Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Speaker 1: Thing from iHeart Radio. My guest today is a renowned
Speaker 1: journalist and former CBS correspondent for sixty Minutes. Known for
Speaker 1: his acclaimed investigative reporting, Steve Croft has won five Peabody
Speaker 1: Awards and eleven Emmy Awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Emmy
Speaker 1: in two thousand and three. His legendary reporting career spans
Speaker 1: international war coverage and major historical events such as the
Speaker 1: Chernobyl disaster and the infamous nineteen ninety two interview with
Speaker 1: Hillary and President Bill Clinton. Steve Croft got his starred
Speaker 1: in journalism when he was drafted into the Army in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy. There he worked for the military newspaper Stars
Speaker 1: and Stripes as a correspondent photographer in Vietnam. He received
Speaker 1: an honorable discharge from the army a year later in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one, although the war would not officially end
Speaker 1: for another four years. I was curious if Croft had
Speaker 1: any sense that the end of conflict was near when
Speaker 1: he arrived in Vietnam.
Speaker 2: We had a sense that it was supposed to wind down.
Speaker 2: I'm not really sure I had much confidence in that
Speaker 2: because it was still dangerous and actually actually nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: nine was the bloodiest year of the war, more people killed.
Speaker 2: I would have guessed sixty eight, but it was sixty nine,
Speaker 2: and that was all fighting sort of geared up to
Speaker 2: pulling the US troops out. I have to tell you
Speaker 2: right now. I mean, this was the beginning of my
Speaker 2: journalism career. Did you feel a.
Speaker 1: Sense when you were there that you were managed in
Speaker 1: terms of what reporting they expected from you.
Speaker 2: Definitely. I mean the first ten months I was there,
Speaker 2: I was with a headquarters company with the twenty fifth
Speaker 2: Infantry Division, and I was in information SPECIALI Cucchi and
Speaker 2: I did half an hour radio show for Armed Forces
Speaker 2: Network every week, and one of my jobs was to
Speaker 2: escort network correspondence and print correspondence in the field, and
Speaker 2: we had a lot of those people come through the office,
Speaker 2: and that was really what got me hooked when I
Speaker 2: went in. I wanted to be an advertising That's what
Speaker 2: I thought I wanted to do. Well. It was during
Speaker 2: the great year of Doyle Daane burn Back and all
Speaker 2: those great ideas. Yeah yeah, yeah, and television commercials were
Speaker 2: the most in the newspaper magazine commercials were the most
Speaker 2: interesting things and the most creative things around. I went
Speaker 2: to Syracuse one of the most horrifying experiences of a
Speaker 2: whole Vietnam. So it really took up five years of
Speaker 2: my life because there were two years of worrying about
Speaker 2: it and what the hell I was going to do,
Speaker 2: because I was about to lose my student deferment and
Speaker 2: I graduated in the sixty seven and in nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: eight was you.
Speaker 1: Know, they're taking everybody crazy, everybody. I got drafted in
Speaker 1: the largest draft call of the war, so I had
Speaker 1: to figure out how I was going to deal with it.
Speaker 1: I certainly didn't want to go to officers Candidate school
Speaker 1: because I didn't have strong feelings about the war one
Speaker 1: way or the other. But I knew that if I
Speaker 1: was an officer, I'd have to worry about getting shot
Speaker 1: in the back and shot from the front because there
Speaker 1: were a lot of lame second lieutenants who didn't know
Speaker 1: what they were doing, who led a lot of people
Speaker 1: into dangerous situations and were removed. So I had a
Speaker 1: friend who had been in the army. He was the
Speaker 1: editor of The Daily Orange, the Syracuse newspaper, and he
Speaker 1: for one reason or another I can't remember. Had done
Speaker 1: a stint with the eighty second Airborn sort of in
Speaker 1: between his college years, and he said, what you should
Speaker 1: do is you should go down and enlist in the Army.
Speaker 1: Because the Navy was four years, in the Air Force
Speaker 1: was four years, all these other things. The Army had
Speaker 1: a program where you could go down and enlist for
Speaker 1: three years and get to pick what you were going
Speaker 1: to do more or less. And it turned out to
Speaker 1: be a great decision because I got in this field,
Speaker 1: this information field, and it became my sort of survival skill,
Speaker 1: and it was a great experience.
Speaker 2: I was very lucky. Carl Bernstein said to me, not
Speaker 2: too long ago, you had a good war. But it
Speaker 2: was also a great You know, my boss was like
Speaker 2: on the staff at the general of the division, and
Speaker 2: it was right next to command headquarters, and you would
Speaker 2: see people coming in all the time from the battalions
Speaker 2: and companies in the field, and you had a good
Speaker 2: sense of how the war was going not all that well,
Speaker 2: and you had a sense of what was being reported.
Speaker 2: And I remember my boss having just shouting matches with
Speaker 2: this guy named George Esper from the Associated Press, arguing
Speaker 2: over battles and great reports that had come in. Now
Speaker 2: there it was clear that I had that I was
Speaker 2: doing the bidding of the twenty fifth. That was my job.
Speaker 2: The difference in going to Stars at Stripes was was
Speaker 2: that I had much more freedom to report, and it
Speaker 2: was the newspaper of the Pacific Command and my boss,
Speaker 2: my ultimate boss, who I used to care for when
Speaker 2: he came to Vietnam was John McCain's father, who was
Speaker 2: the Commander of Chief in the Pacific. There you could write,
Speaker 2: You could get away with a lot of stuff, and
Speaker 2: we didn't have to send it to the censors. We
Speaker 2: had editors in Tokyo that looked at it, but I
Speaker 2: didn't have to like send it down to Saigon for
Speaker 2: the military censors to go through.
Speaker 1: But you're somebody at sixty minutes, your career marks that
Speaker 1: dedicated section. Yeah, the Steve Croft years are the years. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm parked in front of the TV and it's sixty minutes.
Speaker 1: Chinese food for dinner would arrive at the apartment right
Speaker 1: the Sopranos. That was my Sunday every night. I was
Speaker 1: a boomer representative.
Speaker 2: When I first came there, I used to joke, I
Speaker 2: said you know that you can divide this show into
Speaker 2: two categories, the people who like rock and roll and
Speaker 2: the people who think it's a passing fad. So I
Speaker 2: was the first of the baby boomer.
Speaker 1: Well, when I would watch the show, what I'm getting
Speaker 1: to is that, you know, you were always somebody who
Speaker 1: what came across effortlessly. Here's a guy that's reporting, and
Speaker 1: inside and threading into that person is the person, and
Speaker 1: therefore the reporting was your conscience.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you bring a lot of conscience to your work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, people knew you were going to be fair and
Speaker 1: not just progressive, lefty whatever. And you know, taking that stance,
Speaker 1: you were going to be smart and fair and your
Speaker 1: conscience was going.
Speaker 2: Fair is important word. But then you then you can't
Speaker 2: consider so much important anymore. Well, it's bag it's baggage.
Speaker 1: But the thing is that when you're there, I'm assuming
Speaker 1: there wasn't a lot of things you wanted to report,
Speaker 1: un that they told you not to do that.
Speaker 2: There wasn't much of that was there. The best story
Speaker 2: that I ever covered for Stars and Stripes was not printed.
Speaker 2: I was up in quang Nam Province outside the nang
Speaker 2: and we were going out with what they called the
Speaker 2: Rough Tough Unit sort of Vietnamese farmer who were militiamen.
Speaker 2: And it was a very nasty area and we knew
Speaker 2: going out that we were going to get hit, and
Speaker 2: we did. And the Arvin, you know, they came in
Speaker 2: and were the Vietnase commanders and pulled some women out
Speaker 2: of the hooches and took one of them down and
Speaker 2: tortured her by trying to drown her in the river.
Speaker 2: I took some pictures of it. I wrote the story,
Speaker 2: and they said, we're not going to print.
Speaker 3: This.
Speaker 2: Was this after Melai. Yes, yeah, so they were sensitive
Speaker 2: about the Yes, about the US, and they're always sensitive
Speaker 2: about the allies, which included the Koreans who are now
Speaker 2: fighting the Northern Koreans who are now fighting for the
Speaker 2: Russians in Ukraine.
Speaker 1: Now you're when you're there during this period, you're writing
Speaker 1: and you're doing some radio, but no television. Well when
Speaker 1: you come home, it becomes TV. You get into TV
Speaker 1: pretty quickly once you get home. Yeah, why why didn't
Speaker 1: you say a writer? I'd always kind of wanted to
Speaker 1: be in television. I had taken a lot of television courses,
Speaker 1: and I had done the radios thing. So the Stars
Speaker 1: and Stripes was really the only print journalism I did.
Speaker 1: And you know, I had six months of like unemployment
Speaker 1: insurance coming back from Vietnam.
Speaker 2: But I had to go and like go to a
Speaker 2: job interview. And one of the job interviews was for
Speaker 2: a television station and the person who was the head
Speaker 2: of the Chamber of Commerce was also the head of
Speaker 2: the TV station and he hired me, so offered me
Speaker 2: a job, and it was hard to get. Those jobs
Speaker 2: were hard to get, and I took it. So, I mean,
Speaker 2: it's just why I fell into place. Yeah, that's why.
Speaker 2: That's why I are. You do s Yr But then
Speaker 2: you go down to Florida. Correct? Why I went off
Speaker 2: to Columbia, I'm sorry, a graduate degree at JO Why
Speaker 2: did you want to do that? You were working?
Speaker 3: Why?
Speaker 2: I wanted to do it to get out of Syracuse
Speaker 2: because I was finding it difficult to make a jump
Speaker 2: to a major market, and I thought that the Columbia
Speaker 2: thing would give me a little bit more credibility in
Speaker 2: New York if I wanted it, because I wanted to
Speaker 2: ultimately go to the networks.
Speaker 1: Yeah and so, and they did give you the credibility
Speaker 1: because you just work you're in Jacksonville, you're in Miami.
Speaker 2: Both those stations owned by the Washington Post Company. What
Speaker 2: was your just someone connection with them? Had you worked
Speaker 2: for them? I didn't, but it was a great company
Speaker 2: to work for Back then. I got hired to go
Speaker 2: down to Jacksonville. I had a friend at CBS and
Speaker 2: he says, why don't you go down talk to Jim Snyder,
Speaker 2: who is the head of WTP, the CBS affiliate in Washington.
Speaker 2: He runs Post newsweek stations. You know. I went down
Speaker 2: and I talked to Jim, and Jim said, I've got
Speaker 2: this investigator reporter's job opening Jacksonville. You know, I'd like
Speaker 2: you to go down and talk to the news director
Speaker 2: and we can put you in there because I've done
Speaker 2: some investigative reporting at WSYR. So I get down there
Speaker 2: and it turns out that everybody in town, all these people,
Speaker 2: you know, the news director says, oh, we've got some
Speaker 2: great stories down here. The town was run kind of
Speaker 2: by independent authorities. It was like all these businessmen were
Speaker 2: running the town. There was support authority, the electric all
Speaker 2: of this stuff, and our license. Both stations were being
Speaker 2: challenged by a group of very rich Republicans who had
Speaker 2: gotten in trouble. If you may remember when I think
Speaker 2: it was Bernstein or Woodward called up John Mitchell, who
Speaker 2: was the Attorney General of the United States at the time,
Speaker 2: and asked him a couple of questions about Watergate. Woke
Speaker 2: come up and woke him up, And Mitchell's response was,
Speaker 2: Katie Graham's going to get her kit in her ringer
Speaker 2: if you print this story. But what they did was
Speaker 2: they challenged the licenses of the two most profitable parts
Speaker 2: of the Washington Post want the TV stations in Jacksonville
Speaker 2: and Miami. So I was there and it ended up
Speaker 2: I didn't know this at the time, but I was
Speaker 2: doing stories on all the people that were behind the
Speaker 2: license channel challenge. I wanted something about journalism that day.
Speaker 2: They didn't prevail them.
Speaker 1: They didn't prevail, right, And you were there for how
Speaker 1: long in Florida before because eventually come to New York
Speaker 1: after that two years?
Speaker 2: I was there in Jacksonville two years and two years
Speaker 2: in Miami.
Speaker 1: What was your where had you spent even during your
Speaker 1: su days and then of course during your Columbia days
Speaker 1: you're uptown? But what did you think about when you
Speaker 1: first came to New York. Did you see it potentially
Speaker 1: as a place you were going to spend the rest
Speaker 1: of your life? You being from Indiana, Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: also been from Chappaqua. I graduated from high school at Chapequa,
Speaker 1: so I knew it by taking the Harlem Line into
Speaker 1: Grand Center and going to play.
Speaker 2: You're familiar with New York obviously, Yeah, But did you
Speaker 2: love New York?
Speaker 1: Did you think you did you know it was going
Speaker 1: to be I thought it was a big time, you know,
Speaker 1: And I thought, here I am.
Speaker 2: I'm working for CBS and a network correspondent. I'd got
Speaker 2: in my dream the whole thing. It was absolutely the
Speaker 2: most junior person at CBS at the time and worked
Speaker 2: in the Northeast Bureau. And I did a lot of
Speaker 2: crap work, a lot of stakouts. You know, you take
Speaker 2: a camera crew and you wait all day waiting for
Speaker 2: somebody to come out. Maybe they won't come out. I
Speaker 2: don't know how many days I spent standing outside the
Speaker 2: hospital where they thought the show of Iran was but
Speaker 2: he was not there. Ever there and I spent two
Speaker 2: miserable days in the rain outside the DA Code after
Speaker 2: John Lennon got shot. Now and I got sent to Dallas,
Speaker 2: and I said, we're making you a correspondent, because everybody
Speaker 2: started off as a reporter. We're making a correspondent. That's
Speaker 2: the good news. Bad news is we're sending you to
Speaker 2: our Salvador. So I went down there and spent a
Speaker 2: couple of months in our salad, which actually was more
Speaker 2: dangerous for me than Vietnam.
Speaker 1: Journalist and news correspondent Steve Croft. If you enjoy conversations
Speaker 1: with world class journalists, check out my interview with Dan Rather.
Speaker 3: When the first faint edges of what we came to
Speaker 3: know is Watergate begun to emerge, I was skeptical that
Speaker 3: it would reach the Oval Office itself. You never met
Speaker 3: anybody who had more respect for the office of the
Speaker 3: Presidency in the United States than I do. It was
Speaker 3: very difficult for me to accept that the President himself
Speaker 3: would be involved in any way. However, as time went along,
Speaker 3: facts began the first wisp. Then they begin to speak
Speaker 3: in fou voice, and then the facts begin to shout.
Speaker 3: It isn't just lower level campaign operatuies, It isn't just
Speaker 3: lower level members of the administration. That this probably goes
Speaker 3: into the Oval Office itself.
Speaker 1: To hear more of my conversation with Dan rather go
Speaker 1: to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Steve
Speaker 1: Croft tells the story of being attacked while reporting on location.
Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. In
Speaker 1: Steve Croft's final interview for sixty Minutes, he told fellow
Speaker 1: correspondent Leslie Stall that in spite of interviewing intimidating figures
Speaker 1: and traveling to dangerous places, he was never afraid while
Speaker 1: doing an interview. The only exceptions Croft cited were interview
Speaker 1: was in Beirut and Zimbabwe. I was curious what made
Speaker 1: him nervous during those two particular stories.
Speaker 2: Well, in Zimbabwe, we were attacked by a group of
Speaker 2: black quote unquote war veterans who were trying to drive
Speaker 2: the white farmers out of South Africa. I was doing
Speaker 2: a story on one of the farmers and I thought
Speaker 2: that was going to be really hairy. They had big,
Speaker 2: huge clubs and they were very upset. But we got
Speaker 2: out of it. In Beirute just because it was brute.
Speaker 2: I mean there were buildings blowing up every fifteen minutes
Speaker 2: and you had to really pay attention to where you
Speaker 2: went and what you were doing. The place was out
Speaker 2: of control. Are you a religious man? Do you think
Speaker 2: you're alive because of a lot of war coverage? For you,
Speaker 2: I did intense, intense period of this kind of very
Speaker 2: dangerous reporting. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, other than being lucky, what else do you
Speaker 1: attributed to You just had an eye for what to do.
Speaker 1: He had a sense it's very exciting, Okay. Churchill said,
Speaker 1: there's no feeling in the world. The most exhilarating feeling
Speaker 1: in the world is to be shot at without result.
Speaker 2: And it was. There was a lot of adrenaline, and
Speaker 2: it was a great way to advance your career, and
Speaker 2: because you were always going to be on the air
Speaker 2: and I liked it. I liked it for a while,
Speaker 2: and then the chance came to go to London and
Speaker 2: I decided to do that. That's where I ended up
Speaker 2: in Beirut when I was working in the London bureau,
Speaker 2: which was I spent three years there and I was
Speaker 2: traveling all over the world and that was really the
Speaker 2: best time I had at CBS. I love that why,
Speaker 2: because that's the reason I wanted to be a correspondent.
Speaker 2: I wanted to see the world and learn about things.
Speaker 2: We traveled in those days, first class, and you stayed
Speaker 2: in the best hotels, and it was you were like
Speaker 2: a dignitary. It was a different world for journals expect then.
Speaker 1: Yeah, now when you finally land at sixty minutes, you
Speaker 1: join sixty Minutes in what year?
Speaker 2: Is it eighty nine?
Speaker 1: I think eighty nine, So eighty nine, fifty six plus
Speaker 1: years after it started. Sixty Minutes is better and more
Speaker 1: substantive than any other TV news program today, not just
Speaker 1: in prime time, but still the gold standard.
Speaker 2: Why do you think they maintained that authority because it
Speaker 2: was a very good show. It came in generally followed
Speaker 2: the NFL football games on CBS, which gave us a
Speaker 2: huge leading, particularly among males. And it had a genius
Speaker 2: and Don Hewett was the executive producer and sort of
Speaker 2: the inventor of the show. And it had Mike Wallace
Speaker 2: and Morley Safer and Ed Bradley and Leslie Stall and
Speaker 2: you know the best. You know, all these people had,
Speaker 2: like myself, gone out and done all the stuff that
Speaker 2: I had done. And I think that was one of
Speaker 2: the reasons why I was under consideration. You know, I've
Speaker 2: been overseas and knew how to handle myself. I could
Speaker 2: was a good writer, but I think that the success
Speaker 2: for the show was I think that people felt smart
Speaker 2: watching it. We would take on very difficult subjects, but
Speaker 2: we never talked down to the audience, and we would
Speaker 2: go to great links to try and give the story
Speaker 2: context and explain what was going on and why we
Speaker 2: were doing this story. And people just they like that,
Speaker 2: I think, and they learned something from it, and I
Speaker 2: think that's really important. I mean television today and television
Speaker 2: generally talks down to people. They don't give the audience
Speaker 2: much credit for being smart, and I think sixty Minutes
Speaker 2: did that, and I think the audience appreciated it. Also.
Speaker 2: I thought people always thought sixty Minutes was a really
Speaker 2: liberal show, and I don't think it was liberal. I
Speaker 2: think that it was we did. There's no show in
Speaker 2: tell Vision that did more stories about the waste and
Speaker 2: dysfunction of the US government right than sixty minutes.
Speaker 1: Right now, when you're working for the network prior to
Speaker 1: the appointment to sixty Minutes, you're running against some of
Speaker 1: these guys in a lot of headbutting with your competitors,
Speaker 1: if you will, I mean the other guys on the show.
Speaker 1: Reisner safer. You guys don't want to cover the same story.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, And that was even before sixty minutes when
Speaker 1: your correspondence or no, yeah, no.
Speaker 2: I had some huge fights with Morley when I was
Speaker 2: in London over who is going to do what story?
Speaker 2: Whether you know, I'd be I'd been working on it,
Speaker 2: and he wanted to do the story with John Tiffin,
Speaker 2: who is a very powerful producer, and we would, you know,
Speaker 2: take the gloves off and have at it and have
Speaker 2: at it.
Speaker 1: And then when you got on the show, the same
Speaker 1: thing when it's sixteen minutes, same thing, A lot of competition.
Speaker 2: Who's going to do what story? Yes, now you do it.
Speaker 1: And one thing that was mentioned to me was you
Speaker 1: interview me obviously every president during your term there and
Speaker 1: their term you and you interview Obama several times. To me,
Speaker 1: the presidency is you you have to have a special
Speaker 1: land in your body to want to do that job
Speaker 1: and believe you can succeed, especially the contemporary presidence, let's
Speaker 1: say since nineteen eighty and as monolithic as the budget
Speaker 1: is and everything, what was it you got from each
Speaker 1: of them that you interviewed that you thought was the
Speaker 1: reason they won? Name each president won by one that
Speaker 1: you interviewed. Most of them I interviewed were just short,
Speaker 1: short interviews, no long profiles, no long profiles, not sixty minutes.
Speaker 1: The two presidents that I interviewed for sixty minutes were
Speaker 1: Clinton several times and Obama many times. I think Obama
Speaker 1: was a bit a class by himself, simply for the
Speaker 1: fact that he was so knowledgeable and he was very articulate.
Speaker 1: When you go down and interview with somebody in Washington,
Speaker 1: whether it's the president or whatever, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: things you ask them that they don't know, and they
Speaker 1: constantly have to check with their aids, and they always
Speaker 1: have them in the room. In all the times I interviewed,
Speaker 1: Obama never stopped to ask any questions, and I never
Speaker 1: had anybody maybe one time somebody from his staff called
Speaker 1: and wanted to correct a small factual era. He knew
Speaker 1: what he was talking about, and he was able to
Speaker 1: give people, I think, a sense of what it was
Speaker 1: like being in that job, which is why I liked
Speaker 1: so much about interviewing. The reason we interviewed him so
Speaker 1: many times. What sense did you get? What was his
Speaker 1: view of the job.
Speaker 2: Did he enjoy it? I think he enjoyed it less
Speaker 2: over time. I think his wife never really she didn't
Speaker 2: want him to run. Originally, the first time I interviewed
Speaker 2: was the week before he declared, and she was very successful,
Speaker 2: had her own career, and she had lived through time
Speaker 2: in the Senate and he was gone all the time.
Speaker 2: She hated that. I think both of them took great
Speaker 2: solace in the fact that it was going to be Basically,
Speaker 2: they had a place to live and he was going
Speaker 2: to be there, so this will be together. Yeah, So
Speaker 2: from a family point of view, it worked out very well.
Speaker 2: I think he was ready to leave when he left,
Speaker 2: and I think that I know that they had a deal.
Speaker 2: You know that that you know that he was going
Speaker 2: to be there for the eight years and then and
Speaker 2: then it was going to be a private life of
Speaker 2: a private life.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean I interviewed Michael Wolfe when he had
Speaker 1: Fire and Fury coming in right for his book about Trumph.
Speaker 2: He's what a character he is. Yeah, he has a character.
Speaker 1: But when we did Fire and Fury at town Hall,
Speaker 1: and I said to him that the presidency is this
Speaker 1: cockpit that very few people can ever occupy, and your
Speaker 1: vista is something that's only the most singular experience in
Speaker 1: the world.
Speaker 2: You see the high high and the low low.
Speaker 1: Is it only one man has gone into that cockpit
Speaker 1: and come out of that cockpit unchanged, exactly the same
Speaker 1: in his worldview and his behavior as went And that's Trump.
Speaker 1: You didn't cover Trump obviously when he were you you
Speaker 1: left the show what year? I left the show in
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, so you were there for the first three Trumps.
Speaker 1: I was, But I didn't interview him.
Speaker 2: Did you want to? I didn't want to. You didn't
Speaker 2: why I didn't have the opportunity, And I watched other
Speaker 2: people interview him, and he didn't answer any questions, and
Speaker 2: you know, he's a bully, and it didn't seem to
Speaker 2: be productive.
Speaker 1: It wasn't what I wanted to do. And I knew
Speaker 1: him from New York because he loved the press. He
Speaker 1: liked to hang around with reporters. And you know, if
Speaker 1: you see him out in town, around town or at
Speaker 1: a party or something like that.
Speaker 2: Screening, he was in front of the camera. Yeah, he
Speaker 2: just come up to you and schmooze.
Speaker 1: Journalist and news correspondent Steve Kroft. If you're enjoying this conversation,
Speaker 1: tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the
Speaker 1: Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts. When we come back, Steve Croft shares what
Speaker 1: he thinks of journalism today and what has changed since
Speaker 1: he started over fifty years ago. I I'm Alec Baldwin,
Speaker 1: and this is here's the thing. Steve Croft interviewed many
Speaker 1: politicians throughout his impressive career. He famously spoke with President
Speaker 1: Barack Obama sixteen times during his presidency. While he found
Speaker 1: Obama to be highly informed on these subjects at hand,
Speaker 1: I was curious what Croft thought of the current political
Speaker 1: climate and the caliber of people we see in the
Speaker 1: public eye today. What worries me even more, I think
Speaker 1: is that I think the two major political parties, the
Speaker 1: only parties we have, are just in terrible shape. It's
Speaker 1: hard to tell which one is in worse shape. I
Speaker 1: think that the Democrats have plenty of problems and the
Speaker 1: Republicans have lots of problems. And I don't think people
Speaker 1: fel a real affinity for either party.
Speaker 2: And I think that Trump was elected. Somebody gave me
Speaker 2: this analysis the other day.
Speaker 1: I thought it was pretty interesting. It's you know, you
Speaker 1: people out there. They don't pay that close attention to
Speaker 1: what's going on, but they'll see clips of Trump on
Speaker 1: television and they like what he said, and they like
Speaker 1: the way he says it, and they want that and
Speaker 1: they'll give it another you know, they'll give him another
Speaker 1: shot without really knowing that much about his history, about
Speaker 1: the criminal cases that had been brought against him, and
Speaker 1: about what happened on January sixth. I think people very
Speaker 1: easy for those people to say.
Speaker 2: Well, this is just politics.
Speaker 1: This it's just that this is the Democrats making throwing
Speaker 1: a lot of dirt, and they don't really analyze it.
Speaker 1: I think, you know, people in this country are not stupid,
Speaker 1: and I think they're very upset with the way the country,
Speaker 1: the shape that the country is in, the way it's
Speaker 1: been run for a while, the levels of corruption, debt,
Speaker 1: the debt, the income inequality, all of these things, the
Speaker 1: medical system.
Speaker 2: I mean, everybody has a lot of complaints.
Speaker 1: But when you were the last season, you were doing
Speaker 1: the show, you were doing sixty minutes, you knew how
Speaker 1: far in advance, Like I'm always thinking of this in
Speaker 1: kind of a wistful way, how far away from you
Speaker 1: leaving did you.
Speaker 2: Know you were going to leave. I knew at the
Speaker 2: beginning of the last year, so that last year you
Speaker 2: knew would be her last year. I did for a
Speaker 2: number of reasons. One, I had thought very seriously about
Speaker 2: leaving a couple of years before that. At the end
Speaker 2: of every year, I would sit back, I'd say, do
Speaker 2: I really want to do this anymore? The job? If
Speaker 2: you did that job right, it was really a killer, really,
Speaker 2: and I thought, you know, I was about to turn
Speaker 2: seventy four.
Speaker 1: I thought I'd been there. It was going to be
Speaker 1: my fortieth year at CPS and my thirtieth year. At
Speaker 1: sixty minutes, the numbers were all aligned, and I thought, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to do this anymore.
Speaker 2: And also CBS was in a real state of turmoil,
Speaker 2: which was not an insignificant part.
Speaker 1: What happened to them, without you getting personal and whatever,
Speaker 1: say what you can, but what do you think.
Speaker 2: Happened to them? Well, I think that it was there's
Speaker 2: no way to avoid this. I think that it started
Speaker 2: with the merger between CBS and Viacom, and I think
Speaker 2: that they were two different cultures and it was a
Speaker 2: very painful, dirty split up. And last Moonvez was regardless
Speaker 2: of what you think about some of the allegations that
Speaker 2: were made, most of which were involved events long before
Speaker 2: he came to CBS. Was very good at his job,
Speaker 2: and he was a very powerful person in Hollywood. And
Speaker 2: I think the people at Viacom are really mostly just
Speaker 2: interested in the money.
Speaker 1: So when you're looking at that last year, you're pretty clear,
Speaker 1: now it's going to be your last year.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Do you pick the shows with an eye tour? Do
Speaker 1: I want to have my final season? Did you do
Speaker 1: picked them with an eye toward this is it? I
Speaker 1: want to go out with a great year?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: And you thought to yourself, well, I want to do
Speaker 1: this person that I want to do this story. I
Speaker 1: don't want to do that, right. Yes, you're a little
Speaker 1: bit more precious about it that final year. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: were things I wanted. Look, I had a rule with
Speaker 1: my producers. I reserved the rut to say no to
Speaker 1: any story I didn't want to do, and I would
Speaker 1: not impose a story that the producers didn't want to
Speaker 1: do on them. So when you were last year, what's
Speaker 1: a story that really really spoke to you that you
Speaker 1: really enjoyed doing.
Speaker 2: I think one of the last stories I did was
Speaker 2: about this place called the Isle of Egg, which was,
Speaker 2: you know, just a little speck in the ocean. That
Speaker 2: was a very interesting place, and I wanted to go
Speaker 2: do that story, and I really wanted to do an
Speaker 2: interview with Samuel L. Jackson, who I've always admired as
Speaker 2: an actor and knew very little about him when I
Speaker 2: started researching the story, and it ended up being one
Speaker 2: of my favorite stories. Those are the two things. In
Speaker 2: the last story I did was about money laundering, and
Speaker 2: you know, talk about how things are screwed up in
Speaker 2: the country and the corrupt level of the level of corruption.
Speaker 2: This was mostly going on and written, but it was
Speaker 2: a story about a little bank, a Danish branch of
Speaker 2: a Danish bank that was wandering all this money coming
Speaker 2: out of the Soviet Union. And it was such this
Speaker 2: the scam was so easy to pick and see, and
Speaker 2: all the American banks knew about it, and they were
Speaker 2: all handling this corrupt Russian money and only one bank,
Speaker 2: Jamie and Jamie Diamond, You refused to do business with them.
Speaker 1: Is there anybody, I mean, I'm sure there were some
Speaker 1: name one or two where they surprised you in the interview,
Speaker 1: they weren't at all what you thought they might be.
Speaker 2: I'd say the biggest surprise was Clint Eastwood, because I
Speaker 2: thought that he was, you know, the real macho man
Speaker 2: and you know, staunch Republican and all this, which both
Speaker 2: of which are true, right, But he is a really
Speaker 2: interesting character, very smart, great businessman, very polite, very well
Speaker 2: mannered and interesting. I mean he had you know, he
Speaker 2: wrote all the music, you know, he's for all of
Speaker 2: his movies. He's multifaceted, multifaceted, and everybody loved him. And
Speaker 2: he didn't have the best reputation. When I went out
Speaker 2: there and started spending time with him, and you know,
Speaker 2: stayed in touch with him over the years, I just
Speaker 2: thought he was really a first class individual. Impressed you. Yes,
Speaker 2: I'll tell you the worst interview I ever tell you.
Speaker 2: I'll rie Cardier Brossan, the French photographer earlier. He's a
Speaker 2: great photographer, you know, one of the best, truly, but
Speaker 2: he didn't want to talk about photography. He wanted to
Speaker 2: talk about art, which was his new fascination, and he
Speaker 2: didn't really want to talk at all. And he was
Speaker 2: a really old, glumpy Frenchman. And I was like, I
Speaker 2: really regretted doing that story.
Speaker 1: My last question for you, it started working in non
Speaker 1: military journalism when you were thirty. If you were thirty
Speaker 1: right now, would you become a journalist. I probably wouldn't.
Speaker 2: I think the word journalism is it almost doesn't exist anymore.
Speaker 2: I mean it does. I mean that's too harsh judgment.
Speaker 2: The New York Times and the major newspapers are still
Speaker 2: capable of doing really good journalism, but it doesn't exist
Speaker 2: on the cable news networks for sure. It doesn't really exist,
Speaker 2: with a few possible exceptions, on network television. So it's
Speaker 2: hard to say. Because I had I mean to talk
Speaker 2: about journalism, that's a whole other thing. I mean, journalism
Speaker 2: is really in trouble. Yeah, I wanted to talk about,
Speaker 2: to a certain extent, what's wrong with it and what
Speaker 2: is that? And the same thing that's wrong with everything
Speaker 2: else in this country right now, the corporate imperative. Money,
Speaker 2: not so much the corporate imperative. It's historical. During COVID,
Speaker 2: I was supposed to go out and give a speech
Speaker 2: at the law school at the University of Iowa, and
Speaker 2: it got postponed because of COVID, and I spent a
Speaker 2: lot of time while during COVID trying to figure out
Speaker 2: what I was going to say in this speech, and
Speaker 2: people were stopping me on the street and saying, you're
Speaker 2: in the news business. What's wrong with this country? Those
Speaker 2: are really screwed up. It's not working the way it
Speaker 2: used to. So I decided that I would do some
Speaker 2: reporting on it and try to figure out what the
Speaker 2: answer to the question was. I mean, I would usually
Speaker 2: when people would come up to me, I'd say, I
Speaker 2: just have some flip answer, like algorithms or you know.
Speaker 2: And then I started reading up on it, and there
Speaker 2: was this book that was written in nineteen seventy called
Speaker 2: Future Shock Alvin Toffler, Yes, which just turned out to
Speaker 2: be one of the most pressured books ever written because
Speaker 2: it describes all the things that have happened. And at
Speaker 2: the time he wrote it, all of the technology that
Speaker 2: is screwing us up was in the incubator in science
Speaker 2: slabs and MIT and places like that while they tried
Speaker 2: to figure out, you know, how can we make money off?
Speaker 2: And it's changed too fast. It's changed everything too fast,
Speaker 2: and it's fractured our society and it's changed our institutions,
Speaker 2: which is why nobody everybody feels so alienated, Toffler predicted.
Speaker 2: He said, you know, it's going to be great opportunity.
Speaker 2: You know, it's going to make a lot of people
Speaker 2: a lot of money, but it's going to have a
Speaker 2: really not great effect on people on the population, and
Speaker 2: talked about how the businesses and products were going to
Speaker 2: become disposable, and entire industries would be disappear and be
Speaker 2: replaced by something completely different. It would require people moving
Speaker 2: out of neighborhoods and out of cities to go and
Speaker 2: find work other places. It was going to be hard
Speaker 2: on people, and I think that's the problem, and that's
Speaker 2: why everything is kind of screwed up, because we're forced
Speaker 2: now to change and deal with so many things that
Speaker 2: are artists. Yes, it's very incredibly stressful, and people don't
Speaker 2: quite know what to make of it and don't like it.
Speaker 2: And I think it's one of the things that's happened
Speaker 2: to journalism. We're now bombarded with so much information from
Speaker 2: so many different sources, some of them really questionable. You've
Speaker 2: got so many conflicting narratives you don't know who to believe,
Speaker 2: and it's had this impact on our trust of institutions,
Speaker 2: and that is one of the deeply rooted problems in
Speaker 2: the country right now.
Speaker 1: My thanks to journalist and former sixty Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft.
Speaker 1: This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City.
Speaker 1: Were produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Victoria de Martin.
Speaker 1: Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is
Speaker 1: Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought
Speaker 1: to you by iHeart Radio.