Anchoring the news for WSM-TV in Nashville with Dan Miller and Pat Sajak was like being on TV with your family. Dan was eleven years my senior, and he made it easy to follow his lead. I was comfortable subordinating myself to his elder statesmanship and avuncular style, and he seemed comfortable in the role of mentor to me. Dan and I also shared a passion for music. I discovered this one night between the six and eleven o’clock newscasts. I usually spent those hours banging on an old upright piano in the WSM production studios, practicing and composing music. One night Dan walked in holding a vintage Autoharp, also known as a zither. He strummed the thing like he was Pete Townshend from the Who. Our jam sessions ended up becoming a nightly ritual. Dan taught me Merle Haggard songs; I taught him Beatles tunes.
When I wasn’t on the news set with Dan and Pat, I worked under the direction and instruction of our news director, Mike Kettenring. Kettenring was exacting, merciless, and he suffered no foolishness. Each morning he would meet with the reporting staff, distributing written critiques of the previous evening’s newscast. He would then play a VHS recording of the broadcast, all the while commenting, gesturing, and scribbling his reviews on a giant whiteboard. Every reporting, interviewing, writing, and editing technique I use today has come from the tutelage of Mike Kettenring.
In 1975, he coached me through an investigation of the Nashville fire codes. The city had been plagued by fatalities following numerous fires in newly constructed apartment complexes. The builders were allegedly creating fire hazards in the crawl spaces joining the apartments in an attempt to save money. Our reporting began with clandestine, Watergate-like “deep throat” tips from inspectors inside the fire marshal’s office, hinting that the building approvals were being signed off on without the proper inspections. When our series of reports began airing, WSM received threats of legal action, demanding that we reveal our sources. Kettenring was steadfast in his support of protecting my sources, even under enormous pressure from station management to back down, and like always, he was right.
Ultimately, under pressure the fire marshal stepped down, the Nashville fire codes were rewritten, and the series won the station and me an Associated Press award for Investigative Reporting. Indeed, Mike Kettenring’s unyielding dedication to the importance of investigative journalism and his unflinching persistence throughout the story lifted WSM-TV News into a realm reserved for the likes of 60 Minutes, and it opened the door a year later for the next chapter in my career as a correspondent for WCBS News back home in New York.
Whenever I reported or produced a story at WSM that I believed might be exceptional, I archived it on three-quarter-inch tape. It wasn’t that I was unhappy with my job in Nashville. Working with news director Mike Kettenring was transformative. However, I still felt the constant pull toward even more. I had my sights set on a top-ten news market.
Broadcasting magazine frequently published stories about award-winning news operations. One of them was WCBS-TV in New York City. In the story the writer singled out the news director, Ed Joyce, as a force of innovation and journalistic excellence. I couldn’t tell you exactly why, but I knew that I knew that I knew that I would, somehow, get an interview with Mr. Joyce. So one Friday evening, when the WSM staff had gone home for the weekend following the 11:00 p.m. news, I stayed behind, grabbed three of my three-quarter-inch archival video-tapes, switched on the CMX editing deck, and began piecing together a compilation of my work. Before dawn, I had a new six-minute demo tape.
On that tape were excerpts of my investigative reports; snippets of me anchoring the news with Dan and Pat; and live interviews with politicians during election coverage. (Oddly enough, the video of the election coverage included me reporting from Republican headquarters with a nineteen-year-old Oprah Winfrey seen over my shoulder, filing her own live report for rival news station WLAC-TV.) I typed out a personal letter to Ed Joyce, shoved the demo tape and the letter into my backpack, and pointed my Datsun 240Z back home to my apartment in Bellevue. Within three weeks of sending off the tape to New York, I received a letter from Ed Joyce.
I was very familiar with form rejection letters. They always started out the same way. You could tell your name was inserted using a different typewriter, or even a ballpoint pen. Except this was different. This appeared to be a personal letter from Mr. Joyce himself. In it, he mentioned how much he enjoyed the tape and suggested that we meet at the broadcast center in New York City at my earliest convenience.
What?! This was not a rejection letter.
I reread the letter from the beginning. This was not just a friendly meet-and-greet either. This was an itinerary! Mr. Joyce’s assistant would take care of my travel arrangements. I should be prepared with proper attire to do what he called an “audition” on the news set at WCBS in New York. I would spend three days with Mr. Joyce, general manager Neil Derrough, assignment editor Donna Ziede, and several producers.
The audition went remarkably well and on August 4, 1976, I walked through the CBS Broadcast Center security desk in New York City wearing my CBS personnel badge for the first time. It was my inaugural day as a correspondent for WCBS News. I was barely twenty-four years old, and the youngest reporter in the building. If I had known then what I know today about the scope of the job I had signed on for, I am confident I would have run out of the CBS building like my hair was on fire.
This was CBS’s flagship local news operation, after all. They employed famous reporters, with names my parents recognized. There was John Stossel, the decorated consumer reporter, who would become my close friend and who would soon advance to ABC’s 20/20 news magazine with Barbara Walters. There was Dave Marash, veteran print and radio journalist. Marash was a musician and jazz music aficionado whom I soon bonded with as we sat front-row center in after-hours jazz clubs after the news. There was legendary WCBS anchorman Jim Jensen, known for his booming, authoritative voice, whom I used to watch from our TV when I was a first grader on Long Island. And now I would be working on the same news team with them? The bullpen of news reporters, anchors, writers, and producers was no less formidable. It was a who’s who of remarkable talent.
If you were fortunate enough to catch HBO’s Newsroom series, then you can imagine this scene. In the first moment when the news director, Ed Joyce, introduced me around the newsroom, there’s no better way to describe this experience than to just say it was like “Welcome to Fido’s first day at the dog park!” At the sight of Mr. Joyce, everyone looked up from their typewriters, acknowledged their boss, scanned me, sniffed the air for the scent of fear, and then got back to business.
I bonded easily with another recent hire, newswriter Andrew Heyward, who was two years my senior. Heyward graduated from Harvard College in 1972 with a BA in history and literature and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Not all that long out of a pup tent, I decided to keep my résumé to myself for a while. Heyward would go on to become president of CBS News, but not before he, like Nashville’s Mike Kettenring, would closely mentor me as a newswriter and reporter-producer.
I began my employment at WCBS at the nexus of what was known as “participatory journalism”—a bit of an oxymoron—where reporters were encouraged to insert themselves into the story to add more drama to the broadcast and perhaps a more powerful connection to the viewer. The trend created giant news personalities. One of the most successful was Geraldo Rivera, a local reporter at rival WABC-Eyewitness News.
Geraldo’s exposé on the Willowbrook State School shocked New York City—and the world, for that matter. Willowbrook housed over six thousand intellectually disabled people despite having a maximum capacity of four thousand. In early 1972, Geraldo conducted a series of investigations at Willowbrook uncovering deplorable conditions, including overcrowding, abhorrent sanitary facilities, and physical and sexual abuse of residents by members of the school’s staff. Parents who watched the exposé had been unaware of what was happening to the children they’d admitted to Willowbrook. They had placed their family members at the school to receive care that they could not provide. Now they were watching along with television viewers as Geraldo and his camera crew marched through the halls of the school revealing unspeakable atrocities.
The exposé, Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace, garnered national attention and won Rivera a Peabody Award. He later appeared on the nationally televised Dick Cavett Show with his film of patients at the school. As a result of the overcrowding and inhumane conditions, a class-action lawsuit was filed against the state of New York by the parents of five thousand residents of Willowbrook in federal court on March 17, 1972. The political reaction to this report led to the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Geraldo continued to build a reputation as a champion of the people. He was famous for “going in rolling,” and he and a film crew regularly ambushed landlords, street vendors, and politicians, browbeating them with a barrage of questions while his camera crew recorded their awkward, and at times violent, reactions. By the time I began my work at CBS, Geraldo’s persona had grown to near absurdity.
I recall one afternoon when all of us television, radio, and print journalists were rushing to the scene of a hostage crisis only to find the perpetrator screaming for Geraldo from a third-story window. Much to the dismay and horror of the local police detectives, the hostage-taker invited Geraldo up to interview him. Geraldo did the interview and then walked the criminal down to the waiting officers. All of us journalists acted horrified, too, although I remember it more as jealousy if I’m being honest.
Not to be outdone, my fellow TV news reporters and I inserted ourselves in more than a few news stories during this trend in the late 1970s.
When a landlord in the South Bronx was accused of limiting steam-heat to his renters, I went and spent the night with one of the families in the building. The next day I proudly demonstrated on camera how I couldn’t brush my teeth because the toothpaste was frozen solid.
I ran the NYC Marathon carrying a camera and broadcast my run live. Painful.
I got shot at during a nine-hour siege covering the JFK bus hijacking story in July of ’77.
Later that month, I covered the legendary blackout of 1977, whispering my reports into a microphone from the bathroom stall of a Western Auto store, my cameraman risking both our lives by recording the rioting and looting through a crack in the bathroom door. Over three thousand people were arrested, and the city’s already crowded prisons were so overburdened that some suggested reopening the recently condemned Manhattan Detention Complex to accommodate them.
Then there was my “Con Man Cabbies: A Special Report!” with camera crew Steve Jackson and Howard Raymond shooting video through one-way glass in a white van. I posed as a Swedish businessman; I had been a Swedish exchange student in high school, so I knew a few Swedish words. We began our investigation on a tip that some New York City cab drivers were weighing their passengers halfway through the trip from the JFK Airport into the city. Rumor had it they would pull their cab over somewhere in the middle of Queens, open the trunk, take out a bathroom scale, and then weigh the passenger while the passenger held their luggage. The crooked cabbies then created some cockamamie formula for the fare increase, based on the number on the scale. No cab driver had weighed me, but nearly one-fourth of the cabbies did overcharge me once they heard my fake Swedish accent. After we ran the three-part series, I couldn’t get a taxi for six months. I was a marked man.
One of the biggest stories I covered was the Son of Sam manhunt (when we began our coverage, he was called the .44 Caliber Killer). David Berkowitz killed six people and wounded seven others between the middle of 1976 and July 1977, before being arrested in August. As the number of victims increased, Berkowitz was able to elude the biggest police manhunt in the history of New York City. He left letters that mocked the police and promised more killings. The killing spree terrorized our New York City viewers. One of his attacks occurred not far from where my crew and I were covering another story. The police scanner in our news van erupted with the news that the .44 Caliber Killer had struck again.
I am now on the two-way radio with the assignment desk at CBS. Nightshift editor Andy Meppen is relaying the location of the attack. It’s less than a half mile away from our location. Cameraman Dennis Drinnon is already strapping on his battery belt and pulling the giant Ikegami news camera onto his shoulder. My heart begins to race as I realize we are the first news team to arrive. It looks as if there are a hundred police cars on the scene. Officers are running everywhere, ostensibly trying to find the trail of the killer. Out of the corner of my eye I see a young man sitting on a ledge. His head is in his hands. He is covered in what appears to be blood. I motion to Dennis to roll the camera and switch on his light.
Dennis looks at me with surprise. He’s clearly uncomfortable. “Uh, hey, John . . .”
Too late. My hand and the WCBS microphone are in John Diehl’s face. I make a spinning motion with my arm, cueing Dennis to roll his camera. I can barely get my questions out, consumed by the adrenaline in my bloodstream. This is a huge scoop. I am the first reporter on the scene, interviewing a victim of the .44 Caliber Killer! John Diehl is now sobbing as I pepper him with questions—about his girlfriend, about his first thought when he heard the gunshot, whether he saw the killer, whether he was frightened. His hands are bright red. There is blood and human tissue in his lap—pieces of his girlfriend’s skull. He’s now crying so hard I can’t understand his answers. And then there’s a hand on my arm. It’s Dennis. He’s doused the blinding Frezzi light on his camera. He has stopped recording. Over my shoulder I see two very angry detectives hastily approaching. One is a woman. She shakes her head at me in disgust as she wraps a blanket around John Diehl’s shoulders and begins to comfort him.
“Leave, now. This is an active crime scene.”
Like a slap in the face to someone in uncontrollable hysterics, reality sets in. Here is where a paradigm shift becomes painfully real, particularly when it occurs in the context of doing what you think you were put here to do. If I had just taken a deep breath and reacted to the pause cued by my cameraman, I might have acted responsibly. I would have seen this man as a human being, suffering horribly. Instead, I am consumed by self-inflicted shame. In a crucial moment where I had an opportunity to act with compassion, I let pride and selfish ambition rule my decision.
On Jan. 29, 1977, in the brick plaza in front of the Forest Hills Inn, Christine Freund, 26, sat in the car with her boyfriend, John Diehl, 30. They had just seen a movie up the street and now a pudgy guy with a wool watch cap on ran up to the car and held a gun out in both hands and fired three shots through the passenger window and into Christine Freund’s head. She died. [John survived.]1
Dennis and I drove the interview tape back to the broadcast center in silence. The interview aired on the newscast, and I was congratulated for my aggressive reporting work. But at what cost? As I write this, the memory plays like a movie in my head. It’s easy to understand why that awful decision has remained with me for these forty-plus years. It was one I worked to rectify, both personally and professionally.
The year 1977 was not the ideal time to be living or working in New York City but it was the perfect time to be a street reporter. The city and its people were coming apart at the seams. It was painful to watch but plentiful to report on. “Slow news day” was never heard in our newsroom. My fellow reporters and I were filing at least two stories a day, seven days a week. There was the massive financial downturn. There was rising poverty and inequality levels, paranoia about the Son of Sam murders, and the debauchery of Studio 54. In the summer of 1977 fires burned down much of the Bronx. Then hip-hop music began to rise from the ashes. The looting of music stores during the blackout allowed people who couldn’t afford turntables and mixers to pick up the equipment they needed to become DJs. All of these things took hold of the city and, in lockstep with high crime rates, a widespread belief emerged among its people that New York City was in irreversible decline.
By the end of the 1970s, more than a million people had left the city. Fled is a more apt verb. This ultimately became a population loss that would not be recouped for another twenty-five years. To quote Jonathan Mahler, the author of The Bronx Is Burning, “The clinical term for it, fiscal crisis, didn’t approach the raw reality. Spiritual crisis was more like it.”2
This miasma of circumstances also made it a very bad time to be a homeless person in New York City. (Is there ever a good time?) Out-of-work white males in particular, often in very bad health and many with alcohol and drug addictions, made up a big part of the growing homeless community. There were more than fifteen thousand people in the city’s shelters by the end of 1977, but most of the homeless were confined to “skid rows,” with the Bowery as New York’s homeless hub. In the Bowery, men would be found sleeping in the streets, the subway, or tiny, windowless, ninety-cents-a-night hotel rooms. Police stations also became the shelter for hundreds of homeless people on any given night. And to make matters even worse, the city’s financial predicament meant that there was little money available to expand any meaningful services to the homeless.
This story needed to be told and I felt the need to be the one to tell it.
I pitched my idea to the news desk. They were, of course, familiar with the data and agreed to a two-part series in the dead of winter in 1978. Andrew Heyward, now an associate producer, had what was, at the time, a novel, radical idea, even for this era of participatory journalism. Cameraman/documentarian Steve Jackson and soundman Howard Raymond would join me to film John Tesh: Homeless in NYC. We would take the audience on a vérité trip through the plight of the homeless by spending three nights in subzero temperatures with some of those unfortunate enough to have missed out on one of the limited number of shelter beds.
It took three hours of makeup and many tubes of glue and charcoal to apply my homeless disguise—beard, ratty wig, and tattered clothing—but eventually, and with Jackson and Raymond once again recording behind the one-way glass of a van, I began walking the streets of the Bowery. There was only one problem, at least in the beginning: I had no acting experience, so my first attempt to wander the streets was laughable. Even the homeless men shook their heads at me: a shivering six-foot-six, 210-pound man with good posture. They were readily able to spot my masquerade.
Jackson: Tesh. You look like a friggen tight end for the Jets!
This all changed, however, once I purchased a pint of rot-gut Mad Dog 20/20 wine and chugged half of it before pouring the rest over my clothing. I now stumbled, smelled, and spoke in character. As I shuffled through the Bowery, my appearance and “walking dead” gait were horrifying to anyone who dared look in my direction. I begged for cash. People changed sides of the street. I attempted to enter one of the shelters. No room. Full.
The footage we took to document my every step was both enlightening and disturbing. For the first time the WCBS audience would see homelessness through the eyes of the homeless. It was also heartbreaking personally, as I befriended dozens of homeless men and women on the streets, knowing that I would soon be returning to the warmth and safety of my Upper West Side apartment. I was fully aware that, in this withering cold, at least one of them wouldn’t make it through the night. I bought more MD 20/20 and shared it with my new friends. The burn of the alcohol generated warmth, if only for a moment.
It’s hard to find a hero in a news report like this. But one showed up nonetheless. I’m sorry I cannot remember his name or his badge number. He knows who he is. After I got turned away from two shelters, I walked up the front steps of Manhattan’s Seventh Police Precinct, Lower East Side. I was a mess. I smelled horrible. By now I was exhausted and nearly frostbitten. The temperature was three degrees. As I approached the front entrance of the station, the sergeant raised his hand, motioning for me to stop. With my wireless microphone hidden inside my coat, Jackson and Raymond recorded my conversation as I told the officer how I was turned away from the overcrowded shelters, and I asked him if he could find me a warm place to lie down. If not, I would surely freeze, I told him.
Without hesitation, the police sergeant acted with compassion. He told me he would find a space for me in his precinct house to spend the night out of the cold, if only for one night. He reached out to take my hand. I hesitated. Instead of taking his hand, I held mine up in protest, then motioned over my shoulder for the crew to open the sliding door of the van, revealing their presence. I explained to the officer that our goal with the hidden camera and personal immersion was to reveal the true plight of the city’s homeless population.
The officer agreed to answer a few questions. I spent the next forty minutes recording his answers, which were both forthright and chilling. He was risking a reprimand from his superiors—offering opinions to a TV news crew was way outside an officer’s protocol—but his honesty and concern added gravity to the pictures we would broadcast later that week. They also reinforced how I had come to feel over those three frigid days, and they helped to make me feel just slightly less ashamed about the way I’d treated poor John Diehl in service of my own unrelenting personal ambition.
The homelessness series, complete with a music score I composed in my home recording studio, won an Emmy award for me and WCBS, but most importantly, it raised awareness for the epidemic of lost, suffering souls in the city. The series also became part of a new conversation in city hall about the lack of homeless shelters in the Lower East Side. Still, since my news report in 1978 the homeless population in New York City has only gotten worse. By early 2019, there were more than sixty-three thousand people sleeping in the New York City municipal shelter system—up 43 percent from just ten years earlier. Nearly four thousand more sleep on the street, in the subway system, or in other public spaces.3 It’s a problem that is not going away.
My most poignant remembrances of my evenings on the cold Manhattan sidewalks were the times when I felt like a dead man walking. Not human. It was the way people looked upon me. When eyes met, it was only for a moment. But that was enough. No one should feel that. I was transformed by those nights in the Bowery. To many I was a ghoulish figure to be avoided at all costs. To my “peers” on the street I was a brother in suffering.