You probably saw the 60 Minutes tribute to Don Hewitt last night; I had meant to write about him when he died, got distracted and then, last night, realized I couldn’t not (if you forgive the double negative) recall him a bit. The photo you see here was during the production, I think, of an interview with President Kennedy. It shows him in action, rather than in a cute photo so it’s the one I wanted to use.
I was a kid when I first met Hewitt – 21 and new to the CBS Washington Bureau. It was late 1968 and he’d come down from New York to get everyone excited about his new show, 60 Minutes. That’s right – it’s almost 41 years old. He was introduced to me as “the only producer who could make you proud that you were the only one who’d gotten the recipe for Tricia Nixon’s White House wedding cake.” It was that infectious sense of competition — the joy of it, not the rest of it — that inspired the rest of us. Oh – and it was only later that I learned he had also been the producer of the Kennedy-Nixon presidential debates, the first ever to appear on TV.
Of course he could also drive you crazy – pushing, making last-minute changes, taking forever to finally appoint women as producers (his long-time secretary became one of the best) and, like all people of great energy, sometimes yelling. Really yelling.
I had the most to do with him at the presidential nominating conventions, which used to run “gavel to gavel” – from the moment the convention began until the moment it ended, live on TV. Four “floor correspondents” wandered the convention hall searching for stories. Each, and later each two, had a producer. And these correspondents were the top talent, showcased in the pressure cooker of 8 – 12 hours of live television. Over the years I worked with Roger Mudd, Mike Wallace, Ed Bradley, Leslie Stahl and Dan Rather, among others. No shrinking violets here. And, presiding over them all, in his control room above the floor, was Don. When you had a story to offer you would go to a “floor phone” and call the booth. Someone would take your offer and relay it to Don (sometimes you’d tell him yourself) who would accept or reject it. Remember at the same time he was dealing with Walter Cronkite in the anchor booth and all the live guests who showed up there, remotes” out in the convention city and hometowns of about-to-be nominees and more. For all those hours, he’d make decisions. Sometimes you could argue, but usually you lost. With all the incoming data, he kept things flowing for four days (and evenings.) And he did it all with the same sense of “story telling” that he described as the secret behind the success of 60 Minutes. And it was a blast.
So there you are. Another “legend” gone – and he was a legend who transformed the news business for the better and kept it that way for a long time before commerce made it much harder to sustain the kind of quality he demanded. Except on 60 Minutes, of course.