The day after they broadcast a tape of Dr. Jack Kevorkian killing a terminally ill 52-year-old man by lethal injection, Don Hewitt, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, and Mike Wallace, who reported the story, sat in Mr. Hewitt’s office on West 57th Street watching one of their many critics hold forth on TV. Howard Kurtz was making the point on CNN that had 60 Minutes not aired the tape, Dr. Kevorkian "simply would not have gotten the same attention." Though the remark was not meant as a compliment, Mr. Hewitt and Mr. Wallace vigorously nodded their heads in approval, taking it as one.
"There was no story without the tape," Mr. Wallace said. "You’d have a lot of talking heads, which can be fascinating, but just look at how the whole country has focused on it now. Every radio talk show is talking about it."
The rap on Mr. Hewitt and Mr. Wallace is that they pumped up ratings during the all-important November sweeps with the ultimate sacrilege: death as entertainment. They argue that their perennially top-rated show (it had been No. 8 the week before) has no history of sweeps whoring, and that they were reporting legitimate news, even as they recognized that Dr. Kevorkian is, in Mr. Wallace’s words, "a publicity seeker . . . a zealot, fanatic, whatever." He added that he had initially not been keen on the story himself. "As soon as I heard the word 'Kevorkian,' I thought -- ," Mr. Wallace said, ending the sentence with a gagging noise. "He’s shopworn. I’ve seen the act before. Why in the world could I possibly be interested?" What persuaded him was the tape.
And I must say the tape persuaded me, too. It is not entertaining like the crime carnage of local news, nor is it terrifying like the Pulitzer Prize photo of the South Vietnamese police commander executing a Vietcong soldier in 1968. It is upsetting, and forces you to stop and think. It thrust me back to a chilling moment I had had, a moment many Americans have had, when a doctor quietly asked a leading question about the "quality of life" of a hospitalized loved one who could live on indefinitely. The "60 Minutes" piece presented a man crippled by Lou Gehrig’s disease who still had his own waning chance to answer this question himself, and chose death with the approval of his wife and brother - who gave their own testimony to Mr. Wallace.
Courts can and should judge Dr. Kevorkian’s role in all this; they must rise to his taunts and determine if he’s a criminal manipulator of the terminally ill. But it is not so easy to condemn Thomas Youk, the man who turned to him in desperation, or to dismiss the words of his family. Not if you can imagine yourself or anyone you love in his or their shoes.
In a culture where oral sex has joined graphic violence as routine fare, candor about terminal illness and death is still often taboo. Though "60 Minutes" has had its debacles - its tobacco retreat of '95 and the recent Kathleen Willey botch - this piece wasn’t one of them. Its sober account of a man’s final breath, not the nadir of taste in TV’s Springerland, did provoke the entire country into talking openly about the right to die.
"It's going on right now in every hospital in New York," said Mr. Hewitt of assisted suicide and euthanasia, with only a touch of hyperbole. Whatever is going on, it’s often shrouded in whispers and secrecy. Honest debate, which can lead to sensible regulation of managed-death scenarios now exercised covertly, is desperately needed - even if its catalyst is Dr. Kevorkian, yet another one of those American flakes (remember Madalyn Murray O’Hare?) who habitually push the most inflammatory moral questions onto the national radar screen.
I asked Mr. Wallace, who is 80, if he had any personal thoughts about these questions, should he find himself in the situation of a Thomas Youk. "Would I want this for myself? Absolutely," he answered. "Instead of having some stranger come in and assist me with suicide, I’d like to say to a doctor who was a friend, who knew me, 'Enough - help me.'" Mr. Wallace added that he wasn’t advocating any position in his piece, and I think its straightforward presentation of Dr. Kevorkian’s ghoulish self-promotion bears him out. If anything, 60 Minutes may finally speed the trial of Dr. Death for murder, which, whatever the verdict, can only be a spur to a frank, humane and long-overdue national conversation about the boundaries of life.
Copyright 1998 The New York Times. Reprinted by permission.
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