Why Charlie Rose Left Comfort of ‘Nightwatch’

For the last six years Charlie Rose has been the insomniac’s best friend. As the Emmy Award-winning host of CBS’ “Nightwatch,” weekdays from 2 to 6 a.m., Rose interviewed everyone from Woody Allen to Charles Manson.

But a few months ago he left the Washington, D.C.-based “Nightwatch” and gave up comfort, security and protection” to anchor the new syndicated magazine series “Personalities,” which debuts Monday at 7 p.m. on KTTV.

Sitting in his cluttered office at Fox Studios in Hollywood, Rose doesn’t fit the stereotype of the slick TV journalist. Tall and lanky with a Southern drawl, he appears to have stepped out of a Frank Capra movie.

Though Rose is the interview subject, he can’t help but do a little interviewing himself. “First,” he says, “tell me about yourself before we start.” Rose listens intently as the interviewer offers a brief introduction, then stretches out his long legs and settles back into his chair. He is now ready to talk about himself.

“I miss ‘Nightwatch’ every day,” he says. “It’s not easy to fly in the face of change, to pick up roots, so to speak, and move from one coast to the other.” North Carolina is home to Rose. “That place means everything to me,” he says. “I have a farm there, I have family there. I get back there every six weeks or so.”

So why give up a secure job and things near and dear for a new show? “To come here it had to be a powerful magnet,” Rose says, explaining he found himself drawn to “Personalities” when executive producer Joel Cheatwood approached him earlier this year.

“I thought the idea was right,” he says. “I think what is most interesting in journalism is what makes people tick, whether it is foreign affairs, journalism or even people in business. Why do they do what they do? What can we understand about the rest of things by looking at the person behind the event? That is what my curiosity is about.”

“Personalities” will be transmitted by satellite to 117 stations midday for a same-day evening telecast. Rose will anchor the 30-minute program, which will contain an average of four interviews. He will conduct at least one.

“There are about five correspondents and 10 producers involved,” he says. “It’s a newsmagazine show that will go all over the country and the world to find interesting people.”

Rose recently returned from New York, where he interviewed Gov. Mario Cuomo. “He’s a very interesting personality beyond the fact he is a potential nominee for President,” he says. “I talked to him at length about his diaries. He gets up early in the morning and writes in his diary. He uses that as a kind of self-examination process. It’s very interesting to hear him talk about it and what it does for him. We’re not trying to go to Mario Cuomo and cover the waterfront. Let’s go and see what makes him tick.”

Rose researches each subject before each interview. “You read newspapers, newsmagazines, you watch the news broadcasts on TV and other shows so you come to a particular subject with a wide-ranging background. Then you decide how you want to approach the guest and what you might explore that hasn’t been explored. That’s why I used the diaries as the subject with Cuomo.”

The late broadcaster Edward R. Murrow served as inspiration to Rose. “An entire generation of people my age followed Murrow,” he says. “I have a record of old Murrow radio broadcasts, and I would listen to them and be inspired to get some sense of how one person did it. He was unique and special. It had to do with his integrity, courage, craft and style.”

As a youngster growing up in North Carolina, Rose was fascinated with personalities. “I always had an interest in biography,” he says. He was pre-med and later switched to pre-law at Duke University. “I went to graduate school for a year and decided to go to law school and was on my way to be a lawyer-businessman when (PBS journalist) Bill Moyers gave me an opportunity to come to work for him.”

Moyers hired Rose in 1974 to be managing editor of the series “Bill Moyers’ International Report.” “I think Bill made a singular and significant impact on me because he really infused me with the notion of quality and maintaining your standards and insisting that it had to be right,” says Rose. “He was an important mentor.”