TWO MEN AND A TIME SLOT

With David Letterman's CBS contract expiring, ABC mounted "Project Gap-Tooth," a covert, high-gear campaign to woo him for the 11:35 P.M. time slot occupied by Nightline. When their secret leaked to The New York Times, all hell broke loose, as CBS's Les Moonves scrambled to keep his prickly star from defecting, and an anguished chorus of "What about Ted Koppel?" filled the air. Talking to Moonves, Koppel, Disney president Robert Iger, and other key players, DAVID MARGOLICK gets the story—clashing egos, last-minute jet flights, newsroom Schadenfreude—behind a P.R. debacle

One night in early March, Ted Koppel sat on a makeshift stage in the middle of the dusty, decrepit Elks Lodge No. 878 in Elmhurst, Queens. A Nightline town meeting on homeland security was about to get under way, and in the audience were the familiar faces of American television, post-September 11, Norman Rockwell images updated to the age of globalization and global terror: policemen and firemen, bereaved young widows and aggrieved ArabAmericans, hard-liners and civil libertarians, people with veterans' caps and clerical collars and union windbreakers.

The 21st-century cameras that had taken over the 19th-century room were about to roll, and in his customary way with ordinary people—measured, avuncular, courtly, a bit bemused—Koppel greeted the audience. He thanked them all very much indeed for their hospitality, told them how he'd wooed his wife less than two blocks away 42 years earlier, warned them that the 90 minutes to come would fly right by and that not everyone, alas, would have a chance to speak. "It will all be your fault!" someone shouted out good-naturedly, cutting through the dense reverence.

"It s hard to hug somebody whose arms aren't open'' says CBS's Les Moonves of his tortured star.

"Of course," Koppel shot back. "That's why I get the big bucks."

"For how long?" a second voice then cried out, and groans and gasps mingled with the laughs.

"This is getting nasty a little sooner than I thought," Koppel coolly retorted, smiling one of those slightly pained Ted Koppel smiles.

A little more than a week earlier a wisecrack about Koppel's professional longevity would have been not only nonsensical but inconceivable. That was before reports that his bosses at the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC, which broadcasts Nightline, were trying to shove him aside for David Letterman, whom they hoped to poach from CBS, and before an unnamed Disney executive told The New York Times that Nightline was irrelevant. Spelled out in the four comers of the room above Koppel's head, in pink and green mock-Tiffany glass, the tenets of the Elks Club creed—"Charity," "Justice," "Brotherly Love," and "Fidelity"— seemed even quainter than usual that night, juxtaposed with the brutal reality of the television business.

Only three days later Letterman decided to stay at CBS, but for almost four more weeks the fates of Nightline and Koppel remained unclear. Stung by the realization of his program's expendability and the anonymous barbs of what he called "attack weasels" at ABC, Koppel held out for assurances that Nightline had a future, and Disney executives held out back. Imagine Nightline's familiar four-note trumpet fanfare. Then imagine the sonorous voice of Ted Koppel doing one of those elegant overtures, known as "Page Two" in Nightline lingo, with which he always begins his broadcasts, the ones he writes out longhand in his southpaw script: "It was an extraordinary spectacle. Two mighty corporations and two of television's most famous faces. It was a contest not only between two networks but between two visions of just what television should be: a machine for making money, or, as it was originally envisioned, a steward for the public good. Apart from symbolizing a tectonic shift in television culture, it was also a tale of strong personalities. There were David Letterman and Leslie Moonves, his boss and, often, the butt of his jokes. And there were Ted Koppel and Bob Iger, president of Disney, friends and colleagues who ended up in a colossal battle of ego, pride, and prerogatives. We'll be back ... in a moment."

The mock Nightline would begin with the chase after Letterman: the furtive negotiations, the fevered pitches, the spectacle of entertainment moguls prostrating themselves before the "talent," the brooding deliberations of a reclusive and petulant comic star. Then, in homage to the program's origins as the daily chronicle of the Americans held captive in Iran nearly 23 years ago, it would depict "Nightline Held Hostage." Like those people in the American Embassy in Teheran, Koppel had been caught by surprise: he knew nothing at all about Nightlines imperiled state until a few hours before The New York Times broke the story. "I felt as though I'd been punched in the gut," Koppel recalls.

Koppel is now 62 years old. Unusual in his world, he has let himself grow leathery and lined. Despite his devotion to the news, even his ABC News peers sometimes find him selfrighteous, uncollegial, preachy. But when he was sitting on the stage in Queens that night, the familiar back of his famous head before me, Koppel displayed everything that has made him a television institution and, increasingly, an anachronism: his intelligence, his elegance, his empathy, his reasonableness, his patience, his wit. With the wounded and indignant and intemperate of September 11, he was simultaneously scintillating and soothing. Just as striking was everything he has never been and refuses to become, as so many in television "news" now are: belligerent, inarticulate, plastic, primitive.

Even while threatening to supplant him, the Letterman camp went out of its way to praise Koppel. They might have gone even further; indeed, with Paul Schaffer and the CBS Orchestra breaking into the jingle for Doublemint gum in the background, he could have done a list of the "Top 10 Reasons That David Letterman and Ted Koppel Are Really the Same Person." Not every item would be funny, but it would help explain the strange bond between the two, and the role it played in the spectacle.

10. Both are left-handers who have gone up against The Tonight Show and survived.

9. Both are iconoclasts who have somehow become icons.

8. Each enjoys the other's company and embodies something the other would like to be.

7. Drew Barrymore has had crushes on both.

6. Both are recluses; each refused to grant interviews during the imbroglio, becoming about the only people who did.

5. Both have effected historic televised reconciliations: Koppel between Bishop Desmond Tutu and then South African foreign minister Pik Botha, Letterman between Sonny and Cher.

4. Both dislike hanging out with their bosses.

3. Both are surrounded by ferocious, industrious loyalists, also known as cults.

2. Both have made assets out of their physical eccentricities.

1. Both have been said, by Mad magazine itself, to resemble Alfred E. Neuman.

Leslie Moonves, the 52-year-old president of CBS Television, is a famously charming man. A reformed actor, rough and smooth at once, he is the type to bound up to greet a visitor as if his entire day, if not his entire life, had been spent awaiting that moment. Within nanoseconds of meeting you, he has you laughing, and after a few moments of high-octane, cozy conversation, amply sprinkled with intimate asides and "by the way"s, you're thinking there's no lie he would ever tell you, few secrets he would not share.

The afternoon I saw him, in his offices at Television City, the Hollywood hills outside his window looked particularly well scrubbed, and he himself was pretty ebullient, too. Since he had won the Letterman sweepstakes, it did not matter how close he'd come to losing. "At the end of the day, David Letterman sat and looked me in the eye at eight o'clock on that Monday night and said, 'Thank you, I'm grateful for what you did.'

That's all I care about," he said. "At the end of the day,

I'm very happy, David Letterman's very happy, the Worldwide Pants [Letterman's production company] people are happy. The only ones who aren't happy are over in Mickey Mouse land."

For starters, Moonves wanted to set the record straight on something: his relationship with Letterman. It is said that they don't get along, that Moonves is too showbizzy for Letterman, resents his star power, is irked that he can't deliver him for corporate events, and hates that he can't answer the No. 1 question he gets at parties: "What's Letterman like?" "Our relationship, or should I say the negativity of our relationship, has been greatly exaggerated," Moonves insists. Picking on his bosses, he notes, is "part of David Letterman's shtick." The day he showed up at CBS, he recalls, Letterman asked an actor playing Moonves on his show, "Is it true that your first job is to impregnate Connie Chung [who was then trying to have a child]?" "I thought that was the funniest thing I ever heard," Moonves says with a laugh.

"I have enjoyed probably 95 percent of the things he has said about me," Moonves says. "There have been a couple of things that were a little edgy, but, by the way, at no point did I ever call him on it." Moonves concedes that he and Dave don't talk much, and it's easy to see how, to someone so congenitally personable as Moonves, Letterman's standoffishness could seem almost sadistic. In fact, one prominent talent agent speculated to me that Letterman didn't flirt with ABC in search of higher ratings or a chance to beat Jay Leno, as is widely assumed, but "to take five years off of Les's life." "I really do care about him greatly, but I don't know him very, very well," Moonves says of his tortured star. "I would like to. It's hard to hug somebody whose arms aren't open."

What made things still sorer was Letterman's feeling that Moonves—unlike at ABC, where authority is diffused and confused, Moonves is CBS—wasn't backing the show properly. Letterman and his minions believe, as do some critics, that the Late Show is infinitely superior to The Tonight Show, and that it has lagged behind only because of poorly rated local news broadcasts, weaker stations, and insufficient promotion on CBS. "We're giving the guy at NBC an 80-yard lead on a 100-yard dash," says Rob Burnett, the president of Worldwide Pants.

One person aware of all this was Lloyd Braun, the chairman of ABC Entertainment. With ABC's ratings and revenues in shambles, he began toying last year with putting on an entertainment show in place of Nightline at 11:35. He'd run the numbers on Conan O'Brien and Jon Stewart, but quickly concluded that only Letterman, whose contract with CBS was set to expire in August 2002, would give ABC "the enormous shot of adrenaline" it needed. He had preliminary discussions with Letterman's agent, Lee Gabler of Creative Artists Agency (CAA).

At a lunch last November with Disney chief Michael Eisner; Iger; Alex Wallau, president of the ABC television network; Steve Bornstein, president of the ABC Television Group; and Stu Bloomberg, CONTINUED ON PAGE 229 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 195 then ABC's chief programmer, in the Team Disney building in Burbank—the one with the statues of the Seven Dwarfs on the facade—Braun first broached going after Letterman. "I think their jaws dropped a little," he recalls. "They thought, How can CBS possibly let this guy go out on the open market?" Iger, 51, was among the skeptics, largely because of his respect for Moonves. "Even though there are detractors in town who believe that Les has an ego that's larger than most of the studio lots," Iger says, "I actually believe that not only is Les talented but Les is very talented at managing talent."

But if Disney was ready to move Koppel off 11:35, another crucial player wasn't, or at least said he wasn't: Letterman. Long before Disney tied their fates together, Letterman and Koppel knew and liked each other; if Letterman brought out Koppel's latent wackiness (Koppel had appeared on the Late Show Rollerblading with Letterman down 53 rd Street and having his aged dog do a "stupid pet trick"), Koppel appealed to Letterman's latent seriousness. Letterman, after all, is someone who gets his news from the BBC.

Letterman's representatives said he would move only if ABC independently decided to kill Nightline. And they got that assurance, they say. ABC maintains that it told them only that the show's status was under review, and that it would not be aired forever. There was unhappiness at ABC about Nightline, which some believed had lost its edge and was certainly not nearly as profitable as it had once been. But in December 2000 both Koppel and his executive producer Tom Bettag had signed up for an additional five years. Koppel's contract provided for three-day workweeks, prompting unflattering comparisons to Johnny Carson in his late-night dotage.

"I was told by Lloyd that we had to be careful here," Iger recalls, "that we were walking a fine line, that we didn't create the appearance that Nightline's death was solely due to David Letterman, and I kind of said, 'Well, good luck. How the hell do we do that?"' At one point, Iger says, the Letterman people asked for written assurances that Letterman wasn't killing Nightline. "I said, 'If that's the case, just let's forget it,' " Iger says. "And they backed way down on that."

Knowing that their plan could succeed only by stealth—that is, without alerting CBS to its interest—Braun and his colleagues proceeded clandestinely on what Iger codenamed "Project Gap-Tooth." Discussions were confined to a handful of Disney executives. There was to be no paperwork, no E-mail, no conference calls, no cell-phone discussions. And, insulting as it might seem, nothing was to be said to the two people most directly affected—Koppel and his immediate boss, David Westin, head of ABC News—not because they are blabbermouths, Iger insists, but because each would feel bound, and rightly so, to tell his colleagues.

For Westin, being left out of the loop was the latest of several humiliations that compounded skepticism about his lack of news experience: not being consulted by his Disney superiors about scheduling changes favoring the entertainment division over his news division; being opposed by them in contractual matters involving the talent; being asked to fire veteran newsmen at a time when he was trying to establish trust among the staff. He had largely rebounded from these with his deft handling of the terrorist and anthrax attacks and support for investigative journalism. But not knowing about his bosses' pursuit of Letterman was a real setback. Still, Iger could deal with Westin, a refugee from corporate law, who had nowhere as sexy to go. "They treat him very, very badly, but it's not a job people walk away from," said one veteran ABC newsman. "You can take a lot of shit at these prices."

With Koppel, things would be much trickier for Iger, both because of the man's star power and their long ties. Koppel liked Iger; as with Moonves, it's hard not to. Neither Iger nor Moonves is the kind of pointyheaded grind your parents wanted you to emulate; each is the more intuitive sort who probably cut classes, watched lots of schlock television, took chances, cultivated friends— all, it turned out, better preparation for Hollywood jobs than holing up in some library.

Iger liked and respected Koppel, even held him in a kind of awe—the awe, as one ABC colleague puts it, "of an Ithaca College graduate for someone like Koppel who thought he was secretary of state." Periodically, Iger had sought out Koppel for career advice. They liked to talk technology. Koppel had narrated the satirical video prepared when Iger married the newscaster Willow Bay in 1995; the same video features David Letterman doing a "Top 10 Reasons Why Willow Bay Is Marrying Bob Iger." ("It's hilarious. Hilarious," Iger says.)

At the same time, Iger knew that Koppel could sometimes get on his high horse. That much was clear a year ago, when Iger, Eisner, and Westin visited ABC News's Washington bureau. Seeking to spare the news division from the companywide budget cuts Disney had mandated, Koppel asked Eisner if he had ever heard of several ABC News hands killed in action. His message: News was different, so treat it differently. Some applauded Koppel's courage, Iger was infuriated. "I thought the manner in which he manipulated or exploited those names was really unfortunate and improper," he recalls. "I said, 'Ted, news isn't different. Do we like news? Yes. Do we respect it? Of course. Do we want it to succeed? Absolutely. But we also need it to work economically.' The room was silent. Silent. I was really angry. I had steam coming out of my ears." But Iger maintains that the contretemps quickly passed, and calls speculation that it poisoned the well for Koppel at Disney "just silly."

When Letterman's contract came up for renewal, CBS had exclusive negotiating rights for 45 days; then others could come in. Braun prodded CAA to start the clock as soon as possible so that if ABC did land Letterman it would have time to buy and renovate a Manhattan theater for him before the next television season started. As it turned out, the negotiating period began on December 5, which from ABC's standpoint had another advantage: the holidays were coming, and CBS might just be distracted enough to let things lapse.

The negotiations went badly from the beginning. CBS, the Letterman camp surmised, felt it could play hardball because Letterman had no alternatives. And even if he strayed, CBS believed, it would have the right to make a last offer, a point ABC disputes. At first, according to Worldwide Pants, Moonves actually tried to cut Letterman's budget. According to CBS sources, Worldwide Pants demanded control of the 11:35 time slot for 10 years after Letterman's retirement, an annuity worth tens of millions, plus fines whenever the Late Show was delayed for any reason. Nothing moved quickly. Moonves "just sat on it and sat on it and sat on it," a Letterman representative said.

Monitoring the situation as best he could, IVA mindful to avoid charges of tampering, was Braun, who lent his name to the character of George Costanza's occasional nemesis on Seinfeld. He'd make vague inquiries of CAA, careful never to mention Letterman by name so that even if the phones were bugged he'd be clean. He took other precautions; for one thing, he shelved all talks about the fate of the troubled Politically Incorrect, lest the press report that ABC was reexamining its entire late-night lineup. In December and January, ABC put together a package for Letterman, all under elaborate cover. When Braun came east to scout theater locations, it was supposedly to attend a trustees' meeting at his alma mater, Vassar College. When he visited the sites, it was ostensibly for a Saturday-night sketch show.

Moonves, though, says ABC might have saved itself the trouble. He claims he always thought ABC might enter the fray, simply because it was in such sorry shape and needed to make a splash. He says he's not even sure when he learned ABC was in the picture, nor could he have ever headed it off; Letterman was determined to dicker. "I would have done exactly what [the Letterman people] did," he says. "You ask for the moon. 'Oh, you're not going to give me the moon? Well, I'll talk to somebody else who may want to give me the moon.'"

Throughout February the sides put together essentially identical offers. Letterman dealt strictly through surrogates, refusing to meet with his pursuers personally. On the morning of February 27, a Wednesday, Gabler told Braun that Letterman would decide soon, maybe as early as that evening, but surely before he left for his vacation house on St. Barts that weekend. Braun was dumbfounded: how, he asked himself, could Letterman decide something so momentous without even meeting the Disney people, without looking them in the eye?

"I have one question to ask you," he said to Gabler. "Underneath whatever mishegoss [Yiddish for personal baggage, neurosis] there may be, is David Letterman a good guy or a bad guy?"

"He's a good guy."

"Then I'm coming to New York. I'm coming today."

"Lloyd, I cannot have you do that," insisted Gabler, who said there was no guarantee Letterman would see him.

"It's worse, because I'm going to call Bob Iger, and I'm sure he's going to want to come with me," Braun replied. No "good guy," he insisted, would ever let them fly 3,000 miles and then bar them at the door. Braun told Gabler he'd call him from outside the Ed Sullivan Theater.

The two got their meeting. As Gabler, Jackoway, Braun, Burnett, and others sat silently, Iger went to work on Letterman, milking their every overlapping experience: their early days as weathermen, their interest in auto racing, even the cardiologist who had performed bypass surgery on both Letterman and, it turned out, Iger's mother. "I was there to sell me," Iger recalls. Once Iger had sold himself, Braun tried selling Disney, suggesting it would be compulsively attentive to his needs.

To meet Letterman, Iger had had to postpone for a day a short Mexican getaway he'd planned with his pregnant wife, but it was all worth it. The following morning, a Thursday, Iger and Braun flew back to California triumphantly. But time was a problem: Bill Carter of The New York Times was onto the story. Iger had urged giving Letterman a deadline. Braun disagreed; put pressure on the guy, he warned, and he'd run in the other direction. Unfortunately for ABC, Letterman didn't decide that night, or even the next day. He needed more time.

Carter's story appeared on the front page of the Times on Friday, March 1. It prompted panic among ABC's spinmeisters; if moving Barbara Walters off Friday nights last year for a doomed Disney drama called Once and Again was a 1 on the Richter scale of public-relations disasters, one told another, this was a 15. Immediately, the story prompted two questions: Who gave it to Carter? And who was the anonymous executive quoted in the story, saying that "the relevancy of 'Nightline' just is not there anymore"?

On the leak, there was an orgy of fingerpointing. The Letterman camp blamed CBS: the ensuing brouhaha would surely give Letterman cold feet about changing channels. Moonves's deputy, executive vice president for communications Gil Schwartz, angrily blamed Burnett of Worldwide Pants. Burnett, convinced that CBS was covering its own tracks, heatedly denied it, noting that he'd actually urged Carter to hold the story. ABC, too, initially suspected CBS, but over time became convinced that the Letterman camp was to blame: how better to gauge how Dave's move would be perceived than to bandy it about beforehand? "It's funny to me to hear them going at each other, and knowing that they're all wrong," says Carter. The leak, he says, "came from left field, really."

As for the anonymous remark about relevancy, which ABC instantly disowned, the author has understandably never stepped forward. Most fingers point to Zenia Mucha, Disney's senior vice president for communications, a legendarily pugnacious former aide to former New York senator Alfonse D'Amato and New York governor George Pataki. Her relations with the press have always been stormy, and she was new enough at ABC— she'd arrived only one year before—to flub things. As further evidence of her guilt, some pointed to the statement's peculiar syntax, and noted that Mucha had been born in Poland. Then there was the attribution. "The Times does its anonymous sources a disfavor: men are called 'he,' women are called 'executives,'" one ABC newsman observes.

Mucha denies ever having uttered what she admitted was "an unfortunate choice of words." But according to an ABC News source, when two executives asked her point-blank whether she'd committed the faux pas, she said nothing in reply. ("Nobody asked me anything," says Mucha.) Still, it seems clear that whoever made the statement was saying something, however clumsily, that one of his or her higher-ups, apparently eager to ease Letterman's conscience, had wanted him or her to say.

The Times story jolted Moonves into overdrive. The next day he pulled his Jaguar convertible off to the side of the road near his home in Brentwood, dialed Rob Burnett, a man he had groused about to associates, and spent the next 90 minutes lavish-

ing him with love. "Maybe I stayed off it longer than I should have, and they didn't feel my passion for them," Moonves recalls. "That's why it was so emotional: 'Rob, I really am passionate, I really do like you guys, I really do want you to stay here. What do you need? What's missing?' He gave me X, Y, and Z, and you know, right on the spot there I gave him X and Y, and I said, 'I'll work on Z.' It was about an hour, hour and a half. And, by the way, it was real human contact."

Tensions between CBS and Worldwide Pants calmed down; Burnett began telling reporters that accounts of a LettermanMoonves feud had been greatly exaggerated. Quickly, the coverage turned; stories began suggesting that Letterman, a man known to hate changing the kinds of candy bars he eats or the sorts of socks he wears, let alone studios or networks, would likely stay put. But within a few days the rapprochement had broken down: anti-Letterman items— that the Late Show was not all that profitable, that Letterman was impossible to please, that Burnett favored ABC because CBS had passed on Ed, a sitcom he'd produced—began popping up. Burnett blamed Gil Schwartz, believing he was building an alibi for CBS should Letterman bolt. The two had another shouting match, during which Burnett was overheard to scream, "While Les is being a gentleman, if this deal goes to ABC it's because of you and your department." (Schwartz, who doubles as Fortunemagazine columnist Stanley Bing, is the author of a newly published parody of a management primer, What Would Machiavelli Do?)

cut back to ABC, where the Times's Carter had called various people to tell them his story was about to appear and what it would say, and to get their comments. That forced Iger to tell Westin about the Letterman chase, though not that he had just flown in to see the guy. ("If Les found out, he might have been inclined to fly in and see him, too," Iger explains. "And I knew Letterman was getting on a plane the next day to go to St. Barts, and I wanted him to leave the country.") Westin, stunned by the news, agreed to call Koppel, then at his vacation home on Captiva Island, Florida. Word was spreading: one of Nightline s executive producers, Leroy Sievers, promptly beeped the other, Tom Bettag. And Iger, facing the music, attempted to reach Koppel. First, he was told Koppel was out. Then he was told that Koppel didn't want to talk to him and had gone to bed.

To staffers, the thought that Nightline was endangered was implausible enough; that it was disrespected was almost unfathomable. Even as ABC was conspiring to replace it, Bettag had blithely been trying to get it expanded to an hour. Bettag and Sievers began calling colleagues at home, telling them to phone in at 10 o'clock for an extraordinary announcement. Perhaps members of a Nightline team in Kazakhstan had been killed, some worried. Once everyone was on the conference call, Westin spoke, then Koppel himself, then Bettag. When Carter's story hit the newspaper's Web site, Bettag began reading it aloud. When he got to "the relevancy of 'Nightline' is just not there anymore," he stopped. "Well, I guess we know everything we have to know," he said, his voice shaking.

Koppel was flying back to Washington early the next morning when Iger, en route to Mexico, tried and failed again to reach him. The next time Iger tried, Koppel was in a staff meeting. Meanwhile, Sievers E-mailed his daily bulletin to Nightline viewers, in this instance reporting not just on the topic of that night's broadcast but the show's troubles as well. "Ted has returned from what was to have been a long weekend, but to this point, no executive from ABC or Disney has spoken to him," it said. "It really pissed me off," Iger recalls. "It completely ignored the fact that someone from the Walt Disney Company—namely the president, me—had tried to reach Ted from the night before."

I ger finally did get hold of Koppel that day. Their conversation, he says, was "frosty." Koppel, irate about the "relevance" quote, demanded a retraction. This Iger agreed to do—"against the will of a lot of people in the company, by the way," Iger says—not in his name, but in that of network chief Alex Wallau. The statement, expressing the hope "that Nightline and Ted will continue to make significant contributions to ABC in the years ahead," placated no one. "I probably should have been a bit more aggressive in our defense of Nightline initially," Iger concedes.

On Monday morning Iger flew to Washington and met with Koppel personally. "He had obviously been simmering all weekend," he recalls. "It didn't change the mood, but I felt I gave him what he deserved, which is the respect a face-to-face meeting suggests." The next day, Koppel had a mild op-ed article in the Times, in which he acknowledged that Disney had "excellent business reasons" for doing what it had done, but called the anonymous swipe "at best, inappropriate and, at worst, malicious."

Around the news division, word of Nightline's and Koppel's travails generated surprisingly mixed emotions. There was worry: people saw in them more ominous portents about Disney and its attitude toward news. Already, Disney had cut budgets, jerked 20/20 around, attempted to subcontract much of its newsgathering to CNN, and hired Pearl Harbor producer Jerry Bruckheimer to do a series of patriotic pseudo-documentaries. There was some sadness too. Many ABC correspondents consider Nightline a haven—a place where, in contrast to the more straitened, less collegial evening news, their work could breathe and was always appreciated. "There wasn't a person in the building who preferred working on World News Tonight to Nightline" says one ABC News alumnus. "Peter [Jennings] is impossible, and Ted is embracing."

But like any elite enclave, "the Principality of Nightline"— as some call it—has also spawned enormous resentment within the larger organization. People resent its fancier facilities: the ergonomic chairs, the wooden floors. They resent how it has largely avoided Disney's budgetary ax. They resent what they see as its self-righteousness, and its unwillingness to take on the same tacky topics they now must. "I don't like doing Gary Condit, but 25 million people are watching that," says one newsman. "We all have to do shit these days."

And they resent Koppel: his short workweek, his unwillingness to pitch in for ABC News, his privileged position with Iger. Periodically, efforts were made by Westin and others to change Nightline, to liven it up and wean it off so many taped reports, but they were always rebuffed. "I've let Nightline get away with everything for years," Westin told one colleague. "No one tells them what to do," says one executive. "They get dismissed by his Tedness."

One veteran Nightline staff member concedes the ill will. "It's a combination of envy that we continue to hold standards and the belief that Nightline people think their shit smells better than others', so that people here are called 'radical fundamentalists' or 'the Cult' or just 'those assholes in Washington,'" he says. To him, the notion that Koppel is loafing—mailing it in, as CNBC's Chris Matthews suggested—borders on blasphemy; Koppel's work on various primetime documentaries and multi-part series, he notes, means he puts in far more than three days a week. (Matthews has literally mailed in an apology to Koppel.)

Good Morning America's Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer remained publicly mum on their network's Letterman flirtation, though Sawyer did cancel an appearance on the Late Show. Perhaps they were following the corporate edict to keep quiet; perhaps they relished the prospect of Letterman's legions waking up to Good Morning America. Sam Donaldson spoke out on Nightline's behalf; so did Peter Jennings, despite a long and complex relationship with Koppel. (Jennings, whose soon-to-expire contract guarantees him $1 more than anyone else at ABC News, once was heard grumbling that Koppel was "so goddamn secure.")

But the most fervent support came from Barbara Walters, who complained on The View that by springing surprises on both of them Disney had treated her, Koppel, and the news itself shabbily. Her choice of soapboxes angered Iger. "Go on any street corner and say what you like, even if it's about the company you work for," Iger says. "Write an op-ed in The New York Times, appear on Larry King if you want. But to use one of our own programs to do that? That was, in my opinion, far worse than what was done to her on Friday night."

"Barbara and Sam could not have been more supportive, perhaps even to their own detriment," says Koppel. Among the many weighing in privately, he adds, was Sawyer, "not once but several times."

After the Times story broke, Braun says, "we were swimming even more upstream." ABC made one last push. Eisner called Letterman from Europe; Braun continued to dangle a state-of-the-art studio on West 66th Street; Braun's 14-year-old daughter baked Letterman a low-fat cake, which Braun carried cross-country and personally delivered to Letterman's office on March 11, the day Dave returned from vacation. "Late Show + ABC = #1," she'd written on ABCyellow frosting.

But that afternoon, only minutes before Letterman began taping that night's show, Braun and Iger got their "Dear John" call. And Moonves heard what he said he had always expected. Sure, at one point during the drama he'd checked on the availability of Conan O'Brien, but that was prudence, not panic. "I have contingency plans for every show on my schedule," he says. "I have Sunday afternoons planned in 2010."

For several more years, then, Moonves can see Letterman on CBS, either by live feed from New York early every afternoon or later on, like the rest of us. "A lot of times I'm asleep by 11:30, but when I'm up I don't watch anything but," he said. "Unless maybe there's a great Nightline story on. If there's a big world event, I'll probably watch Ted Koppel."

Lying in his bed in the Regency Hotel on Lithe night of March 11, Braun heard Letterman express amazement that two networks had actually been "fighting over this crap," then praise Koppel and say he hoped ABC would now leave him where he was "for as long as that guy would like to have that job, because that's just the way it ought to be." Braun could not be blamed for thinking that it was the height of hypocrisy for Letterman to have allowed the courtship with ABC to proceed nearly to consummation, only to leave the network at the altar and then use his show to tell it how to run its business. But Koppel was gratified; he later called Letterman to thank him.

Following Letterman's announcement, Wallau put out another statement, this one saying that Nightline would remain in its time period and Koppel would continue to have "a significant presence at ABC News." To Koppel, Bettag, and Sievers, this was but another slice of Disney Milquetoast. Two hours later they issued a statement of their own, demanding "a clear and unmistakable signal" of corporate backing.

Disney officials found the statement both presumptuous and surprising: Koppel and his cohorts were not only demanding something no network ever gives any show, but also spending all their ammunition at once and leaving the Disney executives in control. With just that in mind, Westin had urged Koppel not to make the statement, or at least to tone it down. That the two sides would eventually work something out seemed obvious. Contractually, Koppel could leave ABC in December, and he had feelers from CNN and PBS, but he was unlikely to earn as much— reportedly $8 million a year—elsewhere, and could not bring along his staff. As for Disney, it still had nothing to put in Nightline's place.

Disney took its sweet time in responding, maybe weighing other options, maybe trying to humble Nightline a bit. For more than three weeks, during which time the program won a Peabody Award, the Nightline staff awaited its fate. The gallows humor grew; someone set the clock in the conference room to three minutes to midnight, and framed the New York Post for March 2: SHAF-TED, it shrieked. On April 8, Disney finally announced, in Iger's name, that the show would continue to set high journalistic standards "for years to come." Unmentioned was a private memorandum, which evidently said that those "years" numbered around two. "Neither of us got everything we wanted, but we all have something we're comfortable with," Koppel says of the agreement.

The rapprochement was celebrated over dinner at Eisner's house a few days before the announcement. It was a boys-only affair, with Eisner, Iger, Koppel, and Bettag on hand. Iger would not discuss it; all that Koppel would say is that the cuisine was Chinese. I asked him if fortune cookies had been served, and he said they had not. And a good thing that may have been, for who knows what message, about the future of Disney or Koppel or Iger or Eisner or Nightline or ABC News or even television itself, might have been inside?