The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes by Ira Rosen

Episode Date: March 9, 2021

Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes by Ira Rosen Two-time Peabody Award-winning writer and producer Ira Rosen reveals the intimate, untold stories of his decades at America’s most iconic news show. It’s a 60 Minutes story on 60 Minutes itself. When producer Ira Rosen walked into the 60 Minutes offices in June 1980, he knew he was about to enter television history. His career catapulted him to the heights of TV journalism, breaking some of the most important stories in TV news. But behind the scenes was a war room of clashing producers, anchors, and the most formidable 60 Minutes figure: legendary correspondent Mike Wallace. Based on decades of access and experience, Ira Rosen takes readers behind closed doors to offer an incisive look at the show that invented TV investigative journalism. With surprising humor, charm, and an eye for colorful detail, Rosen delivers an authoritative account of the unforgettable personalities that battled for prestige, credit, and the desire to scoop everyone else in the game. As Mike Wallace’s top producer, Rosen reveals the interview secrets that made Wallace’s work legendary, and the flaring temper that made him infamous. Later, as senior producer of ABC News Primetime Live and 20/20, Rosen exposes the competitive environment among famous colleagues like Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters, and the power plays between correspondents Chris Wallace, Anderson Cooper, and Chris Cuomo. A master class in how TV news is made, Rosen shows readers how 60 Minutes puts together a story when sources are explosive, unreliable, and even dangerous. From unearthing shocking revelations from inside the Trump White House, to an outrageous proposition from Ghislaine Maxwell, to interviewing gangsters Joe Bonanno and John Gotti Jr., Ira Rosen was behind the scenes of 60 Minutes' most sensational stories. Highly entertaining, dishy, and unforgettable, Ticking Clock is a never-before-told account of the most successful news show in American history.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks chris voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast oh my gosh it's gonna be amazing we. We have today Ira Rosen on the show. He's the Emmy award-winning producer behind the scenes at 60 Minutes and various other places.

We'll get into here. He wrote the book Ticking Clock, and we'll be talking about this groundbreaking, amazing career that he's taken and had, award-winning career he's taken and had. To see the video version of this, which should be pretty interesting, go to youtube.com. For just Chris Foss, hit that bell notification button also go to goodreads.com fortune as chris voss you can see all the books we're reading and reviewing over there as well as his we just got done wrapping reading it and also you can go to all of our groups on facebook linkedin and instagram as well today like i mentioned we have ira Rosen on the show. For 40 years in TV

and nearly 25 years, Ira Rosen has produced some of the most memorable, important, and groundbreaking stories. For 60 Minutes, he was a former Nieman Fellow, Harvard University Fellow, and he was also the Senior Producer of Primetime Live with Diane Sawyer. Rosen has won 24 national Emmys, four DuPont Awards, two RFK Awards, and two Peabody's for his work. He's also the co-author of The Warning, Accident at Three Mile Island. And he joins us here today. Welcome to the show, Ira. How are you?

Hey, how you been? Thanks. Thanks for having me. There you go. And he's joining us from his vehicle today. His vehicle studio. The vehicle studio, yes. The vehicle studio. Ira, I might as well just ask you, what are you driving? So that we have a context of the acoustics we're getting this is an acura it's it actually was my son's car which we got for him in college and the way life works is we give it to him and then he gives it back to us there you go that gives us a chance to get a acura sponsorship

on the show here so thank you for that. Not bad, right? There you go. So you've written this amazing book. It's a tell-all, would you call this a tell-all book? It's a tell-all about my life. I'm not sure if it's a tell-all about the industry. There's a lot more to tell. But certainly it's a tell-all about the Ira Rosen life. There you go. And what motivated you to want to write this book? I have lived and been lucky enough to have had so many different adventures in TV, in print. And I read a quote that Jacques Cousteau, the oceanographer, had given, which is, if you've lived an extraordinary life, it's selfish to keep it to yourself. And I kind of thought about that. And I wanted to

write this book for my friends, for my family, and for a lot of the people I've mentored in journalism over the years. So they could understand how you do stories, the good and the bad, and some of what you have to overcome to make it. And so I wrote it for them. And I let a friend of mine said, the best way to do it is just call bulls and strikes, be an umpire, just lay it out, tell what it is. And that's what I tried to do in this book. I hope I accomplished it. And, and, and also to make it entertaining and be a good storyteller. You've won numerous awards in your, in your past and you've, you've accomplished so much. Tell us a story about how you first came into

60 Minutes, your first big career, or what got you there. Oh, man. So I was working at Channel 9 TV in New York City, which was WOR TV, which was owned for the Joe Franklin show and Million Dollar Movie. And I had bounced around in journalism jobs, been fired from two or three newspaper jobs. And I moved back into that room that I was living in in high school. And one day, so I did a story on Channel 9 and on a magazine show on how easy it was to obtain military secrets. And I got sent in the mail these top secret films. I was posing as a defense contractor. And in the mail, they didn't check. They just sent these secret films. And so I do the story. And what made the story amazing is we did this interview at the Pentagon, and a colonel goes in front of the

camera and tries to block it. And I'm doing like this to the cameraman, keep rolling. And it was really like classic Mike Wallace. And so I did the story. And the next day after it aired, the projectionist at 60 Minutes was on the coffee line with Don Hewitt. And he said, hey, Don, I saw a story. And it was just like the stuff that we used to do. And Don said, what the hell do you mean used to do? And he got the tape, he liked it. And he called my parents' home where I was staying. And my mother answered. And my mother says, who's this Don Hewitt? Oh, I love your wife. She's great. Thank you very much. What are you doing? I'm making a kugel. Oh, I haven't had a good kugel in a long time. I, of course, I'm your typical mid-twenties adult, whatever,

and tuned everything out. And Don says, I'd like to offer your son a job as a producer on 60 Minutes. And my mother said, thank you very much. He's got a job already. Thanks for calling. And takes his number down and hangs up. And I said, who is that? Don Hewitt of 60 Minutes. He wanted to offer you a job, but I told him you have one already. How many jobs do you need? So I called Don back immediately. And Don says, hey, kid, I don't know about you, but I like your mother. If you don't want the job, tell her it's hers. So, of course, I wanted the job.

And I go in the next day and I see Don. And it was a very comfortable kind of thing. It was people walking in and out of his office. It was a walk-in medical clinic. And he's screaming, get me Morley! Harry, what the hell are you doing here? You're supposed to be on the road. And it was kind of like the barker at a carnival or something.

And we had a nice conversation. And he said, I don't... And while we were talking, Phil Shefflin, a senior producer, walks in. And he said, how old't. And while we were talking, Phil Sheffler, the senior producer walks in and he said, how old are you? And not even saying hello. And I said, 26, 26. I have suits older than you. Don, what are we doing here? And he said, no, no, no. You did a great story. Leave him alone. So he then walks me down and he says, it doesn't matter if I like you, he has to like you. And the he was Mike Wallace. And so I walk into Mike Wallace's office and Mike, Don wanted me to feel comfortable. Mike wanted me to feel uncomfortable.

And so he said to me, I know what I can do for you. What can you do for me? It was a great question. I didn't really have a good answer. And I noticed he had a tennis ball in the corner. So I said, you play tennis? And he said, what's it to you? And I said, well, I was on the Cornell tennis team. And Mike said to me later, he said, that clinched the job for me, because he figured if I didn't work out as a producer, he could get six months of tennis out of me before firing me. And so he hired me. And that's how I got my start. And I stuck around till

from the age of 26 with 15 years off in the middle to go to ABC, come back to basically to 65. So it was a pretty good run. I played tennis. I got to tell you, it's an extraordinary book. And somebody who tries to be a good host and tries to be a good interviewer, of course, we don't have the budget to do the big exposés like you do, or you did with 60 Minutes and Prime Time. I've always tried to be a good host, tried to be a good interviewer, tried to have good questions and stuff. And the book is almost a masterclass on that when you read it. It's not only the story of just extraordinary sometimes harrowing tales of your guys's adventures and trying to get the story and trying to land the story it's just an amazing tale of of what it takes sometimes to get good interviews between you jumping into to interviews with mike or others and and sometimes it seemed like you guys were sometimes playing good cop or bad cop trying to poke the the guy, getting riled up and stuff. It really was a great master class in that.

And when I did the interviews with Mike, Mike wanted the questions, like if you thought of a follow-up question, he wanted it to be handed to him immediately. He didn't want you to wait until the tape break and say, oh, you missed this question or that question. So I had to crawl on my knees sometimes and give him a piece of paper as the interview is going on. And he would do like this and extend his hand backwards like we're running a relay race. And he would grab the piece of paper and he'd look at the question, liked it, he kept it on his lap. And if he didn't like it, he would crumple it up and throw it on the floor. The problem was, while the interview is going on, he realized that the question wasn't bad. So he would then reach over and try to find the crumpled up piece of paper on the floor.

And there were moments where you thought he was going to tip over and fall on his face. Meanwhile, the interview subject is watching this kind of play, play itself out and saying, what the hell is going on here? But we had a rhythm about our interviewing style. And I learned that it wasn't something you learn in a year or even two years. His genius was in looking at a total stranger and knowing exactly what button to push to drive them crazy. For example, he'd look at you and say, you like your name, huh? I see you're very into your name. Why is your last name bigger than your first name? I noticed in the background there, are you ashamed of your first name? Do you want to keep it smaller? He would do that immediately upon looking at you. And that was

you were immediately put to you on the defensive. And he was really, there's no one like him in this business who could do that, or has the guts to do it, because it requires little guts. And I can't tell you how many moments there were over the years where we did an interview in California. It was a story on Richard Miller, who was an FBI agent who was convicted of spying. And as we're driving to it, and I know Mike was a troublemaker. And I said, Mike, listen, you better behave yourself. This interview could go south very quickly. And he said, kid, I've done this before. I said, I understand. But Mike, listen, you got to treat this with kid gloves. And it was the totally wrong thing to say, because immediately he's going to start trouble with me. So we get to the prison. We meet Svetlana. And Svetlana, and Mike goes up to her. And it's co-ed prison, remember. And Mike goes up to her and says, my, my, a co-ed prison. Do you have a boyfriend? Yes, I do. And do you have sex with him? Yes, I do. You must show me where. And the two of them go off. And I'm like, oh, my God, what is going on here?

And so we set up the interview and about 10, 15 minutes later, they both come back smoking cigarettes. And he says, I enjoyed that very much. And she says, I did, too. At this point, I'm going completely crazy. What the hell just happened here? Meanwhile, they just pulled a joke on me. And it was when they both started laughing hysterically. And I was like turning red. And I said, oh, my God. And but what it did was it loosened the subject of the interview and made it relaxed. And they collaborated very early on. They had a collaboration pulling one over on me.

And it was genius because it was one of the classic interviews. The piece would end up leading the season that year. And what I loved about that story is one of my favorite that I've ever done with Mike was he was at the height of his powers and I was at the height of my powers. I had been there now about six, seven years. It was before I went off to a Neiman and both of it's like one of these things where like a great quarterback and a great receiver and in sync, no matter what the other team's going to do, you're going to make the connection. And, and he and I were at the top of our game. And I look back on that

as one of those really magical moments in time for both of us. And it really, it really not only captures the masterclass, I think it was chapter 13, the last half of chapter 13, at least in the Audible book. I think the Audible wasn't matched up with the actual chapters, but in chapter 13 of the Audible book, you really, you gave away some of the real cool techniques that he had. And I was, I was just really blown away. Were you, I think at one point in the book, you mentioned there was like five producers around him, including yourself. Were you the one that survived the longest through all the different people?

Let me think. It sounded like you did because everybody seemed to be on the fence and you survived. There were people coming and going. It was like a bus station there was one barry lando who i think survived me who was probably with mike the longest but he survived mike because he moved to paris and so mike couldn't come in and and beat him up it's a long way to go to beat him up so mike would sometimes come into my office and he was like a uh a factory foreman and he'd say who you're talking to on the phone what are you doing why are you wasting your time on that and so one day he comes in and he said so who you're talking to and i got up i gave him the phone and i walk out the door it was my mother

he never did that to me again. I love those stories. Those are so awesome. Yeah. So you, you live through this madman era and you document it almost like a madman era of, of the great days of 60 minutes, but there's hazing, verbal hazing. There's all sorts of ball busting. If you will, you're, you're at the the skinny of your teeth sometimes. Sometimes there's a couple of stories in there where you're about to lose it. And it was interesting. And you really, you talk about the depression of Mike Wallace, the suicide attempt of Mike Wallace. And that really surprised me. I guess I hadn't heard enough of his background in history. And then I thought throughout the whole book, I'm like, I'm really going to have to ask him what his opinion is of Mike Wallace. But when I got to the end and you talked about the tennis story, it was really touching. And what perception of this to readers or listeners is, was this really a love thank you note to Mike Wallace? or what was the summation of your? You know, I think a lot of people who've read it, people are very defensive of Mike and others are

thanks. Thank you for telling this story about the guy. People are complicated. I think in thinking about it, people like black and white cookies and nobody is angelic always, or no one is totally, at least I'm talking in TV, or totally evil. I had this kind of, we had a reconciliation, I think is the word. At the very end, we reconciled all the things that happened earlier. I left him in 1989 to go work with his son. Think about that. And to leave, to basically go work on Primetime Live with Chris Wallace. And I remember that day that I told him that we hadn't had enough. We both reached a point and he came in one Thanksgiving and he wrote me a letter, whatever happened to Young America. They never call you by the way, they call you kid, Young America, Sonny. I can't remember how many times he called me by my name. He wrote this letter and it was whatever happened to Young America.

And I knew the way it was going to play out. I'm going to be the next one to be fired because he cycled through producers pretty regularly. And what I want to do is I want to leave him before he left me. And he didn't like that. And so I got a job at Primetime Live at ABC. And I went to Mike and we were doing our last story together. And the story was about obstetric malpractice. And Mike, in his perverse, crazy way, we were pregnant with our first child. And he said, oh, do a story of obstetric malpractice.

It'll make you more knowledgeable about what's going to happen. What he was really doing is he wanted to scare me from ever having another kid again. And so he assigned this story to me, and the perversity of it didn't escape me. And during that period of time, I got this other job offer at ABC. And I said to Mike, I went to him, we were driving to our last interview. And I said, Mike, I got an opportunity to be senior producer of Primetime Live. And we didn't have a name at the time, but this ABC News magazine, and I want to do it. And I'll be working with your kid, Chris. And please don't, I want this to happen. And I know you want to do it. And I'll be working with your kid, Chris. And please don't, I want this to happen. And I know you want to destroy me for sport, because that's the way you are. But don't do it. Because if you destroy me, you're going to hurt your son, Chris. And there was that moment,

he looked out the window in a car. And I knew what he was thinking. And I said, Mike, don't go there. And he said, Okay, I bless you. You can go. He said, but make sure you tell you it because you would hate hearing it from anyone before he hears it from you. So I knew I thought you would was off in China and I found them in China and I told him and he said, I've always said I won't stand in the way of anybody who doesn't want to stay here. Put Scheffler, Scheffler was the senior producer on and that's how they let me out of my contract at that point but there was there was this recycling that went on and I and it was a really hard place to work yeah the the basic verbal hazing they everyone's giving everyone it it really reminded me of like a madman create everyone smoking and drinking and

the stuff that they can't do anymore as You round out the end of the book. You're like, they can't even do that sort of stuff in the office. No, no. What it was is there was one period. The worst thing that's happened is when Mike got bored. Because he would then, and I wrote about this in the book Ticking Clock, where he would snap people's bra straps, women's bra straps. He would not think twice about smacking somebody on the behind. There was one time he did that to a producer

and she turned around and slapped him in the face. And his response was, what the hell is her problem? Wow. And yeah, there was this crazy madman era that had existed back then. The women weren't filing complaints. The men weren't filing complaints. By the way, the men were harassed as well in a different way, but certainly in a way that would violate human resources today. But everybody was building careers and doing amazing stories and working for the best show on TV. And you just took it in as your part of your job description. And you really paint a man with Mike Wallace as a very complicated, a man who's suffering some depression from some of his life experiences, a man who had a challenging relationship with his son,

who you later went to work for, Chris Wallace. It's really, it's quite the portrait. This could be a movie, but it's an interesting, it's interesting journey that you go through that almost like someone wrote the script for you. Yeah, it's funny you say a movie. Somebody from Hollywood is very interested right now. I didn't write it to be a movie. I just wrote my life and here it is and God bless. And it's been a controversial book because some portion of my former colleagues say you violated the code of Omerta, the stuff that you've talked about. And I said, wait a second,

I know about the code of Omerta. I'm not talking about felonies here. I'm not talking about murders where the bodies are buried or anything like that. I'm telling people about what it was like to work during that period of time and some of the people I work with. And I felt that this book would be, I didn't want to go back into network news. I was done. And I felt that this would be a way to seal my fate in that regard, where I knew I will never go back into network news again. Burn all the ships behind you basically. Yeah. And you blow the bridges up behind you. But part of that is when I was a kid, I covered yogis and swamis. And that was one of my first beats. And one of the people I covered was a guy named Pierre Valliot-at Khan, who was a Sufi.

He ran the Whirling Dervishes Sufi order. And he was really the real deal. I felt he was the real deal of all the spiritual guys who I was following at the time. And he told me, he gave me darshan and he said, change your career every seven years. That way, you become the ruler of your career, and the career doesn't become the ruler of you. And of course, I never did that. I stayed in like one career my entire life, practically. But now I feel like I want to do something like that. And what he was talking about is going from being a journalist to a plumber to an electrician to a teacher.

And if you think about it, it actually is a very freeing kind of thing. Because if you are so worried in your career about offending this person or that person or climbing the ladder of success and making more money and whatever, you're trapped. You may not realize you're trapped, but you are trapped. And at this point, I totally loved working for 60 and thought it was the world's greatest job. But suddenly you wake up and you're no longer 26 years old anymore. And you're no longer, frankly, able to play tennis.

So it's time for sort of new challenges. There's always a plumber job, as you mentioned. Yeah, I couldn't use one today, actually, in my place. Your wife probably has some honeydews for you. So we talked about this before the show, about how the tabloids picked it up and spun out some of your stories is overly salacious or overly critical. Have you heard from anybody in the book that you want to give us maybe respondents that you had as the good, bad or ugly? I had a great relationship at the time. When I say great relationship, I did some amazing work with Diane Sawyer, for example.

And I have nothing but admiration of her. She's one of the great storytellers. And she is so competitive. And I talked about the competition between Diane and Barbara Walters. And I was just talking to a friend of mine who, who used to work there as well. And the thing they don't understand is it's the competitive drive to win, which is not unlike it is in sports and in, in, in, in business, frankly, who's going to get the, who's going to land the account. How are you going to get it?

And they're no different. They were playing to win. And the difference was what they would do is Barbara would try to steal a story from Diane and vice versa. And then at night, they would act like buddy buddies.

And at 60 minutes, Mike would steal a story from Morley and their offices were an inch apart, and they wouldn't talk for a year. They both come to work every day and walk into their offices, not say a word to each other, and that was the nature of 60 in those days, where it was that tough and competitive. To this day day the producers are back then there's those rivalries were really ingrained so that's really one of the things oh my god diana barbara would would be fighting well they were going for the best interviews and and they they i'm not

going to say they play dirty it's that was one of the things i loved about the book just all the stories about network tv network captains of the c of the CBS, NBC and everything and everything they were doing and how it was playing out with all the different players. And yeah, the real infighting, if you would, or competitive nature of it. It's just, it was really fun to read all the different aspects of balances of it and how it played out. Yeah, no, and it's true. I had a story. I did a story on Nicky Barnes, the black heroin dealer from Harlem. And the person who originally was going to be an Ed Bradley story.

And the producer said, oh, you're never going to get him on camera. This guy is in the Witches Protection Program. I said, can I have a try? And his producer said, sure, knock yourself out. Good luck. But I knew Rudy Giuliani, who at the time was the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. And so I went to Rudy, and he summoned Barnes out of the Witness Protection Program. And Barnes still didn't want to go on camera. He said, if I go on camera, I'll get killed or whatever. So Rudy had a number two, Bill Tendi, kind of a very, very tough, experienced prosecutor, no nonsense. And Tendi said, let me talk to Barnes and see if I could persuade him to go on camera. And Tendi leaves the room for about a minute, comes back back and he says, all right, he'll do it.

And Rudy said, what did you do? What did you say to him? I threw the M knocker up against the wall and I told him, the only choice you have in this matter is what color shirt you're going to wear. So sit down and talk to this guy. And that was it. And we did Nicky Barnes and it was an amazing story. But Ed Bradley didn't talk to me for 15 years because he's what i stole it from wow so when i did it he immediately went to the producer and said what and the producer is not going to say oh i gave it to him because i knew he'd never have a chance so he said those guys stole it from us and so that was that was and

then one day at a friend's bachelor party, I'm sitting with Ed, and I said, Ed, it's been 15 years. He looks at me, he said, 15? He said, yeah. Okay. Now, then we started talking. It's like serving a prison sentence or something. Wow.

Wow. That must have been pretty comfortable in the office to walk by each other and stuff. You try to do detours. If you have to go to the bathroom you took the long way around what's funny ira is i grew up in in this golden age that you pretty much document in here you you document an age of television 60 minutes news that is just almost a time capsule in of itself and i grew up as a child watching all this growing up watching the shows just all the shows

you won awards for all the different exposes and different things you guys did i was like wow i remember that i remember that you were like doing the history of my life and watching 60 minutes and these different shows and how they would blow up and turn into things there's even a story in here where your own life you're i think chasing a story i think in pakistan and you're all you almost get kidnapped i was doing a story i i had gotten to know the pakistani ambassador in washington and karabakh and there was a they had just captured an al-qaeda guy who was the communications director of al-qaeda and in in reading it, he was educated in England, which meant he spoke English probably, and he's now cooperating. And you always want to talk to

a cooperator because now they're ready to tell their story. So it worked on a lot of levels, an al-Qaeda guy, good English, cooperating, he'll tell you the inside story. So Karam had set it up for me in Pakistan that we could go there and interview this guy, Nam Noor Khan. And I go to Pakistan. And of course, once when you get to Pakistan, it's all bets off. And so every day I would meet with the ISI, which is a CIA in the Marriott Hotel there. And these guys would walk in, sit down, four o'clock, and tell me, no progress yet on your request. And this would happen day after day. And then finally, one day, I exploded and started going crazy. And I talked on the cell phone to Karam in Washington.

And the next day, they come and said, listen, all the embassies heard what you were saying. You can't do this. I said, you guys are effing me. And they eventually gave me enough that I could make a story on. But before I left, I decided to throw a Hail Mary. And there was this guy, Razi, who was living inside the Red Mosque in Islamabad. And Razi's English was perfect. And he was the Al-Qaeda guy in Islamabad. And Razi's English was perfect. And he was the Al-Qaeda guy inside

Islamabad. So I go there at night with the camera crew and we do an interview and then the camera crew leaves and Razi says, can I show you around? And I was left there with my CBS fixer and translator. And so we go into the back of the madrasa and we're looking and stuff and then suddenly my translator and fixer was started talking in rapid fire urdu and it's what's going on here and i don't know what i'm sitting there shaking my head smiling and and then the cbs guy grabs me and hauls me out and brings me into the car. And he's heaving and very, very upset. And I said, what just happened?

And they said, and he said, they were discussing about whether to make you another Daniel Pearl. And who is the journalist who was beheaded in Pakistan. And I told him that my brother is the police chief in Kohat, which is a nearby town, and that if they would kidnap you, he'll track every member of your family down and slaughter you by morning and slaughter them by morning. So that bought us about 30 seconds because they're saying, oh, should we do this or not? And so we were able to escape. But I had no idea any of this was going on at the time. And yeah, no, it was, it's interesting. When you're sitting in the US and you're thinking about going to the forbidden territories in

Pakistan or some of these places, you're scared. But once when you're over there, the fear leaves you because you're in the middle of it. And it doesn't feel as fearful as if you're in the middle of something and it doesn't feel as fearful as as if you're in the middle of something i suppose that's the way it is if you go into oh my god we're going into a scary neighborhood or something but once when you're in the scary neighborhood it doesn't look so scary here maybe it's okay yeah but it was it was pretty crazy yeah you almost lost your life or you could have maybe lost your life. I could have, yeah, absolutely.

You could have been kidnapped for years and held like they do, and just no one ever heard from, and then we wouldn't have gotten the great stories and the great book. There was a correspondent on 60 Minutes told me a story. He went to Pakistan as well with George Pryor. George Pryor was a fantastic producer, died way, way too young. But George took him to Pakistan, and they went to waziristan the forbidden territories and there was a big sign as soon as you enter the territories which is basically don't proceed any further or you'll be arrested and george said let's keep going

and they were arrested like within five minutes and bob simon said had they not been arrested they probably would have been killed oh wow so yeah it back then it was really nutty times yeah i i gotta tell you i love the book it just captured it captured a lot of my life like i just you would go through the different stories and the exposés you guys did that were explosive and i would just be like wow and uh you really get into your experience with chris wallace and of course they didn't talk for a year chris wallace you they had a comp i mean mike definitely was as you portray in the book a very complicated guy and not like the most uh warm huggy sort of person i guess maybe no i, one of the things that, you know, like normal, when two people have a phone conversation, right? You say, Hello, how are you? This is so and so. They begin phone conversations.

They just talk. And so one time, and I have this story in the book, you talk about Chris Wallace and his father, Chris Wallace was doing a profile of Chris Rock, the comedian. He was all set. He was excited to do it. And then Chris Rock changes his mind and said, I'm not going to do Chris Wallace. I'm going to do Mike Wallace. And Mike had taken the story from him. And this is a betrayal on so many levels. And so I called Mike up and Chris said, I can't believe my father did this. I said, let me call him and see what's going on. So I call Mike and Mike answers. And I said, Mike, are you taking no? Hello. We don't say hello. How are you? It's Ira or whatever. It's just, you try to rip off your kid. And he said,

what are you talking about? I said, you were going to do Chris rock. Your son was going to do Chris rock. And you just took the story from him. He'll get over it. I said, Mike, here's the deal. You have a choice. Either your son will speak at your funeral or you can do Chris Rock. You can't have both. Silence.

Pause. Let me get back to you. And so he calls me back 10 minutes later and he said, I solved the problem. I said, how do you solve the problem? He said, I gave it to Bradley. And I said, you didn't solve your problem. You're still ripping your kid off. And he said, what do you mean? I'm not doing the story. And Chris and Mike didn't talk for a long period of time. The story I just told you was actually the story that Chris Wallace spoke at Mike's memorial after Mike died. Oh, wow.

Mike told this story at his memorial. And obviously he was speaking at the funeral. But he said, Chris said, we had a very difficult relationship. But at the end, he became my best friend. And in many ways, I felt that as we got older, you talked earlier about Mike's depression. And Mike had hidden the depression for a long period of time. Doctors had told him, don't reveal your depression, it will hurt your career.

And he believed that. And then when he outed himself about it, he gave so many people out there the courage to pursue their own medication, if you will, to deal with their own depression. And as a journalist, you're always trying to change the world to make it a better place through the stories you do. And Mike ended up changing the world through the revealing of his depression. And he saved, I think, a lot of lives. And I loved in the last few years that I was there with him, when he was still coming to the office, he would show me the letters of gratitude people sent from what he did.

And interesting, two of his best friends at the time, Mark Buchwald and Bill Styron, the writer, also suffered from depression. And they went public with their stories as well. And in many ways, it was one of, I think, Mike's greatest acts that he did, the revelation of that. And he took great satisfaction in that. Do you feel that's a redemption for everything that went before with all the ball breaking and hazing and stuff? You know, I've been mixed about it. Mike gave an interview towards the end where he said, Mike, sometimes I was really hard on the people I worked with, but the stuff I turned out was first rate. And I don't think that's enough of an apology to all the people he hurt along the way. And there's a tendency to say,

oh, I don't want to talk about it. Don't talk about it. Why is Ira talking about it? You're all this stuff. But I think it's important to talk about it because people, if you allow the corruption, if you will, and I think that's a proper word, you allow this corruption to occur,

it's going to manifest itself and it's going to occur again. And it's going to manifest itself and it's going to occur again. And it's going to allow abusers to continue to be abusers, no matter how incredibly talented they are. If they feel they can get away with it, they'll get away with it. And I think in the end, the revelations about Mike, he understood them. He understood what it was. And he, when, when he got older and he, he lived, I think he lived into his mid nineties and he were, he never wanted to quit. He never wanted to leave. Morally Safer asked him once in an interview, why don't you retire and enjoy your grandkids or something? He said, you could reflect on your life. And he said, reflect, reflect about what?

That's it. And he was, he was true to form to the very end. But I remember there was this, there's a, and I write about this in my book. There's a scene at the very end. And I wandered into Mike's office one day, and it was Don Hewitt and Mike Wallace. And Don had been pushed out of his job, forced out of his job. And he was staying one floor below where he had previously been. And he was doing on and end projects. And Mike, at that point, was being forced out. And the two of them were watching old Muppet documentary. The Muppets had done sort of a thing on 60 Minutes where they pretended to be Mike Wallace and Morley Safer. And it was very funny. And they were preparing something. They had to speak at a university and they were going to show

something and they were trying to figure out what clips to use. And the two of them, these, these Titans sat there and were watching this Muppet thing. And I remember thinking how sad I felt. I feel like crying. It's funny. It's, it's still very emotional for me because it was the end for them. It was the final act. It was, they were laughing. Mike, Mike used to say to me all the time, hey, kids, stick it in, meaning your stomach. Stick in your belly. And even today, when I take family pictures,

I hold my stomach in. And he was sitting there and pointing at Don's stomach and saying, hey, buddy, stick it in. And they were convincing. And I said to Don, I said, I owe you guys a career. And Don, without missing a beat, he told the story I told earlier about my mother, as if it happened 10 minutes before, not 30 years before. And he remembered it as if it happened moments before. And he said, I remember your mother. She said you had a job already,

but I didn't want to leave the room. And that was the last time I saw the two of them together. What a hell of an end picture. And I teared up at the end of the book too. I was like, wow, what a moment. I felt what you just went through and shared in the book. It really was, I mean, I just really feel like you captured a time capsule

of an era of news that is just is just we'll never see again a time capsule of characters of people producers of of the cutthroatness and then on top of that there were so many other extraordinary things i mean you just you just lived through an incredible amount of stuff the mercer's chapter was amazing to me yeah your interviews with trump and baron or bannon steve bannon and his play up on that and some of the backstory that i was just like holy crap wow charlie rose and the me too thing one thing that really surprised me as i was finishing up the book was i is it jeslene maxwell i can never say her first name right yeah she just hits on you and i'm just like wow okay and what an extraordinary thing you think but here's the thing when when when

she hits on me i didn't really know who she she was it was i still have her emails but it's like 2014 i think it was so it wasn't i mean epstein was there and she was there and I didn't really, I wasn't really focused on who she was. And she asked for a lift home and I gave her a lift home and then she tried to seduce me. And I gave some bullshit, lame excuse. I had to go walk my dog or something. But then I called her up once when I figured out who she was and what the connection was shortly before the 2016 election. The end was we're nearing the end towards the race. And I knew she was a pro-Hillary person. And I called her up, said, let's go get a drink. And she said, she immediately said, yes, we got a drink. And then I said, I want the tapes. And she knew exactly what I was

talking about. And I said, listen, I want the tapes of Trump with the girls in Epstein's place. And she puts a finger in my face and said, Ira, I'm the daughter of a press baron. I know the way you people think. If you do one side, you have to do the other. So if you're going to do Trump, you're going to have to do Clinton. And Clinton at that time had ridden on the Epstein jet like 26 times. And I said, I'll go wherever the story takes me. I'm not pro-Trump, anti-Trump, whatever. I wanted the tapes. So she acknowledged that the tapes were there, but she said she didn't know where Epstein kept them. Now, this has been chewed over a little bit. Do I know for sure that there were tapes?

No. I laid out for you. I played a hunch. I was bluffing her a little bit, and I wanted to see where it got me. Maybe she was leading me on or whatever about the tapes. Who knows what the truth is. But I do believe this. I do believe that if there were tapes, she really didn't know.

She wasn't in Epstein's confidence about where he kept them. It's kind of being told where you keep the wall safe in your house, where all the family jewels are kept. You're not going to tell your co co-workers where that where it is so it's it's one of those great mysteries yeah it'll be funny if they ever find like a vault some other great stories were some of your mafia stories in the books with the bananas i believe and other things exposed and the goddies and stuff just some great stories in there and of course those guys are great storytellers they are they are they are i mean you guys expose so much you won so many different awards i think i think for

your master class i would be remiss if i didn't ask you what exactly stories did you not put in the book that are the most scandalous i've often said that the best stories i've done are the ones that i haven't done because what it did was that was that there was a story they asked me to check out, which was a guy who claimed to be an ex-Massad agent who knew how Pan Am 103 was blown up, that they wanted to kill the CIA agents on board. And the guy who was bringing it was a reputable producer. So they asked me to go check it out. So I went off campus for about five days and I come back and I found out that the story was baloney. So I tell the executive producer of Primetime Live, I said, we're not running the story. It's not true. And he said, what are you talking about? Time Magazine is going to put it on the cover. We get a chance to put it on two

days before. I said, great, let them. I said, they'll have to retract it. The guy is a fired LL security officer. He's not a Maasai guy. It's bogus. And he said, so-and-so is bringing it to us. And I said, let them. I don't care, but we're not going to do it. The only choice I'm giving you is do you want Chinese or Italian for lunch? That's the only choice I'm giving you. And I said, stop it. We're not doing it. And so we went to get some Chinese food and we come back and time does put it on the cover and then they have to retract it a week later. And, and long story short, this particular individual who, who was the phony baloney, I run into him 15 years, maybe, maybe 15 years later at a friend's retirement party, a lawyer's retirement party. And I'm talking to the guy briefly and my friend, the lawyer comes over to me and he said, how do you know him? And I tell him the story and he laughs. And he says, I said, how do you know him? And he said, I got him off on fraud charges in lower Manhattan. So those are the stories that actually I'm proudest of, where I prevented

the network from going out on a limb on a story that was untrue. And I have a few of those. I talk about a few of those in the book. Yeah. If you could go back, if you could bring back anyone who's maybe passed on, or maybe is currently still living and do one more story with them, like they could just be brought back for one more story with them like they could just be brought back for one more story in some sort of hollywood sort of heaven's gate whatever thing who would you bring back and and what would it be you're talking about an interview subject yeah no uh like who would you want to work with would it be oh my god yeah. No, no. Hands down. No. End of story. I would love, but the time capsule has to bring him back from the Mike Wallace of the 1980s or 90s, even 80s, maybe. Not the Mike Wallace Mike was at his powers, the genius of him really came through. And we know about all the complications and the craziness and stuff, but he elevated a story. If you had a story

that was so story, he would turn that story from a B to an A just by his presence, by his questions. He really was remarkable. I have to run pretty soon. Sure. We just, yeah. We'll wrap up here. I've just got a call coming in here. Let me see who this is. Bill, Bill. Yeah. Okay. I'll ask him. Bill Clinton just called me. He wants to know, is there a second book or is he going to be okay? Stay tuned. Stay tuned. He said, stay tuned, Bill. I, I i all i hire i all i hear was something about black helicopters so i don't know what that means ira it was wonderful to have you on the show thank you for spending some time with us today and sharing your great stories great chatting with

you thank you thank you very much ira thank you very much have a good one and safe travels thank you be well bye-bye there you go and to Have a good one and safe travels. Thank you. Be well. Bye-bye. There you go. And to my audience, be sure to check out Ira Rosen's book, Ticking Clock Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes, the Emmy Award-winning producer. And, yeah, I got to tell you, I grew up watching 60 Minutes. I grew up watching all the stuff. This is just an amazing story about just some of the most amazing characters

that were on television in this golden age of news and coverage of the 60 Minutes thing. So be sure to check that out. Thanks, Madonis, for tuning in. Be sure to wear your mask. Stay safe, and we'll see you next time.