The Night Stalker

Ted Koppel stormed out of ABC's Washington bureau, furious at his executive producer for approving so frivolous a program. Nightline, after all, was supposed to be devoted to high-minded matters, congressional debates and foreign policy and the like, and here a show on rising unemployment had been scrapped for one on the death of a mere comedian, John Belushi.

When Koppel returned a couple of hours later, he was told that none of Belushi's friends could be persuaded to appear that night. The best that the bookers could do was land an aging comedian who had once done a gig on Saturday Night Live and chatted with the late star. Soon Koppel received an urgent call from the guest in Los Angeles.

"Ted?"

"Yes."

"Milton Berle. What the fuck am I doing on your show?"

Nightline has always had to ply its journalistic trade in an entertainment culture, first pitted against the undisputed king of late night, Johnny Carson, and more recently against Letterman and Leno. More than a decade after the Belushi debacle, Nightline would be swept away by O.J. Simpson mania, devoting fifty-five programs to the seemingly endless saga, blowing off Bob Packwood's resignation and the Mexican peso crisis for a chance to rehash the day's testimony, just like Larry King and Geraldo Rivera and every other talk show in the land.

Despite these occasional bows to popular culture, Nightline is an unalloyed success, the closest thing to a gold standard in television news. Born in the throes of the hostage crisis in Iran, the ABC News program has proven what few believed at the time, that it is possible to attract a mass nighttime audience for serious news without a lot of bells and whistles. Koppel has proven himself the best live interviewer in the business, and Nightline has become the forum of choice for diplomats engaged in global negotiation and embattled public figures trying to save their necks. In an era marked by shout shows in which supposedly serious journalists trade insults, harangue guests, and boldly predict the future, it is worth examining how Koppel & Company have managed to pull this off.

This engaging book about sixteen years of Nightline is by Koppel and Kyle Gibson, a former producer for the program, but the double byline is essentially a marketing device. Koppel is candid enough to admit that while he frequently consulted with his collaborator, "in the final analysis Kyle wrote it." This brings a certain degree of detachment to the inevitable self-congratulations involved in such an effort, and as the Berle anecdote suggests, the warts are not hidden. But it also deprives the book of a consistent voice, depicting Koppel in the third person in the manner of, say, Bob Dole talking about Bob Dole.

The result is less a narrative than a highlight reel, a series of well-crafted anecdotes and stories, sometimes padded a bit too thickly with chunks of transcripts that probably made for better viewing than reading. Still, there are glimpses of the team effort that enables Nightline to produce high-quality taped reports and interviews night after night. What emerges is a sense of how Nightline has repeatedly made electronic history, from the drama in Tehran (an excuse for ABC News president Roone Arledge to hijack a half-hour time slot) to tense moments in South Africa, Israel, the Soviet Union, and China, to high-stakes faceoffs with Geraldine Ferraro, Michael Dukakis, and Bill Clinton.

Not all the programs were quite so memorable. A segment on the "style" of George Bush's presidency, featuring Maureen Dowd of The New York Times and Alessandra Stanley, then of Time magazine, turned "stupefyingly dull" (in the authors' words) when Koppel stuffily insisted on exploring such matters as U.S. troop levels in Europe. "We've sort of run out of things to say," Koppel declared as the show dragged on. "We'll catch fire when we come back in a moment," the host promised. Finally he thanked his guests, saying: "We must do this again one day . . . . Not too soon." (Koppel later apologized to the women for his rude behavior.)

And then there was the night when a man who reviewed school textbooks for offensive material announced he had found one volume that "encourages women to masturbate using a peeled cucumber." What America made of this revelation is impossible to say, except for a group of Smith College women who wrote to thank Koppel for the information.

The most compelling chapters -- those in which Koppel's voice is most clearly heard -- deal with the challenges and pitfalls of the live interview, a venue in which the editing, such as it is, has to be done in front of the audience.

Here is Ted with tobacco industry lawyer John Strauch: "I must congratulate you, you evade answers about as elegantly as anyone I've ever had on the program." With Gary Hart: "Senator, forgive me. There's a certain hypocrisy inherent in what you're saying here." With Evan Mecham, then the governor of Arizona: "No, no, Governor. I tell you what . . . let's play by my rules for a moment, let's play go back to the question that I asked you initially and which, it seems to me, you evaded the first two or three times that I asked you." To Al Campanis, the baseball executive who had to resign for suggesting that blacks have inferior management skills: "That really sounds like garbage, if you'll forgive me for saying so." Still, even Koppel concedes that with a skilled politician or diplomat, "I don't care how good an interviewer you are, there's a limit to what you can achieve in eleven minutes."

Sometimes Koppel goes over the line, as he did in turning a 1984 interview with Ferraro, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, into a high-handed oral exam on the finer points of military strategy. "Yeah, but we're talking facts here, Ms. Ferraro," Koppel snapped at one point. Rick Kaplan, then the executive producer, told Koppel in his earpiece: "Tomorrow you're going to hate this. You're going to be embarrassed by what you're doing now." Koppel kept charging ahead. "This was almost as if I was running against him," Ferraro said later. (Perhaps the former congresswoman learned something from the experience, since she has now signed on as the co-host of Crossfire, the latest politician to seek refuge in the talk-show world.)

What is most fascinating about Nightline is its role as a national show trial for public figures in trouble, from Jim Bakker to Kurt Waldheim. When Gary Hart, after the Donna Rice episode, wanted to get back into the presidential race, he turned to Koppel (and negotiated the first face-to-face interview on a program that preferred the mystique of keeping the guests at remote locations, even if it was just down the hall in Washington). When Dukakis was trailing badly in the '88 campaign, he subjected himself to the Nightline ordeal (and looked so utterly beaten that when Koppel said "I still don't think you get it," the campaign staff was thoroughly demoralized). When candidate Clinton was being pummeled over the release of his thank-you-for-saving-me-from-the-draft letter, he tried to explain himself on Nightline. When Lani Guinier, in a move that angered administration officials, was trying to salvage her nomination as assistant attorney general for civil rights, she pleaded her case with Koppel. (The president dumped her the next day anyway.)

In an earlier era, such people might have courted party leaders or wealthy backers or newspaper columnists; now they take their case to the television audience, with Koppel as interrogator-in-chief. The verdict is rendered by the rest of the media, which pay close attention to Nightline even as it reduces their role to that of theater critics. Still, the inherent suspense of an electronic confrontation provides "a moment of emotional intimacy," in Guinier's words, that no newspaper interview can match.

The history of Nightline is intertwined with the explosive growth of technology, the satellite feeds that have made global debates commonplace and enabled Koppel to link up adversaries in real time. Both Winnie Mandela, while her husband remained in prison, and Corazon Aquino, the day her husband was murdered, were able to reach an international audience through Nightline, even though they lacked access to the media in their own countries. No Israeli and Palestinian officials had ever debated each other in public until they did so on a stage with Koppel, television's secretary of state, separated only by a ridiculous-looking three-foot wall that the host had to keep vaulting. This sort of thing has become the program's signature. The very first edition of Nightline, after all, forced Iranian official Ali Agah to confront Dorothea Morefield, wife of one of the American hostages. (The program did this by ambushing Agah in a maneuver that would be familiar to fans of Jenny Jones and other daytime talkers. "A little bit shameless," Koppel admits.) There is plenty of juicy behind-the-scenes color here -- Boris Yeltsin once canceled a scheduled Nightline interview by refusing to leave a hotel bar -- although the narrative takes on a war-story quality after one too many retellings.

One Nightline weakness is a tendency to reach for the usual white-guy suspects in Washington and New York. The reason that Nightline prefers these professional talkers -- many of whom can be seen gabbing away on other talk shows -- is explained by Dan Morris, head of the booking unit: "Every booker has an innate fear of real people. You just never know. Will the guest freeze up? Will this be a deer-in-the-headlights situation?" The problem, of course, is that the overused Rolodex constricts the range of political views and lends a scripted quality to the debates.

Indeed, what was rare when the program began in 1980 -- politicians, academics, and journalists chewing the rhetorical fat on evening television -- now occurs in quadraphonic sound, on CNN and CNBC and countless other cable channels. Nightline has kept itself fresh by expanding its boundaries -- more investigative reports, day-in-the-life stories, and town meetings -- but it still faces the challenge of being heard above the din.

The tiresome approach of too many talk shows is to book two guests -- Johnnie Cochran and Marcia Clark, say, or their political equivalent, James Carville and Mary Matalin -- and let them go at it. But most issues are far more complicated than this left/right, rock 'em/sock 'em dichotomy would suggest, which is why so much television talk is superficial chatter about who's up and who's down. Nightline often breaks the mold, bringing on guests who offer differing perspectives rather than high-decibel partisanship. If Koppel can keep blazing this trail and avoid the likes of Milton Berle, he will prove that news can be entertaining without sending in the clowns.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe