Seen and Unseen
The Reverend
Reverend Jesse Jackson’s passing and the start of memorial events this week have moved this chapter to be next. Once again, so many threads came together to bring us together, unexpectedly for both of us, first occasionally, and then for an intense year of working together. And as war rages again in the Mideast, there’s a stunning PS about the Reverend and the 1991 fighting in Iraq.
The Reverend
The first time I remember talking with Jesse Jackson was in 1986 when the Reverend, as I always called him, telephoned me, saying he had heard I might be offered the job of head of news at National Public Radio. He urged me to turn it down, saying “those racist white boys” would tear me apart.
What he didn’t know was that only made the job that much more appealing to me; as the Reverend would say, If not now, when? Besides, there were only three people I knew at NPR, none of whom fit his description: Robert Siegel, host of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” with whom I worked at WRVR in New York, when he was a starting reporter and I was assistant news director; Jay Kernis, executive producer of NPR’s “Weekend Edition,” who was an intern at WRVR; and Cokie Roberts, with whom I roamed Capitol Hill as kids – she used to call us “the Hill brats.”
NPR deserves and will get a separate chapter. I spent three years there; I never do anything longer than three years, which is also what they taught when CBS paid for me to attend a Harvard Business School leadership course. By the time I left, we had reversed the network’s audience slide, with listeners up 25%, had created new programs, expanded with bureaus in Asia and Africa, and won every major award in broadcast news – every single one.
But the Reverend’s warning was not baseless. For example, before I arrived, NPR’s hiring and promotion practices were found by a federal court to be blatantly discriminatory. In separate legal actions, several minority NPR journalists received monetary awards, amounts never disclosed, when they sued. In my NPR chapter, you will read about many good people, talented journalists doing solid work. But you will also read about those who were, shall we say, less enlightened. I later learned that NPR’s President, Doug Bennet, called them “racist” – to their faces. More later from me; for now, read about it at
But this chapter is about the Reverend: After that 1986 phone call, then there was the night at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, where the Reverend gave one of his most important, and stirring, speeches. Early in the evening, over the PA system, came a page: Adam Clayton Powell, please call Jesse Jackson. I was there helping supervise NPR coverage, and my older son, Adam IV, was there on vacation, in a different location, and we (separately) answered the page. But no, the Reverend was trying to reach my brother, Adam, who was working in the Jackson campaign. So it wasn’t until 1990 that our paths crossed again:
That fall, my encounter with the Reverend began with a meeting in a Washington DC hotel suite, a meeting he hoped would lead to my becoming co-executive producer, with Quincy Jones, of his weekly one-hour television program. And it did, but I had no clue of the Reverend’s, or Quincy’s, plan.
Our meeting came after Quincy had given me a ride on the Warner Bros jet from LaGuardia to DCA – hey, it was cheaper than taking the air shuttle. It was the start of Q’s plan for me, including the wildest job I ever had in my life. But that, too, deserves and will get its own chapter.
After we landed in Washington, Quincy offered me a ride into town in his limo, to his hotel, where, when he opened the door to his suite, who did I see sitting there? The Reverend. Before anyone else said anything, Reverend Jackson looked at Q and asked,
“He’ll do it, right?”
Do what? All I knew was that the previous day in New York, I saw that at Lincoln Center there was a premiere of a new documentary, “Listen Up! The Lives of Quincy Jones.” I couldn’t resist: I hadn’t seen Quincy since I was eleven or twelve years old, when we used to play checkers on the floor in my mother’s apartment. This was a chance to see what he had been doing over the years – before Michael Jackson and “Thriller.”
The theater was packed. At the end of the screening, the house lights came up, a voice announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Quincy Jones!” And he stood, to a round of applause, about ten yards away from me. To my complete astonishment, he recognized me. “Adam???” and waved me over to be next to him.
“Great to see you! Hey, what are you doing now? Let’s go get something to eat.” I said it was great to see him, too, but it was after 11 p.m. and I had to go to work the next day. “Work? Where?” I explained I had left NPR (Q had sent a case of very expensive champagne to me when I was hired) and was a senior fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University.
“What are you doing tomorrow after work?” I replied that I had to be in DC, and he said, why he was going to DC too, and would I like a ride on the Warner jet? Which is how I wound up in Q’s suite, with the Reverend asking that question. Q’s reply: “Let’s go get something to eat.”
At the end of the evening, Quincy asked me what I was doing the next day. I said I planned to go back to New York. As it turned out, of course, he wanted to go back to New York, too, and wouldn’t I like a ride on the Warner jet? Well, why not? And he asked how early I wanted to be picked up. But what’s this about? And what was the Reverend asking?
After landing at LaGuardia, Q again offered me a ride into town in his limo, but said he had to make a stop, to see Cosby at the Brooklyn studio where “The Cosby Show” was taped. Waiting for us as the car pulled up to the studio was the president of Quincy’s television company, Kevin Wendell. In this very small media world, Kevin had worked for me in the early 1970s, as a desk assistant at all-news 1010WINS, when I was news director there.
Q started to introduce us, but when Kevin and I greeted each other, he realized we had already met. Q went inside, saying he’d be right out, and Kevin slid into the back seat with me.
“You’ve done the deal, right?” he asked.
“What deal?”
“You’re the new executive producer at Quincy Jones Entertainment.”
“What?”
“It’s all done. Warner Bros is sending out the press release this morning.”
“Wait, wait. I have a job. It’s here in New York.”
“No, you’ll be based in L.A. and DC.”
“DC?”
“Priority number one is rescuing Jesse Jackson.” Aha. The Reverend’s program had premiered a few weeks earlier, and the reviews were not kind. The audience was declining, and it faced imminent cancellation. So that’s what all of this was about.
“Kevin, I need to call my boss.”
From the pay phone at NBC, I called the head of the Columbia center, Ev Dennis, and quickly told him the situation. He thought it was a great move – and hoped I could return to the center after I finished with Quincy. (And I did, but that deserves, and will get, another chapter.)
Then I called my lawyer in California, telling him WB was about to send out a press release but that I had had no knowledge of the offer and of course had no deal. He asked me to repeat what I had just told him.
“Great,” he said. “Let them send out the press release. And then we will negotiate.”
But when I told him I was about to get into the car with Q and Kevin, he said that I could make a deal with them right them and there. In writing. And he said I needed agreement on eight items, starting with title and compensation. I asked him to hold on while I found some paper.
Quickly I walked over to the NBC guard and asked whether he had any paper. No, he said. But wait: Those NBC parking passes. Are they blank on the other side? They were. Could I have a few? Sure. Back at the pay phone with my lawyer, I copied notes and a deal outline, then went back to the limo.
Title: Executive Producer. Compensation?
“Oh well, you’re going to see all of the books anyway,” Kevin sighed. “This is what we pay executive producers.” I tried not to react. Thousands of dollars a month! No, Kevin corrected me. That’s per week. Kevin and I wrote it all on the back of an NBC parking permit, and I faxed it to my lawyer. “I can litigate on this,” he said, “Go ahead.” (WB never executed the contract, which I was told was typical, but they honored all of the provisions of our hand-written notes.)
And that is how I began working with the Reverend.
We all drove to the Carlisle, where Q always stayed, and booked rooms for me and the Reverend. When the three of us met to discuss the program, I said I thought the hour-long show needed a major overhaul, “from A to Z but keep J.” And I added that, in my experience, before going any further, the host and the producer first needed to sit down to decide what the show is about. So I suggested the Reverend and I go to a room in the hotel and unplug the phones-
“Do what?”
“Unplug the phones. It’s just you and me. It may be short, or it may take a while. And if we don’t agree, that’s OK. We’ll still respect each other. But I won’t produce your show.”
Our meeting was actually pretty short. I was blunt.
“You look like you are reading. They have you on prompter.”
“Koppel has a prompter.”
“Ted Koppel can’t do what you do, and you shouldn’t try to do what he does. I’ve seen you in church. I’ve seen you at the Democratic convention. You don’t need a prompter.”
“No prompter,” he sighed.
“No prompter.”
“Well, you’re right. I talk better than I read.”
“Next, do you have an audience?”
“Yes, but they’re down below, where I can’t see them.” (I couldn’t imagine that, but so it was.)
“We’ll take of that. We’ll put them up on risers, so they’re right in front of you.”
“No prompter,” he sighed again.
I assured him that we could have blue cards next to him, so that wherever he was in the hour, he could look down and see what the next segment was about. And it would be in his own words.
“My own words?”
“Yes, we can have a minitape running when you come to the office every day –“
“When I do what?”
“When you come to the office every day. This is a show with your name on it. It has to be your show. You pick the topics, You help book the guests.” And that is when I learned that he never came to the office, only walking into the studio when they were about to roll tape.
Then it was time to go to work where the program was based, in Washington DC, at NBC studios on Nebraska Avenue. As soon as I saw the studio layout, I knew putting the audience on risers was only a start, so I called Quincy. I told him we needed to paint the floor and make some other set changes. Oh and could he write some new music for the open and bumps?
“You know how to do this?” Quincy asked.
“Isn’t that why you hired me?”
“No,” he replied. “I hired you to keep an eye on the others.”
And so began the adventure of producing shows 5-40 of “The Jesse Jackson Show.”
Strongest memories: The Reverend was really smart, and kind to everyone, including the most junior on the staff, who were amazed. He also knew television, but as a guest. We had to make him comfortable as the person in charge. And as one booker said, we needed to “Let Jesse Be Jesse!”
Everyone had a favorite program. One of the Reverend’s favorites was when he I invited stars of Gospel music for an hour-long special. The NBC floor crew was worried, to put it mildly. One of them confided, “We only do local news and ‘Meet the Press.’ We’ve never done music here.” The show was technically flawless and a huge hit.
One idea – I don’t believe it was mine – was to have an hour of the Reverend one on one with David Duke, the Klan leader who became a member of the Louisiana state legislature – and hoped to become a U.S. Senator.
“I’m not going to legitimize Duke,” the Reverend objected.
“Are you afraid of debating him?” I asked, to provoke him.
“Of course not!”
“You’ll wipe him out, right?”
“Of course!”
“Let’s do it!”
You can see some of the program today, on YouTube. By today’s standards, it was low key.
Then there were the programs we produced in the spring of 1991 at New York’s Apollo Theater. The Reverend booked “The Prince and the Papa,” an hour with Bill Cosby and Will Smith, star of the then new hit comedy “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” - another Quincy Jones production.
One program that didn’t happen: The Reverend wanted to go to Liberia in the fall to negotiate a peace treaty in that country’s civil war. We’d take a camera crew with us, edit a package there, have the two warring leaders as guests and feed the program via satellite. “And that’s next week’s show!” I told him that it was too soon: We had to wait until he “owned” the program and it fitted “like a glove” – and we weren’t there yet.
Over the winter, the Reverend became more engaged and relaxed, the programs improved, the audience increased, and the threat of cancellation receded. Running on NBC in most cities, usually on Sunday mornings, we began to win our time period, starting with Atlanta, Cleveland, and Detroit.
In Washington DC, we built a massive lead, with more than a 50 share – the majority of people watching TV during that hour. When he would see me in the hallway at NBC, Tim Russert, then the host of “Meet the Press,” would yell down the hall, “I LOVE YOUR SHOW!” Reason: With our huge lead-in audience, his broadcast for the first time was seen by more people than the competition, “CBS News Sunday Morning.”
Then there was the money: Every Friday I had to fly to Burbank for the Warner Bros senior management meeting, in part to report on the program’s finances, already $1 million over budget after just four episodes. Quincy said he was going to terminate most of the senior producers before I started, but that they all remained under contract and on our budget. But with the program’s budget manager, himself an ordained minister, we set out to produce the 40 episodes on the original budget. It wasn’t easy.
When I told them we were going to the Apollo Theater, the executives in Burbank thought I had lost my mind, because it would blow out the budget. Not so: Instead, those were the least expensive hours we produced. We had “trade” – free air transportation and hotel rooms, in exchange for on-air promotion – and the Apollo cost us one dollar (US$1.00). Here’s why:
When I called the Apollo’s owner, Percy Sutton, I was calling an acquaintance of many decades, from his days as Manhattan’s Borough President. Percy was not exactly a friend: he had been one of the “Gang of Four” who worked to unseat my father from Congress. But he felt he owed me something, so he gave me the Apollo Theater. The Apollo also had its own post-production facility, where we could edit the programs before sending them to Burbank. Percy threw that into the deal as well. We saved thousands of dollars every week.
Warner Bros insisted we tape on Wednesdays for air on Sundays, which we all thought was crazy, but that was what I inherited; it was set in stone. So in May, in the senior management meeting at the end of the season, after I reminded WB executives about our near-disaster during the Gulf war (more below), I insisted that for the second season of the Jackson show, we should tape on Saturday to air on Sunday.
Impossible, was the response. OK, we’ll meet you half-way, I countered, offering to tape on Friday to air on Sunday. Again: Can’t be done. Then one of the people at the table – maybe Dick Robertson, head of Warner Bros Television, explained to me that commercials for all WB shows were inserted in time to send the programs to the networks and the stations on Thursday and Friday.
“Give me the commercial reel,” I said, saying we could insert the commercials live into the show as it was recorded. They all looked at each other, and to me. Which is when I learned that ours was the only topical program in a studio that produced “filmed entertainment.”
Here’s the solution, said one executive: Call CBS and get your friends there to take the show. CBS will insert the commercials.
“Gentlemen,” I said slowly (there were no women in the room), “there is no way CBS News will allow a topical television broadcast on the CBS television network hosted by a controversial political figure.” Pause. “However, the Reverend would love to be on CNN.”
Everyone looked at each other. Great idea! So I kept going.
“And you all know the new president of CNN, Tom Johnson!” He had just moved to CNN after being publisher of the Los Angeles Times, so they must all have known him. “You can call him.”
“Adam, you call him.” And that was that.
It was already afternoon in L.A., Friday night in Atlanta, so I waited until Monday at 9:01 a.m. Eastern time, and then called CNN headquarters and asked for Tom Johnson. To my surprise, he took the call. I had a 20-second elevator pitch ready. His reply: “I’ll call you back tomorrow.” Yeah, right.
The next morning at 9:00, I heard the production assistant whose turn it was to answer the call director (I had turned all of the secretaries into P.A.s so they could help produce the programs. That was better all around than their taking dictation.)
“Adam,” he yelled, “it’s Tom Johnson from CNN on line 2!” Suddenly people came out of their offices. CNN???
“We’ll take the show,” Johnson said, under three conditions.”
“You have my attention.”
“First, you come as executive producer.”
“I can’t do that; I’m under contract to Quincy Jones.” (And I knew CNN paid a small fraction of what Q was paying me.) “But we have a terrific senior producer, Lee Thornton, former CBS News. She’s terrific. Next?”
(I forget the second condition.)
“And third, Reverend Jackson must agree, in writing, never to run for elected political office.” Equal time worries were no doubt just the start of CNN’s worries.
“Mr. Johnson,” I said, “that will be between you and the Reverend. Here is his phone number.”
And the Reverend would not sign for months, not until November, and that is when his program began on CNN, where the Reverend’s weekly program, reduced to a half-hour and retitled “Both Sides with Jesse Hackson,” produced by Lee Thornton ran for years. Often I joked with Quincy that the Reverend’s show had run longer than the breakout 1990-91 QJ comedy hit, “Fresh Prince.” “Yeah, but no reruns,” Q would reply, half-joking. What about that Gospel show? Or “The Prince and the Papa”? No interest.
OK, now for my favorites. Credit to Van Gordon Sauter, whom I first knew as CBS News Paris bureau chief, and who became President of CBS News in 1982 and again in 1986. Van said live television is made of “moments.” People remember moments. An only slightly different view came from another CBS colleague, Don Hewitt, who directed “See It Now” in the 1950s, created the 30-minute evening newscast (with Walter Cronkite) in 1963, and then for an encore created “60 Minutes” and drove it to be the highest-audience program on television. Hewitt used to say he wanted people watching TV to say, “Hey Mabel, come in here, you’ve got to see this!”
So here is my favorite “moment” from “The Jesse Jackson Show.” I forget what the topic of that week’s program was, but at the end, as credits rolled, in the control room, we all panicked. A toddler, or just older, had broken free from her mother as the Reverend was closing the program. Watching on TV, viewers could see the little girl running down the aisle from the back of the audience. In the control room, someone – maybe the director, Jesse Vaughn – said “We may need to dump out.”
But no: The little girl was running down the steps to Reverend Jackson, who looked down, swooped her up into his arms, and flashed his big smile. She looked up at the Reverend, and he looked down at her, just as the last credits rolled and we faded to black.
OMG.
Someone in the control room said, “That’s the only thing anyone will remember from this show.” Live TV! Nothing like it!
But my favorite program, without question, was the day the Reverend made a mistake. During the Gulf War - remember, we’re taping on Wednesday to air on Sunday - for the first and only time, during a commercial break, he reached down and knocked the blue cards off of the table next to him. In the control room, someone said, Stop the tape, Jesse is lost. No, no, I said, we never stop the tape, this is live television. We’ll kill the momentum if we stop.
The Reverend reached down to the floor, picked up a blue card, looked into the camera, and flashing his big smile, said “Welcome back!” And then he introduced… the wrong segment. He had just skipped a segment that he and Lee Tornton had prepared, on hostages being held by Saddam Hussein.
“Oh Jesse!” yelled Lee in the control room, balling up her script and throwing it at the TV monitors in frustration. Don’t worry, I said trying to calm her down. We were just one segment ahead, I insisted, so we’ll talk to that guest twice, and no one will ever know the difference. We kept going.
Fast forward four days to the following Sunday morning, as the program was about to be broadcast. The phone rang at 7 a.m. “Hello, Reverend Powell?” He had started calling me that. “Have you seen today’s Washington Post?” I hadn’t seen it.
“Saddam has released those hostages.”
What? You mean the hostages we had in the segment you skipped by accident? We would have been the laughingstock of the television industry. Correct. And before hanging up, he said,
“And you think God isn’t watching over this TV show?”