Enrique Cerna Interviews Bob Schieffer

Enrique Cerna Interviews Bob Schieffer

This is a transcript of an interview with Bob Schieffer on Conversations at KCTS 9 which aired on July 31, 2009.

Enrique Cerna: Bob Schieffer, welcome to "Conversations."

Bob Schieffer: Thank you very much. It’s great to be here.

EC: It’s great to have you here and first of all let me say congratulations. As we speak you, along with Helen Thomas—the legendary Helen Thomas of White House correspondence now columnist, are going to be honored by Washington State University with an Edward R. Murrow Award. How do you feel about that?

BS: I’m very very humble about it. Number one: to get mentioned in the same sentence with Ed Murrow, let alone to have you win an award that had his name on it, I just don’t see how it could get much better than that. And the other part that makes it very meaningful to me is Helen Thomas was the first reporter that I met when I came to Washington in 1969 and we spent a lot of time in church together.

EC: Really?

BS: Yes, and here’s why: people have forgotten it, but Richard Nixon used to hold church services every Sunday morning in the East Room of the White House and they’d invite people in. The White House used to use it as a kind of social payback—they got invited to dinner at someone’s house; they’d invite them to come to the White House on Sunday. They’d have a visiting minister, they’d have a little sermon, sing some hymns, and then at the end everybody would go up and shake hands with the President. And so as the rookie, in the Washington bureau, I always got sent over there to cover that. Helen worked for UPI and she was always there and so we put a lot of deposits into our spiritual bank during those Sunday mornings.

EC: [laughs]

BS: You know, nothing every happened. If there had been any news I would have had to go back and give it to Dan Rather as the White House correspondent, he’d done the story on it.

EC: What a fascinating thing. I never knew that.

BS: It actually led to my first interview face to face with the sitting president. The way it happened was one Sunday morning people were going up to get in the receiving line, the security wasn’t nearly as great then as it is now, and maybe the secret service was just looking the other way, and Helen said: “Get in the line. We’ll go up and ask the President some questions.” And I said:, “Well we’re not suppos—“

“Just get in the line! We’ll ask.” And I said, “Well, I don’t have any questions.” She said, “Well we’ll ask him about these advisors they’re bringing in to the White House.” We didn’t know where these people were coming from. So anyway, long story short, when I got there I shook hands with the President and I said, “Mr. President, about these advisors. Will these be in-house advisors?” And he said, “No. These will be out-house advisors.”

EC: [laughs]

BS: Then he said, “Oh my God, what have I said?” and then he just kind of wandered off. [laughs] But I don’t know of anybody but my mother and I count that as an interview, but I count it as an interview.

EC: I would too.

BS: So I can say that I’ve actually interviewed every president since Nixon face to face and I must say that’s still my favorite. [laughs]

TEXAS ROOTS

EC: You grew up in Texas.

BS: Yes.

EC: You went to school at Texas Christian University.

BS: Yes.

EC: Initially I understood that you took pre-med courses.

BS: Yes.

EC: Mainly because Mother wanted you to.

BS: My mother was determined that I was going to be a doctor and I fooled around with that for about two years. It hated me, I hated it. I never had any interest whatsoever in science and so the end of my sophomore year I decided that was going to be it and if I hadn’t decided I’m sure TCU would have decided that was about it in pre-med for me.

I decided to switch to journalism—which I had always been interested in and that’s what I always wanted to be when I grew up was a writer. That summer I got a job in a little radio station in Fort Worth working in the news department for a dollar an hour. I am proud to say from that summer forward I managed to get a weekly paycheck doing some kind of journalism every week since then. That’s about 52 years ago.

EC: You were born in Austin, Texas, but the family grew up in the Fort Worth area?

BS: Yes. We moved to Fort Worth during World War II because my father got a job there working in a defense plant building houses for people. He worked for a construction company. They were building bombers in Fort Worth and they needed housing and so he got a job there. So that’s how we wound up in Fort Worth.

EC: I hear the Texas still in the voice.

BS: Oh yeah. You know I worked when I was just starting out; I really worked hard on trying to lose my accent and then one day I decided: this is not worth the trouble. [laughs]

EC: [laughs] Now like Dan Rather, do you keep those little sayings?

BS: [laughs] I don’t know where Dan came up with some of those things.

EC: I think that he must’ve written down every one of them he ever heard because he always seemed to always work them on the air, didn’t he?

BS: He stole one from me though.

EC: Oh really?

BS: It was about ‘if,’ and I heard Dan one time say, “If a bullfrog had side pockets he could carry a six-shooter and then he wouldn’t be afraid of blacksnakes.” And I said, “Dan, I said that, you didn’t.” And he said, “Well I heard it somewhere.” [laughs] so I always claim that one.

“THE BIGGEST STORY I ALMOST GOT”

EC: You started out in newspapers and when you were working in Fort Worth, when President Kennedy was assassinated, you actually took a call in the newsroom from Marguerite Oswald.

BS: Yes.

EC: Who’s Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother.

BS: Yes. What happened was I was just trying to answer phones. The place was a complete bedlam as you can imagine. I picked up the phone and a woman says, “Is there anybody there who can take me to Dallas?” And I say, “Lady, we’re not running a taxi service here. Besides, the President has been shot.” She said, “Yes, I heard it on the radio. I think my son is the one they’ve arrested.” It was Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother.

Another reporter and I took down her name. I put aside that stuff about “we don’t run a taxi service” and we went out and picked her up, took her to Dallas—it’s about an hour ride—and I was the only one that interviewed her for about two weeks. But the most remarkable thing about that story is—and the difference between journalism then and journalism today—in those days if you looked like you belonged some place you generally got in. We didn’t have press cards or press passes or any of that kind of stuff. So when I walked in to the police station in Dallas I just said to the first uniformed officer I saw I said, “I’m the one who brought Oswald’s mother over, is there any place we can put her so these reporters won’t be bothering her?” and this man actually found me an office in the burglary squad.

The good thing about it was there was a phone there. It wasn’t in those days like it is today where everybody has a cell phone. If you couldn’t find a phone you didn’t have a story. So I could go out into the hallway, gather up information from our other reporters who were there by that time, go back in and phone it in on my phone.

As darkness came she said to me, “Do you think they’d let me talk to my son?” I said, “I don’t know. I’ll go ask.” So I went to the chief of homicide and he said, “Yeah, we probably ought to do that.” His wife had shown up by then. His wife, his mother, and me we were all ushered into this holding room off the jail and I thought: my God, I’m going to get the interview this man who’s charged with assassinating our president and if I don’t get to interview him I’ll at least get to hear what he has to say to his mother.

Finally a guy standing in the corner says, “Who are you?” and I said, “Well, who are you?” He said, “Are you a reporter?” and I said, “Well, yes,” and he said, “Son, I want you to get out of here. If I ever see you again I’m going to kill you.” And I think he actually meant it. It turned out he was an FBI agent doing what he should have been doing. Up until that point, not one single person had asked me who I was.

EC: Wow.

BS: So I left and that’s the end of the story. But I always say it’s the biggest story I almost got. My heavens, where else but in journalism could a person (I guess was just 26-years-old, or something like that) have that kind of an adventure in the midst of this great tragedy. I’ll never forget it and I think back on it and sometimes I think to myself: did that really happen? It really did happen, you know. It’s amazing.

EC: That’s one thing I think about being a journalist, you have these adventures and experiences.

BS: Well, you know, I always wore a snap-rim hat so I’d look like a detective. So I would look like Dick Tracey. It got you in most places in those days. If people asked us who we were, we told them. We never lied, but if they didn’t ask we didn’t tell them. Again, it’s the great change that’s come over journalism now. But when people say, “How did Jack Ruby get into the jail and get close enough to shoot Lee Harvey Oswald?” He looked like he belonged. In those days that’s about all it took.

HIRED BY ACCIDENT

EC: How did you make the transition from newspapers to broadcast?

BS: It was just by accident. Later, working for the Star Telegram, I went to Vietnam. I was the first reporter from a Texas newspaper to go over there. I came back from Vietnam and when I did the local television station asked me to come out and be on a news talk show they had—I did and afterword they offered me a job. Again, it was ten dollars a week more than I made at the paper, so I took it. I need the money. I didn’t have any money, so I always say I got into TV for the money.

EC: [laughs]

BS: I went from $135 a week to what I think was $145 a week and it seemed like big bucks in those days. That led to my coming to CBS.

EC: 1969 you joined CBS. Did you immediately go to Washington?

BS: Yes, I’ve always been based there, but again, the way I wound up at CBS in itself was kind of one of those weird things that seems to have marked my career. I had been hired by a company called Metro Media, which was going to become the fourth network while I was working at the station in Fort Worth. I got to Washington and the financing that they had arranged to become the fourth network fell through so I found myself just working at a local television station. It wasn’t a very good job.

I had tried for five years, to try and get a job at CBS, but could never get an appointment. So one day I just, because I had never been able to get an appointment, I didn’t call and ask for one I just went over to the Washington bureau. Walked in the door (there was no security in those days), went to the first person I saw and said: “I’m Bob Schieffer. I’ve come to see Mr. Small.” He was the bureau chief. This woman said, “Oh yes, Bob. Come right in.”

I was ushered into the bureau chief’s office, had this interview, and as a result, was hired. But here’s the thing: as I left that interview, I saw this young reporter that I recognized who worked at another television station in Washington—a local station—getting off the elevator going in. When I wrote my book This Just In in 2003 I had always had this hunch and I caught him and I said, “Back there in 1969, did you have an appointment with Bill Small to see about working at CBS?” He said, “Yeah, yeah I did,” as he thought back, but he said, “nothing ever came of it, so NBC offered me a job and I went to work there.” It turned out it was Bob Hager, who just retired last year—a long time correspondent for NBC News. I had, in effect, walked in on his appointment. The woman just heard me say “Bob” and thought I was Bob Hager. He had an appointment and I didn’t. So I always say I was just hired by accident. [laughs] It was a mistake.

EC: When you joined them, we talked to Roger Mudd about a year and half ago and he talked about the golden age of television news, in particularly for CBS.

BS: It really was.

EC: Because at that time, talk about a stable of correspondents.

BS: Dan Rather, Roger Mudd, Daniel Shore, Marvin Kalb, and Eric Sevareid hovering over all of us doing all the commentary.

EC: And that was like the A-team.

BS: Oh yeah. We always said if the A-team went down we had a B-team that was better than everybody else’s. We were the best. We thought we were, but probably more importantly other people thought we were. When I walked into that bureau I was like a little yaker being called up to pitch at the Yankees Stadium. [laughs] I still remember that day.

EC: What was the atmosphere then? Was it a competitive thing because you have this A and B team?

BS: Yeah. We were all competitive with each other, but we all understood that working together we were even better than we were individually. We just took great pride in it.

EC: What happened? How did it change?

BS: Well, television has changed. We’re in the midst of this communications revolution and in those days, of course, there were really only two sources on television of day-of news: NBC and CBS News, on a national scale. ABC wasn’t even a competitor. This was before Roone Arledge came in and built ABC News into what it is today. But that was basically it. You had four choices on your television set. Now, you have hundreds upon hundreds of choices. When you divide a pie up, it used to be divided up into three or four slices. When you start dividing it up into seven hundred slices, as it were, that means the audience that everybody attracts is not going to be nearly as large as it was in those days. And so you don’t attract as large of an audience, that means you can’t charge as much for the commercials, that means you can’t afford to maintain the kind of news staff that you had in those days. It’s just not economically possible right now.

EC: The quality of it, what do you think? Today you’ve got cable operations…

BS: Well I still think they’re doing a good job. I still think the mainstream media—by that I mean the evening news broadcasts, the morning news broadcasts on television, the Sunday shows on network television, and the major newspapers—I think we still do a pretty good job of covering the news.

SUNDAY MORNINGS

EC: Since 1991, you’ve been the moderator for "Face the Nation," which is a 50-year plus program.

BS: Second oldest program on television. "Meet the Press" is the oldest.

EC: I heard in an interview that you did with Charlie Rose, in which you said that you though that Sunday morning was the smartest day on television.

BS: I think so. I sincerely believe that and I don’t just mean "Face the Nation." I mean "Meet the Press," I mean the show that’s on FOX, the show that’s on ABC, CNN now has a very good program that comes on Sunday morning. These programs, what sets them apart sometimes from what you see on cable is they are still information driven. We’re still trying to get news. These are not platforms for an anchor to show off. These are not ideological-driven kinds of programs. These are programs where we’re trying to find out what happened, which is basically what journalism is all about.

We generate tremendous amounts of news. I was just looking, we have a clip service at CBS, I counted fifteen separate stories that were in various newspapers this morning having to do with the interview I did with Tim Geithner, and that’s what these shows are all about. I think the reason they’ve survived so long, I think that is the reason. There’s still an audience for that, there’s still a need for that, people are still interested. We don’t do anything fancy. We turn on the lights, we sit the people down at the table, and we ask them questions about the news of the day.

People talk about TV losing audience—I kind of point to those shows. It seems to work for us. Maybe there’s a lesson there and they’re still very very serious. Some people think we’re kind of dull and stodgy, but we’re still here.

GETTING IT RIGHT

EC: What do you make of what has become of television news today? Particularly the cable operations, you just mentioned, where there seems to be an ideological point-of-view, and it is based around someone’s personality a la Bill O’Reilly or Lou Dobbs or Keith Olbermann…

BS: I think it is maybe—I’ve never given a lecture, never been at any kind of a gathering where I didn’t get the question: “Is the media biased?” It’s almost become an irrelevant question now because with all of these different broadcasts, you can get the news any way you want, served up from any point of view that you want. It’s like going into a restaurant and ordering eggs. If you them scrambled, they’ll scramble them. If you want them over-easy, they’ll do them that way for you, and in many ways that’s what we have now. Then when you add talk radio into that you bring in a whole other perspective, as it were.

You can get it any way you want now, and that is why I think it is so important for those of us in what I call the “mainstream media” to be the place where that if people may not agree with points of view, they can agree on facts. That’s still what the core of journalism is and that’s what we have to maintain. Newspapers are in terrible trouble right now.

EC: Well we just lost one here.

BS: Yeah. There has to be a place in a democracy where people can get independently gathered information about what the government is doing. That’s what sets a democracy apart from a totalitarian society. I think that’s why in journalism schools, I think that’s why in the mainstream media we have to put new emphasis on getting it right. About doing the kind of old-fashioned reporting and adhering to those standards that we’ve always adhered to because that’s what our job now is. That’s what our role I think is going to be.

The internet is wonderful, but it’s the only vehicle we’ve had to deliver news that has no editor. The worst newspaper, the smallest newspaper, has someone on that newspaper that knows where the stuff comes from. Stuff pops up on the web, you don’t know if it’s true, false, if it’s somewhere in-between. The mainstream media has to be the one. That’s the place where when people hear something, see something, or read something they know that must be true because they wouldn’t have published it unless they thought it was.

THE EVENING NEWS

EC: February 2005 it was announced that you would become the interim anchor of the evening news. You did that for about a year-and-a-half I think it was.

BS: A year-and-a-half, yes.

EC: You steadied the ship. You were given a lot of credit for that. Did you want the opportunity to continue without the interim?

BS: It was fun. When they asked me to do it I really did it because I felt I had no choice but to do it. We had gone through some very rough times and I’m very proud—we at least got the train back up on the tracks. We had kind of run off the rails. That part was very very interesting and exciting. I admit it’s of an age that if I have had this opportunity to do this when I was say, 45 or 50, I think I would have jumped at the chance. I would have loved it. But at my age, I’m now 72, that would not have been a good thing for CBS to do or for me to do, I think at this stage of my life to want to do it on a long-term basis. But it was just one of the most wonderful experiences that I think I’ve ever had.

To get an opportunity to do that because really it was the only job at CBS News that I hadn’t had. I’d had all the rest of them. It was just kind of fun to be able to look back on it and say: I did that. And we did do some very different things. I started and I told all the correspondents we’re not going to worry so much about memorizing little pieces like you’re at a high school declamation contest, but I’m going to ask you questions and I want you to explain this story to me in the way that you would explain it to your mother. You know, that worked. If you look at all three of the evening news programs now that’s pretty much the way they’re doing it now. I must say that I am quietly proud at that. I think I made a little contribution there.

It was also good to feel like you were bringing young reporters along. I really enjoyed doing that because I remember when I was a young reporter, and I’ve never forgotten the people who helped me, or told me to do it, showed me how to do it. So that was also very important to me.

THE DEBATES

EC: You’ve moderated two presidential debates.

BS: Yes. Those debates are so important and I was very honored to be asked to do the one in 2004 and then this one.

EC: You did a great job.

BS: The reason I enjoy being a reporter is getting to talk to people, these people who are making the news, and to sit at that same table with Barack Obama and John McCain is something that I will never forget. It was interesting to try to match wits with them and to see their reactions to each other. It’s just one of those things that if you think: “Why would I want to be a reporter?” that would be one of the reasons for me—to get the chance to do that. I guess basically I’m just sort of a rubberneck. I like to see things and be around big events when they happen.

Those debates have become very important because if it were not for those debates, up until this year—or last year, I should say, most of the campaign was happening just in television commercials. Now Barack Obama changed that. We talk about the historic campaign, but it was more than just about the first African-American. Crowds came back. Rhetoric came back. All of the things that had sort of fallen away in our campaigns at every level came back and we saw a resurgence of that. The debates helped to balance those commercials.

Think about it: if you came from some other planet and all you knew about our politics was what you learned in these television commercials you’d think that only depraved people, scum, the dregs of our society ran for office, and that’s not true. The debates kind of put it on a different level. They are influential. They do move voters. People do make decisions based on what they do see in those debates. That’s why I really enjoyed doing it.

40 YEARS

EC: 40 years this year?

BS: Yeah, at CBS. 52 in all. [laughs]

EC: What an amazing time.

BS: Every year seems to be different. I sure haven’t lost my interest in it. I still love to get up every morning and I just can’t wait to see what’s in the paper. I still am interested in what’s happening in the news. That’s why I tell young people when you were thinking about what you want to be and what you want to do pick out something you like to do. If you’re good at it then you’ll make a success of it and the success part will take care of itself, but it also won’t seem like a job and for me it has never seemed like a job.

EC: Bob Schieffer, thank you for your time on "Conversations."

BS: Well I really enjoyed it.