All the King's Henchmen

By now, many of us have had time to absorb the depressing drama unfolding at 60 Minutes, the 57-year-old CBS News flagship show. After months of reporting, editing, fact-checking, and legal-reviewing a segment on the brutal treatment of Venezuelan immigrants sent by the US government to a prison in El Salvador, the show had to pull the piece at the last minute. This was on orders of the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, who was acquired in October 2025, along with her Substack/podcast empire The Free Press. 

Weiss said she was holding the 60 Minutes report for comment from the White House, among other things, although the administration had previously declined multiple requests to go on record. The report aired anyway via a streaming partner in Canada, and now Americans can watch a number of bootleg copies. It’s not clear as of now when or whether the segment will ever air on CBS.

The men released from El Salvador face post-traumatic stress and unemployment. The rest of us face various degrees of shame. Plus an avalanche of takes: That the US is starting to mimic the treatment of media in early Putin-regime Russia. That Bari Weiss is both incompetent and doomed. That she’s ably performing the job she was hired for, and CBS News has been neutered. That this is all a maneuver by the network’s new owner, who’s heir to one of the world’s largest tech fortunes and needs federal approval to further expand his empire. That George Clooney is bad.

The takes make me feel cynical, and the journalistic situation makes me feel terrible for the hard-working reporters, producers and editors at 60 Minutes. And this all makes me wonder what will become of the network CBS, which turns 100 next year — though who knows if anyone in the building will notice amidst all the mergers and acquisitions of late.

But the 60 Minutes affair harkens back to some foundational psycho-dramatics at the company. So here’s my question on the eve of its centenary: Is CBS haunted? 

Let’s go back to the earliest origins of CBS, before it even had that name. On September 18, 1927, listeners of 16 radio stations, from the East Coast through Ohio to Chicago, got to hear a special live program emanating from WOR in New York. The new Columbia Chain, a rival to the just-established NBC network, was making its debut. The highlight was the performance of a new work commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera.

The debut was not auspicious.

The Columbia network turned into a money pit for its eponymous sponsor, Columbia Phonograph, which quickly lost $100,000 (in 1927 money!) before pulling out. In desperation, the network’s founders turned to wealthy friends in Philadelphia for fresh investment. And one of those friends eventually turned to his in-laws, the Paleys.

The Paleys ran a successful cigar-manufacturing business and had used radio sponsorship to boost sales of their most famous brand, La Palina. Now the family had the option to buy a major stake in the struggling Columbia venture. So they did, and restless heir William “Bill” Paley became president of the network, soon to be renamed the Columbia Broadcasting System. Paley had just turned 27, and he rolled into town with his own valet.

Paley quickly established a reputation as a shrewd media mogul, in part because of ballsy investment deal with Paramount Pictures that, thanks to the changing fortunes of movies and broadcasting during the Great Depression, paid off handsomely.

Paley’s reputation was also reinforced by the competent seconds-in-command he hired. He had an eye for people who could accept blame for decisions their boss made, while giving him credit for things that turned out well. All of these men waited for their promised reward — which they did get in compensation, but never in appreciation. 

Paley’s first right-hand was the former newsman Ed Klauber. Paley’s biographer Sally Bedell Smith is fascinated by this unpopular but crucial figure in CBS history.

Klauber became, as Smith writes, Paley’s gatekeeper. He had an adjoining office. He walked Paley home every night. Paley treated him like “a servant,” Smith writes, but paid him extremely well. “Paley chose to ignore Klauber’s cruelty because of his usefulness. Paley preferred to avoid confrontations, and Klauber eagerly took them on, allowing the boss to remain comfortably above it all.” (119)

But Klauber hired good people, including Edward R. Murrow, whom he eventually placed in London to cover fascism’s rise. As Murrow’s team reported on the violence in Europe, they riveted the nation. Their prestige changed Paley’s previously ambivalent view of public affairs programming.

Ed Klauber suffered a heart attack in 1943 and found himself soon out the door at CBS. Paley was by then abroad, overseeing the Psychological Warfare Radio Unit (which is a fascinating story for another post). When Paley returned to civilian life, he summoned the company’s audience-research guru Frank Stanton to his Long Island home. In an oral history with Columbia University, Stanton recalled having to borrow a car to drive out there.

(In the same oral history, Stanton describes, after becoming president of CBS, visiting previous right-hand-man Ed Klauber in his “dark and dingy” apartment. “He sat there and said to me, ‘Don't let Bill do to you what he did to me.’ I didn't have to ask what it was.”)

By all accounts, Stanton was a competent and popular second-in-command, especially when he went to the mat for CBS reporters, refusing a Congressional subpoena in 1971 to give up sources and raw interviews. Stanton held the job of CBS president for a quarter century, until his own mandatory retirement policy forced him to step down at age 65. Although older, Bill Paley refused to follow the same policy himself, hanging on to the boardroom for years to come. A series of company leaders arrived with fanfare and left in frustration as they found their work undermined.

I’ve previously quoted this piece published soon after Paley’s death in 1990, but I’m going to quote it again because it underlines the tragedy at the heart of CBS’s growing corporate weakness.¹

It’s ironic that way back in the 1920s, Paley chose to rename his media company the Columbia Broadcasting System. He was, of course, thinking of the system he intended to build and did build, the network of stations the company owned or persuaded to become affiliates. But even as CBS grew into an empire that shaped popular culture and politics, as a company it could never become a sustainable system with Paley around. And he was around for a really long time. Yes, he let others plant the seeds of journalistic enterprise, and that flourished with protection. But CBS became a monarchy with an increasingly unstable king — an outcome that made the network’s original, stormy debut broadcast weirdly prophetic.

The opera heard in 1927 on the proto-CBS was called The King’s Henchman. Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote the libretto. To be clear, the Metropolitan Opera had commissioned the piece, not Columbia — and it was a big hit, which is why it wound up being performed for radio in the first place.

The plot, based on a story in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is ridiculous — but come on, it’s an opera. So: King Eadgar sends his henchman Aethelwold to find out whether a far-away princess is beautiful enough to be his wife. The princess happens upon Aethelwold sleeping in the woods and uses witchery to get him to fall in love with her. The two marry, but eventually the king comes to visit and finds out the princess is both hot and married to his former employee. She, in turn, is angry when she finds out that all along, she could have been queen instead of an ex-henchman’s wife. In his mortification for having deceived his beloved and for seeking happiness above his station, the henchman does himself in. 

These are the last lines of the play, sung by a chorus as the corpse of the henchman Aethelwold is sent out to sea:

Did people really say “no longer in the room” back in the 970s? I kind of doubt it — but surely they did in the 1920s, that decade of repressed trauma, xenophobia, Prohibition, racial segregation and violence, and technological upheaval. The titans of industry then rising along with their stock prices needed minions to carry out their commands, but sometimes those minions had their own plans. By plucking the story of a wayward henchman from the ancient chronicle, Millay was onto something.

Today we live in another era of courtiers. They want us to make their jobs easier by denying what we know to be true and repeating their lies instead. Not that it will really help them in the end, since their king-boss cannot be satisfied and could care less about us or them. 

Still the henchmen issue orders, go on podcasts, write memos, compose memes and NDAs. They talk and command and threaten, but only history will decide if their words will retain meaning or dissolve, like the wind in the tree.