The Sellout of CBS News

Only a few details of the internal machinations of CBS News were familiar to me when I went to work there in 1985--the year that CBS and CBS News themselves became the news. I had worked as a reporter and an editor--or, as people in television say, "in print"--and I had friends from print who had sojourned in TV, and some of them had run screaming into the night. So I made a solemn vow before I went into TV to keep a close watch on my mental balance, and I promised myself that if it ever got too crazy, I would get out. What I probably was naïve about was CBS; but, then again, probably nothing could have prepared me for what life at CBS turned out to be.

I did, of course, know of CBS' great tradition of broadcast journalism; the legacy Ed Murrow had established at CBS was a powerful one. It represented an ideal: "For any print journalist who wanted to work in television," one veteran CBS producer told me, "the first choice of network in the Fifties was the one where Edward R. Murrow worked." And so the people who came aboard at CBS News in the late Fifties and early Sixties believed they were following in the footsteps of the best in the business.

•

By the time I turned up at the CBS Morning News control room for a final job interview with executive producer Jon Katz, I had done my basic homework, learning a bit about the show's recent history. I knew that as news-division president, Van Gordon Sauter had tried to turn the Morning News around, to compete with Good Morning America and Today.

When Sauter took over the CBS News division in 1981, though he was a personable, even friendly man who called a lot of his co-workers "big guy," it was understood that he had not been appointed president to be charming; he was there to invigorate the CBS Evening News, whose ratings had dropped off after the departure of Walter Cronkite. Together with his deputy, Edward M. Joyce, and the then--executive producer of the Evening News, Howard Stringer, Sauter gave the program what he considered the necessary stylistic changes: Dan Rather was loosened up; there were fewer stories based in Washington and more features that one CBS correspondent called the "very" school of journalism--they made the viewer feel "very" happy or "very" sad. Eventually, the ratings would go up and, in the meantime, Sauter and Joyce turned their attention to the morning program.

After changing the name from Morning to the CBS Morning News, they focused on the anchor team of Charles Kuralt and Diane Sawyer. They dropped Kuralt, replaced him with Bill Kurtis and then, in a move that stunned CBS News staffers, brought in George Merlis as executive producer. Merlis' last assignment had been at the same post at ABC's Good Morning America, which was produced not by the news division but by ABC Entertainment.

The CBS Morning News did well under Merlis' reconstruction, until Sawyer left her co-anchor spot to join 60 Minutes. Then the ratings dropped again, and the hiring of former Miss America and sports-caster Phyllis George--a decision endorsed high in the corporate ranks of CBS--did little to restore them.

When I reached the control room that morning in May 1985, I could see that Katz was in his element. He strode about the place, rubbing his hands, slapping people on the back, exhorting everyone who could make a difference to "speed this baby up." When he finally noticed me, he said, "Sit here," parking me in his executive producer's chair, while he went off to the studio to give the anchors a pep talk. Seated in his chair, I felt a bit like an impostor who was about to be unmasked. The entire scene was slightly overwhelming. In front of me was a vast bank of monitors, some with tape fast-forwarding, some in reverse, others stationary. The monitors were labeled with codes--M-I, V-3, L-Sat--that were beyond my grasp. "It's coming over the London feed now!" someone called out. A news clerk burst through the room on his way to the studio with an update for the news block (the half-hourly five-minute news summary), while a few steps below me, the sound men argued about levels. A director called out camera cues. To my left sat a group of operators whose job, I gathered, was to superimpose printed words on the screen. Behind me, a woman in a tight-fitting dress, whom I took to be a producer, was complaining to another man that she couldn't hear what was being said on the main screen. Hers was the only conversation I could understand. Given the decibel level in the room, I wondered how anyone could hear anything. I felt slightly relieved to see Katz come back from the studio.

"Figured it out yet?"

"I could use a little help," I said, trying to be cool.

"Those three monitors on the left. The top one is G.M.A., the one below is Today. The third one's us."

"That's great," I said. "That's the one part I understood."

Next to Katz, a short man with a trim beard laughed.

Katz said, "That's all you really need to know around here. Our stuff has to be better than theirs."

"Not always easy," said the man with the trim beard, who turned out to be Katz's deputy. "I'm David Corvo, by the way."

"You two haven't met?" Katz acted surprised.

"No, Jon, you didn't introduce us," Corvo said dryly. With a glance at the left bank of monitors, he added, "Fuck. G.M.A. has Victoria Principal. That's a nice hit."

Katz whirled around in his chair. "Jane!" he yelled to the far end of the control room. "Jane! Get over here!"

A tall, attractive woman with a mass of dark hair broke off her conversation and hurried toward him.

"What's the matter, Jon?"

"See who G.M.A. has?"

"I know."

"Well, how come we don't have her?"

"She wouldn't do us, Jon," the woman said sweetly. "We tried and tried, but her agent said she would only be doing G.M.A. as a favor to Hartman. She wasn't even going to do the Today show."

Corvo uttered a short laugh. "What Jane means," he said, "is that not being second is better than not being third."

"Sounds like bullshit to me, Jane," Katz said.

As the woman walked away, he said, "See what I have to put up with."

"Who's Jane?" I asked him.

"Jane Kaplan. One of the bookers. She's been with the show about eight years."

"Bookers book guests?"

"Hey--we're catching on. Next thing you'll be running the place."

"Camera two!" the director called out.

We were watching a discussion about the merits of Reagan's Star Wars program when Corvo leaped out of his seat.

"That name's misspelled!"

He dashed over to the Chyron crew, the people responsible for our fancy computer-generated graphics, and the misspelled name was quickly wiped off the screen.

"No, don't correct it now!" Corvo shouted to the Chyron crew as he returned to his seat. "It's too late now. Jesus Christ!"

Katz leaned toward me.

"See the big screen in the middle?" he said. "That's going out over the air. If that's ever black at seven o'clock, we're in trouble." The show broke for a commercial, and Katz said, "Come on. Let's go down to my office and we can talk."

We reached his office and flicked on the TVs. As we watched the show, we went through my ideas.

"Carl Icahn is trying to take over TWA," I said. "You should interview him."

"Good idea," Katz said. "If we can get him."

"Malcolm Forbes is going to bid for a Fabergé egg at one of the auction houses. If he gets it, he'll own more than the Russians."

"Two for two so far," Katz said.

After I'd pitched ideas for another five minutes, Katz cut me off.

"Listen, I think you could work here, but I want to be sure you understand what this place is like. I mean, there's a terror here about taking risks, doing anything new, and I want you to be happy here. You can't change this business, and the people who try don't last."

I couldn't say I hadn't been warned.

•

My first few mornings as a senior producer of the Morning News, I sat in the studio, observing both anchors at work. It was obvious to me that Kurtis came prepared. He was clearly one of the most proficient news readers in the business, and whether he was reading the news or doing interviews, he conducted himself with effortless grace. Phyllis, on the other hand, flitted between the studio and her dressing room in a state of near panic, often being briefed en route by equally panicky producers. She had no news background and was constantly concerned about her appearance, which seemed to me to be a case of misplaced priorities, because if there was one thing Phyllis did not need to worry about, it was how she looked. She was every bit as glamorous as when she achieved celebrity on the beauty-queen circuit in 1971, first as Miss Texas, then as Miss America. Since then, she had hosted game shows, co-hosted Candid Camera, squeezed in an 11-month marriage to movie producer Bob Evans, divorced him and married John Y. Brown, Jr., the multimillionaire former governor of Kentucky, by whom she had two children. Between segments, there was always a touch of make-up necessary, or a sweep of the brush from Vincent, her hairdresser, who was forever in attendance, and enormous concern over whether or not her lipstick had smudged.

The process of booking guests, with which I was to be involved, began long before the morning preceding the broad-cast. It was the futures unit's task to line (continued on page 76) CBS News (continued from page 66) up interview guests for entertainment features and for news events that could be anticipated. A list of upcoming events was compiled by a researcher; then the senior staff would meet and decide what could and should be booked ahead of time. These assignments were then given to the bookers, who would beg, cajole and solicit guests, either directly or through their press agents. The bookers' main equipment was their book or Rolodex, with its valuable home phone numbers and contacts. When a booking was firm, it was placed on a grid to which the senior staff could refer. On any morning, we hoped to have seven of the next day's show's ten segments booked; the balance would be made up with news stories.

A live, two-hour, five-day-a-week news broadcast is like a giant animal that must eat constantly to maintain its weight. The Morning News devoured people and stories and was always hungry for more. It was a difficult place to manage, and Katz's solution was not to systematize at all but to fly by the seat of his pants and try to carry the unruly mass along on a wave of enthusiasm.

I was being groomed to take charge of booking and I did what was expected of me while my education went on. I came up with ideas, handed out assignments to the bookers, read their information packets and did my part in getting the show on the air every day.

The hours were brutal. The day began at six a.m. and rarely ended before eight p.m., and there were always phone calls at home in the evenings and on weekends and in the middle of the night. After my first few weeks, I was given a beeper. My wife hated it, and I could never leave it lying around the apartment for fear she would test its durability with her heel.

But after a while, I got used to the hours. The alarm would go off at six. By 6:30, I would have showered and read one newspaper. I would read another in the cab on the way to the Broadcast Center. I'd arrive just before seven and watch the show in the control room, which continued to hold its fascination for me.

Rarely did a show begin without a premonition that something would go wrong, and usually something did. A line would go down, or we'd lose audio, or a guest would be a total bore or, worse, completely out of it. David Carradine was our biggest dud--he was in a hostile and obnoxious mood when Jane Kaplan picked him up at the airport, and we still, to our subsequent regret, put him on the air (because the show, as I learned to my disbelief, had no backup piece in its bank). Other times, guests would go off on strange tangents, as TV actress Phylicia Ayers Rashad did, insisting that she owed her success to God and wanting to talk about little else. Meanwhile, the anchor began to turn green, and the booker in the control room went white. Or, worse still, one of the guests would be late. Then segments would have to be switched, messing up Katz's nicely drawn plans for a well-paced broadcast. Instead of being able to pick up the show's pace at a crucial moment with an appearance by, say, rock star Phil Collins, we would get stuck with two doctors talking about strokes. Katz would drop his head into his hands, and within seconds, the phone in front of him would ring and he would pick it up, knowing it was probably Joyce or Stringer.

By nine o'clock, when the show ended, most of us were emotionally drained. That's when preparations for the next day began.

•

The choice of news anchors is a prerogative reserved for the very highest levels of management at CBS. Executive producers rarely, if ever, have a say in these matters; and in this case, neither did Ed Joyce, president of CBS News. The decision to hire Phyllis George was made above him.

"It is fair to say that it was not something I wanted to do," Joyce said later. "It was a foolish decision and it certainly wasn't mine. I can't absolve myself completely, because in the end, I acquiesced, but it was Sauter and [CBS Broadcast Group president Gene] Jankowski who wanted her."

Joyce and others at CBS News maintain that Sauter had had Phyllis George in mind all along. He had been instrumental, after all, in bringing her to CBS Sports when he was its president, and it was his idea for her to make those twinkly sideline appearances during The NFL Today. According to Ed Hookstratten, Phyllis' agent, "[Sauter's] endorsement of George was strongly supported by Gene Jankowski," Sauter's own boss, who also happened to be a longtime admirer and friend of Phyllis' and her husband's.

"How they could make the choice of Phyllis is beyond me," says Dick Salant, former president of CBS News. "They knew Phyllis was a hopeless case from the sports division. But there again, Jankowski had no idea what news was about. He always used to say, 'If you don't have the steak, sell the sizzle.' "

It quickly became apparent to me that it was not easy to build a program around Phyllis George. Every day we performed all sorts of inverse somersaults so that Phyllis would think she was doing substantive stories when, in fact, she was not. Almost all the substantive stories--certainly anything that concerned a major political or social issue--wound up with Kurtis. Phyllis got the human-interest stuff.

I had been watching the Cable News Network in the fish bowl--the glassed-in area where the senior producers sat--on April 4, 1985, the day convicted rapist Gary Dotson was brought out of an Illinois prison. With his wimpy mustache and downcast eyes, mumbling "No comment" as he was escorted away, he did not seem to fit the cloak of the wrongfully imprisoned. Nor did I care for his erstwhile victim, the unconvincing Cathleen Webb, who was now recanting her rape charge. As I listened each day to the live hearings conducted by Illinois governor James Thompson, her account of her born-again experience seemed less pertinent than her studied pauses, her lack of memory for detail.

In the meantime, however, Dotson-Webb had escalated through those various phases--from story to carnival--that delight the publishers of tabloids and the producers of morning TV. America couldn't get enough of them and had relished every moment of the hearings as Thompson pressed Webb for more details on the condition of her underpants. Over the previous weekend, he had announced that he was commuting Dotson's sentence to time served, even though he did not believe that Dotson had been wrongfully convicted at his trial. Call it human interest if you will--as a couple, Dotson and Webb were the most prized morning-show guests in the country at that moment.

Over the previous several weeks, of course, we had booked and "done" everybody peripheral to the case. We'd interviewed the families, lawyers, friends--we'd even had Cathy Webb on the show when she announced her recantation. Throughout the hearings, our bookers had baby-sat, guarded homes and hotel rooms, phoned in questions and fought off the enemy, making sure we were represented on the story. Now the action had moved from Chicago to New York. Webb had arrived on a United flight from Chicago the day before Dotson was due to arrive on a plane chartered by NBC. It was evident that Today would have the first live interview with the two of them. Our best chance was to be second. But now, as I was about to learn for the first time, we were about to hit a snag.

"There's a problem." The singsong (continued on page 161) CBS News (continued from page 76) voice was Janice Platt's. She was one of the bookers.

"Shit," I said. "What now?"

"They're on G.M.A. second. They don't want to do us at all."

I was silent.

"You know what I think?" Janice said.

"I think we'd never have had this problem if they'd let us do what Today did--charter a plane."

I went back to the fish bowl to await the next bulletin. A few minutes later, Janice called again.

"You want me to still try to book them?"

"Yes," I said.

It was the philosophy we all lived by. When in doubt, book 'em. In the final analysis, you could always cancel, and we did. Often.

By the time I left the newsroom that evening at eight o'clock, Dotson and Webb had still not agreed to appear on the show. It was decided that two bookers were to show up at the G.M.A. lobby at eight a.m. and try at the last minute to persuade Dotson and Webb to appear on CBS. We would be third, but we'd known losses of pride before on the Morning News.

My alarm went off at six the next morning. I got up and turned on the TV. I had logged seven hours of sleep, a blessing. All too often, the phone would ring at three a.m. Some problem had arisen or, worse, a celebrity had died--peacefully, presumably, in his or her bed--in which case the overnight staff would want me to think of someone who could say nice things about the dead person.

In the taxi, I glanced over the Times and the "Life" section of USA Today. When I got to the Broadcast Center, the usual line of limos was outside the entrance. Guests were emerging, people who didn't know me but for whose presence there I was partly responsible. An odd feeling. On the way, I passed the greenroom, where the guests who'd already arrived were being served coffee and orange juice. It was always a bizarre mix--Senators, actresses, children who owed their lives to a medical miracle, ordinary people caught up in some horrifying news event that they were about to share with 10,000,000 others. They waited their turn to be escorted to the studio, being entertained by one of the set decorators, Budd Gourmen, who took upon himself the role of jester, loosening up our guests so that our anchors could freeze them.

I helped myself to some coffee and went into the control room. The director and the technicians were in their final stages of preparation. Corvo was in his chair, surrounded by the usual chaos. I settled in next to him.

"Thirty seconds!" shouted the floor director.

On the enormous bank of monitors in front of us, I watched Bill and Phyllis attach their mikes and adjust their smiles. Some tape was coming over the London feed. Charts of mortgage rates covered several screens.

"Fifteen seconds!"

"Quiet!"

Kurtis, sleek and smooth as usual, in pale-gray suit and snappy tie, told us what was in store, then tossed to Phyllis, radiant as always, in a pink dress. Her hair, which had been worked on for an hour, was perfect. So was her make-up. Her cheeks lit up the morning. She stumbled over one tease for an upcoming segment, and Kurtis smiled his on-camera forgiveness, then read the news block.

At 7:10, I strapped on a headset to hear what Dotson and Webb were saying on the Today show. Jane Pauley was doing the interview. The couple seemed nervous and reticent. Webb looked frumpy in a flower-patterned dress, and Dotson tugged at his tie. Their lawyers did most of the talking.

During the local cutaway (during which affiliates insert local headlines and weather), the noise in the control room rose again. Two techs were arguing about the audio levels. The associate director, Eric Siegel, wanted to know where in his contract it said that he had to sit next to someone who put mayonnaise on a salami sandwich.

"Call for you on 46!"

I picked up the phone. It was Shari Lampert, another booker, who in partnership with Janice was on the trail of Dotson-Webb. She was excited.

"They said they'll do it!"

"It'll be tight," I said, glancing at the clock, which showed 7:48. "They haven't been on G.M.A. yet."

"I know," Shari said breathlessly. "They're on at 8:10. Janice talked to them before they went in and they said they'll do it."

"Call for you on 82!"

"Hold on, Shari," I said.

I passed the word to Corvo and punched 82.

"They're going to do it!" Janice shrieked.

"I know," I said. "Shari's on the other line."

"Can you believe we're chasing these two all over town and this schmeggege driver wants to stop for coffee?"

"Listen up," I said. "As soon as you get them in the car, one of you call and let us know they're coming. Then take a cab."

Joan Lunden did the G.M.A. interview. It wasn't any more lively than Today's. During the interview, Corvo said, "By the way, does Phyllis know anything about this?"

Phyllis had received a background packet the night before, which gave her the history and outcome of the case, as well as a list of suggested questions.

"Has she read it?" Corvo asked.

"Shit, David, I guess," I said.

Corvo knew better than to take chances. At 8:15, between segments, he slid off his seat and went back to the studio to make sure she'd read it. She had.

I looked at the clock as the Lunden interview ended: 8:17. Our entertainment reviewer, Pat Collins, poked Corvo in the back.

"You're bumping me for this?"

She was only half joking.

"No, Pat," he said, "you're still on. We're blowing off something else."

Two minutes later, the phone rang.

"They're on their way!" Janice yelled. "Shari's with them!"

She hung up, and I let Corvo know, so he could change the line-up if necessary.

Ten minutes later, a page ran in from the greenroom. Shari, flushed and breathless, was two paces behind him. It was 8:33.

"Take 'em right in," Corvo said.

Shari darted out to the greenroom, then found out that the message had been relayed ahead of her. Dotson and Webb were already being seated in the studio. We could see them on the monitor. Catching her breath, Shari began filling me in on the details of the chase. Corvo stroked his beard and listened, mildly amused.

Janice arrived in the control room just as we were coming out of a commercial.

"Ready camera one!" the director shouted. "And roll!"

The cheerful intro music started up and the printed title Newsmaker appeared on the screen. When the music subsided, Phyllis read:

"For the past two months, we've been hearing about the strange case of convicted rapist Gary Dotson and of the woman who now says the rape never happened--Cathleen Webb. Today, three days after Dotson's sentence was commuted, he and Mrs. Webb are talking to each other in public for the first time, and they've joined us this morning with their lawyers."

The camera gave us a group shot as Phyllis, underscoring the fact that they'd been on other shows before the Morning News, said brightly, "Do you all feel like you've been at a track meet this morning?"

Corvo groaned.

Addressing them as if they were young lovers, Phyllis continued, "What were the first words you said to each other at your meeting last night?"

"I don't remember who spoke first," Webb said, "but I asked for Gary's forgiveness and it was given sincerely."

"I was nervous," Dotson said, "but I'm glad I met her."

"Did you have dinner together?" Phyllis asked, continuing the lover theme.

"No," they replied in unison.

"Didn't go that far, eh?" Phyllis remarked.

At that point, Dotson's lawyer, Warren Lupel, interrupted with some legal pabulum. Then Phyllis asked Webb if she could live with her burden. Webb said she no longer had a burden and thanked her husband and the Lord for their support.

I glanced at Corvo, but he was being summoned to the phone.

"Is this a new beginning for you?" Phyllis asked Dotson.

"Oh, definitely."

Lupel interrupted again to talk about the upcoming effort to reverse Dotson's previous conviction.

"Why did you go on the morning talk shows?" Phyllis asked.

"To show Gary's character," Webb said. "Gary doesn't have the character of a rapist."

Phyllis then asked Dotson about his movie offers. "I saw you signing autographs yesterday," she said, "and you were handling it like a real pro." This brought out a brief smile, so Phyllis tried an abrupt transition. "How is your mother?"

Dotson assured Phyllis that his mother was fine.

With Corvo on the phone, the director looked at me. There was no reason not to wrap it up.

"Thirty seconds!"

Then Phyllis said, "How about you two shaking hands at the end of a long day?"

They obliged.

Then, with a breezy laugh, Phyllis said, "How about a hug?"

Dotson and Webb smiled awkwardly, frozen.

"We'll be right back," Phyllis told the viewers, all the time smiling radiantly. Clearly, she thought nothing was wrong.

The director spun round. His look demanded confirmation that something was definitely wrong here. I faced the screen in stunned silence. Corvo hung up the phone.

"Were we still on the air when she said that?" he snapped.

"We sure were," I said.

The director nodded.

"Oh, shit," Corvo said through gritted teeth. "Shit, shit, shit."

The phone in front of me rang. It was Stringer.

"Yes," I said, "that was what she said. Yes, I found it hard to believe, too. No, nobody else here could believe it, either."

Over the next few weeks, The Hug was the subject of hundreds of columns by the critics and became a joke on The Tonight Show and even wound up as the subject of a New Yorker cartoon. If everyone who had heard about The Hug had actually seen it, our ratings would have topped G.M.A.'s and Today's combined. We took stock of the full extent of the damage in the fish bowl. It always seemed to me that events on the screen took on an inordinate importance within the CBS News building; from that standpoint, the whole world was watching all the time. But for once, I had to admit that CBS was not overreacting. We were taking broadsides, and every critic in the industry seemed to have a negative opinion.

Then, as I flipped through the Daily News, I came across an item in Liz Smith's column. It stated flatly that Bill Kurtis would soon be leaving the Morning News. I had to assume that, with all the flap over Phyllis, that fact had momentarily escaped notice.

Early in June 1985, Kurtis' future was finally settled. He was going back to WBBM, a CBS affiliate in Chicago. After the show on Friday, June 14, there were a lot of sad faces among the producers at his goodbye party in the studio. Stringer made a florid speech; all the CBS News executives had turned out. So had Rather. After all, since Kurtis was going to WBBM, he was still part of the CBS "family." A five-piece band played, and singer Sandra Reaves-Phillips sang a salute to Kurtis. There was a gag reel, too, featuring one female co-anchor after another--Meredith Vieira, Jane Wallace, Maria Shriver (all substitutes) and Phyllis--each saying her piece about Bill. It ended with Diane Sawyer, who declared, "I don't care what the other girls say, I did it with him first."

Then the people closest to Kurtis went down to his office and drank straight whiskey.

•

With Kurtis gone, we went to work to follow Joyce's mandate: to restructure the broadcast around Phyllis. It was only two months since the Morning News had received a complimentary notice in The Wall Street Journal for carrying the most news of the three morning programs. But, in fact, by midsummer, no longer was any thought being given to exercising what Salant had once called "professional news judgment."

"Where's the glitz?" Katz would say at our morning meetings. "We need some more glitz here."

Katz would look at his line-up each day and, except for a lead story or two, would exclude virtually everything that had the potential to be dull or merely informative. "We need more heat, less light," he would say, and the staff was ordered to raise the temperature. A debate between two qualified people on a matter that might be of some interest to a lot of Americans wasn't enough. The debate had to feature a star or stars, a celebrity of one sort or another or people who would add "heat."

I began to gripe at Katz.

"Jesus Christ, McCabe!" he shot back. "You're starting to sound like one of Murrow's ghosts. Don't you think there's enough of them around here?"

After Phyllis went on a long-planned vacation, I held my regular meeting with the entertainment bookers. They often had to invoke the names of the anchors to get guests. In this case, the name was Maria Shriver's, since it was Maria who was going to be substituting for Phyllis. I warned them not to do it.

"The executive producer makes those decisions," I said. They greeted the reminder as I had expected they would, with silence.

Then Jane said, "You know, this really makes things very difficult. People are saying they don't want to be interviewed by Phyllis."

They had told me this before, and I had discounted it. It wasn't easy to get guests in August, and I had attributed their complaints to general exhaustion from working the phones all day. But now they were insistent. They claimed that if it weren't for Phyllis, a lot more celebrities would be willing to appear on the program.

"Like who?" I asked.

"Dustin Hoffman."

"That's because he's an old friend of Pat Collins'," I said.

Jane looked at her feet.

"No," she said, "that isn't the reason. He didn't want to be interviewed by Phyllis."

"OK," I said, "who else?"

"Tom Hanks."

Jane had a list of at least half a dozen major names. I was surprised. Dotson-Webb, after all, had been three months earlier; and although there had been gaffes and awkwardness since then, Phyllis did celebrity interviews better than she did anything else.

"Face it," one PR agent told me. "Your show has a major liability, and her name is Phyllis George."

I told Corvo what I'd been told and he said, "Let's meet with Katz." That afternoon, I laid out for Katz everything I had gone through with Corvo. Katz listened quietly. For once, there was no banter. He just sat there and listened, and when I was done, he said, "Thanks for telling me this."

The following morning, when I went in for the show, I was hailed by Corvo in the corridor.

"Peter! I need that list!"

"What list?" I said.

He lowered his voice and steered me toward his office. "The list of stars who won't do the show because of Phyllis."

"How come?" I said.

"Katz needs it for Joyce," he confided, "and don't mention this to anyone."

•

When Joyce eventually agreed that Phyllis had to go, it was a dramatic reversal of his position of only a few months earlier. In May, he had ordered that the show be restructured around her. But by August, he had changed his mind. "I felt it was important that we get back to being a respectable broadcast," he now says, "and the only way to do this was to fire Phyllis. I also felt it was unfair to hold the executive producer accountable for the debacle that was not his fault."

But the desire to get rid of Phyllis met with opposition from above. "It was a showdown," Joyce says, "and both Sauter and Jankowski were firmly opposed at first. Finally, they acquiesced, just as I had acquiesced when they hired her. Eventually, they said, 'OK, it's up to you. Do what you like. You want to do this? Go ahead.' "

Joyce called Hookstratten, Phyllis' agent.

"I think the time has come to replace Phyllis," he told Hookstratten. "How do you feel about that?"

One thing Hookstratten felt strongly about was that CBS honor the terms of Phyllis' contract. The contract said "No cut," and he wanted to make sure that she would collect her salary for the next two years and four months--reportedly more than $2,000,000.

"I was assured she would," he says, "and Joyce was quite honorable about the whole thing. Phyllis was pooped and exhausted, anyway, so it was decided."

On the Friday before Labor Day, the suspicion of imminent change pervaded the fish bowl. Throughout the corridors of the building, rumor abounded.

"I don't believe it," one producer said.

"What makes you say that?" senior producer Bob Epstein wanted to know.

"They've got $3,000,000 invested in this lady. You're telling me they're going to walk away from that?"

"If it's true," senior producer Roberta Dougherty said, "and I think it is, the interesting thing will be to see who's going to take the fall for this. Someone's got to take the fall."

By three in the afternoon, nobody could concentrate on any work. It was fortunate that Monday's Labor Day show had been booked way in advance. If there was one day of the year the show did not want to struggle to get last-minute guests, it was the Friday before Labor Day. So we had the usual guests already lined up--labor economists, a workers' panel, a typical American working family, Merle Haggard to talk about the workingman, plus a piece on tennis siblings and another on lifeguards, for variety. There was no news, except in the CBS News building itself, where the swell of rumor was about to crest.

"It's happening, all right!"

Amy Rosenblum, another booker, stormed into the fish bowl, shrieking.

"I just saw Ann Morfogen [head of PR for CBS News] in the elevator, and she had a batch of press releases under her arm, and when I tried to look at them, she snatched them away."

"The intrepid reporter," producer Pat Shevlin said.

"Can't anyone confirm it?" Roberta said.

Epstein got a call. He was all excited.

"It's done!" he exclaimed when he hung up. "Someone in Sports just told me that Hookstratten is shopping her back to Sports, and they don't want her."

"She's toast!" Shevlin exclaimed.

•

Katz himself was toast by October. Five months later, the next executive producer, Johnathan Rodgers, was also gone. The new boss of the Morning News turned out to be an attractive, fashionably dressed woman of 34, with large brown eyes and a tense, set mouth. Her name was Susan Winston. It was well known by April 1986 that Sauter had been her biggest admirer when she was executive producer of Good Morning America. He had enlisted Stringer in the Winston cause, and it was Stringer, as the executive with hands-on responsibility for the program, who brought her by the newsroom the day after her hiring had been announced to introduce her to the assembled staff.

"As some of you know," Stringer said, "I've been trying for a year to get Susan Winston to come to this program, and I'm very pleased to be able to announce that at last I have succeeded."

He turned to her. "Susan."

Our new boss rose to speak.

"Well, I'm not as bad as many of you might have heard," she said by way of breaking the ice. The staff laughed nervously. Winston then made a brief speech about the importance of coming up with a new formula. When she finished, she asked for questions. Nobody had any.

After she left, there was considerable discussion in the fish bowl. Winston brought with her an aura of show business and a reputation for being tough. On Monday, May fifth, I went to my first meeting with her.

It was to be held in Corvo's office. We had been told that Corvo was still running the program while Winston drew up her new plans. But as soon as the meeting started, it was clear who was calling the shots. Corvo deferred to Winston. He ran through the line-up, and she said yes or no or "Why are we bothering?" Then booker Vicki Gordon stuck her head into the room to say that singer Gladys Knight had canceled.

"Get her back," Winston snapped. "Call her PR agent and tell her I said she'd do the show. Just tell her that."

The room was silent.

At 10:30 that morning, once the line-up meeting was over, the senior staff of the CBS Morning News filed into the fourth-floor conference room to hear from the new executive director what was wrong with their broadcast. Winston had brought with her a batch of manila folders, on top of which was a yellow pad with the notes she had taken on that morning's show. She wasted no time on formalities.

"Understand this," she said. "I've been brought in here to get ratings, and I'll do anything, anything to get ratings. I know how hard everyone works on these shows, and don't think I haven't asked myself, 'Why would I want to get into this grind again?' But I've been hired to do a job, and I'm going to do it. I've done it before, at G.M.A., and when I left G.M.A., it was the top-rated morning show, and it was top because everyone pulled together and realized it could be done. So if anyone here feels they are burned out, if anyone here feels they don't want to make the effort, let me know right now, and I'll be happy to accept their resignation."

The room was hushed. People stared at their yellow note pads. The moment for offering resignations passed, and Winston proceeded to find fault with nearly every aspect of the morning's broadcast.

"Let's talk about content," she began. "This show's a clone. It's boring, flat and predictable, and I'm going to change it. First, why did we even bother having Eli Wallach on the show? He's not the kind of celebrity I want. And almost every intro to the segments was too long. People don't want to listen to a lot of words."

"Can you give us some idea what you want the new program to be?" I asked. "Amount of news content, that sort of thing."

"Everything is news to me," she said. "George Shultz is news, Reggie Jackson's news. There's a whole new audience out there, and they're interested in the things you and I are interested in."

"What are you interested in, Susan?" Peter Bonventre asked boldly. Bonventre was another producer hired from print. He was already determined to quit the program but had decided to stick around until Winston took over. He didn't want to miss this for anything.

"Money. We're all interested in money. Working women are interested in money and in business. I want a lot more of those kinds of segments. Also consumer segments."

That afternoon, Winston had a suggestion for the next day's program. We had been running with the Chernobyl story for a week, a story Stringer had described as "our kind of story--a world event and we can't spend money covering it." Winston's idea was that we should examine one of the school children who had just returned from Kiev for evidence of radioactivity. We had booked one of the kids for the next day's show.

"I want Faith [Daniels] to run a Geiger counter over him," she told Corvo.

"But Faith reads the news blocks," Corvo said.

"I know. It's not a whole segment. Faith will ask him a few questions, then she'll pass the Geiger counter over him and we'll see what the thing registers."

"In the middle of the news blocks?"

"Sure, why not? It's good television."

We called one of the bookers and told her what was wanted. A few minutes later, the booker called back. The teenager we had booked had been contaminated but only slightly. The radioactivity had been on his clothes, which had long since been destroyed, and he himself would not set off the machine.

"I can't believe that," Winston said. "Those things are highly calibrated."

The booker was insistent. The Geiger counter would not respond.

"See if you can find another kid," Winston said.

•

On Wednesday afternoon, May seventh, I had my own meeting with Winston. By then I had come to believe that it was unlikely that I could ever work with her. Editorially, we were at odds, and I didn't like her style. Our meeting turned out to be the clincher. I told her about the morale problem on the show.

"A lot of people are trying to second-guess you. The sooner you can clear the air of uncertainty, the more productive people will be."

"Let's talk about the bookers," she said. "Who's good? Who's bad?"

I gave her a breakdown of the people who worked for me. When I was done, she said, "What you're telling me is that some people aren't pulling their weight. OK, I look to you to motivate them. If you can't, I'll get rid of them."

It seemed to me that she had missed the point.

"You can't blame the bookers," I said. "They've worked endless hours for four or five executive producers and seen little in the way of results."

"So their attitude is bad. Whose fault is that? From what you're saying, it sounds like you're pretty burned out yourself."

I wasn't sure what to make of this charge.

"What makes you say that?" I said.

"Well, you haven't exactly been bubbling over with ideas these past two days."

"Most of my ideas are on the grid," I said. "Unlike a few other people on the staff, I haven't been saving them up to impress you."

"Well, I don't know that. I can only go by what I see."

We talked about ideas and about news. I told her that for a time we had reestablished the broadcast's credibility as a news program. I said I felt it was important that this not be allowed to slip away. She said she was interested in news, too, but we were talking at cross-purposes. Having Henry Winkler and Donna Mills do interviews for the program didn't quite fit into my idea of news, no matter how far that rubric was extended.

As I walked home, I recalled the mental note I'd made to myself at the beginning--if it ever got too crazy, I'd get out.

When I got to my apartment, I typed a note to Stringer requesting a transfer to another broadcast. I knew it would not please him. On the day it was announced that Winston was coming, he had told me he expected her to be a "keg of dynamite" for the Morning News.

The next morning, I left my letter with Stringer's secretary and went to my office to find Bonventre sitting there with his feet on the desk. He had given two weeks' notice the day before. On the monitor, he was watching an exclusive interview with a team of explorers who had just returned from an overland trip to the North Pole. They were the first team to make the trip since Admiral Peary.

"This was your idea, wasn't it?" he said.

"It's my last," I said. "I just requested transfer to another broadcast."

"Holy shit!" Bonventre said.

I didn't see Winston that day. She was making a quick trip to Los Angeles. Nor did I see Stringer. The following morning, I called his secretary to remind her that I wanted an appointment. She told me Stringer was aware that I did but that it might be difficult that day. I soon found out why. NBC's Tom Brokaw had tied Dan Rather in the evening-news ratings, and panic had set in. With Stringer pouring oil on the troubled waters of the Evening News, I did not get to see him until Monday.

He waved my letter as I was shown into his office.

"What can I do?" he exclaimed. "I'm being told to collect heads around here. There's nowhere I can assign you to. West 57th is under review. Nightwatch is in trouble."

We faced each other over a long silence.

"Work it out with her," Stringer said finally. "I'll talk to her. I'm sure it can be worked out."

"Howard," I said. "Who are we kidding?"

I got up and left his office and went to search out Bonventre. I needed a drink.

In the morning, Winston called me from the control room.

"I can't operate like this," she said. "Let's meet."

"Whenever you like," I said. "I'm in my office."

I read the papers and watched the show. That morning, it seemed to be devoted entirely to Hands Across America. As soon as it ended, Winston marched in. She was shooting from the hip, and the encounter was brief.

"I see no point in prolonging this," she said. "Are you resigning from this broadcast or not?"

"I haven't resigned," I said.

"Then you're fired," she told me. "I don't think we have anything more to talk about."

"Fine," I said. "Put it in writing."

Suddenly, I was on the outside looking in, as part of one always is in moments of crisis.

"I want you out of here by close of business today," she said.

I laughed. "Susan, there is no such thing as close of business at the Morning News. It's a 24-hour-a-day game."

I pulled my personal stuff together--Rolodex, kids' photos, files. A group of bookers--Janice, Amy, Jane--were congregating outside my office. I told them to come in and we closed the door. The phone rang and I started to answer it.

"You don't have to do that," Amy said. "Let it ring."

"It may be from personnel," I said.

It wasn't. It was a standard PR pitch.

"We think Dr. Diet would make a wonderful guest on your program ..." an enthusiastic voice said.

"Tell her to go suck a big one," Amy suggested.

The other bookers dissolved in giggles. The PR woman rambled on and on, until finally I interrupted her pitch.

"Let me see if I've got this right," I said. "You want five minutes of free publicity on the Morning News. You want to expose Dr. Diet to Maria Shriver, with the hope that five minutes of his unscientific ramblings will sell a few books. Is that right?"

"'Scuse me?" said the PR woman, astonished.

"You're hoping that the Kennedy glamor will mean the difference between Dr. Diet's book sales and all the other idiotic tomes on how to lose weight. Isn't that correct?"

"Is this the CBS Morning News?" the woman asked.

"It sure is," I said. "Can the doctor do cart wheels or stand on his head? I bet he can't set off a Geiger counter.

"I'll tell you what," I continued. "Let me put you through to Susan Winston. She's just the person for this segment. And if you can't reach her, try Howard Stringer."

I transferred the call and hung up. The senior staff came by to offer me condolences, and I did my best to look sad. I finished packing my things. Then, as I was making a final check of my office, I heard the irritating little sound that had plagued me for the past year. The gray contraption attached to my belt--the little gray beeper that over the past year had gone off in movies, on Saturday mornings, in cabs, on the beach, on the night stand at three a.m.--sounded its familiar beep, beep, beep.

I took it off my belt and laid it on my desk. Then I borrowed a shoe from one of the bookers, and with one blow, I sent the thing to beeper heaven.

•

Two months later, CBS announced that the Morning News, such as it was, would no longer exist after December 1986. At the same time, it was announced that Susan Winston would be leaving CBS. In September, Gene Jankowski asked Van Gordon Sauter for his resignation. Sauter obliged. Howard Stringer became president of CBS News in October. Ed Joyce, who had left the company the previous February, was living in Connecticut and writing a book about his CBS career.

"We performed somersaults so that Phyllis would think she was doing substantive stories."