Tick... Tick... Tick... by David Blum Read Free Book Online Page A

-year-old Yale sophomore, Peter had been reported lost by friends while on summer vacation in Greece. Wallace went in search of him and finally found his body 50 feet below the ledge of a mountain where he had apparently fallen during a hike. The death devastated Wallace, forcing him into some deep soul-searching. Ultimately, with the encouragement of wife number three, a Haitian beauty named Lorraine Perigord, whom he’d met on vacation in Puerto Rico and married in 1955 , Wallace disavowed entertainment programming entirely, committing himself to a career in serious journalism instead. “It’s the only kind of work that makes you happy,” Wallace recalled his wife saying after he told her of his decision. He wrote letters to the heads of the news divisions at ABC, NBC, and CBS, and in March 1963 , he received an offer from Richard Salant at CBS to join his staff as a reporter. Late that summer, after bouncing around the network for a few months in various capacities, Wallace was chosen to be the host of The CBS Morning News, a new venture that faced the challenge of competing with NBC’s far more successful Today Show.
    After three years, Wallace left the morning show and moved to a general-assignment reporting position for Cronkite’s evening newscast; this took him briefly to Vietnam and the Middle East. By 1968 , when he agreed to sign on to Hewitt’s new show, he had yet to achieve the success he craved. It was expected that he’d play second banana in the new arrangement, this time to Harry Reasoner.
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    Reasoner had been at CBS since the mid- 1950 s, when he arrived as one of the first writers hired by the nascent network news division, after brief stints as a reporter and drama critic for the Minneapolis Times, and later as a local TV news director. Before that he’d taken a stab at novel writing: in 1946 , at the age of 23 , he published Tell Me About Women.
    At CBS News, Reasoner’s wry wit and laconic delivery caught on immediately; within a few years he became one of the network’s most dependable reporters, dispatched at a moment’s notice to places like Little Rock, Arkansas, where in 1958 he provided distinguished coverage of the school desegregation case. He hosted a network morning show called Calendar from 1961 to 1963 ; replaced by Wallace, Reasoner returned to the daily news beat, reviving his reputation as one of the network’s brightest stars. By 1967 , he was the anchorman of CBS’s Sunday night newscast and the chief substitute for Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News —not to mention the boyfriend of movie star Angie Dickinson.
    The rap on Reasoner—which he went to little effort to shake—was that he was lazy. He loved long lunches at Le Biarritz, a French bistro a couple of blocks from CBS, where he downed martinis before returning to the office for a nap. Between his marriage, his girlfriend, and his passion for food and drink, Reasoner simply didn’t have time to devote to forging a future. His prodigious talents as a writer, reporter, and raconteur were keeping him afloat; in those days, such gifts were worth more than the cut of one’s jaw line or even the number of reporting trips to foreign capitals.
    Those talents were reflected at the end of a typical Sunday night newscast in March 1964 , when he capped the news of the day with a bit of quintessential Reasoner drollery: “Elizabeth Taylor, the American actress, and Richard Burton, the Welsh actor, were married today in Montreal. They met two years ago while working on the movie Cleopatra in Rome and have been good friends ever since.” Pause. “That’s the news. This is Harry Reasoner, CBS News. Good night.”
    Reasoner was always considered good enough to keep skating by, but his options—beyond the anchorman’s job—were limited. Reasoner and Hewitt were both far enough from the top that they needed each other, more perhaps than