The award-winning journalist’s best moments include his interviews with George W. Bush, Alex Rodriguez’s PED supplier, and “The Godfather of AI.”

Scott Pelley’s 7 most memorable 60 Minutes interviews

The award-winning journalist's best moments include his interviews with George W. Bush, Alex Rodriguez's PED supplier, and "The Godfather of AI."

By Kathleen Perricone

June 4, 2026 8:08 p.m. ET

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Scott Pelley interviewing Geoffrey Hinton, the Godfather of AI. Credit:

Scott Pelley's departure from *60 Minutes* may have been unceremonious, but the legacy he leaves behind at the CBS newsmagazine is unmatched.

During his three decades with *60 Minutes* (the first five years with its spinoff, *60 Minutes II*), the award-winning journalist sat down with world leaders, political hopefuls, victims, heroes, drug dealers, and innovators.

Take a look back at Pelley's seven most memorable *60 Minutes* interviews.

2000: The Florida Recount

President-elect George W. Bush in December 2000.

In December 2000, Pelley scored the first primetime interview with president-elect George W. Bush, one day after the U.S. Supreme Court and a Florida circuit court confirmed his defeat of Al Gore.

As he looked towards the Oval Office, Bush of course reflected on the "hanging chad" controversy, detailing the phone call Gore made to rescind his concession and demand a recount of votes in the Sunshine State.

"I wasn't warm and fuzzy on the telephone, let me put it to you that way," Bush told Pelley. "I was fairly abrupt. I was somewhat taken aback. And I, you know, he did what he thought he had to do."

2001: Ground Zero

Scott Pelley at Ground Zero in 2001.

One of the first journalists on the scene in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, Pelley actually witnessed the South Tower collapse. The next day he returned to report from what had been dubbed "Ground Zero," the ruins of the World Trade Center. To Pelley, it was a "mountain of misery": 1.5 million tons of wreckage with 3,000 people, all likely dead, trapped inside.

In the weeks, months, and years since the terrorist attack, Pelley resolutely followed the tragedy, interviewing children of the victims, Pentagon survivors, and the heroic first responders.

2007: ‘Abu Ghraib was a mistake’

President George W. Bush with Scott Pelley at Camp David.

Pelley interviewed President George W. Bush several times during his eight years in office. One of their most candid conversations came during his second term, two days after he announced he'd send 21,000 more troops into Iraq. In his address to the nation, Bush said he'd made "mistakes" — so Pelley asked him to specify what he meant.

"You know, we've been through this before," replied Bush, sitting in Camp David's Laurel Cabin. "Abu Ghraib was a mistake," he said of the Iraq prison where U.S. guards tortured detainees. "Using bad language like, you know, 'bring them on' was a mistake. I think history is gonna look back and see a lot of ways we could have done things better. No question about it."

2011: ‘Hard-Times Generation’

Scott Pelley talks to a struggling family.

Pelley won a Peabody Award for his two-part report on the recession's effect on the youngest victims of the country’s economic crisis. He traveled to Florida, where he spoke to 20 homeless children — and what they had to say was gut-wrenching.

“Who can tell me what it's like to feel hungry?" Pelley asked. Nearly all raised their hands. "You can't sleep," described one boy. "You just go to sleep for, like, five minutes, and then you wake up. Because it is like your stomach is hurting, and it doesn't have any food in it."

In part 2, Pelley spoke to a 15-year-old girl and her younger brother who were living in a truck after losing the family home in foreclosure. "I mean, it's only life," she mused. "You do what you need to do, right?" Viewers were so moved by the children's resilience, calls poured in to *60 Minutes* pledging support, including Florida's Stetson University, which offered to cover the teen girl's undergraduate education in full.

2014: ‘The Case of Alex Rodriguez’

Anthony Bosch, Alex Rodriguez's PED supplier.

Alex Rodriguez was considered one of the greatest baseball players in modern times when a doping scandal resulted in the Yankee third basemen's suspension from the MLB for the entire 2014 season. Pelley sat down with Rodriguez's alleged supplier, Anthony Bosch, for an Emmy-winning no-holds-barred conversation about the athlete's $12,000-a-month habit of performance-enhancement drugs.

"Alex is scared of needles, so at times he would ask me to inject," revealed Bosch. "Alex cared… He would study the substance. He would study the dosage. Because he wanted to achieve all his human-performance, or, in this case, sports-performance objectives. But the most important one was the 800-home run club, which was only going to have one member: Alex Rodriguez."

2016: ‘The Democratic Ticket’

Tim Kaine and Hillary Clinton on '60 Minutes' in 2016.

A week after *60 Minutes* interviewed Donald Trump and Mike Pence, Pelley sat down with the Republican running mates' opposition, Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention. Amid the controversy over Clinton using a private email server while Secretary of State, there were chants of "lock her up" at the Republican National Convention. Had she heard them, asked Pelley. "Well, I didn't hear it, because I wasn't watching," Clinton replied. "But I certainly heard about it, yes."

Instead of feeling "threatened," she explained, "I felt sad… I don't know what their convention was about, other than criticizing me. I seem to be the only unifying theme that they had. There was no positive agenda. It was a very dark, divisive campaign. And the people who were speaking were painting a picture of our country that I did not recognize. You know, negative, scapegoating, fear, bigotry, smears. I just was so — I was saddened by it."

2023: ‘The Godfather of AI’

AI innovator Geoffrey Hinton speaks to Scott Pelley.

Geoffrey Hinton, a British computer scientist nicknamed "The Godfather of AI," appeared on *60 Minutes* to issue a warning: artificial intelligence can take over if we let it. "I think in five years' time," he told Pelley in 2023, "it may well be able to reason better than us."

Speaking to the positives of AI, Hinton predicted healthcare would benefit the greatest. "AI is already comparable with radiologists at understanding what's going on in medical images. It's gonna be very good at designing drugs. It already is designing drugs."

Pelley then asked about the downside of AI. "Well, the risks are having a whole class of people who are unemployed and not valued much because what they — what they used to do is now done by machines," lamented Hinton.

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Source: “EW News”