Tick... Tick... Tick... (4 page)

“I'm coming to you next!” Hewitt would yell to a reporter, ordering him to chase down a candidate or important delegate. If Senator Jacob Javits of New York was reported to be upset about something, Hewitt would scream to Harry Reasoner in the New York delegation: “Get over to see Javits! If you don't know the story I'll tell you but get Javits!” Blessed with encyclopedic recall, Hewitt kept reams of ever-shifting information in his head, weaving a story line that somehow transcended mere news and kept viewers glued to CBS to see what would happen next.

For the
1960
conventions, Hewitt had the smart-sounding idea of pairing Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow—a match that sounded great on paper to hapless CBS News executives who had no choice but to trust Hewitt's casting instincts and showbiz judgment. But the two titanic egos just didn't mesh on television, and the ratings showed that viewers still felt more comfortable with the Huntley-Brinkley team. The experience proved the difficulty of casting Hewitt's made-for-TV dramas: anchormen weren't actors, nor did they like being told how to perform by some maniacal producer swearing at them from on high in the control booth.

 

No drama ever compared to the one that kept Hewitt from going out to lunch on Friday, November
22
,
1963
, when he heard the bulletin that President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Hewitt took control of the news coverage that afternoon and stayed firmly in charge until the network finally resumed regular programming the following Tuesday.

A few hours after the president was assassinated, Dan Rather (then a CBS reporter based in New Orleans) called Hewitt from Dallas with an astonishing scoop.

“Don! Somebody filmed it. The assassination. A man named Abraham Zapruder, he had a camera, he got the whole thing.”

Hewitt was stunned; he recognized immediately the historical significance of what his reporter had just told him, and the incredible value of being able to have the film.

“Go to Zapruder's house!” Hewitt yelled at Rather, thinking fast—possibly too fast. He then recalled instructing Rather to sock him in the jaw, take him to the CBS affiliate in Dallas, copy it onto videotape, and let the CBS lawyers decide whether it could be sold or whether it was in the public domain.

A moment's silence at the other end. “Great idea, I'll do it,” the
32
-year-old reporter said obediently.

As Rather prepared to race across town to Zapruder's house and assault him, Hewitt sat in the control room and reconsidered his instructions. Giving in to a rare moment of self-doubt, he picked up the phone and called Rather back. “For Christ's sake, don't do what I just told you to,” Hewitt said.

It ultimately took more than
30
years for the entire Zapruder film to be shown on network television, much to Hewitt's consternation.

 

No matter how many rules Hewitt broke or bent in the late
1950
s and early
1960
s, he was unable to tell stories the way he wanted to, thwarted by the primitive technology that just could not accommodate the complex pieces Hewitt yearned to produce.

One day in
1963
, as he dealt yet again with the frustration of being stuck with good pictures that arrived with bad audio, he began tinkering and soon came up with a way to separate the sound track from the picture track—he called them the A and B rolls, terms that have survived to the present. It gave television, at last, a bit of leeway in playing with the mix of pictures and sound.

For Walter Cronkite, Hewitt's effort to make the news entertaining went counter to his own straightforward approach. Hewitt was executive producer of the
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
from its debut in
1962
through its expansion to a
30
-minute broadcast on September
15
,
1963
. Anticipating problems with Hewitt, Cronkite made sure he was given the title and duties of managing editor before he agreed to replace Edwards in
1962
. Cronkite was far more hot-blooded than he appeared on television, prone at times to explosive rage. And by
1964
he was running out of patience with Hewitt's style.

At the same time, CBS News was losing in the ratings to NBC's
Huntley-Brinkley Report
, and CBS executives, now under the leadership of Richard Salant, figured they needed new leadership if they had any chance of beating the NBC juggernaut. As experienced as he was, Hewitt just wasn't delivering the numbers.

During preparations for the
1964
political conventions, Cronkite and Hewitt were in regular conflict. Adding to the tension was the fallout from Hewitt's latest stunt. An NBC news producer left an internal guide to the network's coverage of the Republican National Convention in San Francisco lying around within Hewitt's reach—and Hewitt promptly grabbed it. Once NBC realized what had happened, word leaked to the press, and Hewitt was called to task yet again by exasperated bosses.

It got worse. In the fall of
1964
, Hewitt's archenemy Fred Friendly was brought in to replace Richard Salant as president of the ailing news division. That presented the perfect opportunity to get Hewitt out.

Four decades later (during which time Hewitt and Cronkite became friends), Cronkite has no trouble recalling their battles and how it was that he demanded Hewitt be removed as his executive producer. “[Hewitt] would not tell me things that were going into the broadcast until the very last minute, and it was too late to make any changes,” Cronkite remembered. “And then this incident occurred and that confirmed for me that I didn't have control of this broadcast. There was a specific story that somebody had been promised. I forget the story now; it was not a terribly serious story. But it was serious in that Don had promised it was not going to be used, and then he did use it. The promise had been violated.”

Friendly agreed with Cronkite. In December
1964
, he called Don Hewitt into his office. This was it, everyone thought. Fred Friendly was going to fire him from CBS at last. After
16
years, Hewitt's time in television had come to an end.

 

Hewitt went to Friendly's office dragging his feet just a little; no encounter with this particular boss turned out pleasant.

“You know, I've been thinking about this,” Friendly told Hewitt once he'd settled into his seat. “The
CBS Evening News
is not big enough for you. You're bigger than that broadcast. I'm going to set up a special unit that'll be yours, and yours alone. I want you to cover the world. You don't even have to check with anyone. Some big story breaks out, just go. You have my blessing. You have your own crews and your own editors. And that's what I want you to do.”

Now this was a surprise. Hewitt didn't like Friendly, and vice versa. So why was the network news president talking about this fabulous new job? But then Hewitt, never much for introspection, just decided to accept his promotion with as much grace as he could muster.

“Sounds great, Fred,” Hewitt said. “Sounds like a terrific setup. I wouldn't mind getting away from the daily grind.” Hewitt told Friendly he'd be ready to switch roles immediately, they shook hands on it, and Hewitt headed back to the newsroom.

Along the way, Hewitt made a quick stop to see Bill Leonard, a good friend who had recently become a CBS News vice president. He barged into Leonard's office to tell him the good news. “Jesus, Bill, guess what?“ he blurted. “Fred just decided to give me this great new organization, all mine.”

Leonard looked up from his desk and stared at Hewitt, incredulous.

“Don,” he said, “you just got fired.”

“No, you don't understand, he's . . .”

Hewitt stopped talking and took a rare moment to consider his friend's comment.

“Shit.”

“What?”

“You're right,” Hewitt said, slowly. “It was Fred's way of sticking a knife in me. Making me think this is some sort of advancement in my career.” Like many anecdotes from his life, Hewitt has repeated this one endlessly and with a fluid sense of detail. In his
1985
memoir,
Minute by Minute,
Hewitt attributes the “you just got fired” comment to his then-wife Frankie. But by the time Hewitt wrote his
2002
memoir,
Tell Me a Story,
he'd decided it was Leonard who broke the news.

But one detail is constant: Hewitt, heady with the aphrodisiac that long-term power affords, hadn't seen it coming. After nearly two decades designing the future of the TV news business, he'd just become part of its past.

Chapter 3

Did You Ever Think About Two Guys?

Inside the news division—under Friendly's brief, stormy leadership and later, after the return of Richard Salant to the president's office in
1966
—the trend had moved away from Hewitt's news-gathering methods. Serious attention was given to making and obeying new rules to govern the growing influence of news coverage. As the technology changed (thanks in part to Hewitt's endless stream of ideas), reporters had new ways to make stories more interesting—at the possible expense of fairness and ethics. The leaders of the news division wanted to cover themselves in case of attack from the growing number of watchdogs and critics assigned to monitor television.

Hewitt had to watch all this from the sidelines, pacing impatiently as history was made, both inside CBS News headquarters and in the world at large. He'd been booted pretty far from the halls of power—the news division moved to new headquarters in a converted milk barn on West
57
th Street near the Hudson River, and Hewitt's new office was about as far from Walter Cronkite as you could get. Most people figured that's where he'd stay.

 

Let other people do the serious documentaries about drugs and war and poverty; Don Hewitt turned his attention to Frank Sinatra.

There was little dispute that
Sinatra,
a one-hour Hewitt-produced profile of the singer that aired in November
1965
, was the finest hour of TV he'd ever produced. He somehow recruited Cronkite as his interviewer and host; he got his World War II pal Andy Rooney to write the narration. Hewitt delivered Sinatra at a recording session, on a movie set, at a benefit party, crooning to prisoners, and relaxing at a New York saloon owned by his good friend Jilly Rizzo, with friends like Sammy Davis Jr. at the table. This was front-row access to the most famous man in America.

The interview at Sinatra's Palm Springs home had gone well enough at first. In fact, the two men were hitting it off so well that Hewitt, standing behind the camera, decided to push the performer a little. He stopped the filming and walked across the room. “Ask him about Mia Farrow,” Andy Rooney recalled him whispering to Cronkite. The anchorman, unaccustomed to celebrity interviews of this nature, did as he was told.

At which point Sinatra glared over at Hewitt. “You broke the rules and I ought to kill you,” Sinatra said, his blue eyes narrowing. (Sinatra later claimed that Hewitt had previously agreed not to include those questions—an agreement Hewitt once again denied having made.)

“With anyone else that's a figure of speech,” Hewitt said. “You probably mean it.”

“I mean it,” Sinatra growled.

“Well, if I had a choice,” Hewitt said, “I'd rather you didn't.”

Hewitt was beginning to see the risk involved in his approach to journalism. Maybe it was more fun running a show than producing it. After all, he liked life in the power seat, shaping the work of others. So in spare moments between his prosaic producing chores, Hewitt started looking around for something else to do at CBS.

 

“Perhaps I have been mis-titling my proposal for a new Tuesday night concept,” Don Hewitt conceded to his boss, CBS News vice president Bill Leonard, in the fall of
1967
, in a memo riddled with typos and cross-outs. “It may be that ‘magazine' is not the proper word,” he added in a rare moment of modesty.

For months, Hewitt had bombarded Leonard with memos about his idea to create a weekly newsmagazine—a show that would allow pieces more complex than an evening news story but not worth a full hour. Hewitt knew he was staking out uncharted territory in a business still committed to the documentary form, and in his early memos, he hedged his bets. In one, he proposed putting together a staff to produce three
1
-hour Tuesday night magazines a month—“every third one to be devoted to a single subject.” In another, he proposed the notion of guest columnists. He also pitched a sensibility relatively untouched by anyone else in television at the time, except perhaps the producers of
Laugh-In
and
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.

“The magazine should be very ‘with it,'” Hewitt wrote, “and in today's world being ‘with it' connotes a certain amount of irreverence for established institutions.”

But who would host this new show? Hewitt's first idea acknowledged his awareness of where he stood in the hierarchy of CBS News, reaching out to a correspondent who—like himself—had plateaued at a level of success that didn't match his own self-perception.

“I think Harry Reasoner should be the on-air editor of the magazine,” Hewitt wrote, referring to the white-haired correspondent who was Cronkite's chief substitute as anchor of the
CBS Evening News.
Reasoner was an Iowa farm boy who'd risen through the ranks of radio and television by virtue of his classic middle-American manner and his clear intelligence. He smoked, drank, and fancied himself the dashing correspondent, even though he had a wife and children at home in Connecticut. He'd covered civil rights marches, space launches and political conventions for CBS News and ranked among the top TV news personalities of the day. But Reasoner was waiting for something bigger—like the day Cronkite would step aside and CBS would choose him to take over
CBS Evening News.
In
1967
, that day was nowhere in sight and Reasoner was ready to consider other possibilities.

Meanwhile, Hewitt kept flooding his bosses with potential
60 Minutes
story ideas. At one point, he even suggested a segment called “Good Idea!” based on having seen travelers at the Copenhagen airport using scooters to get around. “I thought, ‘What a good idea!'” Hewitt wrote. “And then I thought that all we'd have to do is film thirty seconds or so of people riding the scooters and label it this week's GOOD IDEA!” Okay, so it wasn't a good idea—but if you didn't like it, he had several thousand more.

 

Hewitt got the green light to make a rough pilot with Reasoner in early
1968
, made up of edited portions of hour-long CBS documentaries, some never-used footage, and stale chunks of an old Charles Kuralt profile of Henry Ford. Hewitt showed it to everyone he could buttonhole in the hallway and drag into an editing room.

When the lights came up after Hewitt finally showed the pilot to management, there was modest enthusiasm. “Pretty damn good,” Bill Leonard allowed. He looked over at Bob Chandler, a vice president working under Bill Leonard, who sat in on the screening.

“Did you ever think about
two
guys?” Chandler said.

“Yeah, like who?” Hewitt demanded.

“Mike Wallace,” Chandler replied.

At the time of Chandler's suggestion, Mike Wallace wasn't particularly hot; in fact, the
49
-year-old reporter was far less successful than Reasoner, having been pushed aside by a management team that found him too abrasive to be a major player in the TV news business. He was a general-assignment reporter for the
CBS Evening News
, and as he covered the early stages of what looked like a long-shot Nixon presidential campaign, no one considered him as the Next Big Anything. Like Hewitt, Mike Wallace was desperate for a way back to the top.

Hewitt immediately saw Chandler's point:
60 Minutes
might benefit from two hosts balancing off each other, a black hat–white hat arrangement that perfectly suited their sensibilities.

One weekend that spring, Hewitt visited Wallace at his apartment to pitch the possibility of joining
60 Minutes
. Wallace, then covering the early days of the Nixon presidential campaign, figured there was no harm in listening, even though he knew Hewitt had spent much of the last four years in purgatory and suspected CBS would never truly entrust an hour of its prime-time schedule to him. Besides, he didn't like the show's name:
60 Minutes
sounded too pedestrian, Wallace thought. But Hewitt could not be deterred.

“This is going to be a radical departure in both form and content,” he told Wallace, as recounted in Wallace's memoir,
Close Encounters.
“Our documentaries are so damn stuffy. . . . Most subjects don't deserve the full hour treatment we give them.” Hewitt barely seemed to be stopping for breath.

“You know as well as I do,” he went on, “that television practically ignores what the newsmagazines call the back of the book—the arts and sciences and all that stuff. We'll be going into those subjects, and there will be features and profiles of personalities from all walks of life. The idea is to strike a balance between those pieces and the more serious, conventional stories we'll be doing. And Mike, listen to this: You'll have a chance to do your long interviews again. How about
that?
”

Wallace still wasn't convinced, but he was willing to let Hewitt shoot a second pilot with Reasoner and him. They slapped it together quickly—this time using old footage from a documentary about Bobby Kennedy, showing the New York senator on a ski trip with his family. Wallace didn't think very much of it; he later described it as a “banal pastiche of leftovers and outtakes from pieces that had already been on the air”—at least what he saw of it. He didn't even bother to watch the whole thing.

Wallace's path to the crossroads of
60 Minutes
couldn't have differed more from Hewitt's, yet somehow, he was just as anxiously in need of redemption. And so he figured, what the hell. He dropped off the Nixon campaign trail in August
1968
and went to work on Don Hewitt's new show.

 

Wallace and Hewitt both grew up in immigrant Jewish families, but that's where the similarity ends. While Hewitt, the kid from New Rochelle with the New York accent, scraped his way into journalism through the service entrance, the smooth-talking Wallace sauntered in through the front door in middle age, his notable gifts as an interviewer and television performer already well established.

Young Mike had shown an early interest in theater and spent summers at Interlochen, the fabled music and theater camp in upstate Michigan. By the time he started college at the University of Michigan in
1936
, he'd suffered the ravages of teenage acne that he has referred to as disfiguring, though it never seemed to detract from people's desire to look at him. Wallace emerged from college with a degree in broadcasting and got himself a radio job in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which led to a job in Detroit, then one in Chicago. By then he'd married college sweetheart Norma Kaplan and fathered two sons, Peter and Chris.

In
1946
, radio station WGN hired Wallace to host a celebrity-interview show called
Famous Names,
sponsored by Walgreens. That's where he chatted one morning with an actress named Buff Cobb, who had come to town to appear in Noel Coward's
Private Lives.
Wallace's marriage to Norma Kaplan skidded to a halt as he began a relationship with Cobb that resulted not only in marriage number two but also a professional partnership on a radio show dreamed up by Wallace called
The Chez Show,
broadcast from a Chicago nightclub.

In
1951
, Wallace and Cobb packed up their lives and moved to New York and an afternoon television talk show on CBS called
Mike and Buff.
Built around the notion of the natural bickering between husband and wife, the show dwelled on the specific issues that faced a young married couple (Wallace was
33
when the show first aired). And it worked, at least for a while, allowing Wallace to adjust to a new medium, a new home, and the high-powered lifestyle that came with a network television show.

But after three years CBS pulled the plug on
Mike and Buff.
At the same time it became clear that the on-air bickering was a bit too real; Wallace and Cobb ended their marriage soon after the show was canceled.

That left Wallace at loose ends in the summer of
1954
, until he auditioned for a Broadway show, got the gig, and embarked on yet another new career. He played the part of an art dealer in
Reclining Figure,
a comedy by Harry Kurnitz about an art collector who buys a forgery. In the
New York Times,
Brooks Atkinson noted that “Wallace does well with the part of a dealer who comes as close as possible to being on the level.” Not exactly a career-launching notice, but it led Wallace into a series of TV commercials. One in particular would come back to haunt him
40
years later as a crusading correspondent for
60 Minutes
—hawking cigarettes for Philip Morris. He would later investigate the tobacco industry as part of a controversial segment about the addictive qualities of nicotine. “Where can you find a man's kind of mildness except in today's Philip Morris?” the suave Wallace asked, puffing smoothly on a cigarette. That became a trademark look for him, much as it had for the biggest star of network news at that moment, Edward R. Murrow.