Charlie Rose

• 1. Introduction

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  Charlie Rose, an American journalist born on the 5th of January 1942, hosted a talk show under his own name for 26 years, from 1991 to 2017. He was its executive producer as well as its host, and the program became known for its stature and its intellectual tone. It aired on PBS and on Bloomberg LP.

  In November 2017, his work at three broadcasters ended, and the show with it.

  This documentary follows three questions. How does a boy from North Carolina become a nationally known interviewer? Who agreed to sit across from him, and what did that conversation look like on screen? And what happened in the autumn of 2017 to bring it all to a stop?

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• 2. Tobacco Country Roots

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  Henderson, North Carolina, is where Charles Peete Rose Jr. was born, the only child of Margaret Frazier and Charles Peete Rose Sr. His parents were tobacco farmers who also ran a country store. The family lived above that store, and Rose began helping with the business at the age of seven.

  In an interview for Fresh Dialogues, Rose recalled an insatiable curiosity that kept getting him into trouble as a child. At Henderson High School he was a basketball star.

  Duke University was his next stop, and he arrived planning to follow a pre-med track. An internship in the office of North Carolina's Democratic Senator B. Everett Jordan changed his direction by sparking an interest in politics. He graduated in 1964 with a B.A. in history and belonged to the Kappa Alpha Order fraternity.

  Rose stayed at Duke to earn a J.D. from its law school in 1968. Somewhere in those years he met his first wife, Mary King. Her later job at the BBC in New York would hand him his first assignments in broadcasting.

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• 3. Learning the Interview

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  Freelance work for the BBC in New York was Rose's earliest brush with the news business, arranged after his wife Mary was hired there. In 1972 he was working at the New York bank Bankers Trust when he also landed a weekend reporter job at WPIX-TV.

  The real break came in 1974, when Bill Moyers hired him as managing editor of the PBS series Bill Moyers' International Report. A year later, in 1975, Moyers appointed him executive producer of Bill Moyers Journal. Rose soon began appearing on camera himself.

  "A Conversation with Jimmy Carter" aired on Moyers's series U.S.A.: People and Politics and won a Peabody Award in 1976. After that, Rose worked at several networks, sharpening his interview skills. Then KXAS-TV, an NBC affiliate in Dallas-Fort Worth, hired him as program manager and gave him a late-night time slot. That slot became The Charlie Rose Show.

  CBS News Nightwatch ran from 1984 to 1990 with Rose as anchor. It was the network's first late-night news broadcast, and it often featured him interviewing notable people in a format close to his later PBS program. His Nightwatch interview with Charles Manson won a News & Documentary Emmy Award in 1987.

  In 1990 Rose left CBS to anchor Personalities, a syndicated program produced by Fox TV. Six weeks into production he walked away, unhappy with its soundbite-driven, tabloid approach to stories. That format was the opposite of the long conversation he would build next.

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• 4. The Show

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  On the 30th of September 1991, Charlie Rose premiered on the PBS station Thirteen/WNET. PBS began feeding it nationally in January 1993. In 1994 Rose moved the program into a studio owned by Bloomberg LP, which made high-definition video possible through satellite-remote interviews.

  Barack Obama made 11 appearances, first as a senator, then as a presidential candidate, and later as president. Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush also appeared as former presidents. Donald Trump came on as a private citizen, but never while holding the presidency.

  Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, Sydney Pollack, Quentin Tarantino, Brian de Palma and Oliver Stone were among the filmmakers who sat down with him. Roman Polanski, Tim Burton, Sidney Lumet, Terry Gilliam, David Lynch and Guillermo del Toro came too. Peter Jackson, Wes Anderson, Ron Howard, George Lucas, Peter Bogdanovich and Mike Nichols followed, along with Sofia Coppola, Spike Lee and Noah Baumbach.

  George Carlin, Louis C.K., Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Joan Rivers and Jon Stewart represented comedy. Aziz Ansari, Bill Murray, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Bill Maher and Ricky Gervais also appeared, as did John Oliver and Key & Peele. Writers, athletes, scientists and businesspersons rounded out the guest list.

  Roger Ebert, Janet Maslin, Stanley Kauffmann, Richard Corliss, Richard Schickel, David Denby, Andrew Sarris and A. O. Scott came on as film critics. Guest hosts included A. O. Scott, Judd Apatow, Seth Meyers, Anthony Mason, Jon Meacham, Katie Couric and Molly Haskell.

  Another CBS job would soon run alongside the show. In January 1999, a new newsmagazine launched, and Rose joined it.

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• 5. Network Correspondent

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  When 60 Minutes II began in January 1999, Rose was a correspondent from the start. He stayed until its cancellation in September 2005. In 2008 he was named a correspondent on 60 Minutes itself.

  "Spontaneous, authentic, engaged, and passionate" is how Rose described the ideal interviewee. He said the best guest sees the interview as "an opportunity to express their ideas, to have their ideas tested."

  Russian President Vladimir Putin, Apple executive Tim Cook, political strategist Steve Bannon and comedian Larry David all sat down with Rose for 60 Minutes. So did stage actor Lin-Manuel Miranda and actor Sean Penn.

  Citadel Broadcasting Corporation counted Rose as a board member from 2003 to 2009. In May 2010 he delivered the commencement address at North Carolina State University.

  The 15th of November 2011 brought the announcement that Rose would return to CBS to help anchor CBS This Morning, a show replacing The Early Show. It began on the 9th of January 2012 with co-anchors Gayle King and Erica Hill. Norah O'Donnell replaced Hill in July 2012. The show drew high ratings, credited to the anchors' chemistry.

  CBS Evening News also made use of Rose, who filled in for its anchor. In 2012 he and Lara Logan hosted a revival of the CBS classic Person to Person, in which celebrities are interviewed in their homes. Edward R. Murrow hosted the original from 1953 to 1961.

  Donald Trump was one of Rose's interview subjects in 1992, and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs followed in 1996. Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguistics professor, sat down in 2003, and Leonardo DiCaprio in 2004. In 2012 Rose interviewed President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle.

  Warren Buffett, David Rockefeller and Larry Ellison, the co-founder and then CEO of Oracle Corporation, were also on his list. So were actors Christoph Waltz and Bradley Cooper, director Quentin Tarantino, former Iranian empress Farah Pahlavi and tennis champion Maria Sharapova.

  For his 2013 interview with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Rose won a second Peabody Award.

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• 6. Rose on Screen

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  Walter White watches Charlie Rose on television in "Granite State," the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad, first broadcast on the 22nd of September 2013. Rose appears as himself, interviewing the characters Gretchen and Elliott Schwartz.

  The Simpsons had him as himself in 2000, in the episode "Kill the Alligator and Run." The Good Wife followed in 2013 with "A More Perfect Union." In 2017 he appeared in the House of Cards episode "Chapter 53."

  Primary Colors, in 1998, was his first film role as himself. Elegy followed in 2008, The Ides of March in 2011, Top Five in 2014, Louder Than Bombs in 2015 and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016. In 2006 he also made an uncredited appearance as a book signing party guest in The Da Vinci Code.

  Wes Anderson's film The Royal Tenenbaums, released in 2001, parodied Rose and his show. So did the first episode of BoJack Horseman in 2014.

  In 2009, Rose encouraged a discussion between the leaders of NBC and Fox News. It eventually led to fewer ad hominem attacks between Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly on their respective programs.

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• 7. Honors and Private Life

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  The Vincent Scully Prize, awarded by the National Building Museum in 2014, recognizes "exemplary practice, scholarship or criticism in architecture, historic preservation and urban design." The museum said Rose earned it by interviewing leaders of architecture and design and leading "insightful and substantive conversations" about the growth of cities and urban development. Amanda Burden, a former director of the New York City Department of City Planning, spoke at the ceremony in November 2014.

  On the 16th of October 2014, the State University of New York at Oswego gave Rose an honorary doctorate during its annual Lewis B. O'Donnell Media Summit. Duke University awarded him an honorary degree in 2016. On the 8th of May 2016, Sewanee: The University of the South did the same.

  Mary Rose, formerly Mary King, was married to him from 1968 until their divorce in 1980. In 1992 he began dating Amanda Burden, a socialite and a stepdaughter of CBS founder William S. Paley. In 2011 he told a Financial Times reporter that they had stopped dating around 2006.

  On the 29th of March 2006, Rose experienced shortness of breath in Syria and was flown to Paris. At the Georges-Pompidou European Hospital he underwent mitral valve repair under the supervision of Alain Carpentier, a pioneer of the procedure. He returned to the air on the 12th of June 2006 with Bill Moyers and Yvette Vega, the show's executive producer, to discuss his recovery.

  His property included a large house in Henderson, a 5,500-square-foot beach house in Bellport, New York, and an apartment in The Sherry-Netherland in New York City. Each was worth several million dollars. He also owned apartments in Washington, D.C., and Paris.

  In 1990 Rose bought a 525-acre soybean farm near Oxford, North Carolina, as a country retreat and named it Grassy Creek Farm. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and of the Deepdale Golf Club on Long Island. In February 2017 he announced that he would have surgery to replace the same heart valve.

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• 8. Allegations and Fallout

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  On the 20th of November 2017, The Washington Post published a report in which eight women accused Rose of sexual misconduct. They were employees of Rose or had hoped to work for him. The accusations included harassment, groping and lewd phone calls, and they covered conduct from the late 1990s to 2011. They surfaced amid the Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey cases.

  PBS and Bloomberg LP suspended distribution of his show on the day the article appeared, and CBS announced it was suspending him pending an investigation. The following day, all three formally cut ties.

  "I deeply apologize for my inappropriate behavior," Rose said in a statement. He added that he had "behaved insensitively at times" and accepted responsibility. He also said he did not believe all the allegations were accurate. "I always felt that I was pursuing shared feelings, even though I now realize I was mistaken," he said.

  Gayle King and Norah O'Donnell addressed the firing on air at CBS the day after the report. King said she was still "reeling" and "really struggling." O'Donnell said "there is no excuse for this alleged behavior," and both agreed he "does not get a pass here."

  John Dickerson, the former host of Face the Nation, replaced Rose as a co-anchor on CBS This Morning. Christiane Amanpour took over his roles on PBS. In 2018, an exposé in The Hollywood Reporter described his life after the firing as "lonely."

  In May 2018-27 more women accused him of sexual harassment, including groping and suggestive comments. That brought the total to 35. On the 31st of August 2018, Rose filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by three women on the 4th of May 2018, suggesting they were exploiting the #MeToo campaign. In September 2019, his former makeup artist of 20 years, Gina Riggi, sued him for verbal harassment.

  The honors came off one by one. On the 21st of November 2017, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre rescinded a planned award. Three days later, the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication rescinded the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism it had given him in 2015. The same day, the University of Kansas's journalism school rescinded its 2017 National Citation Award.

  On the 4th of December 2017, Duke University's DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy rescinded the Futrell Award he received in September 2000. The State University of New York at Oswego Board of Trustees voted on the 23rd of January 2018 to revoke his honorary degree. By the 21st of March 2018, Sewanee had rescinded all its honors. Montclair State University was weighing the fate of its 2002 honorary doctorate. The National Building Museum made no public announcement about the Scully Prize, but his name no longer appears on its list of winners.

  The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Hussman School of Journalism and Media considered his 1999 induction into the N.C. Journalism Hall of Fame. Officials decided to keep him in the hall while amending his biography to include the allegations.

  On the 14th of April 2022, in his first public appearance since 2017, Rose released an interview with the billionaire Warren Buffett on his personal website. It was the first in a series called Charlie Rose Conversations. Later episodes featured Thomas Friedman, Ray Dalio, Fatima Gailani, Isabella Rossellini and David Petraeus.

  On the 26th of November 2024, a lawsuit that three former CBS This Morning employees filed in 2018 ended in a settlement. In settling, the plaintiffs acknowledged "no ill intent" on Rose's part for his conduct.

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