It is rare that I don’t know what to make of a book. If I zip through a book with ease, it is usually a sign that I enjoyed it. If I struggle through it but finish, it was okay, but not necessarily something I’d write home about. But what about a book that I zip through with ease, and struggle with along the way? That doesn’t happen often, but it happened while reading Ira Rosen’s new book, Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes.
Rosen was a long-time producer at 60 Minutes working with many of the correspondents, especially Mike Wallace and his book was about his time as a producer in television. (He also worked for ABC for a time before returning to 60 Minutes.) Hollywood memoirs are a kind of guilty pleasure of mine, and I particularly enjoy memoirs and biographies about journalists: My War by Andy Rooney, A Reporter’s Life by Walter Cronkite, A Life on the Road by Charles Kuralt to name just a few. But I struggled with Rosen’s book in ways that I did not with these other books.
While I wouldn’t characterize Rosen’s precisely as mean-spirited, it certainly came across as someone who decided to air all of his grievances and show the worst sides of those people he worked with. I think this would be understandable if Rosen had been treated poorly and that poor treatment affected him in a negative way. Rosen recounts many times when people like Mike Wallace, Diane Sawyer, and Morley Safer treated him or other people rudely. But what made Rosen’s account interesting was that he never seemed to mind this treatment. He was sort of immune to it, and focused on doing the best job as he could as a producer. So why complain about it now, in a book? I just couldn’t understand that.
Perhaps the reason is perspective: Rosen writes from the point of view of a producer, while other books I’ve read are from the points of view of the reporters themselves. Andy Rooney was grumpy at times, as everyone knows–that’s part of what people loved about him. He had complaints about CBS, but he generally didn’t single out people, but the organization as a whole. Cronkite and Kuralt, in their books, seemed to handle this by omissions: they wrote about people they admired, or who helped them out, and didn’t mention those who created problems or roadblocks.
Still, despite Rosen’s dramatic characterizations of those correspondents he worked with, the book was endlessly fascinating. Reading it, I felt like a fly on the wall at some interesting conversations. It made some of the more outlandish stories Rosen had to tell about people all the more out of place in the book, and made me wonder: was the book written as a memoir, or as memoir disguised a vehicle for Rosen to vent about his treatment as a producer? Maybe it was both, and maybe that’s what made it both a fascinating read and a struggle.
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