Don Hewitt

Don Hewitt was a pioneering American television producer whose creativity helped revolutionize television news. His seminal achievement was creating 60 Minutes, one of the most successful and influential news shows in history. Hewitt wondered if he could attract a mass audience for a show that “packaged reality as attractively as Hollywood packages fiction.”

Life before 60 Minutes

A lifelong New Yorker, Donald Shepard Hewitt was born in the city in 1922. He attended New York University on a track scholarship but dropped out after a year and became a copy boy at the New York Herald Tribune, the beginning of his career in journalism. During World War II he worked for the military newspaper The Stars and Stripes in London. After the war he worked again at the Herald Tribune and the Associated Press before landing a job with CBS on the brink of the age of television.

He quickly became a staple at CBS News, working with Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. He was the producer of the first televised presidential debate in 1960 between Vice Pres. Richard Nixon and Sen. John F. Kennedy. He introduced the now-ubiquitous captions that appear on television news shows and the forerunner to the teleprompter.

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The often-brash Hewitt got on the wrong side of CBS News chief Fred Friendly in the mid-1960s and was fired from running the CBS Evening News broadcast. It was probably the best thing that happened to him professionally. He used the time away from daily deadlines to conceive of what he described as a television version of Life magazine. In his 2001 memoir Tell Me a Story, he recounted how the show would work:

We could look into Marilyn Monroe’s closet so long as we looked into Robert Oppenheimer’s laboratory, too.

The 60 Minutes era

On September 24, 1968, CBS brought Hewitt’s vision to life in what was a bold experiment. The show’s first episode didn’t include the iconic stopwatch (that would come several weeks later), but it did feature the program’s lead correspondents, Harry Reasoner and Mike Wallace, explaining to the audience what the show aimed to do: “If this broadcast does what we hope it will do, it will report reality. But we do think this is sort of a new approach. We realize, of course, that new approaches are not always instantly accepted. We’ll see.”

The result was not an instantaneous success with viewers, but from very early on it demonstrated Hewitt’s eclectic vision. Some of the segments featured in that 1968–69 season include:

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• An interview with controversial presidential candidate George Wallace
• An investigation into sexual abuse in prisons
• A tour of a French cottage with the duke and duchess of Windsor
• A report from Reasoner and Wallace on tensions between Israel and Lebanon
• A report on how Venice was becoming a tourist attraction

In 1975 the show moved to its Sunday evening time slot and was well on its way to becoming the most-watched news program, one that set the standard for television reporting. In the 36 years that Hewitt oversaw the program, there were investigations and interviews that ensured that 60 Minutes not only recounted the news but also made the news. Under Hewitt’s leadership the program developed a reputation for fearlessness, one that was tarnished by Hewitt’s decision to kill a controversial story. In 1995 Jeffrey Wigand, a former head of research at tobacco giant Brown & Williamson, told Wallace in an interview that the company knew nicotine was addictive, despite company officials denying it. The interview, however, was quashed by CBS, which feared a lawsuit from the tobacco company. The interview ultimately aired after The Wall Street Journal published a story about Wigand’s claims. Jeff Fager, who succeeded Hewitt as the executive producer of 60 Minutes, called the incident “a low point in our history.”

For all the world-class journalism Hewitt helped create, he had a reputation for being a difficult boss. In at least one instance, it went beyond that. CBS settled a claim in the 1990s against Hewitt and agreed to pay a lifetime stipend to a female employee who said that Hewitt had repeatedly assaulted her. Hewitt retired in 2004 and died in 2009.