Reporting Live

...And when she bothers to tell readers what she said to viewers about some milestone, it is laughably brief: All those chartered planes, loyal hairstylists, cold pizzas and predawn stakeouts 44 Miss Stahl unfailingly sees beyond the substance of public figures to their superficial aspects...

...If I was out of the booth, someone would find me and I'd race back...

...But therein lies the answer...

...After a few sorrowful syllables, her thoughts are swiftly refocused...

...In the latter half of the book her husband, who works at home and raises their daughter, sinks inexorably into depression, and Miss Stahl relates some stories about his desperate behavior and obvious tumble with a startling detachment...

...Similarly, on the subject of her daughter, her sense of proportion is more comically distorted...

...My favorite example of cozy name-dropping occurs at a cocktail party hosted by Mr...

...Latham some professional help...

...Now I didn't flirt at all...

...In 1985 Miss Stahl's onetime producer, 38-year-old Joan Barone, dies of cancer...

...She takes no action on behalf of her spouse, but during commercial breaks on "Face the Nation," or while chasing Marlin Fitzwater with a microphone, she thinks of him at their house and feels a pang...

...When you think of revolutionaries who have overthrown entrenched regimes," she writes, "you think of the dash of Castro in his sexy fatigues, you think of the presence of Zapata, you think of the fire and spiritual air of Mao Tse-tung...

...but she doesn't do much that won't benefit Lesley Stahl...

...I'd even lost all interest in being seductive...

...Yet this curious estrangement from ordinary feelings should come as no surprise...

...Indeed, like many TV journalists, Miss Stahl unfailingly sees beyond the substance of public figures to their superficial aspects...

...But I still kept falling asleep...

...My urge to flirt—once so central, an identity mark, the way I knew I was alive—was gone...

...What Miss Stahl offers is little more than minutiae, small anecdotes and vignettes, all wrapped in well-worn phrases and specimens of slang, beginning with the title...

...Aaron and I had a wonderful time...

...Here is modern feminism, I regret to say, at its most obtuse: Even if it means being late for a briefing, or allowing Sam Donaldson to get a lead on a story, Lesley Stahl is willing to talk to her daughter on the telephone...

...Between those two events, readers will be interested to learn that Richard Nixon was contentious and secretive, that Jimmy Carter paid too close attention to minor details, and that Ronald Reagan "made us feel good about ourselves, even as his hot-button rhetoric seemed to invite religious hatred...and racial intolerance...

...N ow, I am not a reporter, and it is altogether too easy to make fun of people, like Lesley Stahl, who cannot comprehend what they see, or knock themselves silly covering the trivial and portentous with equal energy...

...This cannot be parodied...

...Events march past, names come and go, and the years roll slowly by...

...She paints a picture of TV news as a frantic parade of chartered planes, blind executives, shouted questions, angry phone calls, and contract holdouts...

...Readers will be heartened to know that "most of the reporters got a big kick out of Sam [Donaldson...

...My grieving for Joan broke through the wall of self-control I had been plastering together," she reflects...

...When the deadline for this review unexpectedly rolled around, I was about to leave on a brief trip...

...Yet here was an almost frail, bashful man...

...Beyond cursory observations, she has little or nothing to say or add to conventional wisdom...

...Now, I admit to an unhealthy appetite for this sort of celebrity self-infatuation, and Lesley Stahl is no slouch in that department...

...but found in Lesley Stahl's memoir of her 20 years as a Washington correspondent for CBS News the ideal antidote...

...The American Spectator • March 1999 73...

...Accordingly, I packed the book in my car, drove to Philadelphia, checked into a hotel, ate a light dinner, drank a cup of coffee, retired to my room, pulled off my shoes, lay down on the bed, picked up Reporting Live—and for the next few hours fought a losing struggle against sleep...

...I'd hang up on sources, put officials on hold, talk to her on deadline...

...I should add that I did manage to finish the book, but it was not so easily done...

...Finally, and in characteristic fashion, a fellow celebrity comes to the rescue...

...Of course, it is no great revelation to learn that broadcasting skims the surface of events, is reliant on imagery and sensation, or that TV producers and reporters (in the 72 March 1999 • The American Spectator nation's capital, at least) combine the standards of Hollywood with the fetishes of politics...

...I have loved Walter ever since...

...To know him was (and is) to love him...

...When he got up to speak, he had the charisma of lima beans...

...Whatever it is, Lesley Stahl has it...

...This volume begins with her arrival in Washington, on the eve of the Watergate break-in, and ends with her departure for New York and "6o Minutes," at the end of the Persian Gulf war...

...Nor is it news that most Washington journalists, print and TV alike, share certain familiar biases: When Ronald Reagan delivers his famous "focus of evil in the modern world" speech about the Soviet Union, Miss Stahl and her producer, Susan Zirinsky, are "so boggled by the throwback Cold War exhortation, we ended up holding hands...

...I had been so successful that I began to worry about my disappearing emotions, which had been tamped down to the depth of an index card...

...After describing her husband's condition to Mike Wallace, a famous public sufferer from depression, he persuades her to get Mr...

...Walter Cronkite for Miss Stahl and her husband, Aaron Latham: "Around midnight [Cronkite] announced he was about to tell a party-ending joke, one so raunchy that he was right, it cleared the room...

...If she called me, I'd get on the phone right away...

...Miss Stahl is devastated, to be sure, but not in any way you might reasonably expect...

...One thing, however, seems to separate Lesley Stahl from the bulk of her associates: Even by the standards of what she calls her profession, her ambition seems to have permanently disfigured her humanity...

...It takes a certain kind of character to rise to eminence in TV news, surmounting all manner of obstacles and prejudice, before landing in the sacred precincts of "6o Minutes...

...She lets us know about the men who have found her nerve and vulnerability irresistible, the famous friends who are charming once you get to know them, and the first ladies who have sent her thank-you notes...

...I am a lifelong insomniac, PHILIP TERZIAN writes a Washington column for the Providence Journal...

...It is the impulse that propels you to answer your daughter's phone calls, or mix it up with presidents...

...She would argue, I suppose, that as a female she was held to expectations that her male colleagues need not have met...

...and when a close friend dies young, it moves you to examine your fading sexuality...

...Lesley Stahl and I began our careers in Washington journalism at roughly the same time, and I am just as interested in capital minutiae as the next inhabitant of Grub Street...

...I offer these sentences in evidence: "My colleagues used to tease me that Taylor was the only child on Earth...

...Why should this be so...

...and Mrs...

...When she stands on principle, it usually pertains to her salary, her status as a White House correspondent, her allotted air time, or some valued position as a "weekend anchor...

...Well, it is certainly clear that she surmounted something or other in her rise to the top...

...Lesley Stahl worries a great deal about her status as a woman in a man's world, or about the decline of journalistic values in network news...

...This is never more evident than when she pauses among the Oval Office interviews, overseas excursions, and bureau intrigue to tell us something about her family or private emotions...

...Seated beside the Sandinista dictator, Daniel Ortega, at a New York dinner party, she meditates on history...

...77 lead to two or three expository sentences and 15 seconds of film...

...She would also say, and does so repeatedly, that while she loves journalism "as a drug" she is not naturally talented at the craft, or especially confident, and success required "surmounting my femaleness and my blondness...