Basic HTML Version
NEWS SUMMARY, May 7, 1979
Page 5
Mike Wallace had just asked, after hearing that Mr. Armstrong gives
Steuben crystal gifts to heads of state just as President Eisenhower
did, "Mr. Herbert Armstrong is a head of state?" Mr. Rader replied,
"Exactly; exactly." With that Wallace queried, "Then you are his secre
tary of state?" and Rader quickly responded "You've got it. By God you've
got it. That's it. That is the whole key. This is a state and we are re
presentatives of God and I am Mr. Armstrong's secretary of state."
Mr. Rader continued to explain to the employees in the Auditorium, "When
I am on these programs I am very mindful of what I say. I have to think
of our audience and the general audience. I have to try to think to
give a little levity to balance it off. Any who have seen 'My Fair Lady'
will remember words of that nature when professor Higgins was delighted
with his pupil, Elisa Doolittle, getting the point.
"In this case, however," continued Mr. Rader, "I quickly mixed it with
two things. A touch of levity (if you saw the video tape again you'd
see I smiled very broadly) and I was also indicating /that/ 'BY GOD'
his mind had been opened up. It only took /Mike Wallace;-an hour and a
half /Into the interview/. Later in the program I pointed out it took me
almost 20 years to understand where Mr. Armstrong was corning from, what
this W.:irk was all about."
"SECRET TAPING" OF THE 60 MINUTES INTERVIEW
As many of our readers will recall, Morley Safer held up a couple of
tapes at the end of the "60 Minutes" Mailbag segment April 22, and
said that Mr. Rader didn't know that they knew he was secretly taping
Mike Wallace while Mike was taping him. The obvious intent was to make
it appear that their use of surreptitiously obtained tapes was not wrong
that we did the same sort of thing.
We did tape the "60 Minutes" interview in Mr. Rader's office. Not with
a mike under Wallace's chair, though. But, this was not a confidential
telephone conversation. This was an interview being made-expressly for
broadcast to the whole nation. Everyone in the room knew the interview
was being taped. No confidentiality was being violated.
In contrast, the surreptitiously obtained tapes of Mr. Armstrong's pri
vate, confidential phone conversations were made without his knowledge
while he thought he was speaking to an associate in confidence. The
tapes were spliced together and edited to say what they wanted.
Evidently "60 Minutes" does not think their viewers are smart enough
to see the difference between legally obtained tapes of interviews made
for public release and illegally obtained tapes of private, confidential
telephone conversations!