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| Don Hewitt, Inventor Of '60 Minutes,' Died Today At Age 86 |
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| Written by Anonymous | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Wednesday, 19 August 2009 15:09 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Don Hewitt, the CBS newsman responsible for the invention of "60 Minutes" and produced the popular newsmagazine for 36 years, died Wednesday. He was 86 years old.
His death was caused from pancreatic cancer. Hewitt had passed away at his Bridgehamton home. People at CBS said his death came a month following the death of CBS legendary Walter Cronkite.
Hewitt had joined CBS News in television's entertainment infancy in 1948, and produced the very first televised presidential debate in 1960. Hewitt made his mark in the late 1960s when the people of CBS agreed to try his idea of a one-hour broadcast that mixed hard news and feature stories. The entertainments television newsmagazine was born on Sept. 24, 1968, when the "60 Minutes" stopwatch began ticking. Hewitt dreamed of a television version of Life, the superior magazine of the mid-20th century, where interviews with people in the entertainment industry could co-exist with investigations that exposed corporate malfeasance. "The equation is simple," he wrote in a memoir in 2001, "and is reduced to four words every kid in the world knows: Tell me a story. It's that simple." Hard-driven reporter Mike Wallace, Hewitt's initial hire, became the entertainment reporter those in power would rather not have on their doorsteps. Harry Reasoner, Morley Safer, Ed Bradley and Diane Sawyer also reported for the entertainment show. "60 Minutes" had won 73 Emmys, 13 DuPont/Columbia University Awards and nine Peabody Awards during Hewitt's stewardship, which ended in 2004. After Cronkite's death at 92 on July 17, 2009 Hewitt said, "How many news organizations get the opportunity to bask in the sunshine of a half-century of Edward R. Murrow followed by a half-century of Walter Cronkite?" Hewitt often said the accepted wisdom for television news journalists before the invention of "60 Minutes", was to join words to pictures. He believed that was backward. A Sunday evening fixture, "60 Minutes" was television's top-rated entertainment show four times, most recently in 1992-93. While no longer a regular in the top 10 in Hewitt's later years, it was still TV's most popular newsmagazine to the people. CBS News "Face the Nation" host Bob Schieffer remembers Hewitt saying that the show tip-toes to the edge between news and show business, "and I know exactly where that edge is." "If he had not have been an entertainment television news producer, I think he would have been a circus entertainment ringmaster," Schieffer said. "Just a great showman. Don Hewitt understood that to tell the news, to get people to understand what they need to know about, you have to get them into the tent." "You hear a lot of stories from people that talk about him being brilliant and being a showman, however he really was a great news editor, first and foremost," says Jeff Fager, current "60 Minutes" executive producer. "He always had the capability of making a story better." "I learned everything from him," Fager said. Upon the launch of "60 Minutes," Hewitt remembered that news executive Bill Leonard said to him, "make us proud." "Which could be the last time anyone ever said `make us proud' to anyone else in entertainment television," he wrote in his memoir. "Because Leonard said `make us proud' and not `make us money,' therefore we were able to do both, which I think makes us unique in the history of television." Being executive producer, Hewitt was responsible for deciding which entertainment stories would make it on the air. Correspondents and producers would wait nervously in screening rooms for his decision on their work. Among Hewitt's other jobs, he directed the first network television newscast on May 3, 1948. He thought up the use of cue cards for news readers, which is currently done by electronic machines. He was the first to "superimpose" words on the TV screen for a news show. Before the 1960 presidential debate, Hewitt asked John F. Kennedy if he would like makeup. Tanned and fit, Kennedy said no. Richard Nixon followed his lead. Huge mistake. "As every politician knows, that debate, as in a Miss America contest, turned on who made the better appearance, not with what he said, but how he looked," Hewitt recalls later. "Kennedy won no doubt about it." Hewitt did not retire completely. In 2007, he produced a televised entertainment version of the "Radio City Christmas Spectacular," bringing the venerable show to a national TV audience for the first time - on NBC. Donald Shepard Hewitt was born in New York on December. 14, 1922, and grew up New Rochelle. He had been attending New York University but later dropped out to become a copy boy at the New York Herald Tribune. He joined the Merchant Marines during World War II and worked as a correspondent posted to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower's London headquarters.After the war and a couple brief journalism jobs, Hewitt took a job as an associate director at CBS News in 1948. During his tenure, "60 Minutes" was often a place where people came to make news. Presidential Bill Clinton addressed questions of infidelity in 1992, and Al Gore utilized the show to announce he wouldn't run for president in 2004. Hewitt, many times had said he was proud of his show's ability to exonerate innocent people through investigations, such as when a Texas man sent to jail for life for robbery but was freed after Safer discredited the evidence against him.
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