Please forgive a walk down memory lane, but recent news reports involving, separately, cats and the TV show “60 Minutes” bring this tale to mind.
The current are many: rescued from a cat-meat ring in Vietnam; showing cats Dz’t relieve their owners’ stress; a cat of a production of “Romeo and Juliet,” and .
As for “60 Minutes,” when the long-running news magazine fired its longtime reporter Scott Pelley, (how dare they fire Pelley!) was met with based on the show’s perceived liberal bias.
Well, when I was working as press secretary for U.S. Rep. Bob Livingston (R-Metairie) in 1993, we had our own run-in with that CBS institution’s star of stars, Mike Wallace. To wit:
Livingston, a noted military supporter, was on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee. Constituents began complaining that researchers in his district were using a Pentagon grant for experiments involving shooting cats in the head — yes, you read that correctly — with BB pellets, supposedly to research treatments for battlefield brain injuries.
Livingston was all for helping soldiers survive, but medical specialists told him the actual knowledge gained by the cat experiments involved findings already understood for a full century, since the 1890s. Livingston’s response was sensible: Insert language in the next Appropriations bill to suspend for a year (but not yet kill entirely) the cat trials until they could be peer-reviewed by other scientists, to determine if the medical applications (if any) from the BB tests could justify shooting cats in the head.
Why spend taxpayer money to kill cats if there were no real benefits to be gained for army medics?
For reasons still unknown, Wallace and his crew started poking around, with the obviously predetermined angle of showing that a supposedly pro-military congressman actually didn’t care about troops. In sum, quite bizarrely, Wallace was entirely on the side of the cat shooters.
We sent Wallace and his researchers copious information explaining our concerns. We noted that peer reviews were standard practice for responsible science and wise use of tax money. Yet nothing could dissuade 60 Minutes from its prejudged angle.
Wallace’s producers demanded an on-camera interview with Livingston. Aware of multiple incidents of 60 Minutes splicing interview videotape to make their targets look bad, I advised caution. Livingston decided he would gladly do the interview, but only if it were either live or entirely unedited.
Wallace called me, dropping veiled threats that my own career would be hurt if I didn’t do what he wanted. Wallace called Livingston and said they wouldn’t do unedited interviews “even for Henry Kissinger,” nor for a president or pope. Livingston repeated that he would be happy to talk, but only unedited.
Aha: Wallace didn’t know we were taping the phone call (which was entirely legal in Washington D.C.). If 60 Minutes could do ambush videotapes for some of their stories, certainly we were justified in taping Wallace for our own protection.
Well, Wallace went ahead and aired his report blasting Livingston unmercifully. Then he said, in closing, that he had offered a chance for Livingston to go on camera, but Livingston had refused. No mention that Livingston had offered terms and was willing to go on camera; instead, just the insinuation that Livingston was too cowardly to talk.
We called Wallace the next morning. We told him he had lied about Livingston’s willingness to talk on the record.
Said Wallace (naturally, we recorded this call, too): “I apologize to you, I really do. I’m ashamed of myself because you told it to me. … It’s unfair. Because you were perfectly willing to go on …. That was just dishonest of me, and that was stupid of me.”
Yet when 60 Minutes re-ran the piece a few months later, it amazingly repeated the claim that Livingston wouldn’t talk.
That’s when we called the president of CBS News. We played him both tapes, including the one where Wallace admitted he had been “dishonest.” The news chief was aghast.
To make a longer story short, Wallace eventually made a full, live, abject apology — the first time, according to him, he had ever apologized to an elected official on air.
Before he did, though, he called Livingston once more, in almost groveling fashion. In that call, he said: “You can get this on your tape recorder — I wish you told me you had a tape recorder going; that would have been the gentlemanly thing to do….”
Livingston interrupted: “It would have been, but then I didn’t think that I was necessarily dealing with a gentleman.”
Wallace: “Well, in any case …”
Livingston: “And frankly, you’ve proven me right.”
Now that, rhetorically speaking, was a real head shot.