60 Minutes - 8/12/2018: Hacking Democracy, The Legacy of Lynching, For Better or for Worse

Episode Date: August 13, 2018

Bill Whitaker goes behind the scenes of cyber assaults on U.S. voting systems. Oprah Winfrey reports on a monument dedicated to the thousands of African Americans who have been lynched. Dr. Jon LaPook sits down with a couple, of which the wife has Alzheimer's disease. "60 Minutes" has interviewed them yearly for the past decade to illustrate the disease's impact. Those stories on tonight's "60 Minutes." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. I picked up the phone and said, Steve, we got a problem. I said, okay, what happened?

He says, we've been hacked. I said, oh, my God. And with that, the first shots were fired in the sweeping cyber assault on state voting systems that U.S. intelligence has tied to the Russian government. We now realize that we are potentially dealing with something way more serious. 60 Minutes investigates what happened and finds bipartisan agreement that our democracy is under attack. Are we doing enough? No. Whoa. This is something.

There are 805 steel markers, one for each county where lynchings took place all across this country. So far, the memorial's research team has evidence of more than 4,300 lynchings beginning after the Civil War. Every name has its own story. Yes, that's right. Eliza Cowan was lynched in Lawrence County, South Carolina. Eliza, a woman? A woman. If they couldn't find the man they were looking for, they would lynch that man's wife or daughter or child. When you heard the word Alzheimer's, what did that do to you? I was devastated. What makes this story so unusual is that almost every year for the past 10 years,

we've interviewed Mike and Carol as Alzheimer's took over her brain. Even though this is intensely personal, they wanted all of us to see the devastating impact of Alzheimer's on each of them over a decade. What's your husband's name? My husband's? Your husband's name. Yeah. The guy sitting to your left. I'm Steve Croft.

I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Oprah Kroft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Oprah Winfrey. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. The U.S. intelligence community has concluded there is no doubt the Russians meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, leaking stolen emails and inflaming tensions on social media. While Congress and

Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigate Russian interference, including whether the campaign of Donald Trump colluded with Russia, we focused on one vector of the attack on American democracy, the sweeping cyber assault on state voting systems that U.S. intelligence tied to the Russian government. You're about to hear what happened from the frontline soldiers of a cyber war that was fought largely out of public view. As we first reported in April, it took place on digital battlegrounds in states throughout the country. The first shots were fired here in Illinois, not far from downtown Springfield, in a nondescript shopping center, the kind you'll find anywhere in the United States. There, in a repurposed supermarket, is the headquarters of the Illinois Board of Elections.

This doesn't look like a war zone. No, it doesn't. Steve Sanvas is the executive director. He told us in his first television interview about the attack that this office is on the front lines of a cyber war. We have a good IT department, but... No match for the Russian government. Bows and arrows against the lightning. I hate to say it. Bows and arrows against the lightning. Is that what it felt like?

At first, yes. He vividly remembers the call from his IT director on July 12, 2016, just weeks after the Democratic National Committee announced that Russian hackers had infiltrated its computer network. I picked up the phone and said, Steve, we got a problem. I said, okay, what happened? He says, we've been hacked. I said, oh my God. A staffer noticed the server for the voter registration database with the personal information of 7 and a half million Illinois voters had slowed way down. The IT team discovered a malicious attack, a barrage of digital hits. I suppose

you could analogize it to a fast-growing tumor in the system. It was unlike anything we had ever seen. Did you determine what they were after? It was of a very random nature. They weren't looking for all the Democrats or all the Republicans or all the people who lived in one district or another? There was no rhyme or reason to it. Steve Sandvoss showed us the voter registration website where the hackers exploited a security flaw to get in. His IT team determined the attackers had been in their system unseen for three weeks. They only noticed when the hackers suddenly ramped up their attack and in just a couple of hours scooped up complete

records of 3,500 voters and bits of information on as many as a half million. His engineers upgraded the firewall and plugged the website holes. That stopped the data heist, but not the attack. The hits continued, even though they weren't penetrating. The logs revealed that about a million and a half hits were coming in. A million and a half? Yes. Five queries per second for a period of approximately 30 days. So this almost seems like they wanted to be noticed.

The only thing they didn't do is identify themselves as the Russians. Sanvas says he suspected the hackers wanted to sow doubt about the integrity of the vote. Illinois notified the FBI. What Illinois discovered set off a chain of events that take us to today. Former FBI agent Anthony Ferrante was director of cyber incident response for President Barack Obama's National Security Council. When you go in to investigate this intrusion that the state of Illinois saw, what did you see? The FBI identified digital fingerprints left by the intruder. Think of it as a crime scene where fingerprints are dusted and pulled.

We do the same thing when investigating a computer intrusion. And your analysis pointed the finger at Russia. It did indeed. The Department of Homeland Security was so alarmed by what it saw the Russians doing, it took the unprecedented step of arranging a conference call with election officials from all 50 states. The FBI put out this flash alert. But the intelligence community wasn't prepared to publicly implicate Russia. So the call and the alert simply warned states to be on the

lookout for the kind of malicious attack that had hit Illinois. Did information from other states start flooding in? I would show up to work every single day and learn of two, three, four more states that had been actively targeted by the same actors. And it was after two or three weeks of this that my colleagues and I said, we have to believe that this is a large-scale, coordinated campaign to target every single state in the Union. Anthony Ferrante reported what he was learning to Michael Daniel, President Obama's cyber czar.

What was the reaction when you saw this in the White House? I think that was the point we realized that we were playing a different game. That we had thought that we were dealing with the normal sort of espionage routine that was associated with presidential elections and we now realize that we are potentially dealing with something way more serious. 60 minutes obtained this previously undisclosed Department of Homeland Security internal document that details the scope of the Russian cyber attack, a snapshot of what investigators were seeing on October 28th, less than two weeks before the presidential election.

The document shows hackers tried to get into 20 state election systems and an election IT provider in Nebraska. Hackers successfully infiltrated Illinois, a county election database in Arizona, a Tennessee state website, and an IT vendor in Florida. But it was always our working assumption that we did not detect all of the potential Russian activity that was going on.

There's other stuff that they might have done that we don't know? It's entirely possible. They quickly ruled out the Russians were tampering with voting machines. There are tens of thousands of them, and they're not connected to the Internet. What seemed much more likely to us was causing chaos at the polls on Election Day. So if you intrude into a voter registration database, and you change two digits of everybody's address so that their voter ID doesn't match what's in the voter rolls when they show up at the polls. And that creates chaos? Sure. And those stories start to spread. Lines begin to form. Election officials can't figure out what's going on.

You would only have to do it in a few places, and it would almost feed on itself. Compounding that worry, states were reluctant to accept cybersecurity help from Homeland Security. Under the Constitution, states run elections. Several pushed back against what they saw as federal intrusion, still unaware the threat was coming from Russia. Our system was under attack. Why not scream it from the top of the roof and let the states know that this was a serious and credible threat? The Obama administration did not want to appear to be biased.

We had a presidential candidate who was campaigning on the fact that the election was rigged, and he wasn't certain he was going to get a fair shot at the presidency. And I'm afraid the election's going to be rigged, I have to be honest. It was a very sensitive issue. On October 7th, three months after the Illinois hack, and one month before the election, the Obama administration decided it had enough evidence to call out the Russians. But there was no press conference, no pronouncement from the Oval Office, just this three-paragraph statement saying the Kremlin intended to interfere

with the U.S. election process. Did that statement get the reaction that you had hoped for? There were some other news events that happened around the release of that statement that tended to swamp some of it out. The Access Hollywood tape. The access Hollywood tape, yes. Hello, how are you? Hi. Hi, Mr. Trump, how are you? The hacked emails of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta,

were also leaked the same day. The press and the public paid little attention to the administration's statement on Russian hacking. So the National Security Council did something never done before. Contacted Russia on the cyber hotline, a communication channel added to the old nuclear hotline in 2013 to prevent cyber war. So what did the message say? It basically said, we know that you are carrying out these kinds of activities, and stop. Knock it off.

Was that tough enough? So I think certainly... The fact that this was the first time we'd ever exercised this channel, which was supposed to be for very serious cyber incidents and cyber issues, I think that in and of itself sent a message. The Russians brushed it off. The administration was bracing for the worst. It drew up this Election Day response plan,

which called for war rooms at the White House, the FBI, and Homeland Security, and planned for the unprecedented deployment of armed federal law enforcement agents should a cyber attack cause complete breakdown at a polling place. On Election Day, the team saw no signs the Russians tampered with the vote. Why do you think they didn't pull the trigger on Election Day? I don't know. I don't know if we'll ever know. Do you think they would have succeeded in creating chaos? Absolutely.

The agency charged with helping states protect elections from attack is the Department of Homeland Security, DHS. The agency has been criticized for a slow response. We tried repeatedly to interview Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen or one of her deputies, but DHS denied all our requests. Instead, we were directed to the Secretary's March testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The threat of interference remains,

and we recognize that the 2018 midterm and future elections are clearly potential targets for Russian hacking attempts. Secretary Nielsen told the senators DHS is offering to run security checks of state online election systems. It's also granting security clearances for state officials to receive classified cyber threat briefings. Many senators expressed frustration with the agency's response. With the possible exception of North Korea's nuclear weapons, this is the most serious threat that our country faces today, and we are not adequately dealing with it.

I hear no sense of urgency to really get on top of this issue. With the midterm elections fast approaching, only 17 states have requested extensive on-site security checks from DHS. So far, the agency has completed 16. Illinois, where it all began, didn't get its security check until May, six weeks after it held its primary election. We have to be prepared for wars without blood. Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat from California, and Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma

are on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Democrats and Republicans don't agree on much, but there's bipartisan agreement on the committee that our democracy is under attack. What was the Russians' endgame? To disrupt our democracy is under attack. What was the Russians' endgame? To disrupt our democracy, to disrupt Americans' confidence in their government and their democracy, and in that way weaken our standing in the world.

This could be the Iranians next time, could be the North Koreans next time. This is something that's been exposed as a weakness in our system, that we need to be able to fix that, not knowing who could try to test it out next time senators lankford and harris are backing legislation to set minimum cyber security standards and streamline communication between states and the federal government but even that modest bill has languished in the senate this does not seem like the kind of response that you would have to a nation under attack by a foreign power. Are we doing enough? No, we're not doing enough. We're not doing nothing, but we are certainly not doing enough. Since our story first aired, special counsel Robert Mueller indicted Russian intelligence agents for hacking into state election systems in 2016.

And just this month, the heads of DHS, the FBI, the NSA, and the Director of National Intelligence warned that Russia is still targeting U.S. elections. They said our democracy is, quote, in the crosshairs. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging

into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a reckoning taking place in America over how we remember our history. Much of the focus has been on whether or not to take down monuments that celebrate the Confederacy. But as we first reported in April, this story is about a new monument that has gone up in Montgomery, Alabama. It documents the lynchings of thousands of African-American men, women, and children during a 70-year period following the Civil War. The project is led by criminal defense attorney Brian Stevenson,

who is determined to shed light on a dark period in our past that most people would rather forget. It's a shocking and disturbing reality that lynchings were not isolated murders committed only by men in white hoods in the middle of the night. Often, they were public crimes, witnessed, even celebrated by thousands of people. Stevenson believes, if we want to heal racial divisions, we must educate Americans of every color and creed. These cotton fields in southern Alabama are quiet now.

But in 1937, a brutal murder took place here. The lynching of Wes Johnson. Last January, some of Johnson's descendants came here in what has become a ritual taking place at lynching sites across the country, organized by civil rights attorney Brian Stevenson. Something happened here that was wrong. Something happened here that was unjust. And too few people have talked about it.

And so we want to acknowledge the wrong that happened to Wes Johnson. This is 18-year-old Wes Johnson. It is the only known image of him that remains. He was a tenant farmer accused of assaulting a white woman. Before he could stand trial, a mob of 100 men dragged him from jail, shot him, and left him hanging from a tree. The blood of Wes Johnson is in this soil. I'd like you to begin to dig this soil in remembrance of Wes Johnson. The soil collection is part of Bryan Stevenson's project to document and remember African Americans lynched during a period of what he calls racial terror. We want to call this community to repentance, to acknowledgement, to shame.

We want to tell the truth because we believe in truth and reconciliation, but we know that truth and reconciliation are sequential. We can't get to where we're trying to go if we don't tell the truth first. So far, Stevenson's team has chronicled more than 4,300 lynchings. They continue to find more. Many victims, like Benny Simmons and John Richards, were accused of murder. One in four lynching victims, like Joseph Richardson and Frank Embry, were accused of unlawful conduct with white women. In nearly every case, no evidence, just an accusation, was enough.

There's so many crimes committed against African Americans. Why focus on lynching? At the end of the Civil War, black people are supposed to get the right to vote. And the only way people who were white could maintain their political control was to intimidate black people. And lynching was especially effective

because it would allow the whole community to know that we did this to this person. It was intended to send a message that if you try to vote, if you try to advocate for your rights, if you insist on fair wages, if you do anything that complicates white supremacy and white dominance of political power, we will kill you. Anything that upsets the power structure as I want it to be. That's exactly right.

In 1993, Bryan Stevenson founded an organization he called the Equal Justice Initiative. It's a legal advocacy group based in Montgomery, Alabama, focused on defending the poor and powerless. Stevenson is best known for his legal victories in the United States Supreme Court and for successfully overturning the wrongful convictions of over 100 people on death row. But 10 years ago, he turned the attention of his organization to also investigating crimes of the past, the lynchings of African-Americans. Defense attorney Sia Sane has spent hundreds of hours searching through newspaper archives and visiting county courthouses. Is there usually newspaper evidence or documentation?

Often there were public reports because people acted with impunity, and so there would be newspaper reports, sometimes in advance, saying a man will be lynched later this afternoon. This is an article about the lynching of a man named Jesse Washington, who was accused of a crime in Waco, Texas. The newspaper headline read, Burn Young Negro in Public Square as 15,000 Look On. A mob dragged Jesse Washington, a teenager who was convicted of murder after a one-hour trial, from the courtroom to the public square. There's a remarkable photograph of the crowd, and it's people dressed in their Sunday bests with their hats on. There's clothing oil-soaked. He is strung to tree.

Fire is set under him, and he is dropped into flames as 15,000 people look on. I think it's incredibly revealing that death was not enough, that it wasn't enough to kill people. People would be killed and then shot and then set on fire. And then even after that, there are cases where the body was dragged to the heart of the black community. Fear of that kind of mob led Wes Johnson's relatives to bury him in this unmarked grave. Right here is where Wes Johnson is buried.

And right here... Faye Walker Howell, who is a filmmaker and Wes Johnson's distant cousin, spent decades interviewing relatives who were alive at the time and remembered the lynching. They had to bury him in a hurry. Why? Because the lynch mob, they were coming, they wanted Wes' body to take around town, to drag around town, to show the body off. It wasn't just Wes Johnson who was killed and victimized. It was the entire black community. Everybody was feeling fear and panic and menace and trauma the night of this lynching and for the weeks and months and years after that lynching. It was a community crime.

This wasn't done by the Klan or people who had to wear masks. This was done by teachers and clergy and law enforcement officers. And people you had to deal with every day. Every day. Stevenson's team started their investigation in Alabama, but soon uncovered accounts of mobs murdering African Americans throughout the southern states and beyond. As the cases mounted,

Stevenson wanted to do something to commemorate the victims. So in Montgomery, Alabama, the heart of the Deep South, which still has dozens of monuments celebrating the Confederacy, Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative took on a bold project. They bought six acres of land and started construction on a memorial to the victims of lynching. Actually, you can still see names. Yeah, from here. You can see a lot better than I thought. I think this looks great. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which was paid for through hundreds of private donations, opened in April. It contains 805 steel markers,

one for each county where lynchings took place, and on each marker, the names. The markers are suspended to evoke the horror of being strung up and hanged from a tree. So you start with them at eye level, and then on this corridor, they begin to rise. And then you get to this corridor, and this is when you begin to confront the scale of all of these lynchings. Whoa. This is something. Yes.

Yes. We wanted people to have a sense of just the scale of what this violence, what this terrorism was. So this is over 4,000 that have been documented, but of course there are more. Thousands more. Thousands more. Thousands more. Will more. Thousands more. Will we ever even know how many? We will never know.

Uneven, rusted steel is meant to echo the many shades and skin tones of those African Americans lynched. Every name has its own story. Yes, that's right. Eliza Cowan was lynched in Lawrence County, South Carolina. Eliza, a woman? A woman. A woman. Were women often lynched in lawrence county south carolina eliza a woman a woman a woman were women often lynched they were they were sometimes because they were accused of something and then sometimes women would be lynched if they couldn't find the man they were looking for they would

lynch that man's wife or daughter or child and this was a minister reverend t.a allen who began talking to sharecroppers about their rights. And because he was doing that, the plantation owners, the landowners got together and they lynched him. And the proof they used that he was somebody worthy of lynching is that when they found his body, he had a piece of paper that talked about sharecropper rights. And the other piece of paper he had in his suit jacket was a note that said, Every man a king. A lot of these folks were lynched because they showed too much dignity.

They showed too much humanity. He just wanted to be respected as a human being. And it got him hanged. On the side here, what we do is we start to tell stories. We want people to hear and understand what happened to some of these folks. Oh, my. Robert Morton was lynched for writing a note to a white woman. Yes. David Hunter was lynched in Lauren County, South Carolina,

for leaving the farm where he worked without permission. Yeah. Lenchings became so acceptable, onlookers would send picture postcards to friends and family. This card, depicting the horrific image of a burned corpse, casually notes, this is the barbecue we had last night. Even young children looked on. You know, the thing that gets me

in so many of the photographs that I've seen is the fact that people treated it like major events. I think about who are those people that are smiling into the camera. And I think it's done real psychic damage, not just to black people, but to white people too. Because you can't bring your child to the public square and have your child watch someone be burned to death, be tortured, to have their fingers cut off, to be castrated, to be taunted, to be menaced, to be hanged like that,

and not expect it to have some consequence, some legacy. And the legacy that I think it's created is this indifference to how we treat people who look different than us. And I legacy that I think it's created is this indifference to how we treat people who look different than us. And I think that's tragic. I don't even think that white people in our country are free. I think we're all burdened by this history of racial inequality. What about everyone who says, and there are black people and white people say, enough already of all that. That happened. That's the past. Let's move forward. I don't think we get to pretend that this stuff didn't happen. I don't think you can just play it off. This is like a disease. You have to treat it. To do that, Stevenson says, we need to talk about it.

So along with the memorial, he also opened a museum in Montgomery, designed to teach people more about what he calls the ugly parts of American history. It traces the African-American experience from enslavement to mass incarceration. Slavery doesn't end in 1865, it just evolves. Stevenson wants people to understand that lynchings were not just brutal footnotes in history. They reflected a belief in racial differences that reinforced segregation in the 1950s and 60s, and, he says, has resulted in a pattern of unequal justice today. And now we live in a landscape where you see young black boys and men being rounded up.

One in three black male babies born in this country is expected to go to jail or prison. You actually think that slavery and lynchings led to African Americans being disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system? Yes, I do. And I think actually it's not a hard thing to understand. You know, I look at... I think it is a hard thing to understand for people who think people get locked up. People are locked up because they commit crimes. About 13 percent of the people illegally in possession of drugs in this country are black. That's about our proportion of the population. You know what percentage are arrested? That's about 35 percent. That is an echo of this consciousness that doesn't value the lives of

these folks. Equal value for every life is what Bryan Stevenson has spent his life fighting for. So now, soil from the place of Wes Johnson's lynching sits on this shelf in the museum in Montgomery, along with hundreds of others. And right now, when we talk about our history, when we talk about our past, we're not telling the truth. We're just not.

America can be a great nation even though there was slavery, even though there was lynching, even though there was segregation. But if we don't talk about those things we did, if we don't acknowledge those things, we're not going to get there. Now Dr. John LaPook on assignment for 60 minutes. Mike and Carol Daly have been married for 54 years. Like more than 5 million American families, they're dealing with dementia. Carol has been suffering from Alzheimer's, the main type of dementia. What makes this story so unusual, as we first reported in April, is that almost every year for the past 10 years, we've interviewed Mike and Carol as Alzheimer's took over her brain.

Even though this is intensely personal, they wanted all of us to see the devastating impact of Alzheimer's on each of them over a decade. We should have brought the bread. When we first met Carol and Mike in 2008, Carol was active, conversational, and determined to make the best of her failing memory. How old are you now? 65, 65 now. I think, right? Yeah. Carol's memory had been spotty for several years.

I started to notice it at home, and I used to joke about it to my kids. I would say, you know, I think she has Alzheimer's, the way she forgets everything. Then a doctor told her she really did have Alzheimer's. Mike's mother had had it, now his wife. Carol, when you heard the word Alzheimer's, what did that do to you? I was devastated because I saw his mother, what she went through. It's terrible. She was walking the streets in the middle of the night and we had to bring her home.

As Carol's memory deteriorated, she lost her job at a bank and lost her ability to do a lot of what she'd always done at home. Did you used to be a good cook? Yeah. Oh, yeah. What happened? It stopped. I just couldn't do it.

What couldn't you do? I didn't know what to do first. The meatloaf. Oh, the meatloaf. That was the... It was terrible. They couldn't eat it. Because...

I don't know what I did with the ingredients or whatever. They just couldn't eat it. And you're tearing up. It's upsetting for you. I don't want to be like this. I really don't. Unable to concentrate, Carol had to give up reading and movies, hard for someone who'd worshipped Clark Gable.

Oh, so handsome. So you remember that? That I know. They told us Carol's illness had brought them closer, but they feared the future. My fear is, I guess, maybe to get worse, you know, and it probably would. And it did.

Almost three years later, when we went back to visit, Carol had no idea how old she was. Eighty? No, I don't know. You're actually 67. 67? 67. Yeah. And what about her favorite actor?

Do you remember Clark Gable? Oh, yeah, that was my... Yeah. Who is he? Oh, I... I don't know much now. Now Mike, a former New York City cop, had to apply her makeup and dress her. But he told us this was his chance

to repay all that Carol had done for him. She had a job. She cleaned house. She did the wash. She made the beds. And she put up with me. So all that's changed for us is the roles. Now, I do the wash.

I make the beds, I help Carol. But that's not what you signed up for. Yes, I did. When we took our oath it was for better or for worse. So I did sign up for it in the beginning. But Mike had put on almost

20 pounds over the last two years and started taking pills to reduce anxiety and help him sleep. The thing is, I could sit here and feel sorry for myself, but what is that going to do for me? At our next meeting, one year later, when Carol couldn't come up with words, she answered with laughs. What kind of thing? That's not right. And three years since our first visit, she needed constant watching.

I can't go out by myself or anything like that. So, we have to have somebody around. That's a bad feeling. Yeah. You've lost your independence. Yep. But that's what you do. After all these years, I can't give up.

And I'll continue to try. And I pray to God that she goes before me. Because I'm not going to put her in a nursing home. I can handle it. But we live a life. But that life was a lot tougher when we returned two years later. By then, Carol could no longer remember her last name or this.

What's your husband's name? My husband's? Your husband's name. Yeah. The guy sitting to your left. That big guy who loves you. Yeah, who loves me. Yeah. That big guy who loves you. Yeah, who loves me.

Don't know what's coming tomorrow. Beyond the memory loss, as Alzheimer's affected more of her brain, it was destroying more of her physical abilities. She's losing the ability to control her feet, her hands. It was six years ago that I first met you. Yeah. And at the time you were shouldering all of the burden. Right. And you're still shouldering all of the burden.

I mean, how are your shoulders? They're sore, no doubt about it. But you have to do what you have to do. Carol. At our next meeting, two years later, conversation with Carol was impossible. It's been almost eight years since we first met and since we first sat on this couch. Yeah. Without making you embarrassed, do you remember my name? No. What's this called? What I'm wearing on my wrist. What's the name of that?

I don't know. It's a wristwatch. Oh, yeah. Does that sound familiar? Yeah. Yeah. Carol reached a point where she was not able to do anything for herself at all. She couldn't feed herself, couldn't go to the bathroom by herself.

Face me. Okay. And Mike had reached the point where he simply couldn't take care of her by himself. So he hired a home care aide during the day, costing almost $40,000 a year. Now, Alzheimer's was hitting them financially on top of mentally and physically. What would you say the toll has been of this long journey on you? I'm dying. I really think I am. The stress, I thought I had a heart attack to begin with. You had chest pain. They want to put me in the hospital. I can't go to the hospital. All right, what do I do with

Carol? Then she has anxiety attacks, part of the Alzheimer's. Anxiety attacks may be part of what's happening to you too. It sounds like if you had chest pain but it wasn't a heart attack, is that what it was, an anxiety attack? I call it stress. According to the Alzheimer's Association, the vast majority of caregivers say their toughest challenge is emotional stress. I can still remember when you said, no big deal, I can handle this. Yeah, I think about that comment I made, and I said, what a jerk I was.

Well, not a jerk, but just you were sort of near the beginning of your journey, and you didn't know. Yeah, I thought this was it, you know? So she can't remember things. I see people with dementia. They function normally. She can't walk.

The impact on everybody else is enormous. One year later, 14 years since she was first diagnosed, Carol was spending most of her days sitting silently, no longer able to understand questions. We can't communicate. It's lonely. Let me just get them so they go on nicely. But watch what happened when social worker Dan Cohn put headphones on Carol and played some of her old favorites. The words aren't there, but the beat is, and the melody is.

The melody is pretty good. In Alzheimer's, older memories are usually the last to go. But even then, a faded distant memory can sometimes be revived. And since the music we love is really tied to our emotional system, and our emotional system is still very much intact, that's what we're connecting, and that's why it still works. And it was tied to his emotional system, too. He was tearing up. I think those tears were happy tears, knowing that she hasn't lost it all.

It was like, wow, wow. But the wow did not last. When we met this past January, Carol, now 74, was too far gone to react to music. She's so changed just since the last time I saw her. And her pulse is as strong as can be and regular. I'm feeling it right now. So her heart seems strong, but she has so deteriorated. Stand up, Carol. Come on.

Earlier that morning, they'd shown us how hard it is to get Carol ready for the day. What didn't you realize would happen? That she becomes a vegetable. That's basically what I feel like she is now. Mike is still too heavy, his blood pressure is too high, and a few months ago, his thoughts were too dark. I'm ready to put the gun to my head. I didn't really thought of suicide. Really? Yeah, it got to that point. Caregiving is really tough.

Hardest job I've ever had. And that's from a former New York City cop. But suicidal thoughts are not uncommon for people taking care of a family member with dementia. Mike hired more aides, so Carol now has 24-hour help. It's draining his savings, but allowing him to get out of the house and make new friends. And that's helping lift his depression. I leave this at home. And when I go out, it's a new Mike out there now. But at home, he worries that Carol is in danger. Has she fallen? Yes. She hasn't broken any bones? No. Just bruises. No. So now, despite years of telling us he wouldn't put Carol in a nursing home. I'm coming to the point where maybe a nursing home is the answer for her, her safety. Ten days after that, and 53 years after their wedding day, Mike did put Carol in a nursing home. Do you still love her?

I loved Carol, who was Carol. But now, Carol's not Carol anymore. When Carol was still Carol, that would have been the best time to discuss the kind of caregiving decisions Mike Daly eventually had to face alone. Mike hopes that sharing such intimate details of their lives will help others be better prepared than they were. Recently, Mike told us that with Carol in a nursing home,

both he and Carol are doing better. More on tonight's story, including the reason behind 60 Minutes' decision to show graphic images of lynchings. I think that some people will be offended by seeing the photos. At 60minutesovertime.com. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.