Playboy is? The cover of every news magazine? Merchandising.

[Q] Playboy: But that seems predicated on the idea that the viewer is resistant to being informed, that you have to merchandise.

[A] Hewitt: Oh, absolutely. Viewers didn't buy the set to be informed; they bought the set to be entertained. If you can inform the guy who bought the set to be entertained, you're ahead of the game. That's why 60 Minutes is what it is. We know that the viewers out there essentially bought that set to look at Dallas. Right? If you can get them also to look at us, you're ahead.

[Q] Playboy: You have to twist their arm to get them there, however. But that gives you those all-important ratings that keep you on the air.

[A] Hewitt: Sure. I mean, look. We keep hearing from the critics. They always talk about ratings, ratings. Why is ratings a dirty word and circulation a clean word? It's as if advertising is a clean word and commercials is a dirty word. Everybody's looking for ratings. Any newspaper--almost all of them, with certain minor exceptions, run some kind of circulation stunt. They're in the ratings game, no matter what they call it, and they sit there with this holier-than-thou attitude and talk about television. There's a lot wrong with us that the critics don't know about. The critics are so busy writing the trite, clichéed things they have written for all these years that they beat up on us for all the wrong reasons. Especially The New York Times.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Hewitt: Any time anybody says anything about television that is the least bit unflattering, The New York Times loves it. They go into high gear. And it's because [Times executive editor] Abe Rosenthal has made no bones about how much he hates television. I've heard him on the subject. And if you think Abe's attitude isn't well known on the Time's television pages, you're dead wrong. The Times people know it, and when there's something to criticize, they love it, and they all jump up and down, they salivate and they applaud.

[Q] Playboy: You have some difficulty dealing with criticism, though you acknowledge that there are legitimate criticisms. "They beat up on us for all the wrong reasons" is your quote. You mean that your critics deal with the fluff and not the substance?

[A] Hewitt: Yeah, they don't know enough about us. One of their problems is that all the critics who write about television news, with some minor exceptions, are also writing about Dallas and Dynasty, and they don't know how to differentiate between what we do and what Lorimar Productions does. That's why they don't do it very well.

[Q] Playboy: You don't regard television critics as legitimate journalists?

[A] Hewitt: They're print journalists--any one of whom would give his eyeteeth to come and work here. The nerve of these people! The critics who work for these newspapers wouldn't know how to find their way from the airport in London to downtown Mayfair. And they're going to tell you what you do right and what you do wrong!

What has to make reporters unhappy, and I would be unhappy if I were still in print, is if they go out and work their asses off on a story, and find out that people who read their story had seen it closer-up than the reporter did; they were there. Television has taken them there. There was a time when it was kind of exotic to be a reporter. By God, you got to meet Congressmen and go to Bengasi and Tobruk; wow! Now the viewer goes there every night. It's no big deal.

[Q] Playboy: No more glamorous, trench-coated foreign correspondents?

[A] Hewitt: The glamor of the globe trotters. . . . You know, our correspondents really are the last of a breed. Everything is done by bureaus now. But, in any case, you've got to realize that the viewers have been everywhere. There's no mystery. I mean, some guy says, "Boy, I was at Cape Kennedy for the launch of the first moon flight," and the guy at home says, "So was I." The Super Bowl was played in your living room; John De Lorean was acquitted in your living room. It all happens right there. The place of the print reporter in the world is not the same as it once was. That has got to sting. I would be unhappy about that, too. Let any big story break this minute--something big, some catastrophe or war--in every city newsroom in America, the first thing they do is turn on their TV set!

[Q] Playboy: Morley, how do you feel about criticism?

[A] Safer: Some of it may be deserved. Some of it, I don't know, but it strikes me that the guys across the country who write about television are people whom the editors don't trust to go out and cover stories. Of course, in some cases, there's something like, not quite jealousy but a competition print reporters feel, to which I'm not unsympathetic. When we go out and cover a story, the kind of resources we can bring to bear on it can't be matched by many publications, if any. I'm going to Lagos next week. It's not even a go-ahead story, I'm just going. There's a guy there I want to see about a story. Even the rich newspapers won't spend that kind of money.

[Q] Playboy: Do you agree with Don that 60 Minutes shouldn't be singled out because of showbiz techniques?

[A] Safer: Art Buchwald does showbiz three times a week! My God, he invents characters in your daily newspaper. If we're going to compare what we do with, say, being columnists, something like that, sure, there are entertainment aspects of it. You look for exciting and interesting and affecting stories. You don't look for boring stories, stories of little consequence. The same people who make these allegations are all writing in newspapers. And some of those front pages are much more outrageous than that or more hokey or whatever you want to call it. What do we have to defend here?

[Q] Playboy: You feel you do a job equal to, if not better than, a print reporter's?

[A] Safer: The fact is--and I can't prove I'm right statistically, but I know I'm right--we, in covering the news, do a better job and a much more accurate job than any newspaper in the country.

[Q] Playboy: That's a lot of territory. Do you really believe that?

[A] Safer: Absolutely. I think we check out our facts more carefully than the newspapers do, particularly monopoly newspapers such as The New York Times, which in terms of big journalism is the only newspaper in New York. When we're wrong, we're more open about it. We don't cover as many stories and we don't cover them in the depth The New York Times can.

[Q] Playboy: Your pictures can distort, however. The tight shots, for instance--something we've discussed with Mike--can suggest guilt or innocence without being accurate.

[A] Safer: Your point taken, there's no question that people who have great powers of persuasion, who are extremely articulate, present a better case than people with very weak powers of persuasion or people who are inarticulate. They may be as right or as wrong, but the articulate one will have a better chance. No question, but it's television! That's where we work!

[Q] Playboy: That's a topic that has particular relevance to the General William Westmoreland case, which is in the courts now. Mike, you're the one most involved.

[A] Wallace: Right, but it was not a 60 Minutes piece. It was a CBS Reports, which I narrated, and I believe it was a fair and honest broadcast.

[Q] Playboy: Producer George Crile was charged with selective editing and with improprieties that violated CBS' own guidelines. Isn't that true?

[A] Wallace: George has acknowledged one or two indiscretions in the editing that were strictly against the CBS guidelines. He was reprimanded for it and was eventually suspended for taping telephone calls for accuracy's sake without the knowledge of the two or three people he interviewed. But he's off suspension and back at work.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel you gave Westmoreland a chance to express himself fully?

[A] Wallace: I felt he had an opportunity to express himself adequately. But none of this has anything to do with the substance of the broadcast, which said that there had been a systematic deception, a calculated distortion of enemy-troop-strength figures.

[Q] Playboy: And you felt that you had established that?

[A] Wallace: Anyone who spent any time in Vietnam knew that it was almost standard operating procedure. Everybody knew the body counts were inaccurate. Everybody knew that the weapons counts were inaccurate. They were discussed at what was called the five-o'clock follies, the press briefing that took place every day in Saigon.

[Q] Playboy: What are you saying--that all the critiques of the broadcast were unfair?

[A] Wallace: The most thorough critique, the one done by TV Guide, didn't charge that the substance was inaccurate, just that certain aspects of the process were not according to CBS' own book of standards.

[Q] Playboy: So was it proper or improper not to go by the book?

[A] Wallace: It's something you shouldn't do. Those of us at CBS should probably know more about the book than we do. It's a massive list of guidelines put together after the brouhaha over the program The Selling of the Pentagon some years ago, about which there were complaints in the Congress and the Pentagon. In the best of all possible worlds, we would have it committed to memory. I think it's fair to say that most of us don't. But the real guideline is fairness. I believe the broadcast was fair.

[Q] Playboy: You have a pretty stringent set of checking procedures, don't you? Did they break down in the case of the Westmoreland piece?

[A] Wallace: That piece had a different procedure, because it took more than a year to produce. Howard Stringer, executive producer of CBS Reports, and Andy Lack, senior producer, were involved in another series; I was involved in 60 Minutes. So George Crile, to a certain degree, was by himself, and it's conceivable it didn't get the same kind of exhaustive scrutiny.

[Q] Playboy: How about the camera techniques you used with Westmoreland--your old Night Beat tight shots? You'll admit that kind of close-up didn't do much to convince anyone of his innocence.

[A] Wallace: Right. He seemed to be trapped--trapped by the words coming out of his mouth. But he didn't know what shot they were using. Nor did I know what shot they were using. That option is left to the cameraman.

[Q] Playboy: The cameraman was given no instruction for the shot and the camera did not move physically closer?

[A] Wallace: No, the lens will come in. And the cameraman himself was apparently so moved by what was going on oncamera, realizing that he had a dramatic moment. William Westmoreland, General of the Armies, a man who had run the war in Vietnam, who had addressed a joint session of Congress and was used to the paraphernalia of television and tough questions from journalists----

[Q] Playboy: Falling apart?

[A] Wallace: I was surprised at the confusion and distress that he made quite apparent in that hotel room in Manhattan where we filmed the piece. Perhaps he was unprepared for our preparation.

[Q] Playboy: Then you don't see any difference between asking those kinds of questions with a camera watching and asking them for publication?

[A] Wallace: I don't think there's any difference at all really. I can be confronted in this Interview with contradictions in things I have said or done in the past. Whether I'm dishonest, fair or unfair, I can be confronted in the same way I confront people. Playboy didn't have to subpoena me here. I'm here of my own free will and accord. I'm here not unwillingly, and the price of admission is to make myself vulnerable to whatever is put in print about me.

[Q] Playboy: Diane, how do you feel about zooming in on a subject you're interviewing?

[A] Sawyer: I like tight shots. I think tight shots are revealing. I think they illuminate well. John Chancellor told me once that television is a lie detector, and I think when people look at other people carefully, up close, they sense things about them. I don't think it's necessarily wrong or right to use a tight shot.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't it mostly used to take advantage of the subject?

[A] Reasoner: The tight-shot close-up is not done to make anybody sweat. It's done because it's the most effective way to let the viewer listen to somebody. If over a period of time a cameraman took a shot that I thought was unfair or inappropriate, I would change it in the future. I tell almost everybody I interview before the camera starts that there may be some questions that seem antagonistic, but I tell him that no one is going to mousetrap him, that we have plenty of film. If you feel you gave a stupid or misleading answer to a question, say so and we'll do it again.

[Q] Playboy: Is that responsible journalism? In print, for instance, you may not have that latitude.

[A] Reasoner: Well, in a print interview, you talk a lot longer, and then the reporter has a great deal of latitude that we don't have for indirect quotations and [laughs] mind reading. I wouldn't give the same opportunity to a political figure or an actor, someone who was familiar with the camera. But to someone who was nervous and unfamiliar with the camera, I would.

[Q] Playboy: Mike, you touched on the potential misuse of television. You and Morley had an ethical problem with a Haitian story he wanted to run, didn't you?

[A] Wallace: Yes. My wife had lived in Haiti and had family there. I knew the family well and had done a story there in '71. It was not a self-consciously tough story but fairly tough. We dealt with Papa Doc and Baby Doc. And Hewitt walked into my office one day and said, "Hey, go talk to Morley, he's thinking about doing a story on Haiti."?

[Q] Playboy: Did you try to talk him out of it?

[A] Wallace: I walked over to his office and said, "Look, Lorraine's family wasn't too happy the last time around. If you have a hell of a story to do, Ok, but if you're just thinking about that along with other stories, I'd be happy if you didn't do it."

[Q] Playboy: Which didn't make him very happy?

[A] Wallace: It was obvious that he wasn't happy about being asked not to do it. At that time, there was a little tension between us. Later, it broke in the papers and became a full-blown hassle. In retrospect, it's obvious I shouldn't have asked Morley not to do the story.

[Q] Playboy: But you get along well now?

[A] Wallace: Oh, yes. But I do feel it was badly handled, by Don Hewitt in particular, though he is a man I have great admiration for. In my estimation, there were enough errors to go around in the handling of the whole business.

[Q] Playboy: The Haitian affair occurred about the time you were having some problems because you had used words such as watermelons and tacos in ways that seemed racially disparaging while doing an exposé of lien contracts handled by the San Diego Federal Bank. The bank had filmed you while you were filming them.

[A] Wallace: Yes. Someone kept peddling the film of my quotes until finally a reporter did the story for the Los Angeles Times. When you do the kind of work I do, you're fair game. But what upset me was that I would be perceived as a racist. I have a body of work and friendships that prove otherwise.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about the technique for which 60 Minutes initially became famous--doing interviews with people who don't want to speak to you, otherwise known as ambush journalism. Mike, you're most linked with it, and because of it, you've been called more a performer than a journalist.

[A] Wallace: We wince in television journalism at the word performer, but the fact of the matter is that there is a performance involved. That doesn't mean it's phony or theatrical. But sometimes it's the best way to tell the story of people who are breaking the law. But you know, ambush journalism, that's a kind of old-fashioned 60 Minutes piece. We haven't actually done it for years.

[Q] Playboy: Are you saying you won't practice ambush journalism anymore?

[A] Wallace: Actually, it happens that we do have an old-fashioned piece this season about counterfeiting designer luggage. We set up our cameras behind a wall in a suite at the Plaza, and when a couple of people come in and try to sell counterfeit bags, I pop out from behind the potted palms, so to speak, and confront them. But we don't do that much anymore.

[Q] Playboy: Ed, what do you think about ambush journalism?

[A] Bradley: I've never done it. If it's the only way to get at somebody, then do it. If I've got the goods on somebody and the guy will not face me, how else am I going to confront him? Hey, then take the shot.

[Q] Playboy: You've never used the technique?

[A] Bradley: I can't say I've never done it, because I did it once on CBS Reports. The Blacks in America story. In this little town in Mississippi, there was a doctor who had segregated waiting rooms. And this was in '78. It was the only way to show what existed in Mississippi in 1978. What was I supposed to do--get those doctors to sit down for an interview and tell me why they still had separate waiting rooms for white and black? I knew they wouldn't do it, so we went in rolling.

[A] Hewitt: "Ambush journalism" is a phrase print reporters have invented to describe something that they themselves have done since the penny press. Reporters have always walked up to people unannounced, unawares, trying to catch them off guard. The only difference is that when they did it, nobody saw it. When we do it, people see it.

[Q] Playboy: That description seems strained. The confrontation isn't clearly demonstrated as a confrontation until it's visual.

[A] Hewitt: First of all, there is a tendency to look askance at what is called confrontation journalism. Confrontation, as we practice it, is good journalism.

[Q] Playboy: That seems convenient. Give us an example.

[A] Hewitt: We probably know as much about the guy who is approached on the street as the district attorney knows. We've been trying to reach him for months. Now, this very subject came up recently. We did a thing on a cancer clinic in Murietta, California, where we went posing as patients.

[Q] Playboy: For which, as we recall, you received a great deal of criticism.

[A] Hewitt: Gene Patterson of the St. Petersburg Times said, "That's the kind of thing you shouldn't do; people have a right of privacy." I agree with the latter part of what he said.

[Q] Playboy: But you went ahead anyway, and you would go ahead in similar circumstances to get the story.

[A] Hewitt: I don't think you're entitled to privacy while you are committing malfeasance. Gene had said on a broadcast we had done together, "Those people had not been convicted of anything, and you had no right to do that, because they had not been tried in a court." And I said, "Has your paper ever run those pictures from those hidden cameras of a guy robbing a bank?" And he said yes. I asked, "Why wasn't he allowed to rob the bank in privacy? What right did you have to invade his privacy? He had not been convicted of anything at that point!"

[Q] Playboy: Diane, you haven't yet done many stories, but what are your feelings about ambush journalism?

[A] Sawyer: I think there are times when what they call ambush journalism--I'd call it a surprise encounter--is the only way to get a story. I think that in every case, you have to weigh the importance of the information that you will or won't get against the importance of seeing the person at the center of the story. If it is an important story and you think that seeing him is a critical piece of it, then I think it's justified. When it's done for theater--and I don't think it's been done for theater on 60 Minutes--as has happened on local news stations, imitatively, I'm as opposed to that as anyone else.

[Q] Playboy: The objection is that with a subject unfamiliar with a camera, closing in on him when he's nervous anyway will tend to magnify those nervous reactions in the viewer's mind and, depending on the case, suggest culpability when perhaps there is none.

[A] Sawyer: I don't think people are so obtuse most of the time. They listen, and if the person is making sense, if he consistently makes common sense, they know.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about role playing, the technique Mike uses so effectively on camera to get information?

[A] Sawyer: Well, you want to show your interview subjects a healthy skepticism, and I don't think that's a role outside my character. And as for the fact that the camera is watching--if it were watching right now, it would show you reacting with horror to what I'm saying. I joke. The camera shows you reacting as you would normally. Because it's television and because those reactions are edited into the piece, people think you're playing a role when, in fact, it is nothing more or less than what you would do listening to me. But, no, I don't invent a personality for a piece.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever used the technique of ambush journalism, Morley?

[A] Safer: I did it once. We walked into some villain's office. It was a story on commodity-option dealing in which one company seemed to control the entire industry and turned out to be an utter phony, as it happened. We walked into the company's offices in Detroit with the camera on, because it was the only chance we were going to get to see what the boiler room looked like.

[Q] Playboy: Did you feel it was justified as the only way to get the story?

[A] Safer: I don't feel particularly good about having done that, honestly. It has as much to do with your own sense of, or your own comfort with, something as it has to do with anything else. There are ways of doing a story.

[Q] Playboy: In contrast to the hard stuff you were doing in Vietnam and elsewhere, your 60 Minutes pieces escape most of the criticism. You're perceived to be the white hat. Do you agree?

[A] Safer: Don't tell that to the National Council of Churches.

[Q] Playboy: We know it was going to sue you for an unflattering piece you did on it. But in a general sense, you've escaped the criticisms, you've never ended up in court. Dan Rather did and, of course, Mike is spending a lot of time there.

[A] Safer: Well, I've been sued a number of times. I've never gone to court. I've been very lucky in that respect. I like to think it's because we're so nicely pinned down, that every T is so carefully crossed that they've pulled back a bit. Now, I'm not suggesting that those others aren't! [Points his finger at the interviewer]

[Q] Playboy: No. But you attribute it to something--again, perhaps, to a nonassertive style?

[A] Safer: I think there are ways to do things. You're perceived in a certain way because of the way you do something. I do things differently from the way Mike does or from the way Rather does--no better or worse but different. Is that a calculated difference? Of course not! I'm not an actor, and I'd be a fool if I thought I were.

If you look at the body of work I've done, I've always tried to mix up the kind of stories I do, just to keep my attention focused. I could never function on a one-note kind of job in journalism. Even in Vietnam, I tried to keep from tripping over my own footprints on every single story. I've always preferred to do stories, whether soft or hard, that are observed. That's a conceit of mine. As important as interviews are, and I do them, when you're talking with people, they're often selling something. They're giving a totally biased point of view. I think my eye of the middle-distance observer is often more accurate. I like to write the pieces more than I like to sit and listen to people talk.

[Q] Playboy: Ed, we've talked about how various correspondents get their stories, but you've managed to avoid virtually all of the public controversy that surrounds the others--particularly Mike and, to a lesser extent, Morley and Harry. Is it a matter of style or approach?

[A] Bradley: Mike has a style of reporting and a kind of piece for which he's noted, and I don't think anyone else does as much of that or gets as much attention for the pieces that he does as Mike gets. That's his strong suit. We each bring something different to the broadcast. The kind of witty essays that Morley does add a dimension that helps make this show work. Harry has his own style. Where I fit in, what I've always felt that I do best, involves compassionate listening. The Jahnke story, for instance, was a story of a kid who shot his father. What it required on my part was the ability to get this youngster to talk. It's not always easy, and I think that's what I do best. I think I'm a compassionate listener. I like doing that kind of story better than going, "Aha! I see here by this document that you said in 1957. . . ."

[Q] Playboy: Diane, your style as a reporter is not necessarily of the hard-hitting school, the way Mike's is----

[A] Sawyer: You know, Don says--let him tell you this--that you don't have to be tough or hard-hitting, you just have to be smart! Hard-hitting is to most people a style rather than a process of getting at the truth. I like to think I'm pretty exacting at getting at the truth.

[Q] Playboy: You're in a business in which image, whether you like it or not, can be important; can't it often compensate for lack of substance?

[A] Sawyer: Compensate? Never! People who know can tell. But the reverse question is another way of getting at it; namely, is substance alone what matters on television? We can wish that it were, but when people look at you, they react to you, they're forced to look at you, so therefore, they have to react to what they see. That was the question in the Christine Craft case, in which a newscaster was apparently demoted because of her appearance.

[Q] Playboy: That brings up the frequent criticism that something may look good on television but not necessarily be good journalism.

[A] Sawyer: That's a legitimate question to raise. In television, we're all troubled by the ability of the picture to overwhelm the word, and you will never disentangle yourself from that. It's a fact, and it does occur. All you can hope is that audiences become increasingly sophisticated and look elsewhere besides television, that they read.

[Q] Playboy: Mike, you mentioned your producers earlier. There are assertions that yours is really a producers' show, that the correspondents are just front men. You are given a copy of the story outline they've spent months working on and hop on a plane, and when you get there, they give you the questions to ask. You pop oncamera for a few hours, then you're on a plane back to New York. True?

[A] Wallace: There's a germ of truth to that but only a germ. First of all, at least half of the time, one of the correspondents will come up with a story. Look, it is a collaborative undertaking; all television journalism is. We're really talking about all of us as reporters. The producer and researcher may spend six to eight to ten weeks on a story. The fact is that a correspondent will spend six to eight to ten days on it.

[Q] Playboy: That seems to be relatively little time.

[A] Wallace: It should be apparent that if you're going to turn out 25 stories a year, that is the system that has to be used.

[Q] Playboy: You can't do your own stories?

[A] Wallace: It's impossible. That's the system, and along the way, each one of us has felt, Hey, I want to go back to doing my own stories. Morley and I have talked about that. We had all done our own stories at one point--Safer in London and Vietnam; Bradley in Vietnam and at the White House; Harry at the White House; myself on politics and the Middle East, civil rights. It isn't as though we haven't done these things the producers do now.

[Q] Playboy: Nonetheless, they get relatively little credit.

[A] Wallace: I've said for ten years that 60 Minutes is a producers' show. They really get most of the fun, most of the charge out of the digging and the donkeywork. But the stories are done in constant consultation with the correspondent, and each one of us works differently from the others.

[Q] Playboy: Ed, how do you react to the assertion that you correspondents are front men for your producers?

[A] Bradley: See all of those files over there? All those things are research materials! I've got a story that I'm going to do next week. [Walks over to cabinet and brings back folders] I've got six, seven, no, eight, folders of material that I have to read. [Heatedly] But I've got to have all this material at my finger tips. Now, if that makes me a front man, then I'm a front man!

[Q] Playboy: Morley?

[A] Safer: That charge denies that we [correspondents] have any journalistic intent or any brain, I guess. Do the producers do a lot of research? Yes. Do they produce masses of stuff? Yes. Do they always reduce the masses of stuff? Sometimes. Do they write out areas of questions? Of course. This is a collaborative work.

[Q] Playboy: The question is, where do you come in?

[A] Safer: When it comes down to it, it's you interviewing the guy. But we're all reporters here. If it were anything else, if it were as you or the critics describe it, the broadcast wouldn't work. Honestly. There is a lot of interaction among us and with Don. And you can argue with Don. He doesn't issue edicts to people, either to the producers or to the correspondents. If he did [laughs], the edicts would last about 30 seconds.

[Q] Playboy: Harry?

[A] Reasoner: Fairly frequently, when I go out somewhere to do a piece, people will come up to me and say, "Oh, you really go out on stories." I show them my airlinemileage card.

[Q] Playboy: But is it true that the producers do most of the work?

[A] Reasoner: I don't think the truth is very complicated and it's certainly defensible. We have five producers nominally assigned to us, which means, arithmetically, that the producer spends five times as long on a story as a correspondent does. This is a group business. The role of the producer is tremendously important. But I'm reasonably sure that the producers who work with us don't think of us as puppets or dummies.

[Q] Playboy: Do you normally write your own questions?

[A] Reasoner: No. I don't write them, but the questions that are written are carefully prepared guides to make sure we don't forget or miss anything. A good interview will wander far from the written questions. That's a matter of listening to what the interviewee says.

[Q] Playboy: Don, while we're setting the record straight, what about checkbook journalism? You've been stung on a couple of occasions because of the practice--H. R. Haldeman, for one, conned you by giving you a $100,000 noninterview--haven't you?

[A] Hewitt: Hmmmm. Ok. Will you leave in my response to the Haldeman question?

[Q] Playboy: Of course.

[A] Hewitt: Bob Haldeman was never on 60 Minutes. That's one of the great myths that have been going on for years. We were pre-empted for two weeks. 60 Minutes never paid Bob Haldeman a penny. CBS did. We didn't.

[Q] Playboy: Wallace did the interview, Safer introduced the show and it was in your time slot. So if there is confusion, it's understandable. But you guys were conned; isn't that a good example of what's wrong with checkbook journalism?

[A] Hewitt: Not "you guys"! CBS guys! I had nothing to do with that! I'm not sure I would have done that . . . I might have. But inasmuch as I had no part in it, I want to stay out of it. I vehemently deny, and I am outraged that anyone would think that we would pay Bob Haldeman. . . . [In a whisper] But we did pay Gordon Liddy. [Laughs]

[A] Wallace: I didn't know, nor was it any of my business, how much Haldeman was paid. And I have no objection to that kind of checkbook journalism.

[Q] Playboy: You met offcamera with Haldeman first, didn't you?

[A] Wallace: Yes, we had dinner at his hotel. We could see the White House from the room. And I don't know what triggered it, but he said, "You know, [Richard Nixon] was really the weirdest man to ever sit in the White House."

[Q] Playboy: That convinced you that he was going to give you a great story?

[A] Wallace: I didn't want to pursue too far what he had brought up. If you lose it in rehearsal, you won't get it spontaneously on film. But, yes, it convinced me that he was going to say things on film.

[Q] Playboy: But in reality, he was setting CBS up?

[A] Wallace: That's really what he was doing: selling himself for an interview to CBS.

[Q] Playboy: Getting back to the subject of checkbook journalism. . . .

[A] Hewitt: OK. I didn't invent checkbook journalism. Newspapers did. They call it something else; memoirs, for instance. Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin's daughter, arrives in the United States. The New York Times wants her exclusive, so they buy her memoirs. Checkbook journalism.

[Q] Playboy: There's an accepted difference between memoirs and news.

[A] Hewitt: I'm glad you've brought this up. Print reporters, because they deal with the written word, assume that written words are worth money. I mean, they get paid for words they put on paper. But why shouldn't one get paid for the spoken word? I'm in the spoken-word business.

[Q] Playboy: You paid $500,000 for Nixon's spoken words. That might be considered excessive.

[A] Hewitt:The New York Times paid Richard Nixon for the right to what he put on paper. And they were outraged that CBS would pay him not for what he put on paper but for what he put on video tape. I don't work with paper, I work with video tape. Henry Luce, the publisher of Time, was buying news before I was born. That kind of money in this business pays for just a minute-and-a-half commercial. I'm glad CBS spent some of its hard-earned money to inform the public.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking of CBS money, from what we've been able to gather, 60 Minutes is responsible for some 60 percent of the broadcast division's profit. CBS keeps those figures pretty well hidden, but----

[A] Wallace: Come on!

[Q] Playboy: That's what our research shows.

[A] Wallace: Then they can certainly afford to pay the first-class travel we fought for. We're kept on food budgets of $50 a day--breakfast, lunch and dinner, $10, $15, $25--so not much money goes to waste on 60 Minutes.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't your recent contract guarantee you $1,000,000 a year until 1987?

[Wallace smiles broadly]

[A] Hewitt: You know, if that's true about the CBS profits, you're telling me something I've never heard before. I have no idea. I've been told that 60 Minutes is the biggest profit maker in the history of broadcasting, but I just don't know.

[Q] Playboy: Morley, we were on the subject of checkbook journalism. How do you feel about it?

[A] Safer: Well, it's not something I'm comfortable with, partly because the more you do it, the more you're going to have to do it. I think it's a lousy precedent to set. I think there's a danger: When the facts become a commodity, there may be efforts to enhance them and thus the value of the commodity.

[Q] Playboy: Harry, what about you?

[A] Reasoner: I object to it. I think there are probably times when it's justified, but I object to it. That's a personal opinion; I don't speak for CBS.

[Q] Playboy: Diane, checkbook journalism?

[A] Sawyer: I don't know, and I'm glad I don't have to make those decisions. I really don't know. I don't know whether or not it's justified.

[Q] Playboy: Morley, the story most associated with you, and perhaps typical of some of the victories 60 Minutes has had, was the one concerning Lenell Geter, falsely convicted of a crime, whom you got out of jail. It demonstrated why, in the eyes of many, 60 Minutes is considered the nation's ombudsman, the people's defense counsel.

[A] Safer: We spent a long time on that story, I'll tell you, the three of us--Suzanne St. Pierre, producer, Marti Galovic, who was the researcher, and I. We went through these highs and lows that you go through, but never at the same time. [Laughs] It was a very satisfying story. You go into those pieces, as I don't have to remind you, with some doubts. It's the only way to go into that kind of piece.

[Q] Playboy: With skepticism?

[A] Safer: You can't go in being a true believer in the guy's innocence, because that way lies folly. I went in with some great doubts about his innocence. In the final analysis, all we said was that we had some serious doubts about this guy's guilt. I think we ultimately convinced the authorities of what, in their hearts, they knew had been a sloppy job. Also, I think it is fair to say that when a poor black man in Texas is brought into court, the assumption of guilt is overwhelming.

[Q] Playboy: Harry, what do you think about 60 Minutes' being a sort of ombudsman?

[A] Reasoner: Well, it's evanescent. I think we may create a fuss about something with the show, and there may be an outcry in Congress and maybe even hearings, but then [waves his hand] it goes away.

[Q] Playboy: Perhaps, but you've accomplished a lot of things, haven't you?

[A] Reasoner: We were the first to do a major program on drunk driving, two or three years ago, I think; and a few months later, drunk driving was on the cover of Newsweek. Then there was a lot of talk about changing the laws in various states. I don't know if anything permanent ever happened.

[Q] Playboy: Of course something permanent happened. New laws are sweeping the country. Don't you think the show can take some credit?

[A] Reasoner: Well, come to think of it, we also did the first story on the danger to asthmatics of sulfites, the preservatives used in wine and in food. We did a very good piece--then, months later, The New York Times ran a great big story as if it had just discovered it for the first time!

[Q] Playboy: Diane, how do you respond to the idea that the program is an ombudsman?

[A] Sawyer: You respond by being doubly, triply, quadruply careful. I don't place myself in that role, but I do see 60 Minutes serving that purpose in many ways. Insofar as you can watch and say, "Good heavens, that's happening to me!" and something will be done about it, I think it's a terrific thing for the country to have.

[Q] Playboy: Mike, your report on Polo, Illinois, was a look at a family whose severely disabled daughter had died after the town cut off its water because the family could not pay its bill. You effectively held up the entire population of the town to national vilification. But wasn't there a real question as to relative guilt?

[A] Wallace: We didn't set out to prove anything. I didn't even believe the stories about the town at first. I was prepared to believe what the townspeople claimed. But all you had to do was walk in and see the mother and the father and the older children and then the desperately ill baby and the family's devotion to her. There wasn't an extra dime around that family.

[Q] Playboy: And that established your angle, what you set out to prove--that the townspeople were the villains--right?

[A] Wallace: It was perfectly apparent that there was hostility in the town. The family were regarded as deadbeats, because the father had had the gall to buy himself a beer or a pack of cigarettes instead of paying his water bill.

[Q] Playboy: The town's defense, as we recall, was that the family had cable television and three cars and that they refused to demonstrate to the social services that they hadn't the income to pay the bill.

[A] Wallace: Look, there was absolutely no desire to hold the townspeople of Polo up to public obloquy. I think they were ashamed that this had taken place. They realized that they were wrong. A lot of them, surprisingly, were thin-lipped and almost cruel, in my estimation, toward that family.

[Q] Playboy: One of the complaints about the broadcast was that you had arbitrarily edited out some of the more positive responses to the town's charitable actions.

[A] Wallace: Not some of them, one of them, I believe--a fellow in a wheelchair. It was not, believe me, out of unwillingness to tell an accurate story. He had a speech impediment in addition to being a paraplegic.

[Q] Playboy: But he testified as to the town's fair treatment of him, and that aspect was left out of your piece entirely.

[A] Wallace: It would have been very painful for an audience to watch him try to speak; at least, that was the judgment of both producer Bill Willson and myself. It did nothing to change the sense of the story. If you go back to the poll that was taken in the local newspaper, it came down on the same side as our piece.

[Q] Playboy: The response to that is that you were also selective in airing the responses to the poll in which townspeople gave their view of the situation.

[A] Wallace: My answer to that is "Baloney!" Take a look at the newspaper; it was stunning, because what it did was to convict the townspeople of Polo out of their own mouths.

[Q] Playboy: But what about the repercussions? You portrayed the town as filled with heartless monsters, then picked up your camera and left. After your broadcast, there were calls and hate mail from throughout the nation threatening the entire population. The mayor was forced to move. Don't you think there might have been some balance in the piece?

[A] Wallace: I was satisfied that I was telling an accurate story. The fact that the girl had died shortly before we put the piece on the air was an indication of how sick she'd really been.

[Q] Playboy: OK, let's move on to one of Harry Reasoner's stories. You did a controversial piece on the Illinois Power Company concerning cost overruns on construction of a nuclear facility; after your broadcast, the company was able to demonstrate inaccuracies. In fact, it distributed a film demonstrating them.

[A] Reasoner: Well, on the contrary. In the Illinois Power Company story, with which I am intimately familiar, for obvious reasons, the company did tape everything we did. And it made an hour-long piece, compared with our 15-minute piece. We had two inaccuracies: We had misread a chart, which we admitted on the air, and we had an error in judgment in that we had had an interview with the officer of the nuclear-power commission, or whatever it's called, that was verbose. We chose to paraphrase it and we shouldn't have; we should have used the guy. That was one inaccuracy, one error in judgment. Everything else we said was understated. The cost overruns are at this point approximately four times as bad as we said they were at the time.

[Q] Playboy: You were forced to make on-the-air corrections, presumably because the company was distributing the film. Perhaps you might not have if not for that.

[A] Reasoner: Among other things, the company people finished their piece with a picture of my doing a concluding statement across the lake from their power plant. And as I was talking, they superimposed Lincoln's quote "You can fool some of the people some of the time but not all of the people all of the time." Well, in the first place, it was a shrewd thing to do. But in the second place, it turned out that Lincoln probably never said it, and if he did, he did not say it in Clinton, Illinois.

[Q] Playboy: You televised a story critical of the power of the Mormon Church in Utah and of its efforts to take control of a member's farm. It didn't hold up, did it?

[A] Reasoner: I think we didn't have it. I don't think we . . . I think it was a legitimate idea and a legitimate story, but I don't think we had the documentation.

[Q] Playboy: It certainly appeared that there was some substance to the story. Why do you feel it wasn't there?

[A] Reasoner: My feeling was--when the story first came up--because any church has very great secular power, you have potential problems. I mean, it was true when Massachusetts and Connecticut were overwhelmingly Catholic, and it's been true in a lot of places and I thought it was true in Utah. [Reflective pause] I don't think it was an inaccurate story. I just don't think we established it.

[Q] Playboy: So it's a mixed record; despite your many triumphs of innovative reporting, the Westmoreland case is continuing and Mike now has to go to court over the story he did exposing Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Herbert, the officer who claimed that atrocities had been covered up by the high command in Vietnam.

[A] Reasoner: It's not Mike's year. Right or wrong, it's a pain in the neck.

[Q] Playboy:60 Minutes has also spawned a new cottage industry: teaching businessmen and politicians and the Pentagon how to deal with television interviews.

[A] Safer: I think that's about as valid an industry as snake oil.

[Q] Playboy: Are they selling the public a bill of goods?

[A] Safer: How can they know what 60 Minutes wants to do when most of the time, we don't know what 60 Minutes wants to do? These guys have no understanding of journalism. They have no real feel for what reporters think, what the process is. They think it's all cut and dried: Step A follows step B. Journalism is erratic. It's often irrational. It's the way certain facts fall into place. There is no process.

[Q] Playboy: Businesspeople sometimes do perceive 60 Minutes as being against big business, given the number of corporate targets you've gone after.

[A] Hewitt: If we're perceived as being against big business, well, we're a big business ourselves. We're probably a bigger business than what we usually report on. Business is antimedia. And the media are antibusiness; there's a very simple reason. There are only two things a businessman ever wants said about himself: what he pays his advertising agency to say and what he pays his PR people to say. I would love to go through life, if I were a car company, with people thinking that everybody who worked for me was named Mr. Goodwrench--or, if I were a tobacco company, that people thought my middle name was low tar and nicotine. That's why businesspeople go up the wall: We play with their carefully manicured image.

[Q] Playboy: As you said, CBS is a very large business. How often have you taken on CBS itself?

[A] Hewitt: Well, we've taken on CBS once, when we did a story on press junkets and said, "These are bad things for reporters to go on and CBS runs them."

[Q] Playboy: What else?

[A] Hewitt: We also took on the Ford Pinto, and Ford is one of our biggest advertisers. Ford dropped off that week but came back the next. We also took on the breakfast-food companies, which are among our biggest advertisers. I think we're living in an era when people expect us to do that.

[Q] Playboy: Some of your critics, whether corporate or individual, bring up the charge of "selective editing." How do you plead?

[A] Hewitt: Good God, I've never known a newspaperman in my life who didn't edit selectively.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you concede a potential for distortion in your choice of the outtakes that aren't useful to a story?

[A] Hewitt: No, wait a minute. That's a very important point. Outtakes are the news that isn't fit to print. Outtakes are what we put into the wastebasket. It's just that everybody has a right to come in and rummage around in our wastebasket. The newspapers have found that words like outtakes sound evil. "All right, Louie, what did you do with the outtakes?" That's ridiculous! Outtakes are what we decide is not worth putting on the air.

[Q] Playboy: What about the issue of oversimplifying, of trying to get every story down to 12 or 14 minutes?

[A] Safer: That's a tough question. I don't know. I think we try like hell to be fair. But space is the curse of all journalism, whether you're writing for The New York Times or Playboy or us.

[Q] Playboy: Have there been occasions when you've bent the rules in putting together a piece?

[A] Reasoner: There are the CBS standards that say, for example, that you cannot use a question from one part of the interview with an answer from another. You cannot stage; you cannot re-enact unless you say you're doing it. But you know the rules when you do a story. Normally, unless it's a very important person whose time is very valuable, we shoot with one camera. That means you shoot reverse questions. You're shooting over the subject's shoulder to get the correspondents asking questions for editing purposes. There is a famous story about why the rule that an interviewee must stay while you do the reverse shots, even though you don't need him, was made. When Walter Ulbricht was the Communist head of East Germany, Dan Schorr, then with CBS, got a rare interview with him. It was a real coup; it ran for a half hour on prime time. A month or so later, Paley was in Europe and had dinner with Schorr. He said, "That was a great interview! What I don't understand, though, is how you could dare to be so tough on him." Dan said, "Oh, he wasn't there then." The next day, the rule came down to have the interviewee stay and listen to the questions. [Laughs]

[A] Safer: Now we have very strict rules about editing. I can't recite them all to you, but they're here.

[Q] Playboy: Give us an example.

[A] Safer: Well, we can't do what you do all the time and what newspapers do all the time--which is perfectly legitimate, by the way--and that is to edit out of time sequence. If during this Interview we were finishing and you ended up saying, "Thank you very much, and by the way, did you ever commit a crime?" and I said, "Oh, yeah, I robbed a bank in 1948. I got away with $50,000," I think I know what your lead would be. Right?

[Q] Playboy: Probably.

[A] Safer: You'd take that exchange and put it at the beginning of your Interview and go from there. We can't do it that way. It doesn't mean that we do things absolutely chronologically. We might put that quote up at the top, but we would have to go through this torturous dance to explain what we were doing.

[Q] Playboy: The mechanical requirements are simply different. Splicing film is more exacting than editing in print, granted. But the contextual integrity is the issue.

[A] Safer: Come on, with you guys in print, if the guy said it, the guy said it. It doesn't matter where in the piece you put it. But it matters where in the piece we put it. Our critics say, "You took it out of context." Well, you guys take it out of context all the time! Our rules--which I think are not good rules, by the way--are a lot tougher.

[Q] Playboy: They're not good? Why not?

[A] Safer: Some of them are just foolish. We shouldn't be compelled to be fair; we should be fair, period. But I think some of the minutiae of the editing process are silly. I guess there has never been any other form of journalism so acutely examined as ours.

[Q] Playboy: By the print media?

[A] Safer: Of course! [With some exasperation] And not just by the print media, but by the public, by the people we go out and do stories on!

[Q] Playboy: When you go out and do a story, do you find that the celebrity of being one of the 60 Minutes correspondents has an effect on you?

[A] Safer: I think it makes you seek what you used to assume--privacy or anonymity or whatever you want to call it. Sometimes you have questions about people: Are they being nice simply because they want to know somebody who's visible?

[Q] Playboy: But the show provides access, certainly?

[A] Safer: People return your calls. You usually get a table at a restaurant. And professionally, it's good. If somebody doesn't want to give you an interview, he wouldn't give it to Jesus Christ if he called.

[Q] Playboy: Don, how do you keep your feet on the ground with all the attention your people get?

[A] Hewitt: Whatever the egos are here, whatever happens, for some reason I don't really understand, we generate a lot of psychic energy in this office. And we're able to project that psychic energy through the tube every Sunday. This place is an amalgam of talents, and nobody around here ever gets too big for his britches. The secretaries will slap me down if I do it. And that's why it works, by the way. Because to make the right decisions, I can't be Don Hewitt, producer of 60 Minutes; I have to be Don Hewitt, Joe Viewer. I have a very healthy respect for the Lions, the Kiwanians, the traveling salesmen. The one thing I can't abide is elitists.

[Q] Playboy: Whether or not you have people to remind you that you're mortal, you still have a great deal of power----

[A] Hewitt: I never think of myself as powerful. I'm always stunned when people say it.

[Q] Playboy: But you must realize that you are.

[A] Hewitt: Probably, yes. But it doesn't compute in my head.

[Q] Playboy: Nevertheless, running America's number-one-rated show is a fact--as is the possibility that you could dictate to the viewer or be as manipulative as you wanted with the audience.

[A] Hewitt: Hey, wait a minute. I don't know what you mean by manipulative. How is that any different from what Playboy does with its readers? Anyone can be manipulative. The Pope can be manipulative. [Testily] I don't know what the hell that means.

[Q] Playboy: Effectively, that once you establish contact with the viewers and draw them in--once you have them "in the tent"--you can do whatever you choose.

[A] Hewitt: Yeah, more or less. But one of the things I'm always curious about is, if our TV critics look at that [points to office TV set] as the boob tube, why are they always on our backs? We may have elevated the boob tube and helped cultivate a little of that vast wasteland!

[Q] Playboy: You've never used your position to make a political statement or take a stand. Why?

[A] Hewitt: I'm ideologically neuter. Today I may love Ronald Reagan, but by this afternoon, I may hate him. One of the reasons this broadcast is successful is that it has no point of view. But I don't take positions, because I don't know enough to do that. I'm always bored and astounded by editorial writers who decide they know what to tell the world.

[Q] Playboy: You believe in the wisdom of the masses?

[A] Hewitt: I like the masses. I hate the left wing and the right wing, but I like the people in the great middle wing.

[Q] Playboy: Because they're buffeted on either side by absolutes?

[A] Hewitt: Right! Right! That's true. I'm not so egomaniacal that I'm going to tell people what's right and what's wrong. Everybody who works here is middle-class and proud of being middle-class. We may live a lot better than most because we make a lot of money, but we still have middle-class attitudes.

[Q] Playboy: What about the show's becoming too middle-class, too bland? Some people feel that with fewer confrontations and other encounters, the show has developed middle-age spread.

[A] Hewitt: I don't know. We've been on the air for 16 years, and we're still doing better than a 35 percent share of the audience every Sunday night. Middle-age spread? I hope not. I go in every Sunday as if it's both the first and the last show I'll ever do.

[Q] Playboy: Morley, Don feels that the broadcast appeals to the great middle class. How, given your salaries and perks, can you maintain your perspective?

[A] Safer: That's a fair question but not only to highly paid, highly visible journalists--a fair question for every reporter, including somebody on a small-town newspaper, because reporters as a breed tend to be pretty arrogant, to feel, if not above the crowd, then apart from the crowd. It's a strength and a weakness at the same time. But does a doctor stop being a doctor when he becomes rich? I think he feels the same responsibility. If you're a professional, you're able to separate your life. Look, I was a reporter in the street at 19 and never went to college. So, obviously, my perceptions aren't that much different from most people's.

[Q] Playboy: Diane, Don has been talking about the program's basic appeal to Joe Viewer, to the middle class. With your background as a Junior Miss and in Wellesley College and the Nixon White House, and now the big salary, can you share the perspective of the middle class?

[A] Sawyer: I care about the same things. First of all--I don't know who you think I am! My grandparents on both sides were farmers. I am from a terrific, probably very middle-class family, and I care about the same things the viewer cares about.

[Q] Playboy: OK. Ed, how do you manage to get away from big-time journalism and all its trappings?

[A] Bradley: I have a friend, singer Jimmy Buffett. From time to time, I go on the road with him and play in the band. I play the tambourine or the cowbell, with the most god-awful beat you've ever heard. But it's a wonderful feeling for me to get out and do that.

[Q] Playboy: You seem the most restless; is it possible you might move on?

[A] Bradley: I don't see myself being here 20 years from now. I'm 43 years old. Jeez, I don't want to do this for another 20 years. I don't know. Maybe now I have to start looking, but I've never thought that way and I don't want to start now. Maybe I'm just too stubborn to change. But it has always taken care of itself. When I get to that fork in the road, I'll make that decision--but not until I reach that fork.

[Q] Playboy: You're shortly going to be renegotiating your contract. Do you have many options besides 60 Minutes?

[A] Bradley: No, there are more options on the way up than when you're there at the top. There's a lot of room to maneuver on the bottom of the pyramid, but when you're at the top or near the top, there's not much room.

[Q] Playboy: There's always Paris.

[A] Bradley: [Laughs] Yep. Yep. Joe Masraff, who was kind of my mentor in Paris--Joe taught me how to cook, among other things--I used to tell him, "When I get back from Vietnam, I'm going to save about $30,000 and come back to Paris and retire." Well, the last time I saw Joe, he said, "So, my friend, you must have the $30,000 to retire on." I said, "Well, Joe, you know how it is with inflation and all."

[Q] Playboy: Harry, what do you say about keeping your feet on the ground amid all the wealth and fame?

[A] Reasoner: James Kilpatrick, the conservative columnist, once said that all reporters should remember that even though they're invited to sup at the homes of the powerful they should remember that tomorrow they may be begging for crumbs at the kitchen door. Your clout is because you're CBS or Playboy or The New York Times. It's not because it's you.

[Q] Playboy: Let's finish by returning to the theme of what makes this show tick. It doesn't appear to have much to do with a Harvard Business School approach to management or organization.

[A] Safer: [Laughs] It's haphazard, very much unplanned. People write books about the broadcast and analyze it as if Hewitt and the rest of us sat around this big table plotting this show.

[Q] Playboy: There don't seem to be a lot of rules and regulations around here. No memos or meetings?

[A] Bradley: I've got a memo here on my desk somewhere. [Searches through papers] This is the second memo I've received from Don Hewitt in four years [laughs]. We don't have memos and we don't have staff meetings.

[A] Sawyer: My first week here, I kept walking around, looking for any clue about how things worked. And then it occurred to me, it's like . . . it's like going to a mixer; there's no form. There are just simple communications, and you find a producer in the hall and you say, "What do you think about . . . ?" And maybe he'll say, "I don't like it," and then you'll walk on to the next producer and say, "What on you think about . . .?" and he'll say, "I love it!" and you've got yourself a story. [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: Don has supposedly written only two memos in 16 years?

[A] Sawyer: And held one meeting, which was a disaster, in 1967. The tone is set at every level; you don't have to do a story if you're not interested in it. You learn that very early. The correspondents and the producers and the researchers never have to do a story. At every level, you have the option of saying, "I'm not interested in this one. I'll do something else," so that only people who really care about it are part of it.

[Q] Playboy: Do you, like the others, expect to have turf problems?

[A] Sawyer: Well, initially, everyone has been extraordinarily generous about producers and about stories and about letting me get my feet wet. What happens a year from now--check in with me. Let's see what it's like when a story is thrown out into the middle of the floor and we all have to go for it.

[Q] Playboy: Harry, do you think 60 Minutes can last much longer at its present peak?

[A] Reasoner: I would guess so. Even if a decline began, or an erosion, which would not be too surprising after 16 years, I don't think there would be a dramatic erosion. In other words, I don't think 60 Minutes would be number three one year and number 30 the next. But there may not be any decline at all. As long as Don Hewitt retains his 16 years of wonder and amazement at the fact that people can talk on film, I guess we're all right.

[Q] Playboy: Morley, do you have any criticisms of the broadcast?

[A] Safer: They would probably be benign.

[Q] Playboy: Benign criticisms are better than none.

[A] Safer: Oh, I don't know. They really are benign. Well, one of them is not so benign, but I'm not going to tell you what it is.

[Q] Playboy: Go ahead.

[A] Safer: You won't tell anybody, right?

[Q] Playboy: No, it's just between you and us.

[A] Safer: I'd like to see more soft pieces--arts pieces--on the air.

[Q] Playboy: That's pretty benign. But wouldn't you lose some of your audience?

[A] Safer: I think that when you have the advantage of what 60 Minutes covers, you can do it. We wouldn't do it if it weren't interesting. I'm probably the only one who would say that. I would also like to feel less compelled to tie things into neat packages and to leave some time to explain the contradictions. It may tend to leave some people confused. That's not a bad thing.

[Q] Playboy: Ed, as you look back someday at your career and your visible success, what will you think about?

[A] Bradley: The good things we've been able to do, the places we've been. I still want to go back to Vietnam or Pakistan. Here [pointing to a picture on the wall of himself in the mountains of Pakistan]. This is me in the Khyber Pass. For me to be able to stand up in the Khyber Pass and say, "Boy, here's little Butch Bradley from West Philly. Alexander the Great passed through here 2500 years ago"--God, I mean, that's a kick!

I had to write a new will a few years ago. My divorce was final and I had to make some changes. What did I do with the thing? [Searches messy desk] Here. The last line, see? It says that the last five percent of my assets should be used to toss a party with as much food and drink the money will allow. When it's time to punch out, if you had some fun, what more can you ask for?

[A] Wallace: Partly because of the way things are run, by and large, 60 Minutes is the happiest shop I've ever worked in. Another part is a matter of pride in our work and our success. Of course, I've gotten older, too. And I've gotten to the point, at 66, where people don't get angry at an old man. When you're 46, you get angry; by the time you're 66, you're a character.

[Q] Playboy: In your book, you say that your epitaph--we're talking prematurely here----

[A] Wallace: Not if I keep playing tennis the way I do.

[Q] Playboy: Your epitaph would be Tough-But Fair. Anything to add to that?

[A] Wallace: Not a thing.

[Q] Playboy: And looking back on your career? Contented? Vindicated?

[A] Wallace: Fulfilled, yes. Look, I paid my dues along the way. Little by little, found myself. Gave up some things, conceivably, in pursuit of my profession. I don't say there are no regrets. I made some choices. But by and large, I can't think of a more useful way to have spent a professional life. And if there have been some casualties along the way, you make choices and live with those choices.

[Q] Playboy: Don, one thing seems to be clear about this show's success: You've had a group of idiosyncratic journalists and have imposed virtually no structure on them. That way, when your imitators say, "We should structure it the way they do----"

[A] Hewitt: [Excitedly] That's right! That's why they can't do it! There's a lot of schlock out there. Nationally, ABC's magazine is OK, but NBC has been to the well--how many times?--and come back dry with First Tuesday or Second Saturday or Holy Thursday. They keep looking at the structure and they keep finding that this is not structure; this is people. It's just a bunch of people, and if you ask us how do we do it, we can't tell you!

[Q] Playboy: There's no recipe.

[A] Hewitt: There's no recipe. Absolutely; you've got it. [Laughs heartily] The reason nobody else can fake this cake is that there's no recipe for it. And that's why the network leaves us alone, because they figure the whole fucking thing is so fragile. You know, it could fall apart. If a big gust of wind came along, it might blow the whole thing over, and they don't want to mess with it. The corporate brass get to testify before the Senate on how much of a national institution we've become--but they have no idea how the hell it works!

Hell, it's luck, as I said. You're looking at a man upon whom God bestowed Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Harry Reasoner, Ed Bradley, once Dan Rather and now Diane Sawyer. A man with just enough common sense to know what to do with the gift.

"Mike and I have argued this publicly: 'Haw do you get flies--with honey or with vinegar?"'

"I caught Al Capp without his psychiatrist. He was sweating and uncomfortable, almost a butterfly on a pin."

"A number of other things would have made me happy. But this is the Valhalla of TV."

"'What do you care what they think, as long as you get them into the tent?'"