Steve Kroft may have had an acclaimed 30-season career at 60 Minutes before he retired in 2019, but if he had the chance to do it again, he “probably wouldn’t.”
Kroft joined Bill O’Reilly on the latter’s We’ll Do It Live! podcast, where he reflected on his decades at the iconic newsmagazine, a job that he confessed he “hated.”
“60 Minutes was really appealing, and I thought, I wasn’t really sure I was ever going to get there. I didn’t really seriously think about it. When I did, there’s so many things that, first of all, the job is just 24 hours a day,” Kroft said of the grind at the prestigious program. “I mean, you may get a couple hours of bad sleep. Beepers going off, getting on jets, going here and there, the whole thing, then coming back and spending, you know, three or four days writing the script, and then going to the screenings and then getting on, starting it all over again.”
He also recalls the competitive atmosphere and envy among fellow journalists after he got the gig.
“I can remember when I was tapped to go to 60 Minutes, I thought this was fantastic and I expected a lot of people would just come up and say, ‘That’s really great, I’m really happy for you,’” he recalled. “And then you realize after a while that not everybody was happy that I got this job. There were other people that wanted it. And so then you’ve all of a sudden made a bunch of enemies. And that’s, it’s just, you know, it’s a snake pit.”
Instead, Kroft said the best job he had at CBS was when he was a correspondent in the London bureau.
“I got to see the world, that was the job I always wanted,” Kroft said.
Still, Kroft found it “exhilarating” to do the stories he did.
“It was exhilarating in the sense that the reason I loved the job was because of the stories that I could do, and the fact that they liked good stories,” he said.
When Kroft retired at the age of 73, he was 60 Minutes‘ longest-tenured correspondent and had conducted some of the long-running show’s most indelible interviews. He spoke to the Clintons in 1992 when Hillary Clinton famously invoked Tammy Wynette amid claims that then-candidate Bill Clinton had had an affair with Gennifer Flowers.
“It began awkwardly because of the delicate subject matter, but as Hillary got more involved and joined in the conversation, I knew we had a good story,” Kroft, who admitted he was nervous about the big sit-down, previously recalled to The Hollywood Reporter. “When she made the Tammy Wynette remark, I knew we were home free.”
He also had memorable sit-downs with Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood and Barack Obama (16 in total, including one after the 2011 assassination of Osama Bin Laden) and he led significant investigations into Saddam Hussein’s hidden financial assets and insider trading in Congress. Still, he said the story that had the greatest impact on him was a 2001 report about financial firm Sandler O’Neill, which lost a third of its employees in the World Trade Center attacks.
“In the days following the disaster, the surviving partner, Jimmy Dunne, allowed us to follow him and other managers as they planned the funerals, comforted and counseled the families, and against impossible odds, kept the company running during the worst days,” he said. “It survived and is thriving today.”
When asked how his producers would describe him, the skilled, veteran correspondent, also a perfectionist, said, “I think if you asked them during the scripting process the answer would be unprintable. When the story is finished and screened, they would be more complimentary. I’m not easy.”
Over the summer, Kroft briefly returned to the spotlight when he joined Jon Stewart on The Daily Show to share his thoughts on Paramount’s controversial $16 million settlement with President Trump tied to 60 Minutes‘ editing of its interview with Trump’s opponent in the 2024 presidential election, former Vice President Kamala Harris. Kroft was blunt in his assessment of the deal, calling it a “shakedown.”
When asked about the mood at 60 Minutes in light of his likely ongoing communications with past colleagues, Kroft agreed with Stewart’s assessment that the settlement is likely “devastating to the people who work in a place that prides themselves on contextual, good journalism.”
“I think there’s a lot of fear over there,” Kroft said. “Fear of losing their job, fear of what’s happening to the country, fear of losing the First Amendment, all of those things.”
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