>> people would line up for hours to get him like he was some rock star .

and then i went to hillary clinton's rallies and some of them, they had topull people off the streets .i'm not saying one versus the other. i don't want to go all political here but people saw that and that's what he did so well on camera is they felt like when he would be screamingget that person out of here , you would never see hillary clinton or anybody. they welcome diverse opinions on things . >> i was going to save one of my questions for later but i'm going to do it right now you're in a great position to watch the interaction of media and politics and we were young when kennedy and nixon did their first interview . we were six,seven years old . now at the start of the media and how people have fall in their relationship back and

forth between the media and the politicians so what you're saying is very interesting. which is still, the genuineness of somebody to come across and the training may be of somebody like reagan to come across. i assume you assume thefuture is going to be more of the same . >> you're exactly right. how do you teach authenticity? how do you teach honesty? you're obviously a student of socrates. how do you teachtruthfulness? how do you teach honesty ? >> that's the old and in hollywood, once you learn to think considerably you've got it made here. >> but it's getting harder and harder to do that because i think the people who come off as genuine whether it's somebody who's buying a pizza and saying ilike a pizza

versus this pizza who has an enormous number of followers . the reason some of these platforms are heading , tiktok for example is people see there's a realness to it, it's fun. when i was doing a story on social influencers, there was a woman who bought a chewbacca mask and put it on and she just was laughing. it became the hottestvideo . all it was was a woman who went in, bought a chewbacca mask and put it on her face, and had an authentic reaction to it. the thing went viral and viral and she ends up getting invited to talk shows because people were sofascinated by her . it's the search for authenticity, the search for realness that i think people are craving and want and that's what they see and that's what punches through on tv.

>> that's what punches through on tv, exactly and what i find fascinating about this is people have allbeen lying to each other for such a long train time and wait why are we interested in all the shows we put on for 40 years ? everybody's saying we all have to live life. we're all trying to figure out how other people did it because we don't have a blueprint . you just watch how other people do it so the more authentic it is the more interest you have and was somebody left trunk in spite of the fact that the genuineness -- is a throwback to something from 1000 years ago who said i know what i'm doing, everybody follow me but had confidence and didn't try to polish himself in the way that the elite that he was talking, they always been trained to polish themselves. >> i did a profile of john

gotti junior and once he had succeeded his father who was the biggest gangster in new york city, he didn't want to and he quit the mob in order to be with his family. it took me 4 years to get him to share, to do the interview and at one point he didn't interview it became one of the most memorable 60minutes of all time . it started as two point park and grew into an hour and it's heated and you can watch it on youtube if you're interested but there was just somethingreal and sincere about what he was talking about . he said he would follow his father no matter what the business was. if my father was a butcher, just get the smock. there was that. one of my favorite things is after the piece air i got a

call from one of the former new york city police commissioners who said i really like it. you like him? i got him in jail for 10 years. but he came off well. like i justshook my head . >> people talk about how rich people can get out of their crimes and so on but people who have that capacity to be genuine in front of the court and in front of the jury also can walk awaybecause people again are saying well , if not for the grace of god i would be in those shoes to or i would be in that situation though they feel for him. that's what you always say, the cover-up is much worse than the crime you commit. >> that's exactly right. >> you talked about gotti and his father became the mafia leader the cause he took out

cost a lot of front of sparks statehouse. to show in one of her connections which is i was 14 as a lawyer in new york city and one of our clients was going to buy sparks statehouse and we were negotiating with sparks statehouse on the day the guy got shot . that put him into the deal because the mafia goes there? he had no idea. but it was weird to have a deal destroyed by the fact that there was a mafia hit outside. that will do it, yes. you worked before we get to some of the celebrities, you worked on important investigations . that changed things, one of them was insider trading. and also, the avalon which is disappointing about politicians but it's kind of a story that i think is -- but still tell that story, it's great.

>> i was working with peter schweitzer who is an author who had written a few books. i think he's another hoover institute person. but there was a chapter in his book that kind of caught my eye about it's legal for congressmen and senators to trade stocks based on inside information that they gotten from congressional hearings. closed hearings in many cases so their trading stock based on you know, who may have a contract or who won't. what center he focused on shorted stocks after getting a briefing from hank paulson that the us economy was about to crater. and the way i kind of found that little bit of business out was i looked at hank colson's book and he basically wrote it in diary form so he said i briefed this senator this time that the us economy was going to crater and the senator hosted

his stock trades but we posted the brokerage accounts so you have time stamped when the stock trade was . i matched up when the meeting was with when the stock trade was and it was within 30 minutes. and the senator cleared30,000 or something in a short tranny time . 30,000 is a lot of money for 25 percent of what they make in a year or something atthat time . and they given themselvessome racist sense . so at the time there was a corrective legislation to make this illegal call the stock and it only had 13 sponsors so after we did the story, it got 185 sponsors within a week. senators were fighting over who's going to sponsorit in the senate . president obama talk about it in the state of the union and

within three or four months it ended up passing and i was in the white house, invited to the white house to watch the signing and that was enormously satisfying. however, within a few months after 60 minutes leaves town and the stock act is passed and everybody glad hands themselves quietly , they rescinded through a voice vote which basically means there's no registered votes by any congressman or senator's . so they rescinded it and then in the last go-round in the pandemic a few senators got called out on the carpet for doing insider trading on the pandemic. so it's business as usual. i found over the years the

corruption in washington is breathtaking. in many ways, much worse and much with far larger impact to people and anything like the mafia may be doing in brooklyn . these guys, i mean these guys and women, i don't want to just blame the male race. but they're extraordinary. another story we did was on, which i'm incredibly proud was on the opioid epidemic and what congress did is they passed legislation that neutered the powers of the dea at the height of the opioid epidemic that took away all their powers of enforcement abilities and after they pass this legislation, scores of them went to work for the opioid industries. as lobbyists, as vice presidents.

so one person in particular helps craft the legislation that neutered the agency that heused to work for and then he went to work for the drug industry . so one of the congressman who did this, he didn't work for the drug industry but grossman marino. his people did but he was the architect of this legislation and then two days after he was named to be done from new drugs are. and then we do the story and within two days of usdoing the story , trump rescinds the offer if you will. and it takes it away. we did that as a great collaboration with the washington post and it really affected change. those are the stories that over the years i've gotten the most satisfaction from. >> not to mention quite a few awards. >> i've done well.

>> very well and it's a good time to go back and tell the story about your father's childhood because it clearly must have affected your desire to have an effect on the community in which people live. because it's such a difficult situation. >> there's not a day or week that goes by that idon't think about what he went through in poland . he was in a small town on the border of poland and russia when the nazis came in. and they basically told his mother secured a place for him to be hidden basically while the naziswere there and basically through the war . a righteous family took him in, hit him in a haystack and protected him for three years, not even telling their kids except their oldest

daughter that they had my father hiding upstairs. he was 16 years old at the time but hecould only hide one . so my father's mother and his twin sisters went back to the town and basically what the nazis said was for the next 48 hours you could do anything to the jews but the jews were slaughtered all through the town and they rob and also to things and i often thought about that. on one hand given permission to commit a crime without consequence, would you do that or given the opportunity to save another life but it would risk putting your family at risk, would you do that? so my father thinks in that little town in poland it was the best of humanity and the

worst of humanity coming out to play. and as i wrote in my book ticking clock, at the end of the first chapter it's like i always keep one eye open looking after the neighbors if you will . it's the old reagan line of trust but verify. i think about that a lot, about what decision would i have the courage to take in somebody who was about to get murdered but it would be putting my family at risk. the story of the righteousness of those people has been told a little bit. but not cold enough. certainly spielberg did a version of that in schindler's list. but i think about that quite a bit. >> it brings us back to the big issues about politicians

and what they've done and how they do it. there was a good line that you had in the 60 minutes show with the carter's during raging reagan's administration when carter said this thing about reagan because reagan was somebody who himself personally was one of those charming people that especially after he got shot using his sense of humor, that kind of thing that worked on tv whether you like his policies or not, he was popular at different times. but he did do something all kinds of politicians do which i thought puts the needle on when she made her comment and i want you to tell that story . >> i was doing i think one of the first interviews afterhe left the white house . and mike wallace was the correspondent and mike was friendly with the reagan's. and i knew this was not going to go very well. before we were doing the

interview and i'm trying to prod him, to prod mike to ask the president about reagan. and i said you asked him about human rights under ronald reagan and mike said to me on not going to ask him about human rights under ronald reagan and i said will you ask him about human rights and i he said number i said mister president, will you tell him to ask you this and this is also a little bit about what reducing is right. and he said i wrote, don't get me involved in your city silly little questions. now you're embarrassing me and he said you want me to ask, alaskan and he sleepsthe camera and he says this is how you ask the question . human rights under ronald reagan . carter almost was like set up and he did it and ran with it

. he said the first thing this president did was send jean kirkpatrick down to snuggle down to pinochet and that sent a message that human rights is no longeroperative in the ronald reagan administration and mike says pretty good and he says to me like that ? mike called me a name. front-page new york times the day after it appears . later in the day i go up to rosalynn carter and i say he's really friendly with nancy reagan. i want you to come out with your guns blazing and he says i'll do my best and he sits down and says the line which you referred to which stayed with me which is this president makes us comfortable with our prejudices. and it kind of blew me away. mike didn't always know how to react. he basically said that's not a very nice thing to say. and it was a fantastic line, it was one of i think for most quoted lines she's ever spoken.

and in the car ride back to atlanta when we were flying back home mike was all worried about what nancy reagan and ronald reagan would say because he had good relations with them and to mike's credit all of it stayed in. it was a tough peace and we all move forward but it was a lie not always stuck with me. >> interesting how both of them were media savvy, especially how carterplayed the game between you and mike wallace . he got his point in. it reminded me of a story i heard out here of how politicians get their way in things. it was bill clinton, one of the political reporters for abc san francisco and he said that when people come to town during elections they all lined up at the hotel and there's five rooms and abc, nbc, everybody's got their ownroom so nobody knows

anything . nobody knows anybody but in order to get on the air, the politicians are always using your name. so every time you answer they say bob this, i read this. the guy said that the smartest of them all was bill clinton because he only said your name once and that was a sound like he wanted to goon . he knew that increase the chances of the soundbite he wanted to get on because your name was there. >> grunwald told him that these on error. people had such vanity if you use their name they will use the bite. so he then did an interview with 60 minutes during that time and he kept mentioning steve kraut's name and steve whatever he wanted the answer to be, when he didn't he left his name out . >> he said that the thing

that put him up above the otherpoliticians . >> but his mistake was in revealing that so as a producer you start doing it and you say that theone answer i'm not going to use . >> you told a story about how he got lots of things done because he was so proud of it and i thought that shifted the way the presidency operated because most presidents had done the same things but never told anybody . that sort of gave away his nativity about being a politician. but i thought it was very funny. he gave it away but still at the same time figured out ways to make it work better for him . so there's those investigations. there's a couple of other big ones that you've done. medicare fraud is another big one. and it just reminded me because i read something the other day .

unemployment and with all this money being spread around by the government the unemployment fraud they said was $11 billion in california alone under the new money that's going out so you can tell a little bit about the medicare fraud situation. >> it's remarkable how easy it was. what they used to do and we focused on southern florida. they set up a clinic and would order all this material through medicare. and they would then just and medicare would just ship it. there was no checks and balances on a lot of these things. so the amount of money they could make was extraordinary. what they did was got a hold of people's medicare numbers and one of the people in that story was a former federal judge. ordered 2 prosthetic arms for him, not one but two and the they said you can see my arms are fine.

hey for it and the cutout made a lot of money on it. i love doing stories where you sort of say at the end of it they can't be real. that's not real. another one like that was tax refund fraud which was sort of along the same lines . these scam artists get a hold of your refund checks andhave it sent to a mailbox . guys said i fill out 10, 20 forms and i can make $10,000, $20,000 in the course of a day or two. and without working very hard . and the irs just paid it. there's an extraordinary amount of money that justgoes out the door without checks and balances . so everybody's trying to scrimp on something that they need much more of an enforcement efforts. i think that's where i came down on it which is medicare the time before we did a

story they didn't have a strong enforcement effort to go after these people. and after we did the story i think they gave like an extra hundred million to try to stop it from going out the door . >> having done all those kinds of stories on the government what is your take on something like the single-payer system and letting government take over certain things, have you developed a philosophy about that kind of thing ? >> this is my opinion. it's, i'm not speaking for anyone else. my opinion is the more that governments involve themselves in our personal lives the worse it is. they don't make things better the systems that they set up. they make things worse. and i'd love to debate somebody on that in terms of what they've actually done that has been great. having said that, great

society programs under johnson obviously have been enormously successful. save lives and done incredible stuff. i think journalists in the future aregoing to be examining the way the vaccine rollout happened . and friends of mine who are in the medical community are telling me horror story after horror story about this. it's the story that's still playing itself out. and i don't think they do it well. i think private industry and private companies have more incentive to do it right and in a more cost-efficient way. here's the thing, when you're just getting a salary you don't get paid whether something works or not. it's not like you're incentivized if you save the government hundred million dollars . you're still getting the same paycheck but that's not the

way it works in private industry. private industry, people are incentivized to improve mechanisms and to make things , obviously i'm speaking broadly but generally, you are credited, people get bonuses or whatever read that doesn't really happen in government. so i think that's one of the big faults and problems in that regard. it was a point in time when i know under the trump administration they were talking about advertising the army for example and sending private armies to iraq or afghanistan. that has its own set of issues and problems. we don't really want to do that. >> to divide what the government does and what it doesn't between what can be monetized and not his hard to put a monetary value on education for example where it's crucial so, but we won't go into that discussion, there's too manyfun stories to do .

let's back up again. you're a young man and you come out of cornell with this one story and you're a good tennis player which helps so why don't you tell the story about playing tennis with peter moss and you play doubles within the hamptons . >> thank you for asking because i got an email from the person, moss his wife so i'm playing tennis peter maas was a writer who wrote that authority papers and cervical and talking about i just admired him so much and i learned so much from him. so he let me hang out with him in the hamptons. and the price was i had to play tennis with him on the weekends . and one day i get to the court and it's kurt vonnegut and morley safer. the way i described in the book is old man tennis the way old man tennis was

supposed to be played with lots of banter and fun. kurt vonnegut's wife sent me an email, she loved the story so much. she passed it around and she called morley's wife jane safer and read it to her basement cigarettes constantly so between games they would smoke a cigarette and played a little bit smoke another cigarette and they got tired of putting the cigarette out and then they go on to the course and both of them weresmoking cigarettes and i didn't want to hit the ball .i was afraid i was going to ruin a joke. but it was so delightful and talking and relax. the tennis was just sort of a different place than a bar. it was a place to banter and talk and it was really one of the most memorable matches i've ever played .

i just love kurt vonnegut. he went to cornell as youknow . >> anyway, that was such a beautiful image and you have so many of them . and if you read the book, there's hundreds of these kinds of things but i don't want to miss the one with marlon brando. you tried to get marlon brando on and i love how you missed today's which almost everybody would have skipped the date but to tell that story that's just wonderful. >> it's appropriate that i'm doing this from a bookstore because i finished the story on joe banana and i want to use a little bit of the godfather and normally it's a simple request through the studio and one day brando himself calls, how is joe banana okay with using this but he and i then began a long conversation over weeks

and months. icall him up and wish him happy birthday . and he said what is this was celebrating birthdays, animals don't celebrate birthdays. i'm just calling to wish you a happy birthday. and then another time he would call me up and i don't know if it's a generational thing but they don't say hello, how are you. they just talk. so one day brando calls out and he says you know people that have these great reputations, and i said marlon, nicetalking to you, i've got to go and i meeting somebody at the bar and he ignores it . charlie chaplin, great reputation and williams o'brien, great reputation . and so then he starts raving saroyan, and it's really

magical and this is a time before cellphones . you can't text. i'm running a little late. you can't do that so i have the choice, listen tobrando or meet the person at the bar and of course i picked brando . and then 20 minutes after he began the conversation he hangs up. and it just stops, he's just bored or whatever and he hangs up but i wanted him as an on camera interview so i was pursuing him and finally i got time to meet him in la with mike wallace. and he picks this up in a white rolls-royce, he's wearing a white suit. mike gets in the front and i'm sitting in the back and mike says i'm nervous and brando is saying i'm a little nervous and i said this is going so well . we drive down mulholland drive and mike is running every red light and he says you're going to let the machine what tell you what to do, be a man. we finally get to this

restaurant and sit down. marlon starts by saying mike, i've admired youracting abilities for a long time and he said what are you talking about ? >> the raised eyebrow, the look of astonishment, i'm a journalist, i'm an actor. >> i said what's going on here and mike decides to hit back so he says how did you get so fat. and brando says well i go to back skin robbins and i can't is decide what flavor so i ordered a court and every flavor and i end up eating it all at which point mike says i'm 66 years old, i don't need to make my reputation by showing america one in acyl you are, let's be friends and i'm going crazy because i wanted the interview. brando at that point the calls became very infrequent but i got one final call and he says to me you play the market and i said a little bit, i don't have much money but he says you should, let me give you a stock tip and

he says there's a copy company called apple and he says i haven't heard of it, you will. put all your money into it and i tell mike about this and mike says are you going to invest in the company and i said are you crazy, i'm not going to take a stopped it from a guy who can't decide what flavor ice cream he wants. >> so you he got the tip direct from steve jobs . >> at that time the company had gone public i guess a year or two before jobs wanted brando and i think commercials or something so he told him and i wasn't really, i'm just call me stupid, i wasn't sensitized to the wholecomputer revolution that was about to take place . i was a year late on that one . >> still hard to look back and see who's going to make it anyway but mark twain didn't invest in the

telephone, he invented in the type invested in the typesetter. but we have a lot of questions and i'm going to ask a couple first and go back to a couple of things i wanted to cover before. for the audience, if you like some of those stories about marlon brando, there's somany stories about so many famous people , especially the media people who you all know that did 60 minutes stores. before we get to these questions i do want to ask you you do seem to be a little nostalgic for the old-fashioned office kind of chaos. was going on and i'll tell you a few things. the inhibiting rules that have come into that whole play. after cut down on creativity or her things for i know you think it's partially a good thing but is it partially a bad thing to for the offices, that the creativityis inhibited ?

>> the most important thing inside an office framework is to feel safe and respected whether you're a man or a woman, harassment sometimes goes both ways as you know so ithink that's most important .the crazy chaos that had existed back then was something that should have been corrected back then. they should have addressed it back then. the creativeness really had to do when i wrote about some of this in my book, and had to do with the fact that these people were larger-than-life characters. mike wallace, what he tried to do was try to get people angry. he tried to get a reaction out of people. and of course he went too far in a lot of cases . but there was this rivalry that existed.

morley safer and mike wallace's office where this far apart yet mike would steal a story from morley and they wouldn't talk for a year. it's not just men who were fighting. i went to abc with diane sawyer and barbara walters. they were two extraordinary talents, the two top best people in the business but they had an enormous rivalry. when we did primetime live at the beginning, in our debut show diane had booked a major figure, a major character and barbara wouldliterally hours before the broadcast tried to steal the interview . and so they had these rivalries and this energy and stuff. so i think that's what i was really referring to. it's the competition that existed. you know, with the chaos and the fighting that existed but

the fighting in some ways and again i'm not excusing their reprehensible behavior which a lot of it was but that fighting was created fighting. they were sparking each other to make the best piece. and they didn't treat each other so nice during those period in time. >> it's interesting that part of being older and it's true of every generation but the people often say we wouldn't do that now, but the humor in the 2005, state like in the office or something like that was popular, we would never do something like that now but back then and you think back then nobody knew about this so you have to go back to the 70s and of course it was a very big issue with feminists. revolt and everybody knew that it was a bad bad boy behavior was not acceptable in the office and so on and

so forth. it's been known for a long time. i find it very humorous when people back 10 or 15 years and say we can excuse their behavior then is nobody knew anything about this than. >> they knew, they just turned their backs on some of that. they didn't address it. and when you're talking about the, some of it was when i talk about sometimes is there wereno grown-ups in the room . if diane, if barbara was stealing a story and i was involved in one situation where barbara was stealing something from diane and we went to art which was the president of abc and his response was she outsmarted you. it wasn'toutsmarting, it was the very . but the rules have changed. people really understand and i think it's made for a much

better work environment for men and for women, women and for men. it's a two-way street. you need to feel safe in the work environment and i think that's a very important thing . >> let's go to a question and i know you're in a perfect position, he's in a perfect position to make that comment. so we have several questions come in, one came from mark shaw, an author and he said you mentioned in your book quotes from the gangster told another regarding thejfk assassination . and do you want to tell that story? in one place you say it's maybe just mafia talk . >> there were two things joe said. we finished the interview with mike wallace and he's on his way to the airport and joe and i are having a cognac on the backporch and i said to joe i first started by saying joe , who killed kennedy?

he said when the kennedy assassination, what happened he called down to santos traffic county who was the head of the mafia in miami and said what's going on and he said listen, this is what joe says said to him miami and new orleans is run by carlos marcello who will take the heat, new york was is all. so joe then senses consiglio area down there and found out they tried to kill kennedy in miami with cuban exiles but failed and then they basically took care of the deed in dallas. now, then the next thing joe told me was joe growing up in new york, i was fascinated by meyer lansky, the jewish gangster and i said was he good investing money? investing money, hehad the picture . he had a picture and this is what jim says of jay and

huber, fbi director and his number two, clyde tolson having sexwith each other . we set that picture to blackmail them to say there was no such thing as the mafia and for a long time as you know huber that there was no such thing. it was even after appalachia in 57 that he kept an eye on, he kept that line. so when anna said that's because he had the picture. so the problem as you pointed out with this sort of thing is you can't just run to the press and say kennedy assassination saul, here it goes. because a lot of these guys like to talk. they like totell stories . another gangster i know said that it was johnny roselli who was shooting from a sewer and shop kennedy. now, when i mentioned this to

gotti junior he said johnny had bad eyesight, he could never make the shot. this is the kind of banter you get when you're dealing with some of these guys. it's delicious. and it's great but it's not something i would call and hold acongressional committee hearing on . >> we don't take it as the only reason why j edgarcooper and robert kennedy didn't get along when he was attorney general . >> exactly where he didn't want the mafia attached that's probably not the only basis i'm sure. >> i cover a lot of this in my book ticking clock so i just urge everybody totake a look . short versions of some of the stories. >> this is from susan pfeiffer, having watched 60 minutes from the beginning i remember the exposc on a auto dealer who rolled back domino and the tobacco story. what's your favorite exposc and profile?

>> my favorite profile, oh boy. you're going to besurprised by what i'm about to say . favorite story that i did, what i had the most fun was truffle hunting in perugia italy. where i was able to go out and with the dogs and hunt for truffles. and of course me being who i am i made it into kind of an investigative story where i found out that the chinese were flooding the truffle market with phony truffles. and you know, i handful of truffles could cause $1000, why truffles are much more expensive. the chinese figured out, they had a cheaper version, i knockoff version that they were selling for $20 a pound so they then started flooding the market and cheating the

customers if you will out of it. it was just a delightful fun story in the hills of italy with dogs hunting for truffles and then having an italian chef singing o solo mio. he's grading truffles on it, leslie stahl and i did that story and both of us regarded as one of our all-time favorites. >> you wrote that story nicely in the book. >> i had a picture from that shoot. >> just an aside, you say the most expensive show ever done was never put on, it was about that tibetanmonks . >> that was such a funny side story. >> i'm not sure what language i can use on this on the zoo, i'll clean it up a little bit so as not to offend anybody but and bradley it a story with his producer bill mcclure . and they went to tibet and

the producer was a former cameraman and he kept shooting sunrise and sunset and became one of the most expensive stories that 60 minutes ever did . but he was shooting the story and they bring it back, they edited together they show it to don ewing, creative director at 60 minutes and don says months walk to the left, the monks walked to the left again,what kind of stories that . he was saying it never made air because when it was extraordinarily expensive but it was kind of, it gave you a sense of what the laissez-faire kind of attitude was 60 the time. we would do stories about the orient express for this extraordinary story where he traveled on the last train ride . and harry reasoner did the most expensive deal you could buy on planet earth. and at the time when we're

going now through pandemics, the divisiveness of the last election, i kind of miss him of those stories where you just could sit back and take a glass and be entertained at the genius of the writing. harry did a story about the end of casablanca for example . the movie set of casablanca and they were selling it off to spare parts and he said everybody remembers who they saw the movie with and here's looking at you kid just brilliant writing . and just as a fan of the show as much as a participant i really miss it. >> we have one more question from kalina gregory. you know you're going to have a bad day when you wake up and see dan rather walking up your driveway. >> you know you're having a

bad day when you wake up and see mike wallace walking up your driveway. today i don't think you would you would because you see him doing an interview with an aging rock star and i love him on access but that's sort of the way people regarded . >> you tell a story about dan rather after he had his debacle with the story about george w. bush. so he's not working anymore and he's in the office and he's got, he's walking by and he asks one of the secretaries what's the soup of the day. >> the had enough self-awareness to realize here i was, the great anchor of cbs evening news and now i'm asking what the soup of the day was and one of the

things in my book i point out is the end of the day is for mike wallace. which a lot of people have talked to me about. and it's amazing that with this extraordinary career that my cat at the end of the day he didn't have a memory of having worked onthe show . >> you tell such personal and moving details about themboth . the stuff that's irritating and the stuff that made it worthwhile for you to work with them. the difficult stuff, his relationship with his son chris wallace was unbelievable and we won't talk about that but you also as a big overarching theme that you had in the book for a lot of the people is do you know when to quit, when you retire and this same is something people discuss when they see tom brady or top

sports stars who have to quit much earlier if they're going to go out but you should talk about that because i think that's an interesting thing for everybody to decide whatever their situation is because the situation isn't just financial. it's something much more than that so why don't you talk about that. >> these people had more money than they will ever spend in their lifetimes and what they inevitably did was stayed on stage too long and morally safer in his last conversations would tell his people spend more time with your family. leave the scene . morley would hand up retiring , dying within a week or a month of the time he retired. rudy was sort of the same way. and bradley died of cancer where in the last stories he did he could barely voice over the stories he was doing

. and you realize thatpeople stay on the stage a little bit too long . when i was, i know we're running out of time i just want to say when i started, i was covering the new age movement and one of the people i had great admiration for was somebody named p or lis con who was head of the sufis and he said change your career every seven years. that way you become the ruler of your career and your career doesn't become the ruler of you and needless to say idisregarded that spiritual directive . but i think you still have a chance and if you can kind of, if you want to have your full career and you want to leave just leave. in my case i left if you will when i was i felt i was at the top of my game. i had won a peabody, and any and other things for the opiate series and it was a perfect time to move on and

do different things and try different things out. it's something that i didn't see a lot of thepeople i worked with do . >> it was clear that you watched and you learned. and i was actually going to go back to your new age journal because i thought that was a very interesting, that's the first thing you did after cornell. what was it that you had done that made you go to work as a writer forced for the new age journal for something. obviously people from the late 60s and early 70s think everybody did that, not everybody but lots of people did that. >> i was very, i had been in and off from four tranny of time, said. . i got to know yogi by john who was running the movement at the time. and you know, that was the direction that i was pursuing

at thatpoint in time . and it was part of the journey of self-discovery. that got me into that and i did that for a short time. >> they must have been happy with the higher ability of writing that they got from you from those journalists, the topics are interesting but they don't really get the top writers that often although at the time, there was really, that was a big push at the time in the early 70s for alternative attitudes towards what's going on in life. maybe we finish up with one last thing. you did a larry flynt interview and he gave you the three things that everybody wants to hear about. all the time. jfk, ufos and drugs. and i thought that was such a weird conclusion but i've run

into other people who are in the magazine industry also just have a very, the way that life works is very simple. you just take people's normal desires, daily desires and dress them up every month in a slightly different dress and he hitting the same things over and over again. >> the context of it was i was just again bouncing around struggling trying to develop some freelance work and flynt during a short period in time was going legit and he created a magazine called ohio magazine where he was hiring legitimate newspaper people and hewanted me to be the washington bureau chief . i was out of work and he's paying me more than i ever thought i make, i think it was $20,000 but he said i've got a story for you to investigate and what's that? they're making human beings in massachusetts without

belly buttons and without souls and i said who and he says the cia and isaid i'll get right on it . it was strange. i write about a lot of that in the book. this was so much fun, thank you for doing this. >> i want to finish with something more substantive, that is the innocence project . you did something on that.i have an associate that that's what he did is pro bono work for it this really saves people's lives. you did a 60 minutes thing on it. >> i've known barry a long time and he really has done such extraordinary noble work . he's both a friend and i'm a huge fan of his and over the decades when i was at abc i did one of the first dna stories with barry. and then we've done other stories. there's nothing more noble you can do as a journalist

and to get somebody who's wrongfully convicted out of jail . and i think that's certainly the work we've done over the years. we did it, barry and i did it and on one story i worked with his partner peterneufeld . on innocence in chicago where these kids were wrongfully convicted in chicago and then i did something on 30 years in death row where somebody was railroaded by a prosecutor who went on camera to talk about how he railroaded. to this day it's an incredible, it's bill whitakers and my favorite story that he ever did. and i just, you've got to read it. i write about a lot of it in there. >> it's very moving and unfortunately it's anunending job . next generation, take it over .

in spite of the fact that it's not very many people who do those kind of things, there's always some pressure at the beginning that if you're a failure, and my going to close a case, it makes people want to closing case and notplay the rules . often times it's a powerless person and it really is a shame that we keep doing that but they keep getting better at it and everybody should keep in mind who likes to work on that kind of thing because that's one of the things that can make things a little better. bringing in all the information has been very useful . thank you so much ira for joining us. >> thank you for having me. >> it's another event at the commonwealth club. thank you for joining us.

>> you're watching tv on c-span2, every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. book tv on c-span2, created by america's cable television company brought to you by these television companies whoprovide book tv to viewers as a public service . >> here's a look at books being published this week. in the whiteness of wealth and her university law professor dorothy brown or argues tax loss benefits white people and martorano claims man-made climate change is not realand argues the green new deal is an excuse to implement socialist policies and in mind wide shots , gary saul morrison and morton schapiro offer their suggestions on how to address america's political divide area neuroscientist

lisa genova explains how memory works and why we forget things in remember. jennifer armstrong profiles for women who were pioneers in the television industry in when women invented television and in traveling black, university of pennsylvania american history professor mia they looked at the history of race and travel in america. find these titles this coming week wherever books are sold and watch for many of the authors in the near future on book tv on c-span2.recently investigative journalist cheryl atkinson offered her thoughts on censorship and journalism . here's a portion of the program. >> used to be we heard from all different viewpoints but now the narrative has caught us and this has been quite successful propaganda that we in the news are to decide who's right and who's wrong even when we can't know the truth of the matter or even

when it's a matter of opinion or debate and we are to say what we report to the public and what we let them see i'm making sure it's controversial or those poor off that narrative or discredit the people who are reporting like that for the scientific studies that are often narrative and that we push instead a one-sided version of somebody's truth and usually if you dig behind that it's not a fair-minded, this is what we think is right because we've investigated. it's more like this is what we're pushing out even though we can't know if it's true or not. >> to watch the rest of this program visit our website to use the search box near the top of the page to look for cheryl atkinson or thetitle of her book planted . >> here are programs to look out for this weekend on tv. tonight on our weekly author interview program, georgetown university law professor rosa brooks details her

experiences in policing after becoming an armed reserve police officer in washington dc and also this evening harvard law professor cass something offers his thoughts on how to limit information in the public forum while protecting free speech and andy no talks about his reporting on antifa. find full information at c-span.org or consult your program guide. >> welcome to our virtual presentation of guilty admissions: who gets in and why we are here with author nick laporte and jeffrey selingo. this includes an audience q and a and if you'd like to submit a question use the ask a question feature at the bottom of your screen. you can vote for any questions you would like for our speakers to answer and they will make their way to the top of the list. please consider supp