The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  The odd thing about Nixon, though, was that his personal affect included a woundedness that belied his reputation as a tough guy (and, later, as a criminal), and people who worked with him saw this. “I don’t think there’s any question of Nixon’s vulnerability,” says John Dean, Nixon’s chief counsel in the early 1970s. “As Kissinger once said, ‘If somebody would have loved the man, he’d have been a different person.’ Nixon was an unusual person to be in the political business. He was not a people person. He couldn’t do small talk. When you took anybody to the Oval Office, you had to give some words for him to start a conversation, like, ‘I understand you just won the Philadelphia bowling contest.’

  “He was a complex man—fascinatingly complex, a different person to different people,” Dean continues. “In my relationship with him, he didn’t swear—he was high-minded. But [Chief of Staff H. R.] Haldeman and [Special Counsel Charles] Colson seemed to bring out the worst in him. With Kissinger, he was constantly showing off, trying to convince Henry how tough he was.”

  The Nixon White House “was not a boys’ club,” John Dean insists, even as he contradicts himself to note that “there were women all over the place—extremely attractive women. I was a bachelor in those days. The White House was a lovely place to work.” Those women mainly ran the social and communications offices, though Dean did hire a female attorney (“Haldeman thought I was crazy”). Still, there were whiffs of feminism from unexpected quarters: First Lady Pat Nixon, the president’s younger daughter, Julie Nixon, and even Martha Mitchell—the later-thought “hysterical” wife of Attorney General John Mitchell—were pushing Nixon to nominate a female Supreme Court justice, a landmark that would not come for another ten years. Nixon was willing to consider it. He brought the idea up to Chief Justice Warren Burger, but Burger, Dean recalls, “threatened to resign if Nixon put a woman on the court.” Burger’s threat caused Nixon to back down, with somewhat absurd reasoning. “Those chambers are small,” the president said. “It would be like putting a woman into a space capsule with men.” Even then, though, he didn’t quite give up. “‘You know, John,’” Dean recalls the president telling John Mitchell, “‘we don’t have any women in the cabinet.’ Mitchell barked his response: ‘Keep ’em in the kitchen or the bedroom!’”

  This was the self-contradictory, challenging atmosphere toward women that twenty-five-year-old Diane Sawyer was entering. She handled it deftly, parlaying her intellect, her work ethic, and her charm. “She brought an intellectual spark to the press office and creativity that was invaluable,” Ron Ziegler, who died in 2003, told a reporter in 1989. In fact, the spark may have been more than intellectual. A journalist who covered Nixon says that some people thought that Diane was having some kind of relationship with (the married) Ziegler. “Diane was ferociously ambitious, though she hid it well,” that journalist adds. Gerry Warren says: “She was just so capable. She just stepped into situations. I would tell her what I needed to prepare Ron for his briefing, and she would get the answers for us.”

  Diane’s job unexpectedly intensified within a year. In early 1971, a huge cache of decades’ worth of secret government reports, known as the Pentagon Papers, were leaked by RAND Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg to the New York Times. These documents revealed, as the Times put it, “that the Lyndon Baines Johnson Administration had systematically lied . . . to the public [and] Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance”: the Vietnam War, which Nixon was continuing to wage, despite a well-advanced antiwar movement. It was at this moment, says John Dean, “that the dark side of Richard Nixon surfaced.”

  A series of explosive developments ensued: The Washington Post also published the incendiary documents about the prior administration’s highly questionable and falsified grounds for the war; the Nixon White House went after the Times and the Post, and lost; the antiwar movement gained even more momentum; and a sensational, bungled break-in into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in Beverly Hills was discovered, auguring darker, more desperate dirty tricks on the part of the administration. Were some of the days dramatic for Ron Ziegler, Gerry Warren, and Diane Sawyer in their efforts to manage the press? “They were all dramatic,” Warren responds, with a grim laugh. “We were working pretty hard in those days, our heads down. We had a small staff and Diane really played a big role.” Diane “worked like a Trojan” during this time, her Seneca High friend Greg Haynes could see. Haynes was working at the old Executive Office Building, which shared a parking lot with the White House. “When I’d drive in very early every morning, her car was already there.”

  • • •

  IN FEBRUARY 1972, Diane accompanied Nixon on his historic trip to China, the first visit by an American president since Mao’s Cultural Revolution, thawing relations that had been frozen for twenty-five years. Av Westin, then executive producer of ABC’s coverage of the trip, met the “bright and with-it assistant to Ron Ziegler” in Beijing and appreciated Diane’s help in tipping him off about each day’s events, enabling “a geometric increase in the amount of coverage” by not having to spread his reporters and cameramen out everywhere. Diane’s attractiveness clearly did not hurt. Her old WLKY boss Ed Shadburne remembers seeing the televised images of Nixon’s key meeting with the Chinese premier “and Diane was sitting at the right-hand side of Chou En-lai and you could tell by the animated way he was talking to her he was totally enthralled with her.” Bill Small, who’d sorely regretted not having a job for Diane, was along on the trip, too. He remembers an embarrassing moment that Diane handled deftly: The press was “gathered in a hotel lobby,” about to leave. “The Chinese at that time were unbelievably honest—if you left a pen in your room, they came running after you. Diane had apparently discarded some underwear. A man came running out, “Miss Sawyer! Miss Sawyer!”—earnestly waving a pair of panties. “She stuffed them into her purse before anyone could see.”

  The only female TV reporter on the trip was Barbara Walters, then the cohost to Frank McGee on Today. “The fact that I was there at all was a minor miracle,” she wrote in her 2008 autobiography, Audition. “The networks sent their heavyweight, politically experienced superstars”—Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Eric Sevareid, Harry Reasoner, John Chancellor, Ted Koppel. “My inclusion,” at NBC executive Richard Wald’s insistence, “ruffled a lot of feathers.” Bill Small observed Walters’s intense preparation on the flight over. “Thirteen hours, and she never once took her head out of the research,” he remembers. The trip to China was the first time the two women met. Diane—who was “in the president’s entourage,” Barbara was quick to note—seemed to Barbara like “a very pretty, young blond with whom I would have a nodding acquaintance but no real contact.” Later they would be ABC colleagues and—as Walters’s wary, even icy appraisal hints at—intense rivals.

  Despite her by then estimable success and popularity, Barbara Walters was suffering daily humiliation at Today, where Frank McGee insisted he get the first four questions with every interview subject. Walters put up with second-class citizenship throughout all three years—1971 to 1974—she cohosted the show. “Barbara was a pioneer—she took all the sexist [slings and arrows],” says former TV executive Paul Friedman, generally a great skeptic about using the s-word and a man who likes her tremendously. (Friedman, a TV news veteran, was Peter Jennings’s producer at ABC World News Tonight, and went on to produce for Diane in her mature career—as well as for Katie Couric. But he can be strikingly non–politically correct about women in TV news.) It’s hard to find a male producer who doesn’t agree with Friedman about her.

  Barbara Walters had been the canary in the coal mine for women in television. First a press agent, then Today lead writer, and the one Today “tea pourer” who made the leap to cohost in 1971, Barbara would pave the way for women anchors/interviewers in all three TV formats: morning, evening, and newsmagazine. “Prior to Barbara, the women on the Today show were all decorations,” having to hid
e their brainpower, says Richard Wald. “We didn’t show that sort of stuff”: smart women. “But Barbara was different. Even when she was just beginning on the Today show, she worked harder than anybody else, and she had more imagination about what would work on television than the people around her. Barbara built the system of letting girls in the tree house.”

  Still, while Walters was opening that tree house for future female anchors, many less-well-placed women at NBC had a tougher road—and were paying a price. “The 1970 NBC Women’s Revolt,” as it’s called, was a legendary battle, recalls Today veteran Beryl Pfizer. Pfizer witnessed the inciting incident. “One morning around ten, I heard a slight disturbance outside my door. A producer yelled, to researcher Marilyn Schultz, ‘Hey, Schultzie, we need coffee!’ Schultzie yelled back, ‘I am not your waitress!’ He yelled back: ‘Damn it, Schultzie! I said: We need coffee! Go get it! ’” Schultzie refused again—and an underdog’s class-action suit was born.

  “Schultzie was brave! She was a true revolutionary!” Pfizer says. The women’s movement was still slightly under the radar, although Betty Friedan’s National Organization for Women (NOW) had been launched and that year would stage its Women’s Strike for Equality. Marilyn Schultz and a few other midlevel women at NBC who instigated the demand for equitable treatment and pay were risking their careers. “The management of NBC was just horrible,” Marlene Sanders says. “Secretaries’ and newswomen’s careers were ended by that lawsuit—they were regarded as troublemakers. And Barbara Walters wouldn’t help,” Sanders contends. Walters would later help the cause of women in TV, but she declined “to be involved in the suit in the very early seventies, when it mattered,” Sanders says, with her usual candor and a feminism that’s never lost its bite. Perhaps back then the only recently ascendant Walters didn’t feel she could afford to help the cause of female colleagues lower in the hierarchy. Or perhaps such narrow self-interest was an inevitable part of getting ahead when the deck was stacked against you.

  • • •

  FOUR MONTHS AFTER THE TRIP to China, the Nixon administration spun criminally out of control. On June 17 came the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex. Diane’s boss, Ron Ziegler, tried to brush it off as a “third-rate burglary attempt.” Arrests were made, and a name in the address books of two of the burglars tied the perpetrators to E. Howard Hunt, of the president’s Special Investigations Unit, otherwise known as the White House Plumbers. A month and a half later, a sizable payment from the Nixon reelection campaign was traced to one of the burglars; then more money was traced. A month after that, it was revealed that John Mitchell oversaw a secret bank account for intelligence gathering activities against the Democratic Party.

  In stunning, weekly, drip-by-drip increments, it became clear that the break-in was part of an enormous, complex campaign of sabotage and spying by the reelection committee. Still, despite these falling dominoes, the president vigorously campaigned against Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern, with the support of entertainers respected by Diane’s generation. James Taylor, Carole King, Carly Simon, and Barbra Streisand were involved in a concert supporting McGovern. To many of that generation, anyone who supported Richard Nixon, even apart from this deepening scandal—including Diane—was highly suspect, and such peers were considered to be contemptibly, almost unbelievably, on the wrong side of this early battle of the yet unnamed culture wars.

  Despite the revelations of Watergate, Nixon won the presidency in 1972 by a near landslide. The McGovern/McCarthy wing had pulled the Democratic Party too far left for middle America’s taste. Even a likely lawbreaker was deemed preferable to a possible coddler of hippies and radicals.

  In early February 1973 the Senate voted unanimously to set up a special committee to investigate Watergate. The unraveling quickened in March 1973, when one of the Watergate burglars admitted perjury. John Dean, Nixon’s counsel, secretly began to cooperate with the prosecution, breaking the story wide open and paving the way for indictments and imprisonments (including his own brief one). But he also warned Nixon, in private talks, that Watergate was “a cancer on the presidency” and that hush money supplied to the Watergate burglars was “the most troublesome post-thing because” H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, and Dean himself were involved in that aspect, which constituted “obstruction of justice.” Dean says today that he cooperated with authorities in part as a warning to others. “It was very hard to convince people that a disaster was imminent. One of my theories was that by blowing it up and going to the prosecutors, my colleagues would follow me and Nixon would survive. That didn’t happen. Instead, Nixon got more mired.”

  Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean—Nixon’s closest advisers—were out of the White House by the end of April, the first two forcibly resigning and Dean being fired. “As things disintegrated, more doors were closed and the circle got smaller,” Dean says. He adds, significantly, “This is the key period when Diane gets closer to Nixon.” With a shrinking team of loyalists, aides farther out moved closer in to do damage control.

  The Senate Watergate televised hearings took place from mid-May to early August. The public was riveted. A full 85 percent of Americans with TV sets watched at least some of the proceedings.

  During it all, Diane knew that her junior position offered her a prime perch for witnessing the psychology of powerful people in crisis. “I was able to listen, because no one was really interested in what I had to say,” she’s said. “To be in the White House at that time, learning about human nature, as you can when you aren’t in the center of the action, was such an education.” She also drew an inspirational lesson from the crisis. She has said that she “learned,” from watching Nixon, how to “get up in the morning when—for whatever reasons, self-inflicted or otherwise—your vision of yourself has been shattered” and you are facing a “cataclysm.”

  • • •

  IRONICALLY, JUST AS Diane was becoming key in protecting the ever more embattled—and ever less innocent-seeming—Richard Nixon, a quartet of young female reporters were fighting to unearth the truth about Watergate from the very bureau—Bill Small’s CBS newsroom in D.C.—that Diane had applied for a job with four years earlier. While Watergate made rock stars of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who were breaking the biggest stories, Lesley Stahl, Connie Chung, Susan Zirinsky, and Marcy McGinnis had, with less fanfare, eagerly invaded the CBS newsroom and were pushing against Diane’s team, and having the time of their lives doing so.

  Their hirings had come about as a form of corporate damage control. In 1971, CBS president Dick Salant was—half forcibly, but effectively—turned into a de facto feminist. This was a full year before Congress enacted Title IX, in June 1972, extending the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to cover gender as well as race. Title IX meant companies could be sued for discrimination if they didn’t meet “certain minimum percentages” of women staffers, and, adds former network executive Paul Friedman, cynically, “That’s a powerful incentive—being afraid of being sued. Most of the men who made it happen for the women [in TV news] were doing it out of fear.”

  Salant jumped the gun on Title IX because he saw the backlash after CBS chairman William Paley issued a memo decreeing that CBS women could no longer wear slacks to work—a peculiarly old-fashioned edict that incensed the women at the network. As the first “consciousness-raising groups” were being set up on Central Park West and Upper East Side living rooms, as Betty Friedan’s NOW was protesting gender-segregated newspaper employment ads and the long-established practice of denying women mortgages and even department store credit, as Ms. magazine was about to be launched, the order for women to wear skirts to work could not have been more ill-timed.

  The female staff at Newsweek magazine had already begun to organize. Their complaint was that women—including the soon-to-be disgusted and defecting Nora Ephron and Ellen Goodman—were stuck being “researcher”; they couldn
’t advance to “writer.” Now the women of CBS joined the fray. In a parallel complaint to those of the (eventually triumphant) Newsweek and the (ill-fated) NBC women, the CBS crew, led in part by the soon-to-be-prominent Sylvia Chase, protested that they had been hired as secretaries at the same time that their male counterparts had been hired as copyboys, yet now the men were producers and reporters and they, like the Newsweek women, were stuck as researchers.

  Spurred by William Paley’s ham-handed memo, Dick Salant decided to head off the outcry. “Salant said we could not hire anyone unless it was a female—that was an absolute dictum,” Sandy Socolow says. “If we were desperate for a particular male, we had to go to him and make a case.” The new female hires “were dogged reporters,” says Bill Small, and each came via a different path. Stahl was the oldest—thirty when she was hired. She’d worked for NBC in London and was back at a station in her hometown of Boston when Socolow, who had a family connection to her, urged her to send an audition tape. Hurriedly she complied, with a laughable offering: She was dressed as a pilgrim re-creating the first Thanksgiving. “I said, ‘Salant will fire me if I give him this. Send me another one,’” Socolow says. Lesley did—and she was hired.