by Stanley Cloud
Cloud is a former Washington bureau chief for Time and is co-author of The Murrow Boys.

The best book ever written by a broadcast journalist may be the late Eric Sevareid's 1946 autobiography, Not So Wild a Dream. With lyric language and remarkable insight, Sevareid, an impertinent thirty-four at the time, not only recounted how he became a CBS superstar but also explored what it meant to be an American between the wars and how World War II changed that meaning forever. Comes now Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes with the story of her own CBS career. Stahl is no Sevareid.

Reporting Live is an anecdote-laden Horatio Alger story, with some frustration, feminism, and family difficulties on the side. Stahl relates how she and two other "affirmative action babies," Connie Chung and Bernard Shaw, were hired in 1972 to work in CBS's Washington bureau. In those days, CBS's corps of Washington correspondents included the likes of Dan Rather, Roger Mudd, Marvin Kalb, and Dan Schorr, each with his own, glassed-in office. Against such august and aggressive competitors, Stahl and the other "babies" could barely find a newsroom desk to sit at, let alone a story to report.

In mid-1972, when most of her colleagues were out covering the Nixon-McGovern campaign, Stahl was assigned to report on a "third-rate burglary" at the Watergate complex. Her first "scoop" came when she and her cameraman beat the competition by getting TV pictures of the burglars on the air. At a Watergate hearing in federal court, Stahl met The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and "made sure he knew I wanted to be friends." A brief romance ensued -- to the chagrin of Woodward's partner, Carl Bernstein, who accused Stahl of being, well, a source-digger. "Was I wrong to be insulted?" she asks.

Stahl was talented, ambitious, intense, young, pretty, and blond. By her own account, these qualities helped her climb the slippery and very sexist network slope. Perhaps her most trying encounter with a male colleague occurred in 1976. Dan Schorr, then CBS's top investigative reporter, had obtained a House committee report on CIA "dirty tricks" and had broadcast several stories about it on the Evening News. Insisting that there was much more to report, Schorr recommended a prime-time special. When the idea was rejected, details from the report magically appeared in The Village Voice under the by-line of Stahl's new journalist boyfriend, Aaron Latham. At first, Stahl writes, Shorr accused her of stealing the report from his desk and giving it to Latham. When it developed that Schorr himself was the source, he resigned from CBS and apologized (more or less) to Stahl.

From that point on, Stahl's career mostly flourished. She was CBS's White House correspondent in the Carter, Reagan, and Bush administrations. For eight years, she was host of Face the Nation. With the late Charles Kuralt, she was co-anchor of CBS's short-lived America Tonight opposite ABC's Nightline. Now in her late fifties, she is a member of the 60 Minutes repertory company, a job she eagerly sought and eagerly accepted as a kind of safe haven from the daily network grind. After marrying Latham, Stahl -- who must have been the first network correspondent to do a full-length standup while hugely pregnant -- gave birth to their daughter, Taylor. But Taylor's primary caregiver was Dad, who worked out of their home while Mom was out there climbing the slippery slope.

Stahl emerges from Reporting Live as a tough, caring pro with a winning and self-deprecating sense of humor. How can you not like someone who is unable to stop correcting and contradicting Dan Rather on the air, even when she's been told repeatedly that the big guy resents it? How can you not root for someone so insecure that she admits calling her mother for approval during commercial breaks of a live election special? How can you not be charmed by someone who repeatedly pokes fun at her famous obsession with her own hairdo? But these things also point up the book's weakness. What about these super-sensitive anchormen? What about Stahl's hair (not to mention, say, Ted Koppel's)? What do these things tell us about TV news and its priorities? Stahl doesn't ask. Stahl doesn't tell.

Clearly, she is ill at ease with the decline she sees at CBS and elsewhere, but she never comes to grips with it. Her criticisms of CBS executives and colleagues are aimed mostly at people no longer with the network (notably Laurence Tisch and Van Gordon Sauter) and she never even seems to wonder if perhaps the celebrityhood, egos, careerism, and inflated salaries of on-air journalists such as herself might have contributed to the decline. The road to journalism hell is, after all, paved with a thousand career-driven compromises.

The problem may lie in Stahl's almost Reaganesque tendency to see the bright side. Media "stakeouts" are demeaning, but they do produce scoops. Ten-second sound bites are terrible, but their shortness means there can be more of them. Recounting how CBS managed to get pictures of a reclusive president and Nancy Reagan at their Santa Barbara ranch by linking an astronomer's reflector telescope to a motor-driven lens, she describes the results -- president on horseback, first lady in a robe -- as "magical."

Granted that Stahl, as a CBS employee, probably has to tread a little carefully, but one imagines that she could have got away with more trenchant criticism than this. The space she might have devoted to analyzing the problems of network news goes instead to portraits of presidents she has covered. She describes a sanctimonious yet vindictive Carter, a dithering yet charming Reagan, a possibly dyslexic yet energetic Bush. For the most part, this reads like what it is: a "what-I-saw-from-the-pressroom" laundry list. Stahl does find that Reagan was more involved in the writing of his own speeches than most of us realized, but that nugget hardly justifies page after page of presidential rehash.

Another problem with Reporting Live is the lack of personal background. The opening sentence -- "I was born on my thirtieth birthday" -- seems to be Stahl's attempt to get around the problem, but it doesn't work. By page two, Stahl is with CBS and moving up. Her parents, especially her mother, appear mainly as sounding boards for the adult Lesley. There is little or nothing about her childhood, her education, her experiences before she turned thirty, her inspirations, her wellsprings of belief. About the closest she comes to any of this is a fleeting reference to two books she read in high school -- Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged -- and a description of herself as a Rand-like "libertarian nonconformist." There are some moving passages about Latham's battle with clinical depression and about the pressures on him as a work-at-home husband and father and on Stahl as an office-bound wife and mother. But these only make us want to know more.

Stahl's rise as a CBS journalist roughly coincided with CBS's decline from the Tiffany's to the K-Mart of broadcasting. That was mostly a coincidence, of course. Working journalists can hardly be blamed for the effects of broadcast deregulation, corporate takeovers, loathsome executives, the advent of cable and the Internet, the nation's seemingly insatiable hunger for entertainment. Stahl was just a passenger on the Titanic -- albeit in First Class, dressed to the nines, sipping champagne, her hair perfectly coifed, and immovably lacquered.

Still, she could have told us much more than she has about what it was like to survive a shipwreck.

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