60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft reflects on his acclaimed reporting career

Steve Kroft is a renowned journalist and former CBS correspondent for 60 Minutes, where he reported for 30 seasons. His investigative reporting garnered widespread acclaim, winning him five Peabody Awards and 11 Emmy Awards, including a Lifetime Achievement in 2003. His legendary reporting career includes international war coverage and major historical events such as the Chernobyl disaster and the infamous 1992 interview with Hillary and President Bill Clinton. Steve Kroft’s interview subjects ranged from the first serial killer to be interviewed on 60 Minutes to elusive actors such as Clint Eastwood. Kroft also interviewed former President Barack Obama 16 times during his presidency. With a storied career that spans generations, Kroft got his start as a correspondent photographer for the military newspaper “Stars and Stripes” after being drafted into the Vietnam War in 1970. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:36Alec Baldwin?

  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 60 Minutes. Known for his acclaimed investigative reporting, Steve Croft has won five Peabody Awards and 11 Emmy Awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 2003. His legendary reporting career spans international war coverage and major historical events such as the Chernobyl disaster and the infamous 1992 interview with Hillary and President Bill Clinton. Steve Croft got his start in journalism when he was drafted into the Army in 1970.

• 2:19Alec Baldwin?

  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 1971. 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.

• 2:41Speaker 04

  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, 1969 was the bloodiest year of the war. More people killed. I would have guessed 68, but it was 69 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.

• 3:08Alec Baldwin?

  Did you feel a sense when you were there that you were managed in terms of what reporting they expected from you?

• 3:13Speaker 04

  Definitely. I mean, the first 10 months I was there, I was with Headquarters Company and with the 25th Infantry Division, and I was an information specialist.

• 3:23Alec Baldwin?

  Coochie.

• 3:24Speaker 04

  Coochie. And I did a half an hour radio show for Armed Forces Network every week, and one of my jobs was to escort network correspondents and print correspondents.

• 3:36Alec Baldwin?

  Dignitaries.

• 3:37Speaker 04

  Out in the field, yeah. 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 in advertising. That's what I thought I wanted to do.

• 3:48Alec Baldwin?

  Why?

• 3:49Speaker 04

  Well, it was during the great era of Doyle Day and Bernbach and all those great commercials.

• 3:55Alec Baldwin?

  BBDNO.

• 3:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And television commercials were the most, and 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 the 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 to firm it. And I graduated in 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 how I was going to deal with it. I 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.

• 4:40Speaker 04

  But I I 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 in that with the eighty second airborne walk 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 and the Air Force was four years. All these other things.

• 5:23Speaker 04

  The army had a program where you could go down and enlist for three years and get to pick which you were going to do, more or less. And it turned out to be a great decision because I got in this 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 of 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.

• 6:07Speaker 04

  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 rape reports that had come in. Now, there, there was, 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 and Stripes 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 in Chief in the Pacific.

• 6:51Speaker 04

  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 send it down to Saigon for the military censors to go through.

• 7:04Alec Baldwin?

  But you're somebody, at Sixty Minutes, your career marks that dedicated section.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:10Alec Baldwin?

  The Steve Croft years are the years where I'm parked in front of a TV and it's Sixty Minutes, Chinese food for dinner would arrive at the apartment.

• 7:18Speaker 04

  Right, right, right.

• 7:18Alec Baldwin?

  The Sopranos, that was my Sunday, every night.

• 7:20Speaker 04

  I was the boomer representative. When I first came there, you know, 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.

• 7:34Alec Baldwin?

  Exactly. That's interesting.

• 7:37Speaker 04

  So I was the first of the baby boomer.

• 7:39Alec Baldwin?

  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 threaded into that person is the person, and therefore the reporting was your conscience.

• 7:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:53Alec Baldwin?

  You bring a lot of conscience to your work.

• 7:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:55Alec Baldwin?

  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 to be fair.

• 8:04Speaker 04

  Fair is an important word.

• 8:05Alec Baldwin?

  Well, but then you go on.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  It's not considered so much important anymore.

• 8:09Alec Baldwin?

  Right, right, well, it's baggage now. It's baggage now. But the thing is that when you're there, I'm assuming there wasn't a lot of things you wanted to report on that they told you not to do that. There wasn't much of that, was there?

• 8:20Speaker 04

  The best story that I ever covered for Stars and Stripes was not printed. I was up in Quang Nam Province outside Da Nang, and we were going out with what they called the rough puff unit, sort of Vietnamese farmers 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 Arvin, you know, they came in and the Vietnamese 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.

• 9:03Alec Baldwin?

  Was this after Milai?

• 9:05Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 9:06Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, so they weren't sensitive about that?

• 9:08Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 9:08Alec Baldwin?

  About the US?

• 9:09Speaker 04

  And they're always sensitive about the Allies.

• 9:11Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 9:12Speaker 04

  Which included the Koreans who are now fighting, the North Koreans who are now fighting for the Russians in Ukraine.

• 9:18Alec Baldwin?

  Now, you're, when you're there during this period, you're writing and you're doing some radio, but no television. But when you come home, it becomes TV. You get into TV pretty quickly once you get home, correct?

• 9:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:29Alec Baldwin?

  Why? Why didn't you stay a writer?

• 9:30Speaker 04

  I'd always kind of wanted to be in television. I had taken a lot of television courses and I had done the, the radio thing. So The Stars and Stripes was really the only print journalism I did.

• 9:41Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 9:42Speaker 04

  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.

• 10:00Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 10:00Speaker 04

  And he hired me. So offered me a job and it was hard to get, those were jobs were hard to get. And I took it. So, I mean, it just

• 10:07Alec Baldwin?

  SYR.

• 10:08Speaker 04

  Fell into place. Yeah.

• 10:09Alec Baldwin?

  SYR.

• 10:09Speaker 04

  WSYR.

• 10:10Alec Baldwin?

  You do SYR, but then you go down to Florida, correct?

• 10:13Speaker 04

  Why, I went off to Columbia.

• 10:15Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, you, I'm sorry.

• 10:16Speaker 04

  A graduate degree at the

• 10:17Alec Baldwin?

  Why did you want to do that? You were working. Why?

• 10:19Speaker 04

  I wanted to do it to get out of Syracuse because I was finding it difficult to make a jump to a major market.

• 10:25Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 10:25Speaker 04

  And I thought that the Columbia thing would give me a little bit more credibility in New York if I wanted, because I wanted to ultimately go to the networks.

• 10:33Alec Baldwin?

  You did?

• 10:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:34Alec Baldwin?

  And so, and it did give you the credibility because you just work, you're in Jacksonville, you're in Miami.

• 10:39Speaker 04

  Both those stations owned by the Washington Post Company.

• 10:42Alec Baldwin?

  Mm-hmm. What was your, did you have some connection with them? Had you worked for them?

• 10:45Speaker 04

  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. He says, why don't you go down, talk to Jim Snyder, who is the head of WTOP, 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 investigative reporter's job open in 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'd 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.

• 11:28Speaker 04

  It was like, all these businessmen were running the town. There was the Port Authority, the Electric Authority, 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.

• 11:58Alec Baldwin?

  Woke him up.

• 11:58Speaker 04

  And woke him up. And Mitchell's response was, Katie Graham's going to get her kit and her ringer.

• 12:04Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 12:04Speaker 04

  If you print this story.

• 12:06Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 12:06Speaker 04

  But what they did was they challenged the licenses of the two most profitable parts of the Washington Post, what 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 challenge. I don't know something about journalism that day.

• 12:25Alec Baldwin?

  They didn't prevail then?

• 12:26Speaker 04

  They didn't prevail.

• 12:27Alec Baldwin?

  Right. And you were there for how long in Florida before, because eventually you come to New York after that?

• 12:31Speaker 04

  Two years. I was there in Jacksonville, two years and two years in Miami.

• 12:35Alec Baldwin?

  What was your, now, 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?

• 12:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'd also been from Chappaqua. I graduated from high school at Chappaqua. So I knew it by taking the Harlem Line into Grand Central and going to places.

• 12:58Alec Baldwin?

  So you're familiar with New York, obviously?

• 12:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:00Alec Baldwin?

  But did you love New York? Did you think you see, did you know it was gonna be?

• 13:03Speaker 04

  I thought it was the big time, you know? And I thought, here I am, I'm working for CBS and a network correspondent. I'd gotten my dream, the whole thing. I was absolutely the most junior person at CBS at the time and worked in the Northeast Bureau and I did a lot of craft work, a lot of stakeouts. 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 a hospital where they thought the Shah of Iran was, but I think he was not there, ever there. And I spent two miserable days in the rain outside the Dakota after John Lennon got shot. Then I got sent to Dallas and they said, "We're making you a correspondent." Because everybody started off as a reporter. "We're making you a correspondent.

• 13:48Speaker 04

  That's the good news. Bad news is we're sending you to El Salvador." So I went down there and spent a couple of months in El Salvador, which actually was more dangerous for me than Vietnam.

• 14:00Alec Baldwin?

  Journalist and news correspondent Steve Croft. If you enjoy conversations with world-class journalists, check out my interview with Dan Rather.

• 14:10Speaker 05

  When the first faint edges of what we came to know as Watergate began to emerge, I was skeptical that it would reach the Oval Office itself. You've never met anybody who had more respect for the Office of the Presidency of 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 to first whisper, then they began to speak in full voice, and then the facts began to shout that it isn't just lower-level campaign operatives, it isn't just lower-level members of the administration, that this probably goes into the Oval Office itself.

• 14:51Alec Baldwin?

  To hear more of my conversation with Dan Rather, go to hereisthething.org. After the break, Steve Croft tells the story of being attacked while reporting on location.

• 15:11Speaker 06

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• 15:29Speaker 07

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• 16:05Speaker 06

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• 17:44Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. In Steve Croft's final interview for 60 Minutes, he told fellow correspondent Leslie Stahl 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 interviews in Beirut and Zimbabwe. I was curious what made him nervous during those two particular stories.

• 18:13Speaker 04

  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 Beirut, just because it was Beirut, I mean, there were buildings blowing up every 15 minutes and you had to really pay attention to where you went and what you were doing. The place was out of control.

• 18:49Alec Baldwin?

  Are you a religious man? Do you think you're alive? Because a lot of war coverage for you.

• 18:54Speaker 04

  I did, yeah.

• 18:55Alec Baldwin?

  Intense, intense period of this kind of very dangerous reporting.

• 18:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:59Alec Baldwin?

  I mean, other than being lucky, what else do you attribute it to? You just had an eye for what to do? You had a sense?

• 19:05Speaker 04

  Well, it was, it's very exciting.

• 19:07Alec Baldwin?

  Okay.

• 19:08Speaker 04

  As Richard said, there's no feeling in the world, the most exhilarating feeling in the world is to be shot at without result. And, and it was, there was a lot of adrenaline and it was a great way to, to advance your career and because you were always going to be on the air. And

• 19:28Speaker 04

  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 loved that.

• 19:47Alec Baldwin?

  Why?

• 19:48Speaker 04

  Because that's the reason I wanted to be a correspondent. I wanted to see the world.

• 19:52Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 19:52Speaker 04

  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.

• 20:03Alec Baldwin?

  Mm-hmm. It was a different world for journalists back then.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:06Alec Baldwin?

  Now, when you finally land at 60 Minutes, you join 60 Minutes in what year is it?

• 20:12Speaker 04

  Uh, 89, I think.

• 20:13Alec Baldwin?

  89. So 89, 56-plus years after it started. 60 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 they maintain that authority?

• 20:30Speaker 04

  Because it was a very good show. It came in, generally followed the NFL football games on CBS, which gave us a huge lead-in. Particularly among males. And it had a genius in Don Hewitt, 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 Stahl. 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'd been overseas, I knew how to handle myself, I was a good writer.

• 21:12Speaker 04

  But I think that the success for the show was, I think that people felt smart watching it.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  We would take on very difficult subjects, but we never talked down to the audience and we would go to great lengths to try and give the story context and explain what was going on and why we were doing this story. And people just, they liked 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 60 Minutes did that. And I think the audience appreciated it. Also, I thought, people always thought 60 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

• 22:04Speaker 04

  in television that did more stories about the waste and dysfunction of the US government than 60 Minutes.

• 22:11Alec Baldwin?

  Right. Now, when you're working for the network prior to the appointment to 60 Minutes, you're running against some of these guys and a lot of headbutting with your competitors, if you will. I mean, the other guys on the show, Weisner, Safer, you guys all wanted to cover the same story.

• 22:25Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:26Alec Baldwin?

  And that was even before 60 Minutes, when you were a correspondent, or no?

• 22:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I had some huge fights with Morley when I was in London over who was going to do what story, whether, you know, I'd been, I'd been working on it, he wanted to do the story with John Tiffin, who was a very powerful producer. And we would, you know, take the gloves off and

• 22:44Alec Baldwin?

  Have at it.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  And have at it.

• 22:47Alec Baldwin?

  And then when you got on the show, the same thing, on 60 Minutes, same thing. A lot of competition of who's going to do what story.

• 22:52Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 22:53Alec Baldwin?

  Now, you do it, and one thing that was mentioned to me was, you interview, we obviously, every president during your term there, and their term. And you, and you interview Obama several times. To me, the presidency is, you have to have a special gland in your body to want to do that job and believe you can succeed.

• 23:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 23:11Alec Baldwin?

  Especially the contemporary presidency, so let's say since 1980.

• 23:13Speaker 04

  Right.

• 23:14Alec Baldwin?

  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 one by one that you interviewed.

• 23:24Speaker 04

  Most of them I interviewed were just short. Short interviews. No long profiles. No long profiles, not 60 Minutes. The two Presidents that I interviewed for 60 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 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 aides, and they always have them in the room. In all the times I interviewed Obama, he never stopped to ask any questions.

• 24:08Speaker 04

  And I never had anybody, maybe one time, somebody from the staff called and wanted to correct a small factual error. 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 what I liked so much about interviewing. That's 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 got it. She didn't want him to run originally. The first time I interviewed him was the week before he declared.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  And she was very successful, had her own career, and she had lived through, you know, this 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. Right. And he was going to be there. At least we'll 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 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 Michelle's tough. Have a private life.

• 25:27Alec Baldwin?

  Well, I mean, I interviewed Michael Wolff when he had Fire and Fury coming out.

• 25:31Speaker 04

  Right.

• 25:31Alec Baldwin?

  For his book about Trump.

• 25:32Speaker 04

  What a character he is.

• 25:33Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, he is 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. Because 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 when he went in. And that's Trump.

• 25:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:58Alec Baldwin?

  You didn't cover Trump, obviously, when he were you. You left the show, what year?

• 26:01Speaker 04

  I left the show in 2019.

• 26:04Alec Baldwin?

  So you were there for the first three years of Trump?

• 26:06Speaker 04

  I was, but I didn't interview him.

• 26:07Alec Baldwin?

  Did you want to?

• 26:08Speaker 04

  I didn't want to.

• 26:09Alec Baldwin?

  You didn't? Why?

• 26:10Speaker 04

  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'd see him out in town, around town, or at a party or something like that, screening.

• 26:33Alec Baldwin?

  He was in front of a camera?

• 26:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, he'd just come up to you and schmooze.

• 26:40Alec Baldwin?

  Journalist and news correspondent Steve Croft. 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 50 years ago.

• 27:15Speaker 06

  Hey, it's Nile Rodgers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Legend. So you're helping Will.i.am write hooks. What made "Ordinary People" become the one song from those sound checks you knew you had to make your own?

• 27:43Speaker 12

  I was just writing for the Black Eyed Peas. I wasn't expecting to write something for myself in that session, but I wrote The Hook for Ordinary People and I recorded a demo and I'm like, I would rather keep Ordinary People for myself. This station in Chicago, W G C I, they start playing it before we're promoting it. The song spoke for itself. It became the defining song for my first album. I knew it was special, but you never know how special it's going to be and how much impact it's going to have in people's lives. And you never believe that you're going to actually change people's lives with a song.

• 28:12Speaker 06

  Experience before the moment. A Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 29:06Speaker 10

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 29:17Speaker 09

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 29:22Speaker 11

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 29:28Speaker 09

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 29:52Alec Baldwin?

  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 16 times during his presidency. While he found Obama to be highly informed on the 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.

• 30:17Speaker 04

  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, you know, have lots of problems. And I don't think people feel 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 says.

• 31:00Alec Baldwin?

  He's rational, yeah.

• 31:01Speaker 04

  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 have been brought against him, and about what happened on January 6th. I think people, very easy for those people to say, "Well, this is just politics. This is just the... This is the Democrats making a lot... Throwing a lot of dirt." And they don't really analyze... 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.

• 31:44Alec Baldwin?

  Debt.

• 31:45Speaker 04

  The debt. The... Income inequality. All of these things, the medical system. I mean, everybody has a lot of complaints.

• 31:55Alec Baldwin?

  When you were, the last season you were doing the show, you were doing 60 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 gonna leave?

• 32:07Speaker 04

  I knew at the beginning of the last year.

• 32:09Alec Baldwin?

  So the last, so that last year you knew would be your last year?

• 32:12Speaker 04

  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.

• 32:27Alec Baldwin?

  Really?

• 32:28Speaker 04

  And I thought, you know, I was about to turn 74. I thought, I'd been there, it was gonna be my 40th year at CBS and my 30th year at 60 Minutes. The numbers were all aligned and I thought, okay, I'm not gonna do this anymore. And also CBS was in a real state of turmoil, which was not an insignificant part.

• 32:49Alec Baldwin?

  What happened to them without you getting personal and whatever? Say what you can, but what do you think happened to them?

• 32:54Speaker 04

  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 Les Moonves 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 that the people at Viacom are really mostly just interested in the money.

• 33:31Alec Baldwin?

  So when you're looking at that last year, you're pretty clear now it's gonna be your last year.

• 33:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:35Alec Baldwin?

  Do you pick the shows with an eye toward, I want to have my final season? Did you pick them with an eye toward, this is it? I want to go out with a great year.

• 33:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:44Alec Baldwin?

  And you thought to yourself, I want to do this person, I want to do this, I don't want to do that.

• 33:48Speaker 04

  Right.

• 33:49Alec Baldwin?

  Yes, you're a little bit more precious about it that final year.

• 33:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, there were things I wanted, I, look, I had a rule with my producers. I reserve the right 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.

• 34:03Alec Baldwin?

  Right. So when you were last here, what's a story that really, really spoke to you that you really enjoyed doing?

• 34:08Speaker 04

  I think one of the last stories I did was about this place called the Isle of Egg, which was a, 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. And 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 in Britain, but it was a story about a little, a little bank,

• 34:50Speaker 04

  a Danish, a branch of a Danish bank that was laundering all this money coming out of the Soviet Union. And it was such, the scam was so easy to just 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 Dimon, you know, refused to do business with them.

• 35:13Alec Baldwin?

  Is there anybody, I mean, I'm sure there are some, name one or two, where they surprised you in the interview? They weren't at all what you thought they might be?

• 35:20Speaker 04

  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.

• 35:33Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 35:34Speaker 04

  But he is a really interesting character and very smart, great businessman, very polite, very well mannered and interesting. I mean, he had, you know, he wrote all the music and, you know, he's, for all of his movies.

• 35:51Alec Baldwin?

  He's multifaceted.

• 35:52Speaker 04

  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.

• 36:05Alec Baldwin?

  Impressed you.

• 36:06Speaker 04

  Yes. I'll tell you the worst interview I ever.

• 36:08Alec Baldwin?

  Tell me.

• 36:10Speaker 04

  Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer.

• 36:13Alec Baldwin?

  Really?

• 36:14Speaker 04

  He's a great photographer, you know, one of the best ever.

• 36:17Alec Baldwin?

  Sure, truly.

• 36:18Speaker 04

  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.

• 36:32Alec Baldwin?

  My last question for you. You started working in non-military journalism when you were 30. If you were 30 right now, would you become a journalist?

• 36:40Speaker 04

  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 a 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.

• 37:13Alec Baldwin?

  In trouble.

• 37:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. I wanted to talk about, to a certain extent, what's wrong with it.

• 37:17Alec Baldwin?

  And what is that?

• 37:18Speaker 04

  And the same thing that's wrong with everything else in this country right now.

• 37:23Alec Baldwin?

  The corporate imperative, money.

• 37:26Speaker 04

  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 the speech. And people were stopping me on the street and saying, you're in the news business. What's wrong with this country? Things 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, 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.

• 38:09Speaker 04

  And there was this book that was written in 1970 called Future Shock.

• 38:14Alec Baldwin?

  Alvin Toffler.

• 38:14Speaker 04

  Yes. Which just turned out to be one of the most prescient books ever written.

• 38:20Alec Baldwin?

  Yes.

• 38:21Speaker 04

  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 and in science labs 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, well, everybody feels so alienated. Tafler predicted, he said, you know, it's going to be great opportunity, you know, and it's going to make a lot of people a lot of money, but it's going to be, have

• 39:05Speaker 04

  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 Pressures, yeah. Yes.

• 39:46Speaker 04

  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.

• 40:25Alec Baldwin?

  My thanks to journalist and former 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Croft. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach McNeese, and Victoria DeMartin. 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.

• 41:06Speaker 13

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• 42:03Speaker 14

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• 43:11Speaker 06

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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