Maybe Wallace was just exasperated and desperate to get something interesting going. I think it's more likely that he planned it out well ahead of time and cleared it with his producers before he ever opened his mouth. In any case, at one point Wallace asked Cutler to comment on a Newsweek report on what Jordan and Clinton talked about when the two of them were out playing golf together, good old heart-to-heart buddies that they were. Jordan, it seems, had been very direct.
"Jordan said, quote 'We talk pussy,'" Wallace reported. Actually he said, "We talk pu____," because the network bleeped half the word "pussy." But pussy is one of those words that you don't have to be a professional lip reader to know when someone is saying, so Wallace and Cutler and CBS News all knew that all we viewers knew that pussy is very much what grandfatherly Mike Wallace had said.
Now, Lloyd Cutler is about as professional at being Mr. Cool as a person can get, which is why he was the guy representing the White House on 60 Minutes. Cutler didn't lose his composure in the least, but you could tell that Wallace had surprised him, how this wasn't a word he was expecting to travel from Wallace's mouth to his ears during a national television interview.
He shrugged it off with a little smile, saying only that Jordan and Clinton could talk about whatever they wanted to while playing golf. "If they have a certain amount of
locker room banter,or tell jokes to one another, who among us can cast the first stone? You and I will tell one another jokes. That's talking pussy." (Bleeped again.) The message was fundamental and clear: Regular sexy guys talk about pussy. Jordan and Clinton are regular sexy guys. Therefore it's not the least surprising or improper for Jordan and Clinton to talk pussy when they're together.
"What could be more natural?" Cutler was implicitly asking, and of course he's right. But being natural about sex is hardly the established American way, so it felt decidedly unnatural, or at least unusual, to hear Mike Wallace and Lloyd Cutler talking pussy so supposedly naturally right there in the middle of 60 Minutes (tick, tick, tick, tick).
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