Between You and Me (26 page)

“You’re just going through a difficult period,” he said. “But you’re a tough guy, Mike, and you’ll snap out of it in no time.”

Putting aside the “tough guy” compliment (if that’s what it was), he was dead wrong about my snapping out of the black mood in no time. What my doctor failed to recognize was that I was sliding down the slope into a clinical depression. As fall gave way to winter, I sank ever more deeply into that dark and devastating malaise, which was crushing my spirit and even sapping my will to live. Shortly before the New Year, I came perilously close to committing suicide. I probably would have taken the plunge into that abyss had it not been for the love and caring support I received from the woman in my life, who was both an old friend and a new romance.

That last comment, I realize, requires a few words of explanation.

The woman I’m referring to was Mary Yates, the widow of Ted Yates, my dear friend and colleague from the early years of Night Beat and The Mike Wallace Interview. After working together on those programs for several years, we went our separate ways—he to NBC and I to CBS—and even though we were now at rival networks, our friendship continued to flourish. One of the saddest days of my life came in June 1967, when I heard that Ted had been shot and killed in East Jerusalem while covering the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

Through the years that followed, my wife, Lorraine, and I remained friends with Mary and her family. (She and Ted had three sons—Ted Jr., Eames, and Angus.) Lorraine and I had been married

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since 1955, the year before Yates came up with the idea for Night Beat, which did so much to change all our lives. But after many years of happiness together, we began to drift apart. By the early 1980s, it had become painfully clear to both of us that we somehow had lost the magic that once had made us so close, so in 1984, Lorraine and I agreed, with deep regret, to get divorced. As I struggled that year to adjust to the challenge of living alone at the age of sixty-six, I reached out to close friends for support, and one of them was Mary. The more time we spent together, the more we came to realize that our long friendship was blossoming into something deeper, and by the fall of

’84 we had become what the gossip columnists used to call “an item.”

Mary and I formally tied the marital knot in 1986, and we’ve been together ever since.

I bring up this personal background to introduce Mary, who played such a critical role in my survival that December in 1984

when I felt I was on my last legs. Recognizing that I was completely losing my grip, she got me to a hospital, where I came under the care of a psychiatrist named Marvin Kaplan; along with Mary, he deserves the credit for saving my life. Thanks to Dr. Kaplan’s wise counsel in our therapy sessions and the medication he prescribed, I was soon on the road to recovery.

I was in the hospital for ten days, and at my request, the public announcement about my confinement said I was being treated for

“nervous exhaustion.” That was an absurdly bland term for the mental and emotional anguish I was going through, but I preferred to conceal the true nature of my illness, and for a long time I clung to that position. As I mentioned in Chapter Two, it took me several years to work up the courage to talk publicly about my depression.

But once I crossed that emotional Rubicon, I became involved in fund-raisers and similar events aimed at shedding light on the prob-

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lems of mental illness and the various misconceptions that often deter victims from getting the help they need.

One of the insidious aspects of depression is that it has a tendency to recur, and since that initial attack in the winter of 1984–85, I’ve had two relapses. The last one occurred in 1993, and the remedy Dr. Kaplan prescribed then was a new drug called Zoloft. That medication produced the desired effect, and since then, I’m happy to say, I’ve been the jovial, easygoing chap you’ve seen on television over the years.

While I was in the hospital in January 1985, I received flowers from General Westmoreland and his wife, Kitsy. I was touched by that olive-branch gesture, especially since the Westmorelands, by then, had ample reason to be displeased with the way the trial was going. By the time I was released from the hospital, all the momentum had shifted and was flowing in our direction. Boies had begun his case for the defense, and true to his word, his impressive stockpile of depositions was being converted into strong and convincing testimony on our behalf. George Crile proved an excellent witness with his lucid and insightful comments on the documentary, the tape of which was shown as evidence. But the most lethal blows to Westmoreland’s case were delivered by General Joseph McChristian and Colonel Gains Hawkins, the two high-ranking intelligence officers from the U.S. command in Saigon. In their testimony, they not only reiterated the stunning revelations they had made on our broadcast, they went into even more detail about the deceptions that Westmoreland had sanctioned in 1967.

It was almost time for me to take the witness stand, and I viewed that prospect with considerable anxiety. I was concerned not about what I might say in my testimony—I was fairly confident on that score—but about how I might appear. The medication I had been

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taking at that time—an antidepressant called Ludiomil—had some side effects, and one of them caused my hands to shake involuntarily.

The last thing I needed was for jurors to wonder why my hands were trembling; I could vividly imagine the questions that might form in their minds: Is he that nervous because he has something to hide? Is he afraid of being exposed as a libelous scoundrel who truly did set out to “smear” General Westmoreland? Fortunately, it never came to that, because just two days before I was scheduled to testify, Westmoreland withdrew his libel suit. Just like that, it was all over.

Westmoreland’s abrupt decision to throw in the towel did not sit well with many of his conservative supporters, who had been pulling for him to win “revenge” against the network that had besmirched his reputation. Some of them grumbled that the general had wilted under the pressure and had deserted the cause. But Westmoreland knew what he was doing. There was no point in drawing out the trial to its official and all but inevitable verdict. Westmoreland’s big mistake was not withdrawing when he did but his decision to initiate the costly libel suit in the first place. In that respect, his legal action stands as a parable of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The mistake was not pulling out of Vietnam when we did, but the succession of tragic blunders that led us into the quagmire.

At the same time, I believe that the management of CBS News had only itself to blame for the libel suit. If Van Gordon Sauter had not overreacted to the piece in TV Guide, the resulting uproar would have petered out in a week or two. It was Sauter’s public call for an in-house investigation—and the deeply flawed report that came out of that probe—that kept the controversy boiling and created a climate that could be viewed as conducive to a libel suit against us.

But for all the disappointment and frustration I felt toward my superiors onthat occasionin1982, it was nothing compared to my

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feelings of outrage and betrayal thirteen years later, when—for the first time—the corporate management of CBS emasculated a 60

Minutes story I had done just as we were preparing to put it on the air.

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across the

country in the latter part of the twentieth century had such a profound and powerful impact on our social habits that it is startling to look back to a time when cigarettes permeated almost every aspect of American culture. Nowhere was their presence more pervasive than on our airwaves. In writing about my interview programs in that dis-tant era of black-and-white television, I’ve made occasional mention of the fact that our sponsor was Philip Morris. Ours was just one voice in a cacophony of sales pitches to entice viewers to smoke a particular brand, for we had plenty of competition from other tobacco companies.

Throughout most of the 1950s, NBC’s evening news show was the Camel News Caravan, with its recurring vow of commitment: “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.” Its chief rival for the dinner-hour audience was Douglas Edwards with the News onCBS, which was sponsored by Pall Mall. (“Outstanding, and they are mild!”) And the millions of Americans who tuned in to Jack Benny’s popular comedy show every week were acutely familiar with this brisk assertion: “L S M F T—Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.” Another catchy slogan was the ungram-matical “Winston tastes good like [sic] a cigarette should.” For several years my sponsor’s favorite gimmick had been a diminutive bellhop who cried out the name of the brand as if it—or he—were an impor-

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tant hotel guest who had to be paged: “Call for Philip Morris . . .” But the Philip Morris people didn’t need the bellhop and his hearty shout on The Mike Wallace Interview. That was because they had me.

The show’s format called for me to open with a commercial spiel on behalf of the cigarette. After the interview was over, I would turn to the camera and do some more selling. On one occasion, I opened the broadcast with a few remarks about a recent trip I had made to Europe and what a good ambassador Philip Morris had been during that overseas visit.

“Wherever I went, whenever I offered someone one of these Philip Morrises, I made a friend—or [holding up the cigarette pack]

we did. . . . It happens wherever I go. So I’m more convinced than ever that today’s Philip Morris is something special. After all, where else can you find a man’s kind of mildness except in today’s Philip Morris? Here is natural mildness, genuine mildness. No filter, no foolin’. You see, no filter is needed, because the mildness comes from the tobacco itself. . . .”

That riff was, I’m afraid, all too typical. To further enhance the aura of my devotion to the product, I generally smoked when I was on the air, even during the interviews. I was under no obligation to do so, but since I happened to be a heavy smoker at the time, I thought of it as a natural indulgence. The main reason I smoked on-camera was not to please our sponsor but because both Yates and I believed it helped to sharpen the visual effect we were trying to achieve. Our stark set, with its klieg lights stabbing into the faces of the interviewees, gave our broadcast the austere look of a verbal prize ring, and the plumes of smoke curling from my cigarette fit in perfectly with that image. Besides, I was in very good company. The most celebrated television journalist of that era—Edward R. Murrow—almost never appeared on the air without a burning cigarette clutched between his fingers.

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Even after The Mike Wallace Interview went off the air, I continued to do commercials for Philip Morris because, frankly, they were a lucrative source of income during a period when I was bouncing from one job to another. When I finally extricated myself from them in the fall of 1962, my decision had nothing to do with cancer or any other health concern. That was the year I made up my mind to go straight and work exclusively in news, and I knew no network would hire me as a correspondent if I was still appearing in commercials, regardless of the product. As it was, the residual stigma from my fling with sales pitches proved to be an obstacle that was not easy to overcome. But thanks to Dick Salant, the president of CBS News, I was given an opportunity to build a new career in network journalism.

In 1964 the surgeon general, Luther Terry, issued his famous report that established an unmistakable link between cigarettes and lung cancer. Seven years later, cigarette commercials were banned from the nation’s airwaves, and not long after that, I joined the growing horde of Americans who quit smoking. The social revolution to eradicate smoking was well under way by then, and it persisted, with ever increasing force and intensity, over the next two decades. In the 1990s, I did a couple of 60 Minutes stories on the life-and-death struggle that had come to be known as the Tobacco War.

The producer I worked with on those pieces was Lowell Bergman, whose forte was investigative reporting. Among the stories we had already done together were a look at accusations of child abuse at a preschool in Los Angeles and a 1992 probe into the so-called Iraq-Gate banking scandal. In early 1994 we fixed our gaze on the tobacco industry and the inflammatory dangers posed by cigarettes. We called that story “Up in Smoke,” and in it, we reported that fires ignited by cigarettes were the number one cause of fire deaths in America, with most of them occurring in bed after a

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smoker has drifted off to sleep with a lit cigarette. Our story revolved around some confidential documents about a top-secret project that had been carried out by my old sponsor, Philip Morris. According to the documents, which were leaked to Bergman by an anonymous source, the purpose of the undertaking was to develop a fire-safe cigarette that smokers would find acceptable. It was called Project Hamlet, because the pet phrase within the company for the question it explored was “To burn or not to burn.”