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As the show’s star correspondent, Arledge chose Geraldo Rivera. In the late 1970s, 60
Minutes’s
cast of graying Cold War-era journalists in their tailored suits and trenchcoats was decidedly unhip. Geraldo, with his relative youth and his unapologetically open liberal politics, would be a hip, ethnic version of Mike Wallace.

When Geraldo first burst on the scene, he was seen by many as a welcome alternative to the largely Anglo-Saxon cast of television reporters who saw themselves as the direct descendants, if not the contemporaries, of Edward R. Murrow. Half Jewish, half Puerto Rican, a former lawyer for the street gang Young Bloods, a former advocate for the legalization of marijuana, in 1970, at age twenty-seven, Rivera had been tapped by WABC-TV news, which was trying to increase its ethnic representation.
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There, Geraldo almost instantly became a hit. His award-winning 1972 exposé on the grim conditions at Willowbrook, a mental institute on Staten Island, brought him national accolades. Geraldo seemed to be an updated version of the turn-of-the-century crusading journalist.
Newsweek
called him an “outspoken young mod with a passionate commitment to social reform.” A fawning profile in
Life
that year explained how to pronounce his name (“Hair-ALL-dough”). “He is the golden Puerto Rican,” panted
New York
magazine. “His shoulders taper to hips so minor he has to hold up his jeans with a strip of video.”

He became a celebrity in his own right. Geraldo had joined
Good Morning America
in 1975 and started a late night show called
Good Night America,
in which he explored sensational tabloid topics like UFOs, the Kennedy assassination, the Bermuda Triangle, and prostitution. When
Good Night America
was taken off the air in June 1977, Geraldo was so angry that he threatened to leave ABC. Much to his surprise, ABC accepted his resignation before Roone Arledge tapped him, first for the News Department (the week after his Son of Sam reporting, Arledge sent him off to Memphis to cover the death of Elvis), then for
20/20.

The news magazine debuted on June 6, 1978. The show included political cartoons, a Claymation Jimmy Carter singing “Georgia on My Mind,” and, as segues into and out of commercials, the definitions of supposedly obscure words like
exegesis.
There was even a gossip segment called “Cries and Whispers” that featured a couple exchanging secrets in bed. The lead story was a virtual parody of investigative reporting by Geraldo on how rabbits—cuddly, pink-eyed, helpless rabbits—are killed in the training of greyhounds. Wearing a red bandana around his neck and an open-collar Western shirt, the reporter looked into the camera and with grim indignation intoned, “The rabbits don’t stand a chance.” The debut show also included an alarmist segment on terrorism, an irreverent review of the week’s news called “The Wayward Week,” and dazzling graphics.
Washington Post
critic Tom Shales called it “probably the trashiest stab at candy-cane journalism yet made by a TV network. 20/20 managed to take a gross leap backward and a garish leap forward at the same time, and if at first it gave us the giggles, it may on second thought justifiably give us the creeps.”

Roone Arledge had viewed an early version of the premiere and had ordered some changes. The evening the show was broadcast, however, he was out on a date with Ethel Kennedy, and the next day he was so embarrassed by the reaction to the debut of his news magazine that he claimed he hadn’t seen it before it was
broadcast. “Frankly, I was appalled,” he told the
Washington Post.
“I hated the program,” he said to the
New York Times.

Arledge fired Hayes and Hughes, demoted Bob Shanks, and hired the staid but reliable Hugh Downs as anchor. He also eliminated the bizarre graphics and lead-ins, and the show’s second episode—restrained and conventional, with a piece by Geraldo on the homeless—bore virtually no resemblance to the first. “Roone Arledge didn’t become the Toscanini of TV sports technology without learning when to hit the stop-action button,” wrote Harry Waters in
Newsweek.
“In went Hugh Downs and a journalistic sobriety that, while not as slick as CBS’s ‘60 Minutes,’ at least tapped the program’s potential.”

Nonetheless, Arledge continued to think he could revitalize ABC News by importing people from outside television. He hired Carl Bernstein—whom he had earlier interviewed to be the host—to be ABC News’s Washington bureau chief. Bernstein, for all his genuine investigative accomplishments during Watergate, not only had never worked in television but also had never held a management position and indeed, while at the
Post,
had tended to be contemptuous of managers and bureaucrats. Furthermore, since the success of
All the President’s Men,
which became the best-selling nonfiction book to date, and the release of the movie version starring Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein, the reporter had come to think of himself not as a journalist but as a celebrity.

The disaster that followed seemed inevitable. “He’d have his clothes on all backward like he just got up, and he’d have come back from New York where he stayed some place dancing with Bianca Jagger and he was full of show biz stories and name dropping,” said Washington producer John Armstrong. “Bernstein became a joke,” said Charles Gibson. “He tried to bluff his way through the job and people would ignore him. He spent more and more time in that office, with nobody going in there and nobody talking to him.” Once, while working on a story in England, he borrowed £500 from a producer and lost it all gambling. After fourteen months, Arledge removed him as bureau chief and made him a correspondent, where he fared somewhat better, but parted company with the network in 1984, and devoted much of his time to writing and lecturing about the evils of gossip.

ABC also hired Ron Reagan Jr., the son of the President. He was widely liked by colleagues, but some remember with amusement that during the height of Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign against drug use, he was growing his own pot. “He told me that when the Secret Service agents came to tell him that his father had been shot,” recalls one co-worker, “he was absolutely terrified because he thought they were coming in to bust him.” When called for comment, young Reagan denied that he grew pot, but admitted that he smoked it.

But Geraldo remained Arledge’s most memorable—and controversial—hire. He was, to begin with, notoriously promiscuous, even in the sexually uninhibited world of television journalism. “I was like a pig,” he once admitted, “a grunting, voracious pig in heat.” He once did a report on hookers and then, by his own account, took the services of two of them for free. He once had sex in the boiler room with two college interns. In his autobiography,
Exposing Myself,
he boasted of bedding Bette Midler, the former Canadian Premier Pierre Trudeau’s wife Margaret, and Marian Javits, the wife of the well-known senator Jacob Javits. He had Mick Jagger and Rudolf Nureyev dancing provocatively in his Lower East Side apartment, where his walls were painted all black. He even seemed attractive to the remote Barbara Walters, on one occasion declaring that he thought she had “great tits.” He later added, “I’m a big fan of hers…. She’s a sexy woman. She’s a real good lookin’ old broad.”

It wasn’t just his unchecked libido that annoyed his critics, it was the way he injected his testosterone-fueled personal style into his reporting. As a roving correspondent for
20/20,
Geraldo pioneered a form of participatory, point-of-view television journalism that had its print counterpart in the Gonzo school of New Journalism originated by Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe. The stories Geraldo did tended to fall into two categories: one was what could be called Geraldo Goes on an Adventure; the other could be called Geraldo Investigates. In the former category, the correspondent ran with the bulls at Pamplona, swam with whales in the Caribbean, descended in a shark cage off San Francisco, boxed with Mohammed Ali, and shot hoops with Johnny Matthis. In
the investigative category, Geraldo explored traditional news magazine topics like Agent Orange and fetal alcohol syndrome. But he also ventured into what had previously been considered tabloid territory, including his hugely successful “Elvis Cover-up.”

While Geraldo’s investigative stories received considerable attention, they were also often attacked as irresponsible and unfair and lacking journalistic credibility. He and ABC were sued by a group of Chicago businessmen he had secretly taped with a hidden camera, which is illegal in Illinois, in a story accusing them of buying slum tenements, insuring them, and then burning them down without regard for the tenants. He was sued by an Ohio judge he accused of accepting sexual favors from prostitutes in exchange for lenient sentences and then sued by one of the women he had interviewed for describing her as a “hooker.” And all of those compromised broadcasts took place in just one year. Rivera won the case in the hooker story. The arson case was settled out of court.

By the early eighties,
20/20
had hit its stride. It was using broadcast news for the sorts of stories hitherto confined to the tabloid press. In the process it became adept at what some considered staging real news. In 1980, for example, in an exercise that recalled
New York Post
editor Steve Dunleavy’s appeal to the Son of Sam to surrender to him, Barbara Walters persuaded radical fugitive Abbie Hoffman to “surrender” to her on camera. They met on two boats in one of the lakes in upstate New York. While the story generated incredible publicity for Walters, Hoffman had already made a decision to turn himself in, and, critics observed, his real motive in granting the interview was to promote his new book,
Soon to be a Major Motion Picture.
In other words, the purported “surrender” was simply another Abbie Hoffman publicity stunt in which Walters had willingly participated.

Walters, however, always seemed to get away with such behavior. It wasn’t just her regal bearing and poised, dry, at times intimidating, style. Nor was it her vast array of friends and contacts. Barbara Walters was a team player in a way that Geraldo never was. Despite her often tabloidy topics, she was clearly a member of the establishment, and she would back off a topic
when she was told to. Geraldo basked in his bad-boy reputation, but by the mid-eighties Roone Arledge, the former sports producer who, having established the success of ABC News, now began to yearn for establishment approval, began to see his former protégé as a liability. “Geraldo had become a symbol in many people’s minds of how the line had been blurred between news and entertainment,” Arledge said to his biographer, Marc Gunther. He complained that people would say, “Yeah, they’re good, but they’re not really serious or they wouldn’t have Geraldo on.”

Arledge began distancing himself from his former star reporter. He stopped returning Geraldo’s calls. He began looking for an excuse to dump him. Then, in late 1985, he got one. In October,
20/20
put together a segment that promised to be a blockbuster. Correspondent Sylvia Chase and producer Stanhope Gould had a twenty-six-minute piece that linked Marilyn Monroe to the Kennedys and the mob. Based largely on Anthony Summers’s well-documented book,
Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe,
the segment also included an on-camera interview with Fred Otash, the detective who worked for
Confidential
and who claimed to be involved in tapping Marilyn Monroe’s house for Jimmy Hoffa. Sylvia Chase was one of the show’s most respected reporters;
TV Guide
once called her “the most trusted woman on TV.” She was responsible for a segment on flaming gas tanks on Ford’s subcompact Pinto that revealed that Ford had tested a safer gas tank but never used it. Producer Gould was also respected in the industry, and had won an Emmy for his work. “I’ve never seen anything comparable in shock value,” Milo Speriglio, a private detective who worked on the program as a consultant, said of the program. “I believed it would not just change our way of looking at a notorious real-life Hollywood drama, but our thinking about the Camelot years.”

There was some concern that Arledge, who had dated Ethel Kennedy, would kill the piece because of his ties to the Kennedy family. His links to the Kennedys went beyond Ethel. His top aide, David Burke, was a former high-level aide to Teddy Kennedy.
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Ethel’s
daughter Courtney Kennedy had married Arledge’s longtime assistant Jeff Ruhel. Ethel’s son Michael Kennedy was married to Vicki Gifford, the daughter of Frank Gifford, one of Arledge’s closest friends. And Arledge was quite close to Stephen Smith, a Kennedy brother-in-law. Roone had earlier killed a piece on Chappaquidick, but he insisted that his numerous ties to the Kennedy clan didn’t influence his coverage of the family. “Ethel Kennedy is a friend of mine like hundreds of people we do stories on,” Arledge said. “That has never affected our judgment.”

The Marilyn Monroe story was originally scheduled to air on the season premiere, September 26, 1985. At the last minute, however, Arledge declared that the segment “needed work” and bumped it to the next week. The segment was also cut from twenty-six minutes to seventeen. On October 3, while Sylvia Chase was getting her makeup done to go on the air with the Kennedy story, she learned that it would be delayed again. It was replaced by a piece on sniffer dogs and was cut down again, from seventeen minutes to thirteen. The next week, it was bumped again, and finally, ABC announced that the piece would not run at all. “It was gossip-column stuff,” said Arledge, and “did not live up to its billing.”

Inside ABC, there was outrage.
20/20
co-anchor Hugh Downs said that he thought the story had “air-tight” documentation. “All of us felt jolted by this preemptive strike against what we considered a balanced and revealing piece of television journalism,” Downs said. “I honestly believe that this is more carefully documented than anything any network did during Watergate.”

No one was more infuriated than Geraldo. “This is a fucking outrage,” he declared to his colleagues. “Arledge should resign.” He went to Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs and argued passionately that they should join forces and publicly protest the decision. Walters and Downs low-keyed their complaints, but Geraldo took his protest where he knew it would be most read: to
People
magazine and to Liz Smith’s gossip column. “The decision smacks of cronyism,” Rivera told
People.
“We were appalled that the head of this network would suddenly show such an interest in a particular story when he hasn’t shown interest in so many others we’ve done,” he told Liz Smith.