Leslie Stahl Shares Her Early Career with Marc Maron

I listened to a podcast the other day that is one of my regular go-to’s, Marc Maron’s WTF podcast.  He interviewed Lesley

Stahl, of 60 Minutes fame and she talked about her upbringing on the north shore of Boston Mass and how she got into the news business.

It was clear that Stahl was a beneficiary of the times, when she first got a job and then wanted to move up to CBS, she told Maron that it was an all men’s club…guys like Daniel Schorr, Dan Rather and other men ran the show. But it was clear that the mandate had been put out, CBS had to hire more women.

So they hired Stahl but it wasn’t like being hired and getting to be a full reporter.  Instead, she said that each woman hire was made an apprentice to the seasoned newsmen.  So she glommed onto Schoor, and then she spent time covering an obscure Washington DC break-in that had occurred at the Watergate hotel.

The Democratic National Committee had been clumsily broken into, and Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward joined Stahl as they attended the court proceedings and then ran to the payphones to phone in their stories. She did this for months, filing stories and thinking they were going to go on the air. Then one of her editors told her that none of the stories she had dictated to the Post newsroom secretaries had actually been broadcast!

Apparently, they didn’t think there was enough of a story to use them….but after about two years of snowballing evidence and the Saturday Night Massacre firings, well, finally all of this culminated in an emerging movement to impeach….and Nixon took the fall and resigned.  LISTEN TO THE PODCAST