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The only thing Lowell Bergman misses about his old job at CBS’s "60 Minutes" is the money. Not the salary, mind you, although he was making quite a bit. He misses the money to do things. "See, at `60 Minutes,’ we had unlimited expense accounts," he says. An unlimited expense account would sure come in handy today: a drug informant in a witness protection program critical to Bergman’s four-hour PBS documentary on the international drug trade has decided to talk, and Bergman wants to get him on camera right away. But public television does not have unlimited expense accounts. Public television does not know the meaning of right away. At public television, you submit a budget and you wait. Fortunately, Bergman has an inside track with the senior producer. She’s his wife. Most people know Lowell Bergman as the man Al Pacino played in the movie The Insider. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism students know him as a teaching fellow. If you hang around him long enough, you learn a bit more: He’s a very funny guy. A past resident of communes. And a bit of a fashion shlump. When not on the road interviewing drug dealers, he’s crammed into the low-ceilinged "Frontline" offices stuffed behind the Journalism School library, in North Gate Hall. He fits right into these rooms; short, stocky, and jack-o-lantern smiley, perfectly comfortable standing on a rug that probably came from an undergraduate’s garage sale. One of the middle buttons on his dark-red shirt is undone; the T-shirt underneath could be a white shirt gone gray; and he’s paired his black pseudo-dress shoes with white socks and a brown belt. In this get-up, you can imagine him annoying CBS suits just by walking into a room. If he seems happy today, he wasn’t so happy during the events chronicled in The Insider. The movie was released last fall to great critical acclaim, but a big yawn from the movie-going public. It made just $26 million in its first nine weeks at the box office, while Toy Story 2 made $227 million over the same period. But, on February 15 The Insider was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including best picture, best actor, best director, best screenplay, best cinematography, best sound, and best editing. (Oscar winners were announced after this article went to press.) The Insider recounts how Bergman (played by Al Pacino) got former Brown & Williamson tobacco scientist Dr. Jeffrey Wigand (played by Russell Crowe) to talk on the record to "60 Minutes" about what he knew: that B&W’s tobacco products contained additives which increased the danger of diseases; and that, contrary to their public statements, big tobacco executives were well aware that their products are addictive. But, after Bergman got Wigand to spill his guts to correspondent Mike Wallace, the story was abandoned by lawsuit-shy executives at CBS News. As the movie shows, Wigand’s revelations came at considerable personal cost. He lost his wife and his home. His life was threatened. He had to take a high school science teaching position, at one-tenth his previous salary. He was devastated when CBS attorneys decided to spike his interview rather than deal with the threat of a lawsuit from Brown & Williamson. Bergman fought obsessively to get Wigand’s story on the air, but "60 Minutes" executive producer Don Hewitt and correspondent Wallace caved in. It was not until after a January 1996 Wall Street Journal article revealed most of what Wigand had to say--and thus alleviated the lawsuit threat--that CBS and "60 Minutes" aired the interview. In the process of telling Wigand's and Bergman’s story, Insider director Michael Mann glossed over some chronological and factual details for dramatic effect. Wigand and Bergman maintain that the movie is "philosophically and emotionally accurate," while Hewitt and Wallace were none too happy to see their cowardly behavior displayed by Hollywood. In fact, when "60 Minutes" bigwigs saw a draft script of the movie in the spring of 1998, Bergman, who had already quit working for "60 Minutes" and was halfway out the doors of "CBS Nightly News," found those doors slammed and locked behind him. The original script characterized Wallace as a self-centered prima donna (one version had the correspondent focusing more on the quality of the hotel than an interview Bergman had risked his life to secure) but even the exorcism of these nastier details in later drafts failed to please Wallace. "Mike Wallace would probably say that this is a very entertaining movie," Bergman said last month. "What he is most upset about--as I understand it from one-sided conversations, where he’s doing all the talking and I’m doing all the listening--is that the movie reveals that he’s a human being. When that camera is turned around, it’s not like he has a thin skin. He doesn’t have any skin." In addition to painting CBS as a corporation of wimps, The Insider explores the trauma and heartache whistleblowers go through as their stories becomes public. "It was very, very, very hard," says Dr. Stanton Glantz, a UCSF tobacco expert who was close to Wigand through most of the events portrayed in the movie. "These tobacco guys are the meanest, most aggressive sonsabitches you’ll ever see. I mean, they kill three million people a year. Even a cynic like Lowell didn’t appreciate what he was getting himself into." Pacino’s portrayal of Bergman’s single-minded protection of Wigand is dead-on, say those familiar with the events. "Lowell was obsessed with protecting Wigand," says Glantz. "It’s exactly the way it’s portrayed in the movie. Lowell got Jeff to go out on a limb and didn’t want it sawed off behind him." Wallace and Hewitt underestimated that. "The fundamental mistake they made was assuming I was going to go along with cutting this guy and his family off," says Bergman. "In a world where most people are superficial, Lowell will insist on the story and the reporting being taken seriously," says Jack Palladino, Boalt ^75, a San Francisco private investigator and attorney who helped refute B&W’s 500-page dossier on Wigand. He’s known Bergman for more than 20 years. "TV newspeople are always dying to do your story--until the minute after they persuade you to be on. Then they’re on to the next story and thinking about lights, camera, hair. Not Lowell. He cares about stories, and the source realizes it." "I think he’s one of the most careful and thoughtful reporters I've ever met," adds San Francisco attorney and Boalt professor Ephraim Margolin, who represented Jeffrey Wigand and has dealt with Bergman on other stories. "I don't know many other reporters who would protect a source the way he protected his source." Jeffrey Wigand agrees. He’s now the sole employee of "Smoke-Free Kids, Inc." If you call the "Smoke-Free Kids" number, Wigand is likely to answer. If you call at night, he’s also likely to answer, since he runs the non-profit from the dining room of his apartment; he does interviews on a speakerphone while he washes dishes. It’s a far cry from his $300,000-a-year tobacco job, and it’s partly because of Lowell Bergman that he’s where he is today. But he has no regrets. "I think Lowell and I share a unique bond," he says. His voice cuts Bronx bluntness with a Southern drawl, and you know he means what he’s saying. "He was a true friend." It’s a testament to the sorry state of journalism that the 54-year-old producer’s decent treatment of sources is noteworthy, and that his decades-old dedication to fairness and honesty is remarkable. "Lowell has lived up to his early promises and hasn’t forgotten what he believed in his twenties," says Palladino. Bergman’s journalistic ethics can be traced back to his days at UC San Diego, where he was a graduate student in philosophy and studied with ^60s guru Herbert Marcuse. While at UCSD, Bergman lived communally in a Hillcrest-area house. He and some other hippies decided to tune in instead of dropping out; they started their own newspaper, the Street Journal, in an effort to expose who really ran the city of San Diego. Staff members were subsequently shot at and arrested, and Street Journal offices were firebombed. They had to drive all the way to Los Angeles to get the paper published because no printer in San Diego County would touch it. Getting shot at gets old, and in 1971, Bergman moved to a commune in Sonoma County. Members lived on 500 acres of redwoods and an old movie set built fifty years earlier by William Randolph Hearst for his movie-star girlfriend, Marion Davies. The set--a series of chateaux–had been buried in mud since 1955, but that didn’t deter the hippies, who dug them all out and added wood heaters and kerosene lights, and lived there happily until another big flood, in 1973. Bergman then moved to Berkeley and to a third commune, where he met his current wife, PBS "Frontline" senior producer Sharon Tiller, at a mass birthday party. ("In these communes, we’d have birthday parties for everybody who was the same sign," he explains. "We met at an annual Leo party, an all-day, all-night, 300-person party.") Raised by a single mother "before it was cool or common," Bergman now has one biological son (27-year-old Jake Bergman), three stepchildren, plus "another stepchild who was absorbed into various tax returns, and then a couple more." Bergman’s been a teaching fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism since 1996, which means he’s taught a seminar, guest-lectured to classes, and hung around. Many J-schoolers will tell you Bergman is not a great teacher, but none is willing to talk on the record. One 1998 grad puts it this way: "He mostly told war stories." Asked about his impact in the classroom, Bergman sighs. "I think I’m probably a bummer of a teacher," he says. One thing Bergman does offer students is the opportunity to work with him on "Frontline" projects; J-school grads now staff the PBS operation’s on-campus offices and often work as associate producers. He says he’s not a popular teacher because he doesn’t offer students any easy answers. "The last seminar I did was about how journalists deal with problems," he says, "how to get out of trouble." He pauses for a moment. "What we should be teaching journalists is how to get into trouble." Melinda Ridgway-Tichelaar, M.J. ’97, is a news producer at KTVU Fox Channel 2 in Oakland. Lowell Bergman was her thesis advisor. |
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