Seen and Unseen

Memories and Fragments

Everything you are about to read actually happened. These accounts are based on contemporaneous diary notes going back to 1963, passports going back to my childhood, news stories about me and the family, and writings by my parents, some never previously published.

It included encounters in the Oval Office and business meetings with the richest men in America - and Asia. On the West Coast, negotiations with Hollywood studio heads and private parties with leading musicians and Hollywood stars. Running a US national lab. Becoming friends with Nelson Mandela (“Ah, you are back!”). And several times I cheated death - NBC twice reported that I had died - but instead, I am living a life filled with personal and professional experiences that just amaze me (and it’s not over yet).

“Adam, you’re Zelig,” said Charles Overby, then Chairman of the Freedom Forum foundation, who had appointed me as a VP and head of programs for the Newseum. “You are always there, but no one sees you.” One friend says my life has had more coincidences than a Dickens novel, and that repeatedly I seem to be in the right place at the right time. Some of the church ladies said simply, “You’re just blessed.”

But let’s start here:

A day of changes

Many of the strands that have filtered through my life came together on a day in June, 1964, at the end of my freshman year at M.I.T., where I was an electrical engineering major and aspiring computer programmer. My colleagues at the student radio station had decided I should be the news director - more about that later - but I had no journalism experience. So I called a friend of my parents, a journalist who had been out of work for years, and I called him at home, asking if I could buy him coffee and get some tips about journalism. He said he had been hired at CBS, and asked me to meet him early, early in the morning (ouch) at his office at CBS News headquarters at the top of the Graybar skyscraper next to Grand Central Station.

His name was Mike Wallace.

Mike was anchoring the CBS Morning News, at 10-10:30 a.m., the first daily half-hour network newscast, which had premiered eight hours before the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite became the second daily half-hour newscast. NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report was third, expanding to 30 minutes a week after CBS. ABC’s half-hour was years later. (And 17 years later, the CBS Morning News had expanded to an hour, Charles Kuralt was the anchor, and I was Coordinating Producer. But more that later…)

To my eye, it was utter chaos. Black and white negative film from the Vietnam war would arrive by motorcycle from Kennedy airport and head for “the soup” (the film processor), live remotes were booked to Washington and to other cities, four film editors would cut and splice film - sometimes working together, breaking a film magazine into pieces (“Has anyone found the open?”), and longer features would be assembled, sometimes on three reels to run simultaneously on three projectors, with director Vern Diamond switching back and forth among them, live on the air. (In later years, complicated film stories would be premixed, recorded on videotape and rolled into the broadcast.)

Presiding over all of this was the producer, Av Westin, who had the reputation of being a boy wonder of CBS. The CBS Morning News with Mike Wallace certainly helped that reputation, as it was reaching more viewers than the competing 10 a.m. game show on NBC. Av was later promoted to executive producer, and in that role he put me on camera, on the air, on two networks (both surprises to me) and tried to put me on a third. (But I didn’t really want to be on the air. Instead - well I’m getting ahead of the story.)

After that day’s Morning News ended, one of the broadcast’s film editors, Bernard (Bernie) Altman, asked me, “Kid, why are you hanging around here?” When I told him, he asked, “Don’t you want a summer job?” Who, me? Bernie sent me down the hall to Henry Wefing, who waved me into his office, and I sat down. He was dubious, opening a file cabinet drawer stuffed with folders.

“These are the applications for summer jobs at CBS News,” he said. sliding the drawer shut with a thud. “Why should I hire you?” (Twelve years later, I had Henry Wefing’s job, but that was in the future, so more of that later. . .)

As I was mumbling about just having come from Cambridge (“Oh, are you the one we are expecting?” Wefing was waiting for a student from Harvard), suddenly, just as in the movies, an assistant director stuck his head in the door, saying they needed someone today, right away, now. Looking at me, asking in rapid fire, “Who are you? Can you cut copy?” “Sure,” I replied, not having the faintest idea what he meant. And so I became a summer intern at CBS News, learning how to cut wire copy, break apart the carbon paper sets used for scripts, and of course make coffee.

There were three people I had to call. First I called my father, who was always at his desk on Capitol Hill at exactly 12:15, the time I could always call him on a private phone line. I gave him the news, there was a brief silence, and he asked, “Where are you again?” When I said I was at CBS News, there was an extended silence. “Dad? Dad? Are you there?” Then: “You’re not going to tell them what really goes on, are you?” (The off the record coordinating meetings of civil rights leaders, who all knew the FBI was listening? His meetings with New York mob leaders to increase payments to Harlem numbers dealers? The secret back channel to President Eisenhower and deals they made that neither could acknowledge? The white envelopes filled with cash that his colleagues accepted - and for what? Of course not.)

My father viewed my work at CBS with suspicion for a year, until I could give him a tip, a CBS exclusive that we had just broadcast as a bulletin, anchored by Robert Trout, interrupting a daytime soap opera. He was overjoyed, telling me later he was the only one in Washington who seemed to know. “I told LBJ! I told Bobby [Kennedy]! Son, if you get any more news like that, you can call me any time.” But that was in the future, so more of that later. . .

Then I called my mother, who burst out laughing. “What’s so funny?” I asked. “Well you know,” she replied, “everyone has wondered whether you would go into politics, like your father, or into show business, like your mother. Now you have found a way of doing both!” And more laughter. (Unlike my father, she had no worries that what I knew of the entertainment world, including the role of the mob and more, would ever be in a CBS broadcast.)

The third call I had to make was to tell someone that, because of my new job, I would be late for our meeting. She had asked me to come up to her hotel suite “for a snort” (no, not what you’re thinking: it was vodka) and “to hang out” (no, not what you’re thinking: it was to share gossip, jokes and more).

Her name was Ava Gardner.