"LOOK, HOW DO WE GET THIS DONE QUICK AND CLEAN, WITHOUT A MESS? I think that they’re pleased with him, or he wouldn’t be on that beat. He’s ridden out that contract. How anyone could have signed a contract like that is nuts. Anyone who couldn’t have gotten a contract closer to six figures is nuts…Ninety-two thousand, and it’s criminal because he’s intelligent and he’s good…You don’t think I could take him across the street for one-thirty five?"

Richard A. Leibner, the country’s pre-eminent talent agent for broadcast journalists, is on the phone. Leibner with a phone is like Mantle with a bat, Child with a spatula, Perlman with a bow. An oval-faced man without much hair, he’ll "do" 50 or 60 calls in a typical working day, sometimes pacing around his Broadway office, an extra-long phone cord thrown over his shoulder like a sport coat on the cover of a Frank Sinatra album. Sometimes, as he’s doing now, he will lie back in his desk chair until he is almost horizontal, his feet resting on his privately stocked jukebox, his right arm reaching inexplicably toward the ceiling.

Leibner, 50, is capable of a remarkable emotional range. He can be plaintive, cajoling, jocular, terse, profane, sentimental, jovial, respectful, dismissive, analytical or expansive; the one constant is the strain of his native Brooklyn in his voice. At times, during a particular textured reading, his associates at N.S. Bienstock, Inc will gather around his office to listen in and savor the nuances.

Leibner and the four other agents who work at Bienstock (including his wife and partner, Carole Cooper, and Stuart Witt, a former CBS Vice President) represent more than 300 television news employees. Their clients range from the highest paid person in the business, Dan Rather, to other network luminaries like Diane Sawyer, Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Tom Jarriel, Maria Shriver and Bernard Goldberg, to more or less anonymous producers. Bienstock also represents local anchors and reporters around the country, including such New York figures as Chuck Scarborough, Michele Marsh and Pia Lindstrom. (All pay Bienstock between 5 and 7 percent of their salaries for contract negotiation; the figure rises for additional financial services. By Leibner’s estimates, the company grosses $3 million a year in commissions.)

Somewhere near the bottom of the salary range is the man under discussion at the moment, a junior network correspondent, who, Leibner is trying to convince the vice president on the other end of the line, is being paid about 40 fewer thousand dollars a year than he is worth:

"And you can’t do a raise on a percentage basis. I could take him to 20 different places. He’s single, he travels light, he’s freaking worth his weight in gold. It’s a question of you’ve been nurturing him for three years, now do you want to cash in your investment?…I really want mid one-thirties. You want me to say one-fifty, I’ll say one-fifty."

SPEAKING OF HIM, LEIBNER’S CLIENTS TEND TO GUSH. Dan Rather: " Richard and Carole are two of the most extraordinary people I’ve ever met. They’re family-centered, decent, honest and trustworthy." "60 Minutes" correspondent Morley Safer: " He’s among the most utterly loyal, true friends a person can have." CBS News special correspondent Bernard Goldberg: "He’s like a spouse, except he knows some clients better than a spouse."

Another client, Herb Denenberg, a consumer reporter at WCAU-TV in Philadelphia calls him "a one-man union" and the analogy is apt. Leibner capacious client roster gives him an estimable power base; he’s particularly rich in the precious currency of information. At any given moment he knows, probably better than anyone else in the industry, who is making what, who is happy, who is disgruntled, who is coming and who is going. When it serves a client’s interest, he has no hesitation about relating any of this information into a telephone receiver.

Nor does Leibner confine his involvement to the usual agent’s job of negotiating contracts. He talks to network vice presidents about his clients’ assignments, billing, job definition, exposure, progress in the company. If they are not offered what he believes is just, he is not averse to advising them to take their services elsewhere.

Ten years ago, he masterfully parlayed ABC’s interest in Dan Rather, at the time a correspondent on "60 Minutes" into the job of Walter Cronkite’s successor on the CBS Evening News, for the then-unprecedented salary of $2.2 million a year. Early this year, after protracted negotiations, his client Diane Sawyer did bolt CBS for ABC, for a $1.6 million salary and the chance to work with Sam Donaldson on a new prime-time show.

In 1983, the then-president of CBS News, Edward M. Joyce, infuriated at Leibner’s self-promotion and what he saw as an habitual intrusion on editorial and management decisions gave a virulent interview to Variety. Referring to Leibner and the Bienstock firm, he said, "I am determined not to let the flesh peddlers affect the caliber of our broadcasts." The trade newspaper accurately headlined the article, CBS NEWS DECLARES WAR ON AGENT. The subheadline, in classic "Stix Nix" style, was SEZ THERE"S TOO MUCH JACK IN THE BIENSTOCK.

Joyce’s offensive was condemned in the industry as overstated, inappropriately personal and, in the view of some, including Leibner, anti-Semitic. (In his book "Prime Times, Bad Times," Joyce wrote that he regretted his "stupid and unfeeling" use of the term "flesh peddler," but still condemned Leibner’s attempts "to broker, even arbitrate, many of the decisions being made at CBS News.") Many, again including Leibner, believe that the outburst contributed to Joyce’s departure from the network two years later. Yet some still feel that Leibner influence is "unseemly," in the words of one of his clients, a veteran network correspondent.

"Talk about inside information," says the client, who asked not to be named. "He can play network against network, reporter against reporter. How many times has he said to a network, ‘I’ll go easy on this negotiation, if you give me that one.’

"He tries to get involved in the politics of the news division. He senses himself as a power center. And sometimes he asks for things that just shouldn’t be asked for by an agent."

"Excuse me," Leibner says, "but are Carole and I more powerful than an organization with a book value of $5 billion?

"When management thinks you control your clients, then they insult their employees. We’re dealing with superintelligent people here. They make their own decisions. You give them options, alternatives and guidance.

" Look, I haven’t won the Nobel Prize. I just come to work and I’m a good b.s. artist."

ON THE PHONE IS A CORRESPONDENT WHO HAS BEEN RELOCATED TO another city. " If you could get that housing stuff as expense-account reimbursement instead of on the W-2, you’d be much better off," Leibner says. "That’s the only way you can beat the taxman."

Leibner moves on to another topic, his client’s relationship with an unsympathetic supervisor. " I don’t think you have any choice, if you want to survive in the world of this man. The only question is, how soon is this man going to go away? He’s a hard man to say yes to because he gives you what he gives you in such a grudging manner…If you don’t move ahead with new people, you’re someone who’s going to stay where they are forever."

Leibner hangs up. "I’m a lay shrink to the world," he says.

Actually, Leibner talks too much to be a good psychiatrist. (Asked to recall her first impression of the agent, Diane Sawyer says, " I remember gasping, trying to get a word in edgewise.")

There also aren’t many therapists with Leibner’s affection for –and command of –profanity. He is capable of tempering it when the occasion demands, however. When Laurence A. Tisch gained control of CBS in 1986, Diane Sawyer informed Leibner that Tisch was very sensitive to foul language. Leibner cleaned up his act in his subsequent dealings with the new network chairman, but it wasn’t easy. On one occasion when, he says, the most common Anglo-Saxonism would have been perfect, he uttered a sentence so un-Leibner-like that Sawyer was inspired to inscribe it on a gold clock that now sits on the mantelpiece in Leibner’s West 57^th Street penthouse apartment. The sentence is: "What the heck, Mr. Tisch."

LEIBNER WAS TRAINED IN HIS FATHER’S TRADE, ACCOUNTING, AND HE went to work in the family firm in 1963. The next year, he and his father, Sol, were given the chance to buy out the agency of Nate Bienstock, an insurance man who had a number of CBS News broadcasters—including Eric Sevareid, Walter Cronkite and Charles Collingwood—among his customers.

Bienstock had supplemented his earnings by occasionally negotiating contracts for some insurance clients, but his 3 percent commission didn’t yield much revenue: these were the days when a salary in the mid-five figures was considered big money. But young Leibner loved the negotiating and loved being in the world of news. Inspired by the likes of the elegant, worldly Collingwood, a photographic blowup of whom occupies an honored place in Leibner’s office, he became, in his words, "a news junkie." He decided to transform his portion of the firm into something that at the time did not exist anywhere else: a major talent agency specializing in the broadcast news business. Its first year, the firm grossed just $48,000.

Things began to change in the late 1960’s and early 70’s, when a number of factors came together to the benefit of both television news and N.S. Bienstock. (Bienstock died in 1984, but Leibner has not seen fit to change the name of the firm.) Describing the evolution, Leibner lapses, as he often does, into the present tense: "We hire Ethel Goldstein to run the office, so I can get out and drum up business. The networks expand their news broadcast from 15 minutes to half an hour. TV Guide starts to write about anchors, and Vietnam puts the spotlight on correspondents." Suddenly it was a seller’s market. Salaries jumped, and reporters and anchors realized that an agent could get them even more money.

At the local level, Leibner believes, the most important innovation was the advent of three-quarter-inch video-cassette recorders in the early 1970’s. " To look at a client or potential client’s work before that, we used to have to use these huge steel reels, save them up for two or three weeks, then rent two hours of commercial studio time at $300 an hour," he says. "Selling people out of town was non-existent. With the cassette, and with Federal Express, suddenly we could agent every city in the country."

The technological advances coincided with the "Happy Talk" era of local news, a boom period when evening broadcasts expanded from 30 minutes to as long as two hours, and took on what seemed like chattering, empathizing, giggling casts of thousands.

"In the late 70’s, you just couldn’t keep up," says Carole Cooper, a onetime producer of television commercials who joined the firm in 1976, and now directs the representation of local newspeople. " A local news director would call up and say, ‘I need a consumer reporter and two general assignment people.’ I’d get off and say, ‘Where am I going to get those people?"

In response to the demand, other agents began to ply the broadcast news field. Today, Bienstock’s main competitors are Ralph Mann of International Creative Management (his clients include Jane Pauley, John Chancellor, Harry Reasoner); Jim Griffin of the William Morris Agency (Lesley Stahl, Deborah Norville); Alfred Geller (Connie Chung); Los Angeles-based Ed Hookstratten (Bryant Gumbel), and in Washington, Robert Barnett (Sam Donaldson, Chris Wallace.)

In 1977, Roone Arledge, the president of ABC Sports, was given a mandate to lead the network’s news division out of its perennial third-place status. He did so by instituting the network equivalent of baseball free agency. Where previously there had been virtually no personnel movement among the networks, Arledge made it known that he was determined to hire the best people; if he had to lure them away from another network, so much the better.

"That’s when the real escalation in network salaries came," Leibner says. " CBS had a frustrated organization—they had a second tier of people who had no room to move up. And they had no first-refusal clause in their contracts. We started jumping people religiously.

It was in this atmosphere that Walter Cronkite let it be known, in 1978, that he had decided to step down as anchor of the CBS Evening News.

Dan Rather had been a network correspondent since 1961, when, as a 29-year-old news director for the CBS affiliate in Houston, he was named chief of the network’s southwestern bureau. Shortly thereafter, Blair Clark, a CBS News vice president, summoned him to New York to negotiate a contract. " He asked me who my agent was," Rather recalls. " I said, ‘What’s an agent?’ Blair said he wouldn’t feel comfortable if I didn’t have representation. He wrote down a list of three agents I could pick from. I chose the middle one—Nate Bienstock." With Bienstock’s help, Rather says, he signed a contract for $17,500.

Leibner came on a short time later, and he saw Rather through a number of other contracts, culminating, it seemed with his "60 Minutes" position at $300,000 a year. But the seemingly universal assumption that Roger Mudd would be Cronkite’s successor got Rather to thinking he deserved consideration. He told Leibner what was on his mind, and the agent took it from there.

Leibner shot up Rather’s value by determining that both Arledge and the NBC News president William J. Small were very eager to get him, and making sure that Bill Leonard at CBS News know of their interest. Then, in a move he later reckoned to be half the battle, he got Leonard to agree to keep Rather in his "60 Minutes" slot for another two years—until 60 days before his present contract expired. Staying in full public view on one of the most popular shows in television, Rather would continue to be just as marketable to the other networks.

At the beginning of the negotiations, Leibner shocked Rather by telling him it would be possible to get a six-year contract for a total of $5 million. CBS ended up offering a 10-year, $22 million deal.

Almost hidden in the contract was a "window" clause: if Rather were to be dissatisfied after five years, he would have the right to renegotiate the deal. In 1985, Leibner used the clause to get Rather an additional raise that will bring his salary to more than $3.5 million a year by 1990.

ONE OF THE TWO MAJOR CHANGES IN THE BUSINESS OF TELEVISION NEWS over the last 15 years was a transformation in the role of anchors, and, to a lesser extent, correspondents. Where they were once like newspaper reporters, only a little better-paid and better known, they came more closely to resemble Hollywood stars, with the kind of celebrity and earning power a print reporter can only dream about.

Being so intimately involved in the shift, Richard Leibner has come under fire from traditionalists who believe that the superstar system with its show-biz values has irretrievably corrupted broadcast journalism. Leibner—and his clients—insist that they’re doing the same job, but are just getting paid better for it. A related criticism is that no one, least of all Dan Rather, is worth $3.5 million a year. It is the same argument that has been made about guitar players and left-handed pitchers, and Leibner makes the same response that they and their defenders do. "No one is putting a gun to the networks’ head," he says. " They pay what the market will bear."

Yet the second major change in television news—the sharp cutbacks in budget and personnel made by all three network news divisions over the last several years, climaxed by CBS News’s 215 layoffs in early 1987—suggests that perhaps the market could not, in fact, bear all the payroll increases. Was the downsizing the end result of the salary escalation? According to one relatively disinterested observer, the answer is no.

"I don’t think they’re related whatsoever," says Bill Leonard, who, as president of CBS News in the late 1970’s and early 80’s, signed off on Dan Rather’s first anchor contract, and who is currently director of the Alfred I. DuPont/ Columbia University journalism awards. "The cutbacks had more to do with the corporate restructuring of all three networks and the new owners’ sense that there was a more efficient way to do things."

"I don’t blame Leibner for getting what he can for his clients. The more journalists are paid, the better. The only negative effect I can see of the rise of Leibner and the other agents is they’ve been able to strike deals for anchorpeople that give them excessive authority and upset the balance of how the news was properly managed."

Leonard is referring to the clause in Dan Rather’s 1980 contract that made him managing editor—in effect, the boss—of the Evening News. Similar clauses—those that go beyond salary to matters such as billing, frequency of appearances and nature of assignment—now frequently appear on other contracts, especially contracts negotiated by agents. It was this intrusion by Leibner and his counterparts into matters perceived as editorial that infuriated Ed Joyce.

It may be because the networks have come to accept the involvement of agents in nonfinancial matters as a necessary evil, it may be because the current austere climate has led Leibner to back off a bit, or it may be testimony to the power that Leibner wields, but the executives contacted for this article had no argument with Leibner’s methods. (None of the three network news chiefs responded to interview requests.)

"He’s a very, very good agent," says Richard C. Wald, senior vice president of ABC News. " A good agent is a little like a good producer—he thinks of possibilities for his client, in terms of both contract and production. Sometimes it’s valuable for an agent to be imaginative the way Richard is. Sometimes, of course, it’s a pain."

A final complaint sometimes heard about Leibner and the Bienstock agency is from the point of view of the people they represent. With only five agents and more than 300 clients, can all of them get the kind of service they need? And specifically, it is said, jobs will inevitably come open in which more than one client is interested. Or a move that will benefit one client will hurt another. Could there be a clearer case of conflict of interest?

"It’s a delicate balancing act," Leibner says. "When we hear about a job being open, we will make a judgement as to which of our clients has the best chance for it. If another client hears about it and is interested in it, we will put him up, too. He has to trust that I’m putting him up with the same enthusiasm as the other candidate."

Leibner’s interpretation is echoed by Bernard Goldberg, a client reportedly considered for the "60 Minutes" job given in May to another Leibner client, Steve Kroft. Goldberg says: " Is it in the back of my mind that Richard sometimes represents two people going for the same job? Yes. But I have to come to believe that Richard honestly makes the same pitch for each of his clients. He will say why Bernie deserves the job; then in the next breath he will say that Joe is exceptionally good at interviews. I don’t believe that he would ever sandbag one client at the expense of another."

NOT LONG AGO, IN HIS OFFICE AT CBS NEWS, MIKE WALLACE WAS discussing the various services provided by his agent. His "60 Minutes" colleague, Morley Safer, walked in, and Wallace asked him, " What does Richard do for you?"

Safer replied, " I’m not going to tell you, Mike, because then you’ll want it, too."

The services Bienstock provides vary with the client. When the anchorman Mike Schneider parted company with WCBS-TV in New York this spring, the agency found him a network anchorman slot with ABC News.

Herb Denenberg in Philadelphia got the full treatment. "When I signed on with Richard, I wasn’t fully aware of my value," Denenberg says. "At the time, I was putting out a story a day. Richard said, ‘You’ve got to be the craziest son of a gun in the country. You’re producing more stories than anybody in the United States.’ What did I know about TV? I used to be a professor. Anyway, Richard negotiated another deal so that my workload was more realistic." He also got Denenberg raises totaling 50 percent.

"Once," Denenberg goes on, " I did a story on dangerous plastics in children’s products. I heard that the CBS Network"—which owns and operates his station—"was going to send a reporter to do a piece on the same subject. I called up Richard, he called CBS and I ended up doing the story on the network."

In Denenberg’s case—as in Schneider’s, Rather’s and many others’—Leibner’s services are clearly worth his commission. Why, then, doesn’t everyone in electronic journalism sign with N.S. Bienstock Inc? One reason is that for a top newsperson –someone making, say, $500,000—paying Leibner $25,000 a year, every year, may not make a great deal of economic sense. (Some competing agencies charge even higher commissions, up to 10 percent.)

"It’s comfortable having Richard as your agent," says a former client who parted "amicably" from him. "But from a business standpoint, it was costing me dollars. I decided to negotiate my own contract, and I found it was easier than I thought."

There is a middle way for those not ready to take that step. Such network heavies as Sam Donaldson, Chris Wallace (a former Leibner client), George Will and Jeff Greenfield are among the more than 250 broadcast clients who use the services of Robert Barnett, a Washington attorney who has developed the news business into a profitable sideline. Instead of a percentage, Barnett charges an hourly fee in the area of $300. If a $500,000-a-year correspondent signed a five-year contract, he would pay Leibner a minimum of $125,000 over that period. Assuming that the negotiations took 20 hours, a liberal estimate, Barnett’s fee would be $6,000. Total.

Off-price services like Barnett’s look especially good in the atmosphere of austerity that has prevailed since Capital Cities Inc. took over ABC, General Electric took over NBC and Laurence Tisch took over CBS. Instead of automatic double-digit salary increases, there have been take-it-or-leave it offers. Instead of bidding wars, there have been layoffs.

Leibner has lost some clients who feel that paying a 6 percent commission for a 3 percent raise isn’t worth it. But he argues that his approach—the full-throttle, 24 hour-a-day devotion to his clients and their careers—is more valuable in times such as these: "When people lose their jobs, we’ve got five people sitting on the telephones, hunting for jobs."

No, the cutbacks haven’t demoralized Richard Leibner. In fact, he’s feeling pretty good these days. That’s thanks in part to the Diane Sawyer deal, which entailed a full complement of late-night phone calls, intense strategy sessions and press coverage, before the newswoman switched from CBS to ABC.