|
John P. Filo/CBS News
|
|
As nearly everyone in the profession will tell you, investigative journalism is not a place for the weak. This hasn’t been a problem for Lesley Stahl. Former Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater once said, “[Lesley] has survived in a business that’s very tough on women. She has done it because of hard work and tenacity.” 60 Minutes colleague Steve Kroft put it simply: “Lesley’s a bulldog.” Why does Stahl possess such a hard-nosed reputation? Perhaps it’s because when John Dean, counsel to Nixon during Watergate, tried to escape her by going into the men’s room, Stahl barged in without hesitation demanding a quote. Or it could be because she was once so intent on getting an interview with Alexander Haig that she ended up being hauled away by a security guard. Stahl’s career took off that summer in the 1970s when as a rookie at CBS News, she was asked to cover the minor break-in at a Washington hotel, and it has hit numerous peaks since, including being the first woman to report live on a presidential election night. Stahl explains her style like this: “There are two kinds of reporters. There are those like the late Charles Kuralt who wrote so well he could spin a good story out of one or two bits of information. And there’s the other kind, door kickers like me.”
Lesley Stahl was raised in Swampscott, Massachusetts, just north of Boston. “I had a very normal, healthy childhood,” said Stahl. In 1963, she graduated from Wheaton College, a women’s college in Norton, Massachusetts, with hopes of becoming a doctor. She attended Columbia University to obtain a graduate degree in zoology before entering medical school. However, confronting vital organs up close changed her career path. “I couldn’t touch anything in class,” Stahl later confessed. “The smell disgusted me.” In 1966 Stahl dropped out of grad school and eventually found a job as an assistant to the speechwriter for New York Mayor John Lindsay. Her office was adjacent to the pressroom, and her exposure to the fast-paced environment fueled an unexpected desire in Stahl to become a journalist.
Stahl began her career in journalism as a writer/researcher with NBC. She took a position with NBC in London, but soon left the foreign post for a producer position at CBS’s Boston affiliate, where she first stepped in front of the camera. In 1972, CBS News initiated a new hiring policy for women and minorities in response to the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. Stahl heard about this new mandate and aggressively pursued one of these new positions. She received her big break when the Washington bureau of CBS News hired her as a general-assignment reporter that summer. Only a rookie, she was assigned to the unimportant story of a minor break-in at the Watergate Hotel. This burglary led to one of the most tumultuous scandals in American history, and Stahl found herself in the middle of one of the most defining moments in the history of investigative journalism. In the company of the toughest, most competitive reporters in the country, she began to forge her signature aggressive style.
While she was a CBS correspondent during the Watergate hearings, she often participated in discussions moderated by John Hart with fellow correspondents Dan Rather and Daniel Schorr. The men dominated one of the discussions so much that producers finally ordered them to let Stahl answer a question. That next question happened to be about Washington gossip, a topic Stahl was reluctant to respond to, and she passed on it. There was silence, until Schorr replied, “Well John, if it’s gossip you want, that’s why we have a woman here.” According to Stahl, she had to “surmount [her] femaleness and blondeness” to become a journalist in the early seventies. However, Stahl never took this treatment without a fight. Responding to the question, “Tell me Lesley, how do you manage to balance career and marriage?,” she replied by asking the reporter if he was married. When he answered “yes,” she asked, “Well, how do you manage?”
Although she overcame the obstacles in this overtly sexist climate, Stahl feels that the women who were hired in the early seventies were disadvantaged by suddenly being expected to play like seasoned pros when their sex had kept them out of the minors, unlike their male counterparts. She has stated that many of her fellow women were not ready for their newly minted jobs: “Right off, we started above our marks. A lot of us weren’t allowed to grow, block by block, one step at a time. Many of us failed, and we failed to establish a solid foundation.”
Stahl persevered, becoming the first woman to report live on a presidential election night and in 1977 the second woman to anchor CBS Morning News. A year later, she received the coveted position of CBS News White House correspondent. For over thirteen years and four presidential terms, she reported on stories of profound significance, including Jimmy Carter’s Middle East peace accords, the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, and the Supreme Court nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor. In 1983 she began moderating Face the Nation, bringing “new energy and prominence to the once-stodgy public affairs broadcast,” according to one critic. On Face the Nation, Stahl pulled no punches, interviewing such international leaders as Boris Yeltsin, Margaret Thatcher, Yasir Arafat, and Daniel Ortega. She was also tough on national leaders, pressing such cabinet members as Secretary of State George Shultz to explain the shipping of weapons to Iran. Having made Face the Nation a relevant news forum, Stahl was appointed CBS News national affairs correspondent in 1986. However, after two years, she was asked to return to her previous position of covering the White House, a job that journalism critic, Thomas J. Colin said “requires keeping up with a staggering amount of information on every issue facing the country.” In addition to this dizzying workload, Stahl was offered and accepted the additional responsibility of coanchoring the late-night America Tonight with Charles Kuralt in 1990.
Stahl relinquished her positions on America Tonight and Face the Nation in 1991, when she joined the august ranks of 60 Minutes, a move she saw as a “new lease on life.” Stahl described the ten years before this ultimate promotion as a “decade of rage,” in which she felt she was constantly overlooked by CBS executives. She considers her current position as one of the best jobs on television: “Since I’ve been at 60 Minutes, I’m not as two-dimensional to the public. I can show another side of myself.” Stahl is able to tackle both hard news subjects as well as human interest stories, with much more air time for analysis and reflection. She received an Emmy Award for her report on radical pro-life terrorist groups, which target doctors performing legal abortions. Her “Punishing Saddam” segment, another Emmy-winning story, exposed the severe effects U.N. sanctions against Iraq were having on Iraqi citizens, mostly children. She has taken on the tobacco industry with her profile on former FDA commissioner David Kessler and her exposé, “Confessions of a Tobacco Lobbyist,” in which she coaxed an inside man to talk about the controversial strategies used to sell cigarettes. For her journalistic achievements, she received the Fred Friendly First Amendment Award from Quinnipiac University.
Stahl’s years in Washington have taught her several things: “Television had become the center of campaigning and governing but also of diplomacy and decision making. I also learned to have enormous faith in the system. Democracy works.” While she now appears gentler and kinder on 60 Minutes, appearances can be deceptive. “She has such a lovely smile when she sits down to talk,” said friend Linda Wertheimer. “Then she asks these dreadfully tough questions. It must be sort of a shock."
|