This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. My guest today is a renowned journalist and former CBS correspondent for sixty Minutes. Known for his acclaimed investigative reporting, Steve Croft has won five Peabody Awards and eleven Emmy Awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Emmy
in two thousand and three. His legendary reporting career spans international war coverage and major historical events such as the Chernobyl disaster and the infamous nineteen ninety two interview with Hillary and President Bill Clinton. Steve Croft got his starred in journalism when he was drafted into the Army in nineteen seventy. There he worked for the military newspaper Stars
and Stripes as a correspondent photographer in Vietnam. He received an honorable discharge from the army a year later in nineteen seventy one, although the war would not officially end for another four years. I was curious if Croft had any sense that the end of conflict was near when he arrived in Vietnam.
We had a sense that it was supposed to wind down. I'm not really sure I had much confidence in that because it was still dangerous and actually actually nineteen sixty nine was the bloodiest year of the war, more people killed. I would have guessed sixty eight, but it was sixty nine, and that was all fighting sort of geared up to pulling the US troops out. I have to tell you right now. I mean, this was the beginning of my journalism career. Did you feel a.
Sense when you were there that you were managed in terms of what reporting they expected from you.
Definitely. I mean the first ten months I was there, I was with a headquarters company with the twenty fifth Infantry Division, and I was in information SPECIALI Cucchi and I did half an hour radio show for Armed Forces Network every week, and one of my jobs was to escort network correspondence and print correspondence in the field, and we had a lot of those people come through the office, and that was really what got me hooked when I went in. I wanted to be an advertising That's what
I thought I wanted to do. Well. It was during the great year of Doyle Daane burn Back and all those great ideas. Yeah yeah, yeah, and television commercials were the most in the newspaper magazine commercials were the most interesting things and the most creative things around. I went to Syracuse one of the most horrifying experiences of a
whole Vietnam. So it really took up five years of my life because there were two years of worrying about it and what the hell I was going to do, because I was about to lose my student deferment and I graduated in the sixty seven and in nineteen sixty eight was you.
Know, they're taking everybody crazy, everybody. I got drafted in the largest draft call of the war, so I had to figure out how I was going to deal with it. I certainly didn't want to go to officers Candidate school because I didn't have strong feelings about the war one
way or the other. But I knew that if I was an officer, I'd have to worry about getting shot in the back and shot from the front because there were a lot of lame second lieutenants who didn't know what they were doing, who led a lot of people into dangerous situations and were removed. So I had a friend who had been in the army. He was the editor of The Daily Orange, the Syracuse newspaper, and he
for one reason or another I can't remember. Had done a stint with the eighty second Airborn sort of in between his college years, and he said, what you should do is you should go down and enlist in the Army. Because the Navy was four years, in the Air Force was four years, all these other things. The Army had a program where you could go down and enlist for three years and get to pick what you were going
to do more or less. And it turned out to be a great decision because I got in this field, this information field, and it became my sort of survival skill, and it was a great experience.
I was very lucky. Carl Bernstein said to me, not too long ago, you had a good war. But it was also a great You know, my boss was like on the staff at the general of the division, and it was right next to command headquarters, and you would see people coming in all the time from the battalions and companies in the field, and you had a good sense of how the war was going not all that well, and you had a sense of what was being reported.
And I remember my boss having just shouting matches with this guy named George Esper from the Associated Press, arguing over battles and great reports that had come in. Now there it was clear that I had that I was doing the bidding of the twenty fifth. That was my job.
The difference in going to Stars at Stripes was was that I had much more freedom to report, and it was the newspaper of the Pacific Command and my boss, my ultimate boss, who I used to care for when he came to Vietnam was John McCain's father, who was the Commander of Chief in the Pacific. There you could write, You could get away with a lot of stuff, and
we didn't have to send it to the censors. We had editors in Tokyo that looked at it, but I didn't have to like send it down to Saigon for the military censors to go through.
But you're somebody at sixty minutes, your career marks that dedicated section. Yeah, the Steve Croft years are the years. Well, I'm parked in front of the TV and it's sixty minutes. Chinese food for dinner would arrive at the apartment right the Sopranos. That was my Sunday every night. I was a boomer representative.
When I first came there, I used to joke, I said you know that you can divide this show into two categories, the people who like rock and roll and the people who think it's a passing fad. So I was the first of the baby boomer.
Well, when I would watch the show, what I'm getting to is that, you know, you were always somebody who what came across effortlessly. Here's a guy that's reporting, and inside and threading into that person is the person, and therefore the reporting was your conscience.
Yeah, you bring a lot of conscience to your work.
Yeah, people knew you were going to be fair and not just progressive, lefty whatever. And you know, taking that stance, you were going to be smart and fair and your conscience was going.
Fair is important word. But then you then you can't consider so much important anymore. Well, it's bag it's baggage.
But the thing is that when you're there, I'm assuming there wasn't a lot of things you wanted to report, un that they told you not to do that.
There wasn't much of that was there. The best story that I ever covered for Stars and Stripes was not printed. I was up in quang Nam Province outside the nang and we were going out with what they called the Rough Tough Unit sort of Vietnamese farmer who were militiamen. And it was a very nasty area and we knew going out that we were going to get hit, and
we did. And the Arvin, you know, they came in and were the Vietnase commanders and pulled some women out of the hooches and took one of them down and tortured her by trying to drown her in the river. I took some pictures of it. I wrote the story, and they said, we're not going to print.
This.
Was this after Melai. Yes, yeah, so they were sensitive about the Yes, about the US, and they're always sensitive about the allies, which included the Koreans who are now fighting the Northern Koreans who are now fighting for the Russians in Ukraine.
Now you're when you're there during this period, you're writing and you're doing some radio, but no television. Well when you come home, it becomes TV. You get into TV pretty quickly once you get home. Yeah, why why didn't you say a writer? I'd always kind of wanted to be in television. I had taken a lot of television courses, and I had done the radios thing. So the Stars and Stripes was really the only print journalism I did.
And you know, I had six months of like unemployment insurance coming back from Vietnam.
But I had to go and like go to a job interview. And one of the job interviews was for a television station and the person who was the head of the Chamber of Commerce was also the head of the TV station and he hired me, so offered me a job, and it was hard to get. Those jobs were hard to get, and I took it. So, I mean, it's just why I fell into place. Yeah, that's why. That's why I are. You do s Yr But then
you go down to Florida. Correct? Why I went off to Columbia, I'm sorry, a graduate degree at JO Why did you want to do that? You were working?
Why?
I wanted to do it to get out of Syracuse because I was finding it difficult to make a jump to a major market, and I thought that the Columbia thing would give me a little bit more credibility in New York if I wanted it, because I wanted to ultimately go to the networks.
Yeah and so, and they did give you the credibility because you just work you're in Jacksonville, you're in Miami.
Both those stations owned by the Washington Post Company. What was your just someone connection with them? Had you worked for them? I didn't, but it was a great company to work for Back then. I got hired to go down to Jacksonville. I had a friend at CBS and he says, why don't you go down talk to Jim Snyder, who is the head of WTP, the CBS affiliate in Washington. He runs Post newsweek stations. You know. I went down and I talked to Jim, and Jim said, I've got
this investigator reporter's job opening Jacksonville. You know, I'd like you to go down and talk to the news director and we can put you in there because I've done some investigative reporting at WSYR. So I get down there and it turns out that everybody in town, all these people, you know, the news director says, oh, we've got some great stories down here. The town was run kind of by independent authorities. It was like all these businessmen were
running the town. There was support authority, the electric all of this stuff, and our license. Both stations were being challenged by a group of very rich Republicans who had gotten in trouble. If you may remember when I think it was Bernstein or Woodward called up John Mitchell, who was the Attorney General of the United States at the time,
and asked him a couple of questions about Watergate. Woke come up and woke him up, And Mitchell's response was, Katie Graham's going to get her kit in her ringer if you print this story. But what they did was they challenged the licenses of the two most profitable parts of the Washington Post want the TV stations in Jacksonville and Miami. So I was there and it ended up I didn't know this at the time, but I was doing stories on all the people that were behind the
license channel challenge. I wanted something about journalism that day. They didn't prevail them.
They didn't prevail, right, And you were there for how long in Florida before because eventually come to New York after that two years?
I was there in Jacksonville two years and two years in Miami.
What was your where had you spent even during your su days and then of course during your Columbia days you're uptown? But what did you think about when you first came to New York. Did you see it potentially as a place you were going to spend the rest of your life? You being from Indiana, Yeah, and I also been from Chappaqua. I graduated from high school at Chapequa, so I knew it by taking the Harlem Line into Grand Center and going to play.
You're familiar with New York obviously, Yeah, But did you love New York?
Did you think you did you know it was going to be I thought it was a big time, you know, And I thought, here I am.
I'm working for CBS and a network correspondent. I'd got in my dream the whole thing. It was absolutely the most junior person at CBS at the time and worked in the Northeast Bureau. And I did a lot of crap work, a lot of stakouts. You know, you take a camera crew and you wait all day waiting for somebody to come out. Maybe they won't come out. I don't know how many days I spent standing outside the hospital where they thought the show of Iran was but
he was not there. Ever there and I spent two miserable days in the rain outside the DA Code after John Lennon got shot. Now and I got sent to Dallas, and I said, we're making you a correspondent, because everybody started off as a reporter. We're making a correspondent. That's the good news. Bad news is we're sending you to our Salvador. So I went down there and spent a couple of months in our salad, which actually was more dangerous for me than Vietnam.
Journalist and news correspondent Steve Croft. If you enjoy conversations with world class journalists, check out my interview with Dan Rather.
When the first faint edges of what we came to know is Watergate begun to emerge, I was skeptical that it would reach the Oval Office itself. You never met anybody who had more respect for the office of the Presidency in the United States than I do. It was very difficult for me to accept that the President himself would be involved in any way. However, as time went along, facts began the first wisp. Then they begin to speak in fou voice, and then the facts begin to shout.
It isn't just lower level campaign operatuies, It isn't just lower level members of the administration. That this probably goes into the Oval Office itself.
To hear more of my conversation with Dan rather go to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Steve Croft tells the story of being attacked while reporting on location. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. In Steve Croft's final interview for sixty Minutes, he told fellow correspondent Leslie Stall that in spite of interviewing intimidating figures and traveling to dangerous places, he was never afraid while doing an interview. The only exceptions Croft cited were interview
was in Beirut and Zimbabwe. I was curious what made him nervous during those two particular stories.
Well, in Zimbabwe, we were attacked by a group of black quote unquote war veterans who were trying to drive the white farmers out of South Africa. I was doing a story on one of the farmers and I thought that was going to be really hairy. They had big, huge clubs and they were very upset. But we got out of it. In Beirute just because it was brute. I mean there were buildings blowing up every fifteen minutes and you had to really pay attention to where you
went and what you were doing. The place was out of control. Are you a religious man? Do you think you're alive because of a lot of war coverage? For you, I did intense, intense period of this kind of very dangerous reporting. Yeah.
I mean, other than being lucky, what else do you attributed to You just had an eye for what to do. He had a sense it's very exciting, Okay. Churchill said, there's no feeling in the world. The most exhilarating feeling in the world is to be shot at without result.
And it was. There was a lot of adrenaline, and it was a great way to advance your career, and because you were always going to be on the air and I liked it. I liked it for a while, and then the chance came to go to London and I decided to do that. That's where I ended up in Beirut when I was working in the London bureau, which was I spent three years there and I was traveling all over the world and that was really the
best time I had at CBS. I love that why, because that's the reason I wanted to be a correspondent. I wanted to see the world and learn about things. We traveled in those days, first class, and you stayed in the best hotels, and it was you were like a dignitary. It was a different world for journals expect then.
Yeah, now when you finally land at sixty minutes, you join sixty Minutes in what year?
Is it eighty nine?
I think eighty nine, So eighty nine, fifty six plus years after it started. Sixty Minutes is better and more substantive than any other TV news program today, not just in prime time, but still the gold standard.
Why do you think they maintained that authority because it was a very good show. It came in generally followed the NFL football games on CBS, which gave us a huge leading, particularly among males. And it had a genius and Don Hewett was the executive producer and sort of the inventor of the show. And it had Mike Wallace and Morley Safer and Ed Bradley and Leslie Stall and you know the best. You know, all these people had, like myself, gone out and done all the stuff that
I had done. And I think that was one of the reasons why I was under consideration. You know, I've been overseas and knew how to handle myself. I could was a good writer, but I think that the success for the show was I think that people felt smart watching it. We would take on very difficult subjects, but we never talked down to the audience, and we would go to great links to try and give the story context and explain what was going on and why we
were doing this story. And people just they like that, I think, and they learned something from it, and I think that's really important. I mean television today and television generally talks down to people. They don't give the audience much credit for being smart, and I think sixty Minutes did that, and I think the audience appreciated it. Also. I thought people always thought sixty Minutes was a really liberal show, and I don't think it was liberal. I
think that it was we did. There's no show in tell Vision that did more stories about the waste and dysfunction of the US government right than sixty minutes.
Right now, when you're working for the network prior to the appointment to sixty Minutes, you're running against some of these guys in a lot of headbutting with your competitors, if you will, I mean the other guys on the show. Reisner safer. You guys don't want to cover the same story. Yeah yeah, And that was even before sixty minutes when your correspondence or no, yeah, no.
I had some huge fights with Morley when I was in London over who is going to do what story? Whether you know, I'd be I'd been working on it, and he wanted to do the story with John Tiffin, who is a very powerful producer, and we would, you know, take the gloves off and have at it and have at it.
And then when you got on the show, the same thing when it's sixteen minutes, same thing, A lot of competition.
Who's going to do what story? Yes, now you do it.
And one thing that was mentioned to me was you interview me obviously every president during your term there and their term you and you interview Obama several times. To me, the presidency is you you have to have a special land in your body to want to do that job and believe you can succeed, especially the contemporary presidence, let's say since nineteen eighty and as monolithic as the budget is and everything, what was it you got from each of them that you interviewed that you thought was the
reason they won? Name each president won by one that you interviewed. Most of them I interviewed were just short, short interviews, no long profiles, no long profiles, not sixty minutes. The two presidents that I interviewed for sixty minutes were Clinton several times and Obama many times. I think Obama was a bit a class by himself, simply for the fact that he was so knowledgeable and he was very articulate.
When you go down and interview with somebody in Washington, whether it's the president or whatever, there's a lot of things you ask them that they don't know, and they constantly have to check with their aids, and they always have them in the room. In all the times I interviewed, Obama never stopped to ask any questions, and I never had anybody maybe one time somebody from his staff called
and wanted to correct a small factual era. He knew what he was talking about, and he was able to give people, I think, a sense of what it was like being in that job, which is why I liked so much about interviewing. The reason we interviewed him so many times. What sense did you get? What was his view of the job.
Did he enjoy it? I think he enjoyed it less over time. I think his wife never really she didn't want him to run. Originally, the first time I interviewed was the week before he declared, and she was very successful, had her own career, and she had lived through time in the Senate and he was gone all the time. She hated that. I think both of them took great solace in the fact that it was going to be Basically, they had a place to live and he was going
to be there, so this will be together. Yeah, So from a family point of view, it worked out very well. I think he was ready to leave when he left, and I think that I know that they had a deal. You know that that you know that he was going to be there for the eight years and then and then it was going to be a private life of a private life.
Well, I mean I interviewed Michael Wolfe when he had Fire and Fury coming in right for his book about Trumph.
He's what a character he is. Yeah, he has a character.
But when we did Fire and Fury at town Hall, and I said to him that the presidency is this cockpit that very few people can ever occupy, and your vista is something that's only the most singular experience in the world.
You see the high high and the low low.
Is it only one man has gone into that cockpit and come out of that cockpit unchanged, exactly the same in his worldview and his behavior as went And that's Trump. You didn't cover Trump obviously when he were you you left the show what year? I left the show in twenty nineteen, so you were there for the first three Trumps. I was, But I didn't interview him.
Did you want to? I didn't want to. You didn't why I didn't have the opportunity, And I watched other people interview him, and he didn't answer any questions, and you know, he's a bully, and it didn't seem to be productive.
It wasn't what I wanted to do. And I knew him from New York because he loved the press. He liked to hang around with reporters. And you know, if you see him out in town, around town or at a party or something like that.
Screening, he was in front of the camera. Yeah, he just come up to you and schmooze.
Journalist and news correspondent Steve Kroft. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Steve Croft shares what he thinks of journalism today and what has changed since he started over fifty years ago. I I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is here's the thing. Steve Croft interviewed many politicians throughout his impressive career. He famously spoke with President
Barack Obama sixteen times during his presidency. While he found Obama to be highly informed on these subjects at hand, I was curious what Croft thought of the current political climate and the caliber of people we see in the public eye today. What worries me even more, I think is that I think the two major political parties, the only parties we have, are just in terrible shape. It's hard to tell which one is in worse shape. I think that the Democrats have plenty of problems and the
Republicans have lots of problems. And I don't think people fel a real affinity for either party.
And I think that Trump was elected. Somebody gave me this analysis the other day.
I thought it was pretty interesting. It's you know, you people out there. They don't pay that close attention to what's going on, but they'll see clips of Trump on television and they like what he said, and they like the way he says it, and they want that and they'll give it another you know, they'll give him another shot without really knowing that much about his history, about the criminal cases that had been brought against him, and
about what happened on January sixth. I think people very easy for those people to say.
Well, this is just politics.
This it's just that this is the Democrats making throwing a lot of dirt, and they don't really analyze it. I think, you know, people in this country are not stupid, and I think they're very upset with the way the country, the shape that the country is in, the way it's been run for a while, the levels of corruption, debt, the debt, the income inequality, all of these things, the medical system.
I mean, everybody has a lot of complaints.
But when you were the last season, you were doing the show, you were doing sixty minutes, you knew how far in advance, Like I'm always thinking of this in kind of a wistful way, how far away from you leaving did you.
Know you were going to leave. I knew at the beginning of the last year, so that last year you knew would be her last year. I did for a number of reasons. One, I had thought very seriously about leaving a couple of years before that. At the end of every year, I would sit back, I'd say, do I really want to do this anymore? The job? If you did that job right, it was really a killer, really, and I thought, you know, I was about to turn seventy four.
I thought I'd been there. It was going to be my fortieth year at CPS and my thirtieth year. At sixty minutes, the numbers were all aligned, and I thought, Okay, I'm not going to do this anymore.
And also CBS was in a real state of turmoil, which was not an insignificant part.
What happened to them, without you getting personal and whatever, say what you can, but what do you think.
Happened to them? Well, I think that it was there's no way to avoid this. I think that it started with the merger between CBS and Viacom, and I think that they were two different cultures and it was a very painful, dirty split up. And last Moonvez was regardless of what you think about some of the allegations that were made, most of which were involved events long before he came to CBS. Was very good at his job,
and he was a very powerful person in Hollywood. And I think the people at Viacom are really mostly just interested in the money.
So when you're looking at that last year, you're pretty clear, now it's going to be your last year.
Yeah.
Do you pick the shows with an eye tour? Do I want to have my final season? Did you do picked them with an eye toward this is it? I want to go out with a great year?
Yeah?
And you thought to yourself, well, I want to do this person that I want to do this story. I don't want to do that, right. Yes, you're a little bit more precious about it that final year. Yeah, there were things I wanted. Look, I had a rule with my producers. I reserved the rut to say no to any story I didn't want to do, and I would not impose a story that the producers didn't want to
do on them. So when you were last year, what's a story that really really spoke to you that you really enjoyed doing.
I think one of the last stories I did was about this place called the Isle of Egg, which was, you know, just a little speck in the ocean. That was a very interesting place, and I wanted to go do that story, and I really wanted to do an interview with Samuel L. Jackson, who I've always admired as an actor and knew very little about him when I started researching the story, and it ended up being one
of my favorite stories. Those are the two things. In the last story I did was about money laundering, and you know, talk about how things are screwed up in the country and the corrupt level of the level of corruption. This was mostly going on and written, but it was a story about a little bank, a Danish branch of a Danish bank that was wandering all this money coming
out of the Soviet Union. And it was such this the scam was so easy to pick and see, and all the American banks knew about it, and they were all handling this corrupt Russian money and only one bank, Jamie and Jamie Diamond, You refused to do business with them.
Is there anybody, I mean, I'm sure there were some name one or two where they surprised you in the interview, they weren't at all what you thought they might be.
I'd say the biggest surprise was Clint Eastwood, because I thought that he was, you know, the real macho man and you know, staunch Republican and all this, which both of which are true, right, But he is a really interesting character, very smart, great businessman, very polite, very well mannered and interesting. I mean he had you know, he wrote all the music, you know, he's for all of his movies. He's multifaceted, multifaceted, and everybody loved him. And
he didn't have the best reputation. When I went out there and started spending time with him, and you know, stayed in touch with him over the years, I just thought he was really a first class individual. Impressed you. Yes, I'll tell you the worst interview I ever tell you. I'll rie Cardier Brossan, the French photographer earlier. He's a great photographer, you know, one of the best, truly, but
he didn't want to talk about photography. He wanted to talk about art, which was his new fascination, and he didn't really want to talk at all. And he was a really old, glumpy Frenchman. And I was like, I really regretted doing that story.
My last question for you, it started working in non military journalism when you were thirty. If you were thirty right now, would you become a journalist. I probably wouldn't.
I think the word journalism is it almost doesn't exist anymore. I mean it does. I mean that's too harsh judgment. The New York Times and the major newspapers are still capable of doing really good journalism, but it doesn't exist on the cable news networks for sure. It doesn't really exist, with a few possible exceptions, on network television. So it's hard to say. Because I had I mean to talk about journalism, that's a whole other thing. I mean, journalism
is really in trouble. Yeah, I wanted to talk about, to a certain extent, what's wrong with it and what is that? And the same thing that's wrong with everything else in this country right now, the corporate imperative. Money,
not so much the corporate imperative. It's historical. During COVID, I was supposed to go out and give a speech at the law school at the University of Iowa, and it got postponed because of COVID, and I spent a lot of time while during COVID trying to figure out what I was going to say in this speech, and people were stopping me on the street and saying, you're in the news business. What's wrong with this country? Those are really screwed up. It's not working the way it
used to. So I decided that I would do some reporting on it and try to figure out what the answer to the question was. I mean, I would usually when people would come up to me, I'd say, I just have some flip answer, like algorithms or you know. And then I started reading up on it, and there was this book that was written in nineteen seventy called Future Shock Alvin Toffler, Yes, which just turned out to be one of the most pressured books ever written because
it describes all the things that have happened. And at the time he wrote it, all of the technology that is screwing us up was in the incubator in science slabs and MIT and places like that while they tried to figure out, you know, how can we make money off? And it's changed too fast. It's changed everything too fast, and it's fractured our society and it's changed our institutions, which is why nobody everybody feels so alienated, Toffler predicted.
He said, you know, it's going to be great opportunity. You know, it's going to make a lot of people a lot of money, but it's going to have a really not great effect on people on the population, and talked about how the businesses and products were going to become disposable, and entire industries would be disappear and be replaced by something completely different. It would require people moving out of neighborhoods and out of cities to go and
find work other places. It was going to be hard on people, and I think that's the problem, and that's why everything is kind of screwed up, because we're forced now to change and deal with so many things that are artists. Yes, it's very incredibly stressful, and people don't quite know what to make of it and don't like it. And I think it's one of the things that's happened to journalism. We're now bombarded with so much information from
so many different sources, some of them really questionable. You've got so many conflicting narratives you don't know who to believe, and it's had this impact on our trust of institutions, and that is one of the deeply rooted problems in the country right now.
My thanks to journalist and former sixty Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. Were produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Victoria de Martin. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.