The Inimitable Art of Lesley Stahl: Inside Her History-Making Career with '60 Minutes'
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Mary Kouw/CBS
For the first five years that Lesley Stahl worked at 60 Minutes, her face hurt from smiling so hard.
"I knew that I had landed in the single best place for a broadcast journalist," she tells PEOPLE. "I knew it then and I know it today."
Prior to joining the show, Stahl was already doing the work that any TV journalist would envy, propelled to stardom early on in her career when she was assigned to cover Watergate as a rookie. As CBS News' first female White House correspondent, she reported on the Carter, Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations for Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather's CBS Evening News broadcasts; for many of those years, she moonlighted as the anchor of Face the Nation.
Stahl had become a fixture in American households by the dawn of the '90s, helping solidify women's place in TV news. If Nancy Dickerson and Barbara Walters forged a clearing in the male-dominated industry, Stahl fought tooth and nail to widen it — ensuring that more women had room to follow their lead.
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CBS Photo Archive/Getty
One day 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt approached Stahl with a proposition: If she would agree to leave D.C. behind and make New York her home base, he would be thrilled to put her on his show.
"I said, 'Well, let me think about it,'" Stahl recalls.
She rang her husband, fellow journalist Aaron Latham, who told her she was out of her mind for not accepting it on the spot. "He said, 'Call him up and tell him yes right away. Don't play with him. Just do it.'" So she did, trading her Washington community for a life in transit — a way of living she soon grew to cherish for giving her ample travel time to catch up on reading.
In March of 1991, Stahl made her 60 Minutes debut as a correspondent. For 31 years now, she's told herself, You're going to tire of this some day. It's going to get routine. "But," she tells PEOPLE, "it's not routine."
On a Thursday afternoon, Stahl briefly ducks into her Midtown Manhattan office. She's just returned from Taiwan, which is under threat amid U.S.-China tensions right now, and she needs face time with her team to strategize about how they'll approach the segment.
If all goes as planned, she'll only have a few moments to chat with them — she has an evening flight to catch, she thinks, and still hasn't finished packing.
"I'm supposed to go to Tehran tonight and we are expecting to go, but it's not 100%," Stahl says, explaining that as she speaks, her team is working out some kinks to make sure the Iranian government will give her the access she'd need for her story. "I've never had this before."
She takes a sip of her freshly reheated coffee and trusts her team to sort it out. Within minutes, they do.
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Mary Kouw/CBS Lesley Stahl in her N.Y.C. office
Stahl is a rare breed of interviewer that aspiring journalists study: always calm in the face of conflict and fearless in the pursuit of truth.
During her fourth sit-down with Donald Trump, just before the 2020 election, she repeatedly challenged the then-president for feeding her unverified claims, ultimately leading him to cut the tense interview short and walk out of the room. Trump's public unraveling remains her most memorable on-screen moment in recent years, but it's hardly the first time her persistence has caught a world leader off guard.
Speaking with PEOPLE in 1999, NPR's Linda Wertheimer attempted to characterize her dear friend. "She has such a lovely smile when she sits down to talk," Wertheimer noted. "Then she asks these dreadfully tough questions. It must be sort of a shock."
60 Minutes Lesley Stahl interviews the Iranian president
Stahl's tenacious interview style has earned her 13 Emmys over the years — nine of which live on various surfaces around her office — but she's unwilling to go so far as to consider herself one of the greats.
"I'm a student and there are some excellent, absolutely excellent, interviewers," she says, adding that she religiously keeps up with all the Sunday broadcasts and is sure to tape them if she's away. "I sometimes watch and I say, 'I wouldn't have been able to get that out of that person.'"
An immediate name that comes to her mind as an inspiration is Margaret Brennan, only the second woman to anchor Face the Nation in its 68-year history; Stahl, of course, being the first.
"Each one of us — people who interview for a living — have their own special technique, I guess the word is. Personality," she says. "And sometimes, leaning back gets things out of people that a leaning forward person, like me, might not get. So I admire other techniques a lot."
At 80 years old, Stahl brings her heart to the job every day. "There's no ladder up from here if you want to keep being a reporter," she says, "and that's fine with me."
A couple times as she reflects on interview subjects that touched her and her supportive husband of 45 years, who died of Parkinson's disease in late July, her eyes glisten and she smiles through the joy that her career has brought. It becomes clear why people feel so comfortable around her.
"I'm so privileged," she says. "It's corny, and I sound like a jerk, but it's how I feel."
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