Booknotes

FRED GRAHAM, AUTHOR, "HAPPY TALK: CONFESSIONS OF A TV NEWSMAN": Because my life in television--that phase of it, the last 20 years--coincides with a remarkable and sometimes unhappy period in television years. And it happened that by telling my experiences, I could humanize for people who are not real new--news buffs, necessarily--you know, ordinary people--what went on and what's going on today and what--in some ways, what's likely to go on in the future in television news.

GRAHAM: I wanted to write about my experiences in journalism, and they were not interested until CBS sort of crashed and burned toward the end of the 1980s--CBS News. All of the--the bad things that happened: the--Bill Moyers leaving in a huff, the upheavals there, the firings, the sackings, the hard feelings and, finally, you know, culminating in some of the people who worked there trying to buy CBS News away from the network to save it from the network.

GRAHAM: You mean to--to get the attention of some people I didn't like?

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Oh, no. You know, every book--every book I've ever written--this is my fourth book--you agonize over the--what are you going to call it--the title. And this was like every book I've ever written. I and the publisher and my editor at the publishing house and my wife--e--everyone had different opinions. And I settled on that one early because at the time I wrote the book, I had gone back to lo--not back--I'd gone to local news. I'd gone home to my hometown to try and be a local anchor. And I was immersed in happy talk up to my ears and drowning in it. And it seemed to me that--that it was an apt name for this book.

GRAHAM: Well, see, I misspoke a minute when I said `get back into local television' because the thing that I didn't really appreciate was that I had never been in local television. I--I was a very unusual network correspondent in that I was innocent of any exposure to local TV. I'd come up through The New York Times. So when I decided in--believe me, in my naivete, to leave CBS and--I saw it as the parallel to the print reporter who--who, in his middle years, goes back to the hometown newspaper and becomes the editor. And I thought the parallel situation was, well, you leave the network and you go back to be a local anchor. I've--I've discovered to my chagrin that those things are not parallel, and it is very hard, as a local TV anchor, to infuse much in the way of substance into the news.

GRAHAM: Mm-hmm.

GRAHAM: Well, basically it was prelaw. I always thought I was going to be a lawyer. And I went in the Marine Corps and went to Korea, and came back to--to go to law school. But I worked my way through as a reporter on the local paper, The Nashville Tennessean--fine paper. And I write about--i--in the book about how fortuitously--there was a little clique there at that newspaper that was getting ready to infiltrate The New York Times: Tom Wicker, David Halberstam, Hedrick Smith, Bill Kovach and on and on. There were about eight of us. And they kidded later--they said it was like the Snopes family because once Wicker got his foot in the door, he started bringing his country cousins up. Before long, there were a lot of us there. And that's the way I--I drifted into it. I got bitten by the bug while I was working my way through law school.

GRAHAM: I w--I went to Oxford. I had a Fulbright Scholarship and got a--you never know when you might need a--an English law degree, so I went to Oxford and got one and then came back and practiced law.

GRAHAM: Three.

GRAHAM: I went up to Washington as chief counsel of one of Senator Estes Kefauver's subcommittees--big Tennessean with a coonskin cap. And he had the bad grace to die shortly after I went up there, leaving me kind of adrift. The New York Times needed a legally trained reporter to replace Anthony Lewis, who was leaving the Supreme Court beat to go overseas. And in those days, Brian, there weren't many people who had that double credential. I did and so they took me.

GRAHAM: Eight years.

GRAHAM: Because I had s--when I went in, I said to myself, `After I have been on this beat longer than Anthony Lewis, I'm going to look at myself and see if I want to do this for the rest of my life or if there's something else.' And I looked at it--the eight years was just past his tenure--and it turned out that I had the best job at The New York Times for me. I was a lawyer. I was--had the legal specialist job. But I--I--I didn't want to spend the rest of my life doing what I'd already done. And at that time, Watergate had occurred. CBS asked me to switch over and cover Watergate, and--and I thought it was a--a--a logical transition. They didn't know that I talk like this because they really picked me because of my byline and my reputation as a writer, and that caused some problems.

GRAHAM: Well, at first, you know, there really was--it was quite a--a--a cause celebre when I first went on he air. People were calling in, writing letters and saying, you know, `Why'd you put that country boy on elevision?' And, you kn--and one of the really discouraging elements of it was that some people said, `And why did you put someone on the--on television who is--is--is prejudiced?' And I have some of those letters to this day because it just seemed so unfair to me to equate being a--from the South with being a prejudiced person. And, Brian, that happened--continued to happen until Jimmy Carter got elected president, and then I never heard it after that.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Well, it was embarrassing because there was an assumption by some of the Carter partisans that I, in some way, had gone into television to pave the way for this fellow Southerner to get accepted by the great masses of the people and get elected. And I was at--I was in New York at the Madison Square Garden at the convention and was interviewing a--a--a Carter delegate, and this woman suddenly turned to me and just gushed all over me and said, `Mr. Graham, we really appreciate all you've done for Jimmy Carter.' And I thought, `Oh, no, the--the viewers are not going to understand that.' So I bailed out at that point.

GRAHAM: Oh, I--I tossed it back to Uncle Walter.

GRAHAM: No, I di--you know, it's surprising how little feedback you get from things like that. As I write there, I got a lot of letters from the middle-of-the-night show that I did, "Nightwatch," because the viewers were much more concentrated. And I think probably C-SPAN has the same--y--it's the same phenomenon. When you have a show that's paced slower than a lot of the network shows, the people go to it with a little more reflective mental attitude, and they involve themselves with it more a--and they react more.

GRAHAM: Almost 15 years.

GRAHAM: As you know, the `almost' turned out later to be crucial because at the time that I left CBS, in a final outrageous act as I was on the way out the door, they tried to--to make--they tried to, in ef--in essence, just to keep me out of 14 years of my severance pay by saying I'd only been there one year because there had been a slight hiatus a year before in my contract. It was s--it was such a--you know, it--CBS, at that time, was a--was a corporation undergoing a--a nervous breakdown. And I've never experienced nything as unhappy in my life. And it was quite a relief to--to leave.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: They had decided to give me another year--to give me a whole new contract. And as I said, it was mysterious to me while they had--you have to explain a little bit here. What happened was that they had announced--CBS president, a man named Ed Joyce, who was called `the Velvet Shiv' within the company because of his executive style, had announced that they were not going to--to renew my contract and had announced that six months older--earlier. He was very shortly fired. Who knows what for? But he was let go, so that when the six months was--were--were up and it was time for me to depart because my contract hadn't been renewed, they had--L--Laurence Tisch, in the meantime, had bought CBS.

GRAHAM: Yeah. Yes.

GRAHAM: Van Gordon Sauter.

GRAHAM: Van Gordon Sauter, for those of you who are watching it--with the beard--and Ed Joyce were brought in by management and they instituted what was called the `infotainment era' at CBS. They said, `We're going to have a mixture of entertainment and information, news with--with en--with entertainment mixed in.

GRAHAM: Yeah. And Laur--Laurence Tisch had bought CBS, and during an early conversation, when everybody was terrified of him, he said--and he was meeting all the vice presidents and there were a legion--and he aid to some of them--he said, `You know, I--I can't understand why, if you have this many vice presidents, you can't afford to keep Fred Graham.' Well, the word went around and they re-evaluated their decision to not renew my contract, and they decided to ask me to stay. And they forgot to tell me until the last day came. I packed--packed up and, you know, cleaned out my door--desk and was ready to go. And at the last minute, someone wised up and they said, `Oh, well, we forgot.' But it was--it was symptomatic of--of an uncaring and really unhealthy situation there. And so I decided I wanted to leave.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: I had been making this outrageous sum, which even I knew was outrageous. But, Brian, what happened was th--that was part of the culture at CBS. As part of infusing the entertainment values into it, they were very--it w--you know, it was like Cecil B. De Mille. It was--you know, they were spending a lot of--it was like Hollywood, and so they were spending the big bucks. But--and--and we had more peop le making a m--a illion dollars a year or more at CBS than the other two networks combined. But then later, of course, when the money crunch came, they were quite resentful of the fact that some of us were really earning more money than we could legitimately claim to be deserving. So in this year interim they said, `Well, you know'--they said, `Stay. We'll give you a four-year contract, but it goes down to $150,000 a year.' And that's a good salary, and it's--but--but it--it was their way of saying, `Stay, but we're not very enthusiastic about this.'

GRAHAM: Yes.

GRAHAM: One day in 1982, I was standing in the Denver airport calling my lawyer, who had been negotiating with the two gentlemen who you just showed on the air here. And he said to me, `Fred, I closed the deal. They're going to pay you $255,000.' And I--I laughed and I said, `Hey, I would have taken $100,000 less.' And the first thing I thought was, `I never thought this Texarkana boy would say a thing'--you know, `would be in a position to say, "I would have taken $100,000 less."' And then for the first time in, I'm sure, 30 years, it came back to me that--I'd been out fishing with who I considered my wise--wisest uncle, and he had said, `Always be underpaid because, you know, then you're--y--that's the proper relationship to have with your job.' And it bothered me, as you read there, that that came back to me at that moment. Later, when we--when I came to grief, I realized that there was a reason for me to remember it at that time.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: You know, I never did, and al--and I--I guess I shouldn't since those are things that have never been disclosed, other than to say that it was about what I had made at the top of my form as a correspondent at CBS.

GRAHAM: You know, it--the--it's--I don't understand why some people are making, you know, really astronomical amounts of money for doing work that does not appear to be successful. The--there's been a lot of c--of musical chairs with anchors in--at the networks, particularly with the women: Connie Chung, Diane Sawyer and on and on. There--there must be four or five of them, and they've all gotten million-dollar contracts when they jump ship to another network. Now I may be wrong, but I don't think any of them have yet been a success in terms of creating a successful or a successfully rated program in the new venture.

Now the ratings of the--and--and the financial position of all the networks are perilous and declining. And I really do wonder how long they can continue to do this. They're basically letting the--the--the talent play them off against each other, but they're not having success out of it on the other end. And--and I--I'm afraid that they are going to have occasion, somewhere down the line, to ponder my sage uncle's advice.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Yeah. But--but his ba--his basic pitch was--he did--he offered me considerably more money than I was making at CBS, but his basic pitch was that, `There's such a strong bench there at CBS, you don't really get a chance to develop yourself and prove yourself. You go over to ABC and we're just really starting to build ourselves up'--this was in the late 1970s--`and you're going to have an opportunity to grow with us as we improve our--our news operation.' The irony of that, Brian, was that I turned him down, and the reason was that CBS was the Tiffany of broadcast operations, news operations, and ABC, in my judgment, was not. It was with considerable irony that I realized, five years later, that CBS had squandered its specialness and it was no better or no worse than the others. And so the reason that it prompted me to stick around was no longer valid.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: A--and that was--well, now, that was part of what I mentioned earlier, the--the sort of Cecil B. De Mille approach to network news. Why they did that--they ga--they gave Dan an $800,000-a-year raise. Peter Jennings was making $800,000 a year at that time, so Dan went up by the amount that Peter Jennings was making and Dan went to $3.5 million a year. Peter Jennings is now on the top of the ratings; Dan is at the bottom. And a l--a lot of people think that one--one reason for ABC's success is that the viewers fee--feel more comfortable with Peter Jennings. But you just--you know, you have to ask yourself what was going through their minds when they were making commitments like that.

GRAHAM: No. I think it will continue in some kind of s--very special circumstances. I have an idea that--that the network evening news programs--"CBS Evening News," ABC, NBC--may be the dinosaurs of the 1990s, and some or all of them may--may not survive into the 21st century because CNN's killing them. And if you can get national, international news on television when you want it, you just don't have to arrive there when they tell you to in the evening.

So you can see now the--the network news operations trying to carve out new niches for themselves, and one of them is the kind of special s--treatment of the news. And you see it in the anchorpeople being sent to Moscow and being sent to Johannesburg and to other places when news seems to be stirring. And I think what they will do is I think they will still cover the--the big events--the disasters, the wars, election night, that sort of thing--and they ill do prime-time stuff--"60 Minutes," "20/20," whatever else survives there. So the--they--they are going to still need the very well-known person to preside over that in a recognizable way, and I think they'll still pay them a lot of money.

GRAHAM: You know what I'd like to do, if I may?

GRAHAM: I--I'd like to talk for a minute about why I left CBS because one of the things--when I wrote this book--and you asked me why I called it "Happy Talk"--I w--did not intend to and would not have written a book in which I would be a crybaby. I was--I had no interest in doing a sour-grapes book. And if I couldn't tell a--kind of a funny, engaging story in a way for n--for people to learn about broadcast news, I wasn't going to do it. And that's really what this is. Most of it is about--is--is telling about television news and the changes through things--most of the things--mostly funny and interesting that have happened to me.

But what did happen in the middle of that, that gives it real insight into some of the important events of the last 15 years, was that after Walter Cronkite was replaced by Dan Rather as the CBS anchor in 1981, the ratings went into the s--the basement at CBS. And management panicked, and they brought in the two gentlemen that you just showed, Van Gordon Sauter and Ed Joyce, to run the news division, and they were not basically journalists. They were company men. They were TV--people who could present pictures on the screen.

And immediately, our marching orders at CBS were changed and our superiors--I'll remember forever the first day right after the--they came in, and the producer took me aside and said, `Now we are now going to present infotainment.' And I said, `What is'--I'd never heard that word. And he said, `Well, it's a mixture of information and entertainment.' And it had two elements. One was when you--when I w uld take a story--and all of us--and say, `Hey, I've got a story,' first question was, `How many elements does it have?' And by that they meant, `How many changes on the screen will there be during this piece?' Because they were afraid that if the screen didn't change often enough, people would get bored and use their zappers and switch to another channel.'

And the second question was, `Does it have any moments?' And they meant, `Does--are there any magic moments?' And the magic moments was--could we get pictures of heart-rending incidents, moments of pathos, oments of anger or incrimination or indignation. Well, the Supreme Court i--you know, it's--it's not the stuff of which magic moments are made, and y--you didn't get that kind of video. And what happened in my dealing and many others' was that over the years the kinds of stories that I would do on the Supreme Court, which were news by any objective valuation, were simply, many of them, not presented on CBS News because they didn't have jazzy pictures and there were no heart-plucking moments.

So what happened was that by the--the mid- and late 1980s, CBS had really ceased to be that--it--it had ceased to follow the kind of journalistic standards that had lured me there in the first place, and that's the reason I decided to leave. Believe me, it was a--no special desire to be a local anchorman.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Yeah, but have you seen--have you seen the--the--the tape that resulted from that? I...

GRAHAM: Well, I've kept it because to me--I mean, Chief Justice Burger--I write in there that he and I had this long, odd relationship in which we were at odds repeatedly over the years. And we remained friends and--in fact, at a time when I was having professional problems with CBS, Chief Justice Burger befriended me in a very--very thoughtful way. But that story he tells--I mean, I must say he has a way of reconstructing reality. And--and in this instance, the camera was rolling when this happened, and--and it did not happen the way he tells it because you can see. I have the film. And what happened was the CBS camera was following him into a elevator, and you see him going along and go into the elevator, and the camera goes in and he reaches out and grabs the camera and slams it down. It's as plain as--you can see it happened that way. He--you know, you re--you tend to someki--sometimes reconstruct things in your memory, and when he remembers that it was shoved in his face, it's not the way the film shows it.

GRAHAM: No.

GRAHAM: As I say in my book, I kn--I've known Chief Justice Burger since he was a lower-court judge, and we were--we were friends. And he told me about his bitterness toward the--the media. And it was really directed at the Washington Post. That's where it started. He felt that when he was a conservative judge on the very liberal District of Columbia Court of Appeals, that the Washington Post--which, of course, is a liberal newspaper--didn't give him a fair hearing. He--he felt that they--they didn't let his dissents--he would write dissents and he wouldn't see them in the paper. His views weren't getting in the paper. And there was some bitterness there; he didn't try to hide it. Well, later, he turned that against the television press with a vengeance, and he--you know, he--he called us--I've forgotten the pejorative names, but there were many. The odd thing about it was, because I am a lawyer, he would tell me these stories as if--and he was lambasting reporters, and I'd be looking at him, thinking, `But I'm a reporter.' But because I was a lawyer, he seemed to--to think it was OK.

GRAHAM: Well, not--not so much in those days, but...

GRAHAM: No. Carl was. Carl Stern of NBC was the first one, and he was really the model for what CBS hired me for, and I was the second. And then there was a--sort of a hiatus before anymore came in. ABC got Tim O'Brien, and now there are several of them over there. But there was a time when I--when I first came there as New York Times reporter, I do believe I was the only lawyer covering the court at that time.

GRAHAM: Mm-hmm.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: That's probably been a--a trait that I have struggled with, with more or less success, throughout my life, and I've found that my--my pratfalls in life have, more often than not, been associated with a period of arrogance in which I l--lowered my guard and did stupid things. And--and I mentioned that that was responsible for the mistakes we made with regard to the Pike papers, where Dan Schorr and I got into a terrible pickle over release of the top-secret Pike papers, and--and--and, to a certain extent, my problems with Vice President Spiro Agnew, where he subpoenaed me and I was at the point of going to jail for refusing to disclose my sources. So, you know, I th--I hope in life I've learned a little bit better to--to keep my guard up from--from arrogance, but it doesn't always work.

GRAHAM: You know, I guess we all have a certain amount of that in life, but I do think that--that life as a TV journalist probably encourages that as much as--maybe--maybe if you were a movie actor or something, it might be in the same--same league with encouraging that, but I think that it's the nature of the job that it plays up that.

GRAHAM: Mm-hmm.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Mm-hmm.

GRAHAM: Mm-hmm.

GRAHAM: Well, you know, anybody--anyone who has had a--uniformly successful career, who suddenly gets sort of publicly dumped with a certain amount of hu--humiliation, you know, there's--there's a chance there that you--you could get kind of down in the mouth over it. I mean, that could ruin your whole day. But, you know, I really think--and I--I'm pretty honest with myself and--I think you've implied here--with my readers in this book. I felt--see, I could have stayed at CBS, but I decided that if I was not going to be a success, if I was going to be just putting in my time, I was going to take a chance, go back home where I started and risk being a--a--risk whatever that involved in order to have a chance of making a success of it. And I've never regretted that.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Mm-hmm.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Well, now you have to tell them what night that was.

GRAHAM: No. You know, I--I don't--for a grown man to cry in justified circumstances is just fine with me.

GRAHAM: It was the day that my wife and I had moved into our dream home here in--in Washington, and we had bought a lovely house out off Massachusetts Avenue and we had refurnished it. And the movers had come, and they were carrying in furniture and all that. And my wife was just ecstatic. But toward the end of the day, the telephone installer came, installed the phone and very quickly it rang. So we'd been there two days without--moving--moving in and out without a telephone. And it was my lawyer, saying, `They've just told--told me they're not going to renew your contract.'

We had gotten a letter from them shortly before saying they would, and they kind of blindsided us. And I--I couldn't bear to tell my wife what had happened because she was so happy. And I knew we couldn't stay; we--we couldn't afford it. So we spent the rest of the day, and I was going to wait. And that night, she s--she knows me too well and she knew something was wrong, and she asked me and I told her. And then I cried.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: That's what I mentioned before. The...

GRAHAM: The--the popularit--well, the fact that people who watched "Nightwatch" really thought about it and remembered it and recognized me from it.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Well, there's a little hyperbole there. We fudged our figures and, you know, that probably is not the first time in the history of broadcasting that a network has--had fudged its figures and--under the ratings. But we were hanging by a thread that--the "Nightwatch" program, which at CBS fills the space between two in the morning and six in the morning. And when they kept cutting the budgets--and they'd cut our budget every time--and we were trying to--to make people believe that we were really earning our keep because of the size of our audience. Well, we fudged a bit on that, but, you know, in terms of just quality work and satisfaction, we didn't have to inflate that at all because we were delivering.

GRAHAM: By the way, they--"Nightwatch" has--has interviewed me in connection with this book...

GRAHAM: ...and it shows--you know, pretty gutsy. I'm not all that popular in some corridors of CBS. It's a CBS show. Pretty good.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: I asked one of the executives there afterwards, because I was intrigued. I said, `Did he get your permission to do this?' And I was told, `No, they just did it.' And--and--and the person who told me that--with--with no disapproval.

GRAHAM: I mean, I--I admire that.

GRAHAM: You know, when I'm a guest in any circumstance, I--I don't violate that. I don't believe in violating that by being unpleasant, and so I went in there and--and my attitude was going to be, `I will answer the questions,' and if Charlie wanted to lead me into those areas, I would answer, but I wasn't going to volunteer. And then he--he very skillfully did lead me into those areas, but in a way that gave me an opportunity to say what I wanted to say without any, you know, unnecessary jagged edges. And we both did it, and I thought he was journalistically as sound as he could have been, and--and--and I--you know, I didn't trim my sails, but we--we didn't make any un--unnecessary--unnecessary scars.

GRAHAM: Well, I--I--I used to be his substitute. And he had a lot of fun with it because when I wrote about be--that in there, I didn't mention his name. I just said, `When the regular anchor was gone, I would substitute.' And Charlie was flailing through this book as if for--realizing for the first time that I'd left his name out. And so he had some fun with it. He kind of--you know, he--he got in his ribbing of me.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Mm-hmm.

GRAHAM: Well, actually, right before--I want to add what I said right before that. I said that `Dan Schorr is a remarkable journalist,' first for his intelligence and his industry. And secondly, so many journalists begin to slow own at bit as they get older, and Schorr, from what I can see, is just as good today as the day I met him, and so I have great admiration for that side of him. Sometimes his aggressiveness was directed too much in house, I thought. You know, there's--it's--there are sort of unspoken limits as to how much you compete with your in-house colleagues, and there was a feeling on the part of various people that he stepped over the line sometimes in that regard.

I told the--the story there when Schorr--Schorr always in--in--wou--wound up on--on the topside whenever I had any deals with him, and--dealings with him. And one time--the day President Nixon had made it clear that he was going to resign, we took over--we, the news division, took over the network, and it--everyone in the country was watching and every red-blooded correspondent wanted to be on the air. Schorr and I were not asked to be on the air, and he was very nervous about it. He came up to me and he said, `Fred, I'll tell you what let's do. Let's propose to them...'

GRAHAM: Oh.

GRAHAM: I'm flail--I'm flailing around here--I'm...

GRAHAM: I'm flailing around here so much I lost--he said, `Let's--let's propose to them that you, Fred, who have been covering the legal side of this--you--you write out a question about where--what's going to happen--the possibility of President Nixon being indicted, and I will--and you have the answer to that--and I will write out a question about where the investigation will go from this. We'll give the questions to Walter; he'll ask us the questions and we'll answer them.' And so they said, `Fine.'

Dan and I sat side by side. The picture of the moment this happened is in that book. Show it to them as I tell them. So the red light goes on. Walter Cronkite asks the question about where this is all going, which I had written out. I opened my mouth to reply, and Schorr answered the question. Then Walter asked the question that Dan had written about the investigation, and of course Dan had a--a very erudite answer to that, leaving me just kind of slack-jawed. And I just--yeah. What can you do? That--that was a--sort of a--I would say a colorful illustration of that relationship.

GRAHAM: That you got paid for?

GRAHAM: No. They had stopped that just as I joined the network.

GRAHAM: Mm-hmm.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Yeah. And they were tr--they--they were going to officially hire me, and this was the sort of formal approval. And it was in New York and everyone was on their best behavior. I was meeting with the president of the news division and other bigwigs, and we were--there was a kind of a hushed dignity about this luncheon there at CBS. The phone rings, and the president of CBS News, Richard Salant, goes over to the wall, picks up the phone and starts yelling, `Yes, damn it! Tell him yes!' And he comes back and he's all in a froth and he says, `Well, that's Roger Mudd. He's in the airport in New Orleans and he wants to fly first class.'

Well, what had happened was, in an effort to stop correspondents from wasting money flying first class, they had put out a memo saying that `Before you can do it, you have to get permission from the president of CBS News,' thinking that nobody would ever do that. Well, Roger obviously thought that e'd--he--he'd make him pay for that. He would ask him every time. And that's what he did.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Roger Mudd is a real purist as a journalist, and his--his value system basically is that--th--th--you know, that sort of the purest form of human endeavor is journalism. And those who don't do journalism and do it in a very purist form--or those who don't are a lower-order of human beings than those who do. And since our executives tended to be, you know, bureaucrats and--and--and others and not journalists, he tended to look at them with a certain amount of disdain.

GRAHAM: Well, I don't think I said it that way, no. But generally, Walter came in and his copy had been written for him. You know what I learned was, when I later became an anchor myself--was that, to a large extent, you add nothing--you, the anchor--by writing your own copy. If--if it was important, Walter would have done it. But, you know, his role there was generally to act as a--sort of a segue between one filmed piece and another, and, generally speaking, the writing that goes into that--it's--it's so routine that it makes no difference who does it.

GRAHAM: Well, I thought then and I still do that--that he was just magnificent. He--you know, he--he--he is the same person off camera that he is on camera, and he's very secure in his--his--who he is off camera and on camera. And one of the things that Dan Rather has suffered from is that he appears to the viewers to be acting on camera as he's a--as he's a--he's anchoring, and--and there's a sense sometimes that he's not being himself. And I think that that's a weakness in--in the way he performs.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Sure.

GRAHAM: Because, you know, those of u--there was a lot of conversation between those of us who worked as correspondents at CBS News about what Dan seemed to be going through as he stopped being a reporter and switched to being the star anchor. And it appeared to us that he was sort of struggling with his identity. He--he is such a fine reporter and seems so comfortable in that, and when he per--you know, when--when he was moving from that into the role of the star anchor, he seemed to be trying to create a more appropriate persona for that, as the--kind of a sophisticated country boy--country slicker from Texas. And I--I tell there about early on in that process--and many of the viewers may recall that Dan at that time, on camera, would spout out these good-old-boy sayings--you know, `That dog won't hunt' and `Stick with one end' and--and those other country...

GRAHAM: Sure. Yeah.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Well--and those that you just read Dan rattled off at various points during election night in 1978 as he was being groomed to be--to replace Walter Cronkite. At the end of that evening, he picked up his--his materials and left, and we were all exhausted. He left a scrap of paper, which someone picked up and passed around gleefully because it was a note from Dan's secretary saying, `Mickey called in with the following,' and then listing many of those quotes. And Mickey--Mickey Herskowitz is a Houston, Texas, sportswriter who collaborated with Dan and was a co-author of his autobiography, "The Camera Never Blinks." And that evidence, that he was having these spontaneous good-old-boy country sayings ghost-written by a Houston, Texas, sportswriter was the start of a--of a feeling of unease among the troops about what was happening to Dan as he became a star anchor.

GRAHAM: Yeah. Yeah. I'll just tell that.

GRAHAM: Yeah. Yeah. OK. Lem Tucker, for those--for those of you who have seen him, is a--a very enthusiastic CBS correspondent, but not one to hide his feelings. He's--he's very up-front. Well, one day, Dan was in the studio waiting to broadcast a bulletin during the Iran-Contra crisis. And there were delays and delays and delays, and he was sitting there and--and there was some nervousness about this. And right outside the circle of light, Tucker came up and started standing there in the dark, staring at Dan Rather. Well, after a while, a colleague came up and said, `Look, Tucker, you've seen Dan Rather before. Why are you standing here staring at Dan Rather?'

Well, Tucker's a kind of excitable guy, and he said, `Look,' he says, `that guy--he is going to blow his top. He's going to go stark-raving mad one of these days. And if he does that and I'm around and I'm not watching, I'll never forgive myself.' Well, what happened was that bef--before long, there were some other people standing around watching him. Of course, the--the broadcast went off fine, but it was symptomatic of a--of a sense of unease among some of the troops in the--in the ranks.

GRAHAM: Yeah.

GRAHAM: Mm-hmm.

GRAHAM: I thought about that a long time, but when I got into writing this book, I decided that I would be willing to expose my own warts and, to the extent that it's relevant to all of this, those of others. And that was one that you--I had to bite the bullet on that one.

GRAHAM: Well, not that he would never do it, but...

GRAHAM: W--what happened was that, obviously, after writing this, as you've implied, I had to give it a lot of thought. And I called Dan to talk with him, to discuss it with him. First, as I say there, we were both covering the--the Republican and the Democratic conventions that summer, 1988. And I tried to find him and went to try and--I thought it would be best if we sat down and--and had a chat, and w--at one point blundered into an executive meeting there at CBS, and I got some startled looks from the top executives there because they knew that I had left CBS. I couldn't arrange that, and then I started calling him to discuss it on the phone and--and was--was unable to get through.

GRAHAM: The writing was and this process now is--is anticlimactic in that sense. Once I--I wrote all of this and--and got that done, then in many ways, it was cathartic, yeah.

GRAHAM: Well, not yet, but I've just started this process now. This is a two-week author's tour, and I'm not even halfway through it.

GRAHAM: You know, it surpris--some of the things are frightening. Everybody--almost everybody--asks about Lem Tucker. I--I'm just so surprised at that. To me, it's not that...

GRAHAM: Yeah, that story about Lem Tucker. And almost every--as I say in the--in the book, over my career, the question that has most often been asked of me is: What's Dan Rather really like? People are fascinated by that, and that's one thing that they ask about.

GRAHAM: I am going to be the chief anchor and the--the managing editor's the title. I'm going to be in charge of programming--the program content for a new cable TV channel that will be put on the air by the Time Warner Corporation. And what we will do is televise real courtroom trials. We'll go--we'll--we'll go into those courtrooms around the country--about half of the states permit us to bring our cameras into the court--and we'll pick interesting and relevant and important trials and bring that right into people's homes.

GRAHAM: New York.

GRAHAM: We haven't said. It'll be after Labor Day; how soon after, I don't know.

GRAHAM: Well, you know, the size of...

GRAHAM: The size of an organization isn't very important with--you know, with a t--a television channel. You know that this is one--C-SPAN. And we are working now on our, you know, table of organization. We're hiring some people, but we--we haven't hired many yet because that's--it's premature now. We have to decide how we go about this, and what we're doing--we are now in the process of practice runs. We'll go into a studio, we'll get a satellite, we'll go to some trial, we'll bring it in and we'll use--practice the techniques. We're using some techniques that you use in sportscasts to try--what we want to do is to make a trial more interesting and more understandable than it would be if you were sitting there in the courtroom.

GRAHAM: Yeah. Yeah. I--you know, judges are just as egotistical as--as anyone else, and they enjoy being on television. In fact, I've had judges tell me, `You know, it's great. You know, I--come election time, everybody knows me.' Most judges are elected, you know, and it helps them get re-elected. And they like to be on television. I think what's going to happen is--first of all, I think that this is good. I think--you know, there used to be a tradition in this country that people went down to the courthouse and sat and watched trials for entertainment and just to sort of find out what's going on in the government. And that withered away. And we are going to return that--and it's a good tradition--but through the magic of television. So it's--this is going to be good for the public and good for the system of justice because its flaws will be laid open now to the public.

But that being said, what I think will happen is that--half the states now let us in with our cameras. I think we're going to be a success and people are going to appreciate it and, very quickly, the others--or most of them--are going to let us in because they're going to say, `We want to be on television, too.'

GRAHAM: I'm worried about--see, I'll be making the decisions--me along with others, but I'm in charge of the programming. And I am going to now be faced with the same dilemmas that Van Gordon Sauter and Ed Joyce were--and I've been critical of them--when they were trying to decide how much flash to put into CBS' mix in order to get ratings. And I know that. And it's interesting--in our discussions that we've had as we go through mock sessions of what we would be covering, more often than not, I am arguing on the side of--of putting that really appealing, colorful trial on the air, where the lawyers who are in on this project tend to be more conservative about it. And I see that.

GRAHAM: Yeah. This one--this is a partnership between the Time Warner Corporation and the American Lawyer publishing group. It's a--a man, Steve Brill, who is a--really an innovator in legal publishing. So it's a teamwork between a legal unit and a television cable unit. There is a competing group, Cablevision, it's called, and they--they have a--a kind of a--it's like a CNN--like a local CNN operation on Long Island, and they've been experimenting with--with broadcasting trials.

GRAHAM: Well, we don't know. See, neither one of us are on now. We intend to go on, and if they want to--if--you know, competition is great and I'm all for it, but we're going on and we're going to be the best. And if they want to come in and walk in our--in our dust, it's fine with me.

GRAHAM: No. You know, anything like this has to be a success or, after some period of time; if it's not, you go on to other things. But they--they appear to be in t--in there to make it a success, and so that's--it's in that attitude that we're going forward.

GRAHAM: No. Oh, no. One of the things we're finding is--see, we have--what we've done is we have hired newspaper reporters around the country to help us spot these cases all around the country. And what we find is they tend to know about criminal cases. And we want to know about s--other cases. We want to know about all kinds of cases, because that really tells you what's going on in the country. And we're going to have to do some work to get our spotters to look harder for non-criminal cases.

GRAHAM: Three. Now that's not a full trial. And we'll--we'll--and--and we'll vary it, depending on--if there's a big case--for instance, I think that the public may become so interested and absorbed in the so-called Central Park jogger rape case, the young woman who was attacked there in Central Park--when that trial goes on, if we're on the air at that time--and we--we'll show it probably start to finish. So that'll start in the morning at 9 and go until 4:30 or so in the afternoon. Then we'll have one trial after that. If we d--if we had a less interesting tri--situation, we might have--show one trial in the morning, one in the early afternoon and one after that.

GRAHAM: Yeah. Yeah, we'll have commercials.

GRAHAM: Well, you know, I don't think we're going to operate in the traditional sense out of bureaus because I'll be sitting in a New York studio, and then we'll use satellites and other ways to get from the courtroom to where I am. So you don't need a big force of people out around the country where the trials are.

GRAHAM: I thought you said bureaus.

GRAHAM: You know, the people at Time Warner are in this business, and they--they have talked about how many you need to have. And I don't know what it is, but there's a certain percentage and it's far smaller than, say, a network has to have. And that's the promising aspect of this--this and--and new channels like this--because you can make a go of it with a smaller sliver of the viewing audience than previously. And it--it holds out the--the--the promise in the future that you'll be able to turn on cable TV and just get pretty much what--what interests you.

GRAHAM: Thank you for having me.