A Supporting Role in Beltway Power Plays

In the skillfully written “Reporting Live,” Lesley Stahl, a reporter for CBS television news for the last 26 years, weaves together several compelling stories about the way politics, and the media that cover it, have changed through the years.

There is the tale of TV network news at the height of its power and also at its descent, pursued by CNN, into the world of corporate takeovers and slashed budgets. There is the story of life inside the Beltway and the often-excessive coziness between politician and reporter. There are fine accounts of the fall of Richard Nixon and the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

And then there is the story of Stahl herself, bright, terribly ambitious and touchingly vulnerable as she gradually leaves her dominant mother and ventures into the difficult world of marriage, motherhood and a demanding full-time job in journalism.

Born in Massachusetts, Stahl writes that by 30 “I wanted to be a journalist, which, I’d figured out, would mean, in the environment of the early 1970s, surmounting my femaleness and my blondness.”

After working as an on-camera reporter for a local Boston TV station she landed a job with CBS’ Washington Bureau in 1972. She was assigned to the Watergate story. In a perhaps inadvertent admission of the pride that can sweep over reporters on a great story, she writes that as the noose tightened around Nixon’s neck, “We were the chosen ones.”

Stahl was quickly in the thick of insider Washington. At a dinner party, news arrived of the “Saturday night massacre,” when Atty. Gen. Elliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused Nixon’s order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox and resigned. Several of the guests were called to work by their offices. What if Stahl’s office didn’t call?

“I’d be totally humiliated,” she writes. So she, too, got up and left for the office.

Stahl seems always to have sensed the perils of the power held by the networks and their staffers.

“Many thought,” she writes, “the press had single-handedly driven the president [Nixon] from office, which gave us a dangerous aura of invincible power.”

But to Stahl, the heroes were District Circuit Judge John Sirica, Sen. Sam Ervin (D-N.C.) and the anonymous people in the administration who leaked the dark secrets to the press.

In the years after Watergate, Stahl writes, the three networks rose to the peak of their power.

“Something like 120 million viewers,” she says, “tuned in to the three networks every night. . . . We were so prominent and influential that our deadline at 6:30 p.m. Eastern time became the deadline of the entire federal government.”

And with that power came indulgence. The CBS News people traveled in style, ordering up helicopters right and left to deliver film. There were hundreds of staffers.

But bit by bit the excitement faded. CBS began losing viewers; as it did, new bosses began cutting budgets, laying off staffers and closing bureaus. They gradually tore down the walls dividing the news side from the business side. And they started listening to, and acting on, the complaints of presidents and other politicians. The worst offender, in Stahl’s eyes, was CBS News’ then-new president Van Gordon Sauter, who wanted both to produce more “feel good” news and to cut back criticism of Reagan.

Stahl came to certain firm judgments about the presidents she covered as White House correspondent for CBS. Carter, for example, and the Georgians he brought with him “succumbed to a tyranny of trivial resentments against the Washington establishment that included the press.” Reagan was a nice guy, but “an air of irresponsibility would become a shadow trademark of the Reagan presidency. It would infect the national psyche.” Bush, on the other hand, was clumsy but endearing. Of Bush’s resistance to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, Stahl says: “In all the years I covered the White House, I cannot recall having so much admiration for a president.”

Along with these presidential portraits, Stahl’s book describes the glass ceiling in network news. She fought hard against prejudice at CBS because she was a blond female. She says the struggle made her tough to the point of brittleness. Now, eight years out of Washington at “60 Minutes” in New York, she seems easier with herself. “Reporting Live” ends with Stahl’s departure to that program and a few parting words about media power: “So what had I learned . . . in Washington? I learned that it’s not only ‘the economy, stupid.’ It’s also television, stupid.”