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At
Easter I did an essay on how artists have portrayed Jesus Christ over
the years.
I said "Turkish artists in Byzantium portrayed Christ's likeness in
ceramic tile."
Greeks were furious and they demanded an apology. They say the Turks
were not in Byzantium and would not have pictured Christ anyway because
they were Muslim. Well, apparently I was wrong and I'm sorry.
It makes you feel bad when people are mad at you and, and for solace, I
spoke to the other 60 Minutes correspondents.
I asked Ed Bradley if he ever had a lot of people mad at him.
“For me Andy, it was Turkish Americans and they were upset because of
a story we did on Abdullah Ocalan,” Ed told me. “Turkish Americans
were upset because we allowed him to answer questions and they
considered him to be a terrorist. We got hundreds and hundreds of
letters and emails. The interesting thing about it is that 90percent of
them were exactly the same, just signed by a different person.”
“Dennis DeConcini... he was the one that was the worst,” Lesley
Stahl told me. “He was a Senator, Arizona. I did a story on
Congressional Pensions. And I asked him what about your Congressional
Pension? He just blew up.”
“Well, you're once again trying to destroy and run down Congress,”
DeConcini said to Stahl at the time. “You shouldn't do that; you're a
grown woman and you ought to have something better to do.”
“He was just livid and he said, 'Besides your pension is probably
bigger than mine,'” Stahl recalls. “And then he just picked up and
stormed off.”
Then I asked Morley Safer.
“Often, they got angriest when I did a story called ‘Yes, But Is It
Art?’ says Safer. “Because you can question people's’ sex life,
you can question their religion, you can question their politics
certainly and they'll deal with you in a very fair-minded way. When you
question their art, their taste, you go to the very soul of their being.
And because I didn't like some of their contemporary art, they accused
me of being in bed with Jesse Helms, of being a philistine of
philistines.”
“I did a story on the overpopulation of Eastern Long Island with
white-tailed deer and the story suggested that maybe some of these deer
would have to be shot,” says Steve Kroft. “I got hundreds of letters
suggesting that maybe I ought to be shot or even worse, something done
to my manhood. I mean the animal lovers are really scary people. Other
than that, after the Super Bowl interview with Bill and Hillary Clinton
discussing Gennifer Flowers. The interview upset Mrs. Clinton so much
that she took Don Hewitt and Mike Wallace off the White House invitation
list. And I think they have always blamed me.”
What about Mike Wallace? “The fact is the pieces that I do are so
bland that nobody really ever gets mad at me,” Wallace told me.
But the archives tell a different story. Many people have been furious
at Wallace for questioning them. He has been called “contemptible”,
and even Nancy Reagan once got annoyed with him.
To err is human to forgive divine... come on you Greeks, be divine,
forgive me.
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