Book: Ticking Clock: Behind The Scenes At 60 Minutes
Author: Ira Rosen
Review by: Paul Varian, retired CNN executive producer
Ticking Clock sat on my bedside table for months before I finally gave it a shot — just another self-serving journalistic memoir, I figured.
It lived up to my expectations in that regard, but once I picked it up I could hardly put it down.
Ira Rosen is a compelling writer and, after 25 years of producing and investigative digging for the most popular television news program ever, he had some riveting stories to tell.
On shows like 60 Minutes, the producers often do more of the reporting than the big-name correspondents you see on the air and spend countless hours setting up interviews with hard-to-get newsmakers or whistleblowers and then packaging the material into a 12 1/2-minute or so narrative in collaboration — frequently contentious — with the correspondent.
Some of Rosen’s most colorful clashes came with the show’s star, Mike Wallace, famous for his clever — at times confrontational — interview style. He was hired at 60 Minutes in 1980 to be Wallace’s primary producer, with no network TV experience, after calling attention to their shared passion for playing tennis.
The book gives us a warts-and-all view of Wallace: his flaring temper and abuse of staffers, “Neanderthal” sexual harassment of women, romantic peccadillos on road trips and severe bouts of depression that led to a suicide attempt, his firing from CBS for a profanity-laced screening room attack against his boss and the dementia that all but silenced him in the final months of his life.
Still Rosen could not shake loose his fondness for Wallace, “as mean and exasperating as he could be.”
He visited him a month before he died — Wallace’s final utterance a sexually disparaging recollection of a female correspondent they both knew.
The greater value of this book is the insight Rosen provides on how the editorial process works — what it takes to create a bulletproof magazine-length segment on a program with the high standards set by 60 Minutes founder Don Hewitt, the man who recruited and hired Rosen after Wallace endorsed him.
He wound up in a dream job. In the pre-internet days, he had carte blanche to troll for stories in random cities he’d fly to on the spur of the moment, check into a nice hotel and spend a few days checking the local papers for under the radar news gems that could be moulded into a memorable 60 Minutes segment.
The son of a Holocaust survivor, Rosen became enamored of storytelling watching comics perform at a Catskills resort where he worked as a tennis coach and developed a taste for investigative reporting as a sportswriter at his college newspaper at Cornell, where he broke a story about a basketball recruiting scandal that eventually got the coach fired and the team placed on NCAA probation.
He later interned for the famed Washington muckraking columnist Jack Anderson, covered the investigation into the still-unsolved disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa for the Oakland Press in Michigan and reported on the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident for Rolling Stone magazine, an assignment that led to his first book.
But it was his brief work as a local TV reporter for WOR-TV in New York that caught Hewitt’s eye —specifically a story in which Rosen posed as a military contractor to show how easy it was to obtain military secrets. It reminded one of Hewitt’s assistants of the types of segments 60 Minutes “used to do.”
“What the hell do you mean ‘used to do,’” Hewitt replied, insisting on seeing it himself. He liked it.
Rosen went on to champion “hidden camera” reports both at 60 Minutes and on ABC magazine shows during his 15-year interlude between CBS stints. The technique is no longer in vogue in network news operations, which now place a greater emphasis on transparency.
The book provides fascinating behind-the-scenes details of Rosen’s award-studded career covering scandals, spies, con-men, gangsters, politicians, whistleblowers and wrongfully convicted prisoners. Equally compelling, the producer’s relentless efforts to secure on-camera interviews with the likes of Marlon Brando, fugitive financier Robert Vesco and Mafia godfather Joe Bonnano.
He succeeded with Bonanno, whose willingness to discuss the Mob’s ruling Commission, according to Rosen, inspired then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani to bring a RICO case against the heads of the five New York Mafia families.
Twenty years later — after two years of trying — he convinced John Gotti’s son, John Jr., who succeeded his father as boss of the Gambino crime family, to sit down for an interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Croft.
In the highly rated 26-minute long segment, Gotti artfully dodged questions about his own criminal activity but talked candidly about how his dad “loved being a gangster” and vowed “to live and die by the rules of the street.” He died in prison.
“My favorite subjects for stories have always been gangsters and con men,” Rosen writes. “I have found that when they are ready to go on camera they are, in their own odd way, very honest.”
What enlivens Ticking Clock are Rosen’s assessments of of such CBS stalwarts as Ed Bradley, Leslie Stahl, Bob Simon and Bill Whitaker and his dishing about personalities and infighting there and at ABC where he worked with Diane Sawyer, Sam Donaldson, Mike Wallace’s son, Chris, and 6-foot-6 Executive Producer Rick Kaplan, “a brilliant egomaniac who often reduced staffers to tears if they didn’t follow his exact wishes.”
He also reports on the firing of 60 Minutes anchor Charlie Rose over sexual harassment accusations from female subordinates and the subsequent fallout in the CBS hierarchy. And, in a chapter titled “No Happy Endings,” he details the ungraceful exit of Dan Rather from 60 Minutes and how ABC phased out Sam Donaldson and longtime Nightline” anchor Ted Koppel.
Rosen said he decided to take his leave when his “blind and total dedication to the job began to wane.” There were new rules governing office behavior — no more drinking on the job, no smoking, be polite and treat each other with respect. Changes that were needed, Rosen said, but he missed “the shouting and laughing that once was commonplace.”
He said it was like working in a library — “the crazy recklessness of a bygone era had disappeared.”
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Each year, Global Atlanta asks influential readers and community leaders to review the most impactful book they read during the course of the year. This endeavor has continued annually since 2010.
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