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

either wanted to admit. Each thought he was doing the other a favor, agreeing to merge talents on a venture that seemed certain to fail.

Chapter 4
    The Symphony of the Real World
    â€œGood evening, this is 60 Minutes, ” Harry Reasoner said into the camera, then paused for a beat as though startled himself by the sound of it.
    Mike Wallace sat stiff and motionless to Reasoner’s right, as Reasoner continued: “It’s a kind of a magazine for television, which means it has the flexibility and diversity of a magazine, adapted to broadcast journalism.” It was 10 : 00 P.M. on Tuesday, September 24 , 1968 ; perhaps 13 million Americans were watching as TV history was getting made. By the standards of 1968 television ratings, when hit shows routinely attracted 30 million viewers, it was a dismal performance. The sole sponsor of the first episode of 60 Minutes was Alpo, “the all-meat dog food!”
    Over on ABC that night, more Americans were watching That’s Life! with Robert Morse, a musical comedy series with guest stars George Burns and Tony Randall; everybody else tuned in for Rock Hudson in Blindfold, the NBC Tuesday night movie. The debut of 60 Minutes wasn’t helped much by its own CBS lead-in, the leaden debut of The Doris Day Show, in which the former film star played a widow who returns to her family ranch with her two young sons.
    Perhaps Hewitt’s years in purgatory had given him the stimulus to rush recklessly into the unknown; the opening moments of 60 Minutes were not the work of a producer who understood the power of finding (rather than manufacturing) drama. Nor was much of what immediately followed. Reasoner segued to the show’s first report, a look inside the hotel rooms of presidential candidates Nixon and Humphrey from that summer’s political conventions. The story had been Wallace’s idea, and Hewitt loved it. But the footage wasn’t particularly groundbreaking or even all that revealing. Still, it struck viewers as entertaining to see these two powerful men behind closed doors, in a way that hadn’t been shown before, and in a backhanded way it ended up revealing something of the show’s intended personality. This wasn’t the stuff of a documentary (it was far too inconsequential for that) but it made for far more interesting viewing than a typical campaign piece on the evening news. It was followed by some interstitial and odd humor from two silhouetted commentators.
    Up next were three prominent European thinkers of the period —Malcolm Muggeridge of England, Luigi Barzini of Italy, and Peter Van Zahn of West Germany—who weighed in portentously with their thoughts on the American presidential campaign. (Humorist Art Buchwald then offered an American perspective.) The show’s third piece, a Mike Wallace interview with Attorney General Ramsey Clark, was executed in the tough-guy mode of the former Night Beat host, though this time in the context of a broader story about the police. Gruff and confrontational, Wallace tried to provoke Clark, but the laconic Texan calmly held his ground.
    Â 
    W ALLACE : I think Dick Gregory has said that today’s cop is yesterday’s nigger. Do you understand that?
    C LARK : Yes, I understand that, and it’s, you know, you’ve got to be able to recognize wisdom and truth where you find it.
    Â 
    Next came a bizarre vignette about the recent violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, again presented by those two silhouetted figures—written by Andy Rooney, and given voice by him and the show’s senior producer, Palmer Williams.
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    F IRST S ILHOUETTE : I know how the cops feel.
    S ECOND S ILHOUETTE : Not being a cop, you can’t possibly know how they feel.
    F IRST : Not being me, how do you know whether I know how the cops feel?
    S ECOND : Not being me, how do you know whether I know how you know or not?
    F IRST : Thank you.
    S ECOND :