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Tick... Tick... Tick...: The Long Life & Turbulent Times of 60 Minutes

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I grew up watching "60 Minutes." I have always wondered what Mike Wallace, Ed Bradley and the others are really like. Now I know. They're a bunch of brilliant, petty, inspired, horny egomaniacs! The book is fascinating and very often hilarious. "60 Minutes" is a real American institution and now I understand how it became one. In spite of, and because of, the people who created it.

As soon as I heard there was a book about "60 Minutes" available, I raced out to get it -- and ended up staying up all night reading it. I literally couldn't put it down. This is a wildly readable, well-reported and profoundly juicy account of the people who put together the best TV newsmagazine around. Blum's depiction of the show's creator and resident genius, Don Hewitt, is tough but respectful, and it's filled with great stories. I love "60 Minutes" and hope these guys live forever --even Dan Rather! I'm buying copies for my dad, my father-in-law, and everyone I know who reserves Sunday nights at 7 for the best show on TV.

60 Minutes is one of those television icons that all of us know something about. My daughter has a list of "The 50 Greatest TV Shows Ever!" on her bulletin board and it lists 60 Minutes in 6th place.

But how many of us have watched every broadcast? Probably no one saw them all but those who worked for the show from the beginning. Certainly, if you're under a certain age, you haven't watched them all because the show is older than you are.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that Mr. Blum had captured as many of the pivotal stories over the years as possible, both in terms of how they were developed and how they were reported. These stories also include 60 Minutes's biggest flubs and embarrassments. As a result, you can catch up on stories you missed the first time around. You also learn details that you didn't know when you first saw the stories you have seen. And you will find out about the aftermath that was often obscure at the time. The key interview lines and responses are usually in the book.

Beyond that, you find out what it's been like for all of these prima donnas to work together all these years. Predictably, they get on each other's nerves and the blow ups can be explosive. Don Hewitt, the show's executive producer and founder, turns out to be one of those high energy, aggressive people who has a million ideas a minute . . . and most of them are worthless. So he's drove people crazy for all of those years. There's a convincing portrait of how his instinct for entertainment in news added a lot of profits for CBS but often undercut reporting professionalism. You will also learn about the personal vices, quirks and flaws of the key players.

When they weren't on deadline cranking out a story, what were Mike Wallace, Harry Reasoner, Dan Rather, Morley Safer, Ed Bradley, Andy Rooney, Diane Sawyer, Steve Kroft and Lesley Stahl really like? There's plenty of material there, as well as brief bios of how they came to join 60 Minutes.

There's also excellent material for those who are interested in the technical side of production on how the many pioneering techniques that 60 Minutes uses were developed.

Mr. Blum had a lot of individual access to reporters, producers and staff so the extensive public record of the shows themselves and the many books published by the leads is amplified by current observations of long ago and current events. The result makes for dramatic reading, particularly the parts about Don Hewitt being ushered off into retirement.

I was pleased to see the many times that Mr. Blum raised ethical issues about what 60 Minutes did or didn't do. Like any show, mistakes happen. It's often what you do about the mistakes that makes all of the difference. There the record is checkered also at times. Mr. Blum points out the issue, but doesn't rub your nose into it. You're left to draw your own conclusion in a pleasant way.

There's a nice insert of publicity photographs in the book to remind you what Mike Wallace, Harry Reasoner, Morley Safer, Dan Rather, Ed Bradley, Diane Sawyer, Steve Kroft and Meredith Vieira looked like in their prime.

The book is balanced, apparently quite factually accurate, and informational from many perspectives. I think you'll like it if you ever watched 60 Minutes and enjoyed the show.

I should note before concluding that I watched the very first broadcast and seldom missed one for the first 20 years or so of the show's history. Around that time, I lost interest. If a touted segment strikes my fancy now, I'll tune in occasionally. But for me, this show doesn't fit my needs any more. I'm usually watching the pre-show for Sunday Night Football or something else instead. That's too bad. 60 Minutes was once the highlight of the viewing week for me.

John Stewart has just squeezed the life out of Tucker Carlson and his show Cross Fire. Now all of TV new's dinosaurs may soon be due for extinction.

What better time to read all about it! Tick, Tick, Tick is a must read history of 60 Minutes--the genetic originator of so many of the TV news formats that we now take for granted. Read it now before 60 Minutes the brontosaurus of bushwack journalism sinks into the media tar pits of history.

While I am not quite as hot to trot about this book as some of the other reviewers, author David Blum tells a pretty remarkable tale. There is a lot of dirty laundry exposed here along with some pretty fascinating stories about the evolution of a show that was at its conception way back in 1968 a revolutionary concept for television. But Don Hewitt had a vision and the determination to make it happen. And no one can deny that "60 Minutes" has been one of the great success stories in the history of television.

But how did CBS, Don Hewitt and his rambunctious and ever-changing cast of charactors manage to pull it all off? In the pages of "tick...tick...tick....The Long Life and Turbulant Times of 60 Minutes" David Blum reveals that the "shop" as Don Hewitt likes to refer to the "60 Minutes" offices is largely occupied by ego-maniacs who genuinely dislike each other. I had read over the years that many of the correspondents and staffers at "60 Minutes" did not get along but I never realized the degree of rancor and bitterness that has existed. It is hard to imagine how a program of such consistantly high quality could emerge from such chaos. Blum also gives the reader a glimpse at all that is involved in getting a story on the air and introduces us to the producers who play a major role in making those important decisions.

"tick...tick...tick.....The Long Life and Turbulant Times of 60 Minutes" is at once a biography of its gifted but tempestuous creator Don Hewitt and a fairly thorough history of the program itself. For younger fans of the program who are too young to remember original co-host Harry Reasoner and features like "Point..Counterpoint" there is an awful lot here that they are probably unaware of. This is a well written book that managed to hold my interest throughout. Recommended.

If you're looking for a book that maintains the illusion that the 60 Minutes team of correspondents is a happy, unified club, look somewhere else. With all of the backbiting and petty jealousies showcased in this book, it's not just amazing that 60 Minutes has thrived for 36+ years, but that it has stayed on the air at all. None of the correspondents come off unscathed. Mike Wallace, especially, comes off as petty, unsupportive, jealous, ultra competitive to the point of vicous, and, ultimately, a little sad. I was amazed to find out that many of the people mentioned in the book very willingly cooperated with author David Blum.

Don Hewitt, however, comes off the worst -- even though Blum singles him out for his cooperation with the book. Hewitt was the original creative force who developed 60 Minutes, but the book makes it seem as if the show succeeded despite him rather than because of him. Hewitt's many terrible ideas, such as offering a correspondent's spot to Candice Bergen post-Murphy Brown, are related in great detail. In addition, Hewitt was reportedly an incurable letch who made Clarence Thomas seem like a boy scout in comparison. That Hewitt cooperated so fully with Blum is stunning. So much so, in fact, that the reader has to admire Hewitt's honesty even while repulsed at his abusive and erratic behavior.

Truth be told, I would have rather had some more behind the scenes details about some of 60 Minutes' greatest stories. The interview with Clint Hill, the Westmoreland suit against CBS and the Jeffrey Wigand fiasco are recounted in the book, but the main focus seems to be the backstabbing and bad relations between Hewitt and his correspondents. The book, as it is, is a very revealing portrait of the journalists who have kept 60 Minutes so good for so long. However, a little less gossip and a little more about the inner workings of the show would have been nice. Still, it's a fascinating read.

With sand running out in his professional hourglass, Don Hewitt agreed to cooperate in the writing of David Blum's book about SIXTY MINUTES, After years of stalling and a slipshod campaign to engineer a reversal on the part of CBS, Hewitt had been forced out as executive producer of the program he began. This book was to be his valedictory.

It didn't quite work out that way. Blum crawled under the hood and opened the engine. What he found isn't pleasant. SIXTY MINUTES is not a happy family and never has been. Hewitt's style was to hire aggressive people and make them compete with one another for stories, resources, and airtime. The results were predictable.

Some of the correspondents were not on speaking terms. Those who couldn't keep up, such as Harry Reasoner due to illness or Meredith Vierra due to her role as a mother, are cruely ostracized. Most of the real reporting was done by unheralded producers-no news there-and some were treated shabbily by the correspondents. Entertainment often (and increasingly) got in the way of news judgment and ethics.

Hewitt himself comes over as a louse, a womanizer and bully, a man who parlayed a few good ideas into an enormously lucrative career and then, like the proverbial dinner guest (and like Dan Rather, with whose career Hewlett's is intertwined) overstayed his welcome, and in the end even forgot why he'd come.

It isn't a pretty story, but it is a fascinating one. And it's a revealing look into an industry whose owners, to quote McGeorge Bundy, have come to "view it only as a business, when, of necessity, it is so much more."

The book is not perfect. In the breathless rush to move from one episode to the next, Blum gives insufficient attention -a scant ten pages-to the Jeffrey Wigand/tobacco industry story which marked the turning point in Hewlitt's passage from crusader to company man and was a watershed in public comprehension of the dangers of corporate media ownership.

It has its odd moments. Blum observes that in 1948, "videotape wasn't in wide use." That's an understatement. It wasn't even invented until the late fifties.

In another passage, he says of Steve Kroft: "He managed to get himself hired as an investigative reporter at WJXT-TV in Jacksonville, Florida, which, as it turned out, was a hotbed of municipal corruption with no tough reporters to cover it. The ambitious Kroft jumped into the job full force. Within a year, his reporting resulted in the indictment of the mayor of Jacksonville [which is not true] along with a slew of other corrupt city officials [which is]."

Steve worked at WJXT long after these events took place. The reporting was done by Al Parsons and editorial director Norm Davis in 1966. Steve arrived in 1975. One wonders who gave Blum this story and why.

Despite these lapses, it is, as Hewlett would demand, a compelling story.

Foul-mouthed book about foul-mouthed, mean people. Every bit as vulgar as watching network tv. I look forward to the G-rated version as beneath the bad language is a fascinating, if disillusioning look at a revered and important institution.