Jeff Fager

People sometimes ask me which of the places my work took me to I still see most vividly, and the honest answer has less to do with beauty than with chemistry. You remember what floods you. Adrenaline is supposed to sharpen memory, and that is exactly what it does. That is why the conflict zones come back first, because those were the nights when the most adrenaline was moving through my system. If you asked me which story returns before all the others, it would be the bombing of Libya. I was on the ground in Tripoli when President Reagan ordered the bombing of Gaddafi. It was retaliation for a terrorist act they believed Libya was behind. I cannot tell you now which one. It was 1986. At that time, the network evening newscasts were the most important broadcasts of the day, and the timing of the raid reflected that. The bombs began falling just as the news was coming on. I went on live and held the phone out the window so Dan Rather could hear them going off. He talked about what he wa...

When you interview the President of the United States, or any other world leader, there is genuine tension in the room before the cameras start rolling. Real tension. You can feel it. It is almost never coming from the principal. It is coming from the staff. I interviewed four presidents as a producer, which meant I was the person responsible for the interviews. Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump. Each was different, and the people surrounding them were different too. The Clinton people were especially nervous. They would try to keep us from asking too many questions or prevent the interview from running too long. Those could be very tense moments. Obama was the easiest of all of them, and the reason is worth noting. Robert Gibbs was his press guy at the beginning, with David Plouffe and Axelrod also around. They were smart, and they did not care what we asked because they had complete confidence that he could handle whatever question we put to him. And he did. There were some p...

September 11 was the most traumatic event of my career. Easily. I think it was that for our entire broadcast. The broadcast was 60 Minutes II, which began in 1999 and ran through 2005. That morning showed how differently we sometimes worked from the original program. At the time, 60 Minutes did not really like covering breaking news stories. I did. So as the boss of 60 Minutes II, I sent everyone we had into the story and tried to cover every angle we could find. Scott Pelley led the coverage and was covered in ash that day. We eventually found ourselves responsible for prime time every night for roughly ten days. We handled five full hours, followed by half of prime time for another three or four nights. One of the assignments I handed out that morning seemed fairly routine at first, but it became the part of the day I have never really been able to put down. The city was setting up emergency hospital facilities across Manhattan, putting cots in place, staffing medical stations, and ...

No matter how often it happens, sitting down with a world leader never feels ordinary. We might spend days or even weeks refining our questions until only the most important ones remain. Then our correspondent takes a seat across from a person whose choices can alter the future of an entire region or determine the course of a war. We interviewed Bashar al-Assad twice. Our second meeting took place at a palace in central Damascus, not at the heavily protected compound outside the city that required driving through fields for nearly a mile to reach. Assad began by offering his condolences for my mother, who had died about a week earlier. I was completely caught off guard. Still, the interview itself could not have been more consequential. We had secured an interview for 60 Minutes after the Arab Spring had spread to Syria and Assad was fighting a full-scale civil war against his own people. Assad was not a likable person, although he appeared to be making an effort to seem agreeable wit...