{"id":1260,"date":"2009-08-24T12:27:26","date_gmt":"2009-08-24T12:27:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2009\/08\/24\/the-amazing-don-hewitt-cbs-news-conventions-60-minutes-and-me\/"},"modified":"2014-08-04T05:40:59","modified_gmt":"2014-08-04T05:40:59","slug":"the-amazing-don-hewitt-cbs-news-conventions-60-minutes-and-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2009\/08\/24\/the-amazing-don-hewitt-cbs-news-conventions-60-minutes-and-me\/","title":{"rendered":"The Amazing Don Hewitt: CBS News, Conventions, 60 Minutes and Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Hewitt<\/a> <\/span>You probably saw the 60 Minutes<\/a> tribute to Don Hewitt<\/a> 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.\u00a0 The photo you see here was during the production, I think, of an interview with President Kennedy.\u00a0 It shows him in action, rather than in a cute photo so it’s the one I wanted to use.<\/p>\n

I was a kid when I first met Hewitt – 21 and new to the CBS Washington Bureau<\/a>.\u00a0 It was late 1968 and he’d come down from New York to get everyone excited about his new show, 60 Minutes.\u00a0 That’s right – it’s almost 41 years old.\u00a0 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.”\u00a0\u00a0 It was that infectious sense of competition — the joy of it, not the rest of it — that inspired the rest of us.\u00a0 Oh – and it was only later that I learned he had also been the producer of the Kennedy-Nixon presidential debates<\/a>, the first ever to appear on TV.<\/p>\n

Of course he could also drive you crazy – pushing, making last-minute changes, taking forever to finally appoint women as\u00a0 producers (his long-time secretary became one of the best) and, like all people of great energy, sometimes yelling.\u00a0 Really <\/em>yelling.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Four “floor correspondents” wandered the convention hall searching for stories.\u00a0 Each, and later each two, had a producer.\u00a0 And these correspondents were the top talent, showcased in the pressure cooker of 8 – 12 hours of live television.\u00a0 Over the years I worked with Roger Mudd<\/a>, Mike Wallace<\/a>, Ed Bradley<\/a>, Leslie Stahl<\/a> and Dan Rather<\/a>, among others.\u00a0 No shrinking violets here.\u00a0 And, presiding over them all, in his control room above the floor, was Don.\u00a0 When you had a story to offer you would go to a “floor phone” and call the booth.\u00a0 Someone would take your offer and relay it to Don (sometimes you’d tell him yourself) who would accept or reject it.\u00a0 Remember at the same time he was dealing with Walter Cronkite<\/a> 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.\u00a0 For all those hours, he’d make decisions.\u00a0 Sometimes you could argue, but usually you lost.\u00a0 With all the incoming data, he kept things flowing for four days (and evenings.)\u00a0 And he did it all with the same sense of “story telling” that he described as the secret behind the success of 60 Minutes.\u00a0 And it was a blast.<\/p>\n

So there you are.\u00a0 Another “legend” gone – and he was <\/em>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.\u00a0 Except on 60 Minutes, of course.<\/p>\n

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