CBS Sunday Morning,

Our CBS Sunday morning podcast is sponsored by Edward Jones. College tours with your oldest daughter. Updating the kitchen to the appropriate decade.

Retiring on the coast. Life is full of moments that matter, and Edward Jones helps you make the most of them. That's why every Edward Jones financial advisor works with you to build personalized strategies for now and down the road. So when your next moment arrives, big or small, you're ready for it. Life is for living.

Let's partner for all of it. Learn more at edwardjones.com. Good morning.

I'm Jane Pauley and this is Sunday Morning. This weekend marks the 20th anniversary of the attacks on 9-11. And we'll take stock in a number of ways, as John Dickerson explains. It's hard to imagine there are still aspects of 9-11 and its aftermath yet to come to light. Take the daring raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The SEAL teams that went into this, they didn't think they would make it back.

That was a surprise to me. A conversation with Chris Wallace about his new book. And Luke Burbank reports on rescue dogs, those four-legged heroes of 9-11.

9-11 then and now, later on Sunday morning. Summer's drawing to a close. The new season is upon us. And all through this morning, we'll be offering you some coming attractions. Jim Axelrod has a preview. The face is familiar and so is the name. What'd you say?

Michael Gandolfini steps into his late father's shoes as young Tony Soprano in a new film that explores the roots of the groundbreaking mob saga. The first instinct was no. Ben Mankiewicz catches up with Cedric the Entertainer.

I would sing, I would do poems. So I was like, don't call me a comedian, call me an entertainer. Steve Hartman has his own take on this 20th anniversary of 9-11. And more. It's Sunday morning, September 12th, 2021. And we'll be back after this. I'm on Prozac. Oh, oh my God.

I've been seeing the therapist. Oh my God. I think that's great. Curtain going up on the new season. We're going to be offering you some coming attractions over the next few weeks. And we begin at the movies. Jim Axelrod takes a closer look at an anxiously awaited prequel to the wildly popular television series, The Sopranos. After six seasons, 86 episodes, and a place on just about every critic's list of most influential TV shows ever. We are a family.

And even in this fucked up day and age, that means something. After Tony Soprano's North Jersey mafia family rewrote the rules, spurning network standards. So what, no fucking TV now?

Hey! For the freedom of cable. It's been a long odyssey with your mother, hasn't it?

All these last 500 years just seem to race by. After show creator David Chase gave us a brutal mob boss who spent sessions with his shrink talking about his mother. And where did all that come from? The therapy part and the mother part. Well, I was in therapy largely because of my mother, you know.

He knew exactly what he'd hear once the series was over. People on enemy socially would say, are you going to do more? Oh, we should do more. Are we always thinking never, I'm done? Yeah, yes I did. But 14 years later, turns out he wasn't done. James Gandolfini's death in 2013 meant a sequel was out.

So Chase went the other way, setting a movie 30 plus years before the show. The Many Saints of Newark is the story of Dickie Moltisanti, a father figure to the young Tony who'd been mentioned on The Sopranos, but never fleshed out. You remember Dickie Moltisanti? No. No?

Is that what you said? Was he a friend of yours? He was my father. I went back over my memories and I thought, oh yeah, Dickie Moltisanti was all that talk about him and he was really, you know, a badass. I'm interested in that, I'd like to find out who that guy was. This isn't a Tony Soprano origin story.

No, it is not. We wanted to make a gangster movie. We didn't want to make an origin story, we wanted to make a gangster movie.

Whatever Chase's intentions, a prequel meant meeting younger versions of such well-known and beloved characters as Silvio, Uncle Junior, and Tony's mother, Livia, and making sure they rang true. Where's the line between honoring the integrity of the character and parody? Mostly casting. That's mostly where the line is. More than writing?

Yeah, I think so. I felt this obligation to these characters as a fan of the Sopranos. Actor John Magaro plays the young Silvio Dante. Hey, sir, I need to talk to my Uncle Dickie. He's not here. His God's here.

Better he's dead. Tony Soprano's eventual right-hand man, portrayed by Steve Van Zandt in the show. Here, go ahead.

Last year I made bail so fast my super still warm when I got home. For me, it started with the, you know, the puss he has, that's kind of the frown he has, and then gets into the shoulders a little bit, and then it's, you know, he always has his hands kind of like this, he kind of keeps his arms in. Magaro says the pressure to capture the essence of these iconic characters and not do impressions of them was felt cast wide. You know, nothing is like playing a character where you have millions of rabid fans who are ready to pounce on you at the slightest mistake, and, you know, this has come out in a few weeks, and I'm gonna have to turn my phone off and internet off for a few weeks, because it's going to be scary as hell, you know, they're going to come at us. No choice will be more scrutinized than the actor cast to play the young Tony Soprano. Did you audition other actors? Yes, we auditioned other actors prior to him. And once you auditioned him, you knew? Yeah.

Him? What'd you say? Is Michael Gandolfini James Gandolfini's son? The first instinct was no. It comes with pressure, it comes with a responsibility, and then a whole other layer of, you know, playing my dad's part. But then he did something he'd never done before. Before your prep for the audition, you had never watched the series?

That is true, yeah, I'd never seen it. And my dad passed, so it was kind of a thing like, it's going to be hard, I don't really want to open that up right now, and then I watched the first season before the audition and just fell in love. It was just, I was so proud of my dad. He studied his dad's work, especially those therapy scenes.

This isn't going to work, I can't talk about my personal life. Hours with a character who has triggers and impulses and a mindset, so it's such a gift. I have hours inside of a mind that I'm about to play. Oh, what's the matter? Don't cry, it's only me, your uncle Tony.

I don't know what it is, it's like a scam or something. The gift was enough confidence to give it a go, despite the shadows and footsteps he knew he'd confront. Did any part of you think, you know what, I'm good, I don't need to do this? I don't know if you've ever jumped out of a plane or something, but you go and you look back and you go, how did I do that? Sometimes it baffles me too, that I just sort of did it, yeah. I guess if I had thought about it too much, it would have crippled me.

Were you at all concerned, any part of your calculus, what if this doesn't work? What consequence might there be for Michael? No, he's an actor, he wants to work, he wants to be a star or whatever, no.

I mean, he's, what is he now, 20, 22? You asked for it, so. I want to go to college, I can't get caught with like this. David Chase knows he's asked for it as well. I always think to myself, when are people going to get tired of this family? I mean, how about never? I mean, I guess that's possible, yeah.

That's just not the way I think. Knowing one thing he can count on from the extended family of passionate Sopranos fans is an unvarnished answer. And so I'm asking a guy who's at this level, does it still matter? Yeah, I mean, I'm one human being trying to communicate with a couple of million human beings and what they respond to me, of course it matters. If they say, you surprised me, that was interesting.

That matters as opposed to, hey, you know, that's, we saw that already. Time for the new season in television. Cedric the Entertainer has been making us laugh for decades now. And he's about to add host of the Emmy Awards to his long list of credits.

He's talking with our man in Hollywood, Ben Mankiewicz. Cedric the Entertainer is riding high. That's the rumble in the jungle right there.

You don't even need to drive anywhere. You just scare people right there with that. His car collection includes a custom 1941 Ford pickup. You know, I love the lines on the trucks of the 40 trucks. That's what really made me buy this. I love the way the front was. And then there's this vintage beauty.

The year was 1960. Thunderbird. Thunderbird. Class, style, and high performance. The T-bird's nice too. I call her Lovey.

Audiences have been loving Cedric the Entertainer for three decades, buying into a comedian who's dapper and driven. Call my grandmother cheating at cars, they put her out, man. We was like, that's grandma. They're like, she gotta go. She gotta go. I'm constantly trying to push the, you know, push the meter. It's like, what's next?

It just shows up in your DNA like that. And show business is in this 57-year-old's DNA. He's a comedian, actor, and producer with dozens of film and TV credits. Currently, he stars in two CBS shows, The Greatest at Home Videos and The Neighborhood. Next Sunday, he'll host the Emmy Awards, also on CBS, A Dream Come True. It felt like, wow, you're sitting there hosting the television prom, if you will.

Just growing up and realizing how big a night that is, I felt like, oh, this is going to be fun. In case you were wondering, Cedric the Entertainer is not his real name. He was born Cedric Antonio Kyles and raised in Carruthersville, Missouri. Small town America. You got the hamburger place up there.

You got football games. Everybody was family. What was your life like at home?

My mother's a school teacher, single-parent household. She raised my younger sister, myself, you know, with a lot of love. We had a very, you know, kind of aspirational energy. But Carruthersville wasn't idyllic. There were rules, different rules, for blacks and whites. I remember there was a single movie theater that, you know, it was kind of like an unwritten rule that blacks go on a certain night, whites go on a different night. He came to comedy late. After college, he tried his hand at broadcasting.

Then came a stint selling fax machines. I just remember how magical people thought it was, and like how hard it was like to sell it at first. Like, that can't happen. People were like, that's not true. I still don't think it could happen.

No, it's going to happen. Watch. He sold electronics at Best Buy. Were you good at selling stuff? Not really.

Not really. I had a personality that could, like, be engaged, but I didn't really know how to close people. So I'd just have a bunch of small conversations for quite a while.

And leave without making a sound. Hey, it's nice meeting you, man. Great. Next, he was a claims adjuster for State Farm. Oh, the original Jake.

Hey, I didn't order any pizza. Jake from State Farm. The original Jake.

Yeah, the original. Had the cards and everything, khakis. Probably another job I wasn't really set up for, but I was really good at, like, getting people into rental cars for prom for their kids. That was my move. That's what people really loved about me is like, oh, man, you know, I had a shopping cart kind of hit my car. I'm going to need to put it in the shop for a week. You're like, got it.

So it's prom time, right? So you were good for the customer, maybe not great for State Farm. And I think that's why they never really bothered to bring me back for any reason. Like, to do commercials or anything. He'd always been funny, but he didn't try stand-up comedy until his mid-20s. A friend talked him into it. Right out of the gate, he won $500 in a stand-up competition.

He quit State Farm and hit the road. But Cedric Kyle's didn't sound right. Where did Cedric the Entertainer come in? You know, I performed as Jess Cedric. I performed as Cheerio for a short period of time there. And I did get a cease and desist letter from General Mills.

Is that true? True story. I never really wanted to do, like, my formal name. I would sing.

I would do poems. So I was like, don't call me a comedian, call me an entertainer. So he introduced me as Cedric the Entertainer, and that was it. It wasn't easy.

The road was paved with rough nights and long drives. But he had support along the way, including from fellow comedian Steve Harvey, who owned a comedy club in Dallas. I came to his club, and he put me on, and I performed.

I did really well. Every night, he was like, let me come and do five, six minutes at the end. And so I just killed it every time, and he gave me 200 bucks. And then he brought me back, maybe like two months later, the headline.

That must have felt unbelievable. This guy is the best. Hightower Robinson, you're out of here. A few years later, they teamed up as co-stars on The Steve Harvey Show. So let me ask you an opinion or something.

Take a shower, change your drugs. And on the groundbreaking Kings of Comedy tour. Talking about we want a black president. Come on, y'all, now.

You know, I mean, you know, we got Clinton that's close. We had a blast doing it. And, you know, to be out on tour with those guys, you know, lifelong friendships through that situation. This is the barbershop. The place where a black man means something. Cornerstone neighborhood.

Our own country club. Film roles followed, among them Eddie Walker, imparting old school wisdom in the barbershop movies. I had a couple of different voices that I was like toying with. But then, you know, as I just started doing it, this guy showed up. And it was like a combination of a guy from my mom's church, an uncle of mine. And it got to the point to where I literally didn't even need a script. Like I could do Eddie just, you say something to me, I can talk for hours as Eddie. You would have driven them nuts. And he wasn't patient like I am. Now he's back as Calvin Butler in season four of The Neighborhood, a show about a white family moving into a predominantly African-American community. I almost got trampled twice.

You know, it's weird because I almost stepped on somebody twice. The show is a comedy about gentrification, but Cedric sees it as a metaphor for these divisive times. And it's all about not kicking people out in order to make it new, but how do we uplift and move forward with everybody being exactly who they are. We used to have Father's Day basketball games. Married for 22 years, Cedric the Entertainer is about to be an empty nester. His youngest just graduated high school. But this entertainer isn't slowing down. He's still revved up and raring to go. We got one little mood that we know we on when we can't just step into the car no more. You know your ass old when you leave like this. All right, I'mma holler at y'all. All he needs is a mic, a spotlight and a crowd.

Going on that stage, like just that moment, just get a joke that works. You're like, oh, yeah, you know, yes, got to do this. So here's to us.

The Good Fight, the final season, now streaming exclusively on Paramount+. This morning, we're remembering the trauma and tragedy of the attacks of 9-11, 20 years on. You may not recollect that the CIA had identified Osama bin Laden as mastermind of those attacks, even before that terrible day had drawn to a close. Yet the search to find him took another 10 tortured years. Chris Wallace has written a new book about the hunt for the world's most wanted man.

It's published by ViacomCBS's Simon & Schuster, and he talks with our John Dickerson. Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda. The 2011 military assault on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, was so successful, it is possible to forget how difficult the U.S. Navy SEAL mission really was. The SEAL team that went into this, they didn't think they would make it back.

That was a surprise to me, and I will tell you that one of the top CIA operatives back watching the drone view back at Langley at CIA headquarters fully expected that he was going to see the compound just explode like a Jerry Bruckheimer action movie, that the whole place was just going to blow up. The SEALs didn't know if bin Laden would even be there, and if he was, he'd be ringed by tripwires, bodyguards, and maybe Pakistani troops. In fact, O'Neill called his particular team of the SEALs the martyrs brigade because he thought, we're going to go out there, we're going to do it, we're going to avenge 9-11, we're going to bring bin Laden to justice, but there's no way we're getting home. Rob O'Neill, the Navy SEAL credited with killing bin Laden, is just one of the characters in Chris Wallace's new book, Countdown Bin Laden, that traces 247 days leading up to that fateful moment. The president is making a decision about a raid that's going to endanger the lives of the couple of dozen SEALs.

It threatens relations with a very important ally, Pakistan, and not so incidentally, probably betting his presidency. Where do you put this one in the history of tough presidential battles? In the history of tough presidential calls. In terms of just the process, the professionalism, the care, the meticulousness, this is right at the top. Wallace's account isn't just about night vision goggles and stairway firefights. It also follows the painstaking puzzle work done at lonesome cubicles and in windowless conference rooms.

The old line, the harder you work, the luckier you get. They had worked as hard as I can't see anything more they could have done to give themselves a chance for success here. It wasn't the only thing going on at the time. Obama has got a civil war in Libya. He's got the Arab Spring across the Middle East. He's got Donald Trump pushing the birther movement.

We provided additional information today about the site of my birth. Four days before the raid, President Obama had to prove he was born in America. But I'm speaking to the vast majority of the American people, as well as to the press. We do not have time for this kind of silliness. We've got better stuff to do.

It's true of every president. You don't get to decide what issues you're going to deal with, what's going to be on your plate today. Some of it you get to decide, but some of it is just incoming. The clock was ticking. The longer the CIA worked to be certain they'd found bin Laden, the greater the chance they might spook him, losing the best chance they had in nine years. Were you conscious of the disconnect between what we see and then what's really going on behind the scenes?

Absolutely. I mean, nobody had a clue. Remember, the night before the raid, Obama is at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and he's taking off after Donald Trump because Trump has been propagating the birther theory, and he starts making fun of the decisions that Trump made on Celebrity Apprentice. But you, Mr. Trump, recognize that the real problem was a lack of leadership.

And so ultimately you didn't blame Little John or Meat Loaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. He's 24 hours from the biggest decision of his presidency, and perhaps it's either going to secure or eliminate the chances for his re-election. It was the biggest decision for that president, but a typical presidential one, a choice where the chance for success was not much better than 50 percent. And even if it wasn't for the president, it wasn't for the president.

It was 50 percent. And even the best outcome was one where Americans were almost certain to die. I came to quite a different view of Obama through writing this book. Did a lot of people think he was the candidate of hope and change and peace and a dove? Yeah, but they didn't recognize how tough Obama was. Admiral William McRaven, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, was also surprised. One of the things that McRaven said is, I know the guy had never been in the military, but he was so discerning about what was important and what wasn't. And he knew his strengths and he knew his limits. He knew the stuff he didn't know. And he wasn't going to presume or pretend that, you know, I'm more of a general than the generals. So given that, what do you think when leaders say, well, I just trust my gut? I think they're damn fools. Do you ever think some of the people who are running or who want to run, you think they couldn't have handled this kind of challenge that Obama faced or that any president faces when it really gets to the toughest things?

Yes. As a regular presidential debate moderator, Wallace has thought a lot about what it takes to be president. I mean, there are a lot of things about the presidency other than making these kinds of life and death decisions. But for the biggest things, the things like bin Laden, the things like getting out of Afghanistan and confronting North Korea and all of these things, there are going to be crises, completely unforeseen crises. And the idea of thinking, really thinking, could they handle that? Could they handle all of the incoming, all of the information, all of the pressure, all of the risks, all of the possibilities and come to the right conclusion? And in the end, it's kind of a guess.

You don't know until they're there. But it's a useful way to look at a potential president. Steve Hartman has a portrait of love everlasting. After 20 years in a box, Monica Eichen is ironing her wedding dress, getting ready to wear it once more. And although she will wipe away every wrinkle, she will not smooth over the tragedy it represents. I think wearing the dress makes a statement.

What is the statement? That I was happily married the day he died. And I was looking forward to having a family.

Monica was married just 11 months when her husband, Michael, a bond trader, died in Tower 2. It was a brief marriage, but Monica says the loss feels everlasting. There is no moving on. You never move on from it. You move in.

You move into the life that was chosen for you. Hi, my name is Monica Eichen, founder of September's Mission. When I first met Monica, just four months after 9-11, she'd already moved into that new life, advocating for a memorial on the site of the towers and warning that any other use of the land would be unacceptable. You're going to stand down there in front of the bulldozers and not let them put up a building.

Right. We don't build over crying souls. She was tenacious, relentless. George Pataki, New York governor at the time, says it's important to remember that a lot of people didn't think we needed a memorial here.

People who just said we had to move on, just rebuilt. But Monica said this was hallowed ground. Was there a louder voice than hers? A lot of people deserve credit for that, but certainly Monica Eichen is among the most. Monica has since remarried and has a family, but she freely admits and has come to accept that she will always be in love with two men. We can live our lives, but still keep that memory. Moving in, but never moving on. Her motto and her vision for this most sacred space. Some 300 search dog teams comb the wreckage of Ground Zero in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, which brings us to this tale of dogged determination from Luke Burbank. 9-11 was undoubtedly one of the darkest moments in our nation's history. But the attacks and the days after also brought out heroes of all kinds, some of them on four legs.

Can't put a price on them. And that smoke you see over there, they can smell through that, and we can. Among them was Anna, a dog trained to find humans in the tangled rubble, all at the direction of her handler, Rick Lee, a firefighter from Sacramento.

Overall, kind of reminded me of the whole World War II films of London being bombed, because everything had no color, it was all gray, everything's destroyed. 20 years later, Lee still vividly remembers searching what had been Building 7 of the World Trade Center. There had been heavy equipment working there for several hours, and they saw the dogs, they asked if we could search the area.

We got up on the pile, you can hear a pin drop. We searched the area, and dogs didn't detect any human scent, live human scent. Which was important because it allowed rescuers to move on to other sections of Ground Zero, where there might be survivors. Lee and his dog knew what they were doing, due in no small part to Wilma Melville, a retired gym teacher from central California. I wanted to learn to train a dog to do something special.

Showing a poodle is not, to me, particularly special. But learning to train a dog to find a person who might be alive after a disaster, that's special. Well into her fifties, Melville and her beloved dog Murphy learned the art of search and rescue, and their first deployment was Oklahoma City. 168 people died in Oklahoma City. That got branded on my heart.

While searching the rubble, Melville noticed something. I could see firsthand that although we have many really terrific civilian dog handlers, I saw that for the first two days, the firefighters, meaning the task force, stood back and wondered, what are we going to do with these civilians? And so she returned home to California with a plan. Start a non-profit, the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation, that would do something that hadn't been done before. Train firefighters and dogs together, free of charge.

The kicker? She'd get most of the dogs from rescue shelters. Kind of looking for a dog that's got a really, really high drive, that really doesn't make a good pet. They're going to run on the rubble. They're going to do everything just to get that toy and that reward. So they have to be really, really driving.

Jason Vasquez is an L.A. County Fire Captain. He says search dogs use their keen noses, and outsized enthusiasm to find humans and human remains in disasters. They're used to 100% smell. They use the sight to get over the rubble, OK, but their nose is 100% working and that's how they find somebody. There are a number of folks out here. How does a dog know to go look for the one guy that's hiding in a barrel? It's kind of like somebody playing like a little kid game hide and seek. The person that's out and they can see them, you're not the one I'm looking for.

I'm looking for the one I can't see that's hard to find. The Foundation's headquarters in Santa Paula, California, are a sort of search dog Disneyland. Where are they, bud?

Where are they? With simulated collapsed freeways, leaning buildings, and many piles of rubble and wrecked cars. It's the only facility of its kind in the U.S. built specifically for dogs to learn search and rescue. I had an ambition once the Search Dog Foundation got going to create 168 FEMA certified teams, one for each person that died in Oklahoma City. And just last year, this agency made it to the 168th mark. An incredible accomplishment for an organization that survives solely on donations and love for these animals.

I find it interesting because it seems like you possess the characteristics that you're looking for in these dogs. I suspect that's exactly true. And so does any person who is a success in whatever they venture to do. You can't be stopped by one or two or three or four hurdles. You can't be stopped because it's difficult. You can't be stopped because people say, why are you doing that? You can't be stopped by anything. Thank you for listening.

Please join us when our trumpet sounds again next Sunday morning. This is Intelligence Matters with former acting director of the CIA, Michael Morell. Bridge Colby is co-founder and principal of the Marathon Initiative, a project focused on developing strategies to prepare the United States for an era of sustained great power competition. The United States put our mind to something we can usually figure it out. What people are saying and what we kind of know analytically and empirically is our strategic situation, our military situation is not being matched up with what we're doing. Follow Intelligence Matters wherever you get your podcasts.