“Oh,” he said casually, barely making eye contact, “we decided to move things around.”
What?
Fager looked down at the papers on his desk in a way that made it clear the conversation was over.
I was at a loss. Feeling screwed with, needing help, I called Les Moonves and asked if we could have lunch.
We met at a dimly lit Chinese restaurant near Black Rock—the kind of place executives bring their mistresses. Les greeted me warmly, as always, giving off the winning whiff of someone who’d just banked another 10 mil.
I cut the small-talk portion short. “Les,” I said, “as you know, one of the reasons I came to CBS was to do pieces for 60 Minutes. I need some advice on how to maneuver the politics over there.” I told him what had happened with the Hillary piece. “Can you give me some guidance? Can you maybe talk to Jeff and find out why this is happening?”
As usual, Les was opaque—although for a split second I did catch him processing the fact that he had a problem. “I’ll talk to Fager,” he said, shoveling some more beef and broccoli onto his plate.
I’ll never know if he did. In retrospect, I don’t know why he would—his evening-news anchor, a bad-press magnet who had failed to move the ratings needle, was butting heads with the EP of the most revered program on television, a critical and commercial triumph.
AT LEAST THERE was one story Fager couldn’t take away.
When a US Airways jet carrying 155 passengers and crew members made an emergency landing on the Hudson, suddenly everyone wanted to know everything about the pilot, Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger.
The second the alert came in, Lori typed out a one-sentence blue sheet—“Katie Couric interviews the crew of US Airways flight 1549”—and submitted it to 60 Minutes. Then she flooded the zone, making calls and sending emails to virtually anyone who had any influence with Sully: the head of the pilots’ union, the copilot, the flight attendants, US Airways corporate communications…
But Fager’s brush-cut lackey, Bill Owens, wanted his buddy Scott Pelley to do the story, natch. Pelley’s entire team was working the phones. There was also Matt Lauer, equally desperate to bag the first interview for TODAY, and with CBS dicking around and competing against itself, he came close.
At a certain point, it was obvious Lori and I were the closest to the finish line—they had no choice but to let me get on with it.
“Don’t fuck it up,” Owens told Lori, helpfully.
I INTERVIEWED SULLY IN his hilltop home in Danville, California. A former air force fighter pilot who’d instructed flight crews on how to respond to crises in the air, he might well have been the perfect person on the planet to be confronted with this situation. I’ll never forget him saying to me, “For 42 years, I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education, and training. And on January 15th, the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.”
We also arranged to have many of the survivors and their families come to Charlotte, North Carolina, the aborted flight’s original destination, to thank Sully and the rest of the crew. I thought it would be moving to see the passengers reunited with the man who’d quite literally saved their lives. Fager didn’t want to do it, but I pushed back.
It was worth it—hugs, tears, grateful spouses, children, homemade signs, roses, a survivor who’d lost his brother on 9/11 and had prayed for his own life so his parents wouldn’t lose another son.
I won an Emmy and got a pretty cool phone call a few years later.
“Hi, this is Clint,” came the gravelly whisper. Clint Eastwood was making a feature film about the incident and wanted me to reenact the interview, replacing Sully with Tom Hanks.
Sure, I said. I also told Clint I could reenact the broadcast I anchored from the freezing banks of the Hudson that night.
“That’s interesting,” he said. “Maybe we should call it The Katie Couric Story Featuring Sully Sullenberger.”
I laughed. “I have no problem with that, Clint.”
69
Damned If You Do
THE MOOD LIFT from a big win was always short-lived. In general, I felt embattled. Defensive. Misunderstood. I guess you could say I was feeling like Hillary Clinton.
I conducted her first White House interview in a prime-time special back in 1993. Rewatching it now, I’m struck by a number of things, starting with the title card: In a fancy, fussy Donna Reed Show–style script, the words Hillary Clinton: America’s First Lady appear on-screen as if being written by an invisible hand. There are pink flowers, tinkly music, and a soothing voice-over befitting a feminine-hygiene ad.