In 1972, Lesley Stahl was the newest hire at CBS News. Her inexperience, it later turned out, proved in some ways to be her making.
As is customary in newsrooms, the most junior member of the team tends to be the person who’s assigned to cover the least important stories — those that are unlikely to dominate the news cycle for more than a day, if that.
And when in June of that year five people were arrested for a break-in at a Washington, D.C., hotel and office complex, everyone at CBS News thought the story would turn out to be one of those flash-in-the-pan events. Stahl was sent to figure out what was going on — and the rest, as they say, is history.
More than 50 years later, the Watergate scandal is still one of the most prominent chapters in US political history and Stahl is one of the country’s best known journalists.
Speaking at Columbia Business School's second annual Think Bigger Innovation Summit — supported by The Hub, a CBS think tank — Stahl reflected on that fortuitous break: Many moving parts aligned, and she was in the right place at the right time.
But one thing she’s learned over the course of her decades-long, prolific career to follow is that it’s rare for an event — even one as momentous as Watergate — to be truly unprecedented or unique. History does repeat itself. Our collective duty is to appreciate that.
In a conversation with Sheena Iyengar, the S.T. Lee Professor of Business at CBS, Stahl compared some of the things shaping the news agenda today to the conflicts, wars, developments, and trends she’s covered over her illustrious career. It’s human nature, she concluded, to think of events as unprecedented and extraordinary, but it’s always worth questioning whether there’s a bias involved and whether we might have felt the same way “back then.”
In the same spirit, it can also seem like a particularly painful period of history might never end, she added, referencing in particular the ongoing war in the Middle East. But it’s important to remember that the “river of history keeps flowing,” she said. “It will morph in some way. And it certainly won't end up where we started, because that's not the way it goes.”
What Makes a Good Leader?
As a function of all the history Stahl has not only borne witness to but also reported on, she’s well placed to answer one of the questions that’s arguably at the heart of the Think Bigger mission: What makes a good leader?
In her conversation with Iyengar, Stahl recounted an anecdote about wanting to do a story for television on precisely that question. In preparation, she reached out to Phil Simms, a former football quarterback-turned-commentator who played in the NFL for 14 seasons with the New York Giants. Stahl remembers how Simms laughed when she told him she wanted to do a piece about what makes good leadership and wanted to interview him.
Good leadership is “ineffable,” he told her: There’s no single formula, and you can’t easily and succinctly define it. Good leadership comes out of complex chemistry. It’s the product of the exact right mix of certain qualities and characteristics, expressed in the right way and at the right time. And ever since her talk with Simms, Stahl has subscribed to the idea that good leadership can’t easily be described but you certainly know it when you see it.
Freedom of Speech Today
Finally, against a backdrop of campus protests and global geopolitical unrest, Iyengar asked Stahl a question so many in US academia, the news, and beyond have been grappling with: What does freedom of speech today really mean, and how might it be redefined to serve the common good?
It’s a question that underpins one of the most troubling conundrums of our time, Stahl said, and as such, there’s no perfect answer. One thing that is clear, however, is that we need to rethink the laws that govern us. One might even say, we need to think bigger.
We have a system of rules today that is rigid, Stahl explained. Many of those rules are based on laws that were passed in the 1700s, before slavery was abolished, for example. And these laws, she continued, are treated as immutable, even as everything else around them changes. We don’t have a mechanism for our systems to catch up with technology, for example, and that’s unsustainable, she said.
So, yes, how to redefine freedom of speech in this country may well be one of the toughest questions we’re all facing, Stahl noted. But if the Think Bigger philosophy teaches us anything, it’s that we must have the courage to confront these uncomfortable questions if we want to make real, sustainable progress toward a better future for all. Change is never easy, but being brave enough to tackle the most incendiary questions certainly seems like a promising start.
