The Secret Of Don Hewitt's Success
Don Hewitt was a television impresario who changed the way viewers saw the news. But viewers rarely saw Don, until he pulled back the curtain at 60 Minutes a decade ago and allowed the public television series "American Masters" to come in for a behind the scenes look.
As correspondent Steve Kroft reports, what their cameras captured was the Don Hewitt his staff knew - a volcano of ideas and frenetic energy, who at age 75 was still a master at the height of his powers.
When you saw him in the hallways, or in the edit rooms or offices, you knew immediately that Don Hewitt was the real star of 60 Minutes. It was his baby, his creation and he ran it to his own specifications.
His vision resulted in one of the most successful shows in television history, on the air longer than Gunsmoke or Lucy or Roseanne or Seinfeld.
In the cutthroat world of network television, of programming, ratings and focus groups, 60 Minutes ran on the gut instincts of Don Hewitt.
Video: Don Hewitt's Success Secret
Photo Gallery: Don Hewitt 1922 - 2009
The Secret of Don Hewitt's Success
Don Hewitt's Favorite 60 Minutes Moments
Timeline: Hewitt's Life and Career
Don and the broadcast were one. It was the culmination of his life's work. The broadcast's shape, its vocabulary, its syntax and its flair were all Don's.
He managed to turn news into primetime entertainment, with a collection of distinct voices and a range of stories every Sunday night - a three-course meal with something for everyone.
"I have all these stories and each week or month I will decide which three or four I'll put in the magazine. I said that's a pretty good way to run this," Hewitt explained.
"The people who watched football and the people who were at home and having Sunday dinner with their families was the ideal audience for a news show," said Sir Howard Stringer, chairman and CEO of the Sony Corporation.
Stringer spent some 30 years at CBS News, some of them as president of the news division and Don Hewitt's corporate boss.
"He brilliantly designed that show to give something for every member of that family," Stringer said. "He could tease them and amuse them occasionally, but he'd bring them back to a story that mattered and counted and made them feel interested and interesting at the same time."
The secret of Don Hewitt's success was no secret at all: he'd tell the same thing to his colleagues at work, and to his competitors at other networks and to young journalists at conferences.
"What do you think the most important thing a young journalist like me could learn from an old school journalist?" one young journalist once asked Hewitt.
"That what we do on 60 Minutes is what everybody should be doing. And it's four words that every child in the world knows: tell me a story. And learn how to tell them a story, and you'll be a success," he replied.
Don liked to say that 60 Minutes doesn't cover issues - it does stories about people who are swept up in them. It's a technique, he said, as old as time.
"Even the people who wrote the Bible were smart enough to know, tell them a story. The issue was evil in the world. The story was Noah. Now, the Bible knew that. And for some reason or other, I latched onto it," Hewitt said.
Hewitt devised a job for himself where he only did the things he wanted to do.
He totally divorced himself from everything he didn't want to do. The boring and mundane he delegated to others. His job was to watch television news stories and make them better.
There was no assignment desk, no memos, no meetings and no audience research. It was an atmosphere best described as controlled chaos, with Don as the roving referee.
The show was loosely organized around the correspondents, who each had their own team of producers and were responsible for coming up with their own stories.
The competition among the correspondents' shops could be fierce. The ultimate competition was getting completed stories off Don's story board and onto the air. In addition to choosing the story mix and the lead, Don tried to balance correspondents' egos, deciding which three of his correspondents would make that week's broadcast.
He also crafted the network promos, running office to office, reading them aloud over and over to various staff members.
"He always, as a showman, could market and promote them better than almost anybody I've ever known in the news business," Stringer said. "He could make you want to see that show tonight with a couple of pithy phrases."
The tease - the 45 second block at the beginning of the broadcast that condensed the night's stories - was Don's particular domain.
Don rarely looked at a script until a script had been edited and turned into television, so he could actually watch it.
He had an uncanny ability to look at something for the first time and know exactly how to fix it.
He saved some of his best performances for the formal screenings attended by the producers, correspondents, editors and his senior staff. It could go very smoothly, or things could get raucous.
Don's only real fear was being bored; his only real enemy the remote control. He instinctively knew what an audience wanted and how to hold their attention. And he saw himself as their surrogate.
"You can only be a television producer if you become a television viewer. You've got to sit in a screening room and say, 'If I were home, tonight, watching this, would I stay with this or would I…It's the, 'Hey, Mildred,' syndrome. It's the guy who says to his wife, 'Hey, Mildred. Do you know what these guys are talking about?' 'No, let's go watch the basketball game,'" Hewitt explained.
"Somebody with a slightly limited attention span isn't going to want to be bored for a second. In a perfect world, Don doesn't want to be bored for a second," Stringer said.
"It kind of dawned on me once, that I may be the only person I ever knew who has turned an attention deficit disorder into an asset," Hewitt joked.
But he was also a superb journalist, widely considered to be among the top editors of his era, print or broadcast.
"There are lots of producers in this business. There has not been, and I don't think there ever will be anyone quite like Don Hewitt. One is enough," Barbara Walters said.
Walters was a Hewitt friend and competitor for decades. "You know, there are a lot of news snobs in this business, especially in the past. I'm in hard news. Don was not a news snob. Don was an editor and a producer. But he also had the common touch. He could relate to the people."
Asked if she thinks Hewitt was concerned about ratings, Walters said, "I think that Don may have been one of the most competitive people I know."
And it's true. The first thing he did every Monday morning was to call the research department for the overnight ratings.
Don said he worried that he had ruined television news because he had made it profitable, and that profit, not quality would become the driving force for network executives.
Don had nominal bosses at both the news division and the television network, but the best of them allowed him to operate independently in his own fiefdom.
CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves held him in awe. "He was unrelenting. He was unbelievably smart, incisive. He knew the medium as well as anybody I've ever met. "
"Throughout the history of CBS, we've had a lot of great things that happened at our network, from sports to entertainment to news. There is no show that meant more to that network then and today than 60 Minutes," Moonves added.
Hewitt took great pride in the team he had assembled - the correspondents, the producers, the editors. He seemed to feed off the energy of his staffers, some of whom were young enough to be his grandchildren.
"Everybody that works for me is smarter than I am. They're better read, they're better educated," Hewitt said. "I really am in awe of all those kids. They don't pander, either to the audience or to me. None of them are afraid to argue with me, which I love. I don't want anybody to work for me who wouldn't argue with me. And somehow, with their brains and my fingertips, it works."
Everyone on the show knew there was no one smarter than Don Hewitt. He'll be remembered as the boss and head cheerleader, who ran 60 Minutes with a nearly insane enthusiasm, sprinting down hallways and into offices trying out his latest brainstorm, or insisting on everyone watching his newest favorite piece.
"Hey, come here you gotta see this. Isn't this terrific? Isn't this the best?" he'd beckon. "Come on, we've got a piece to look at."
That was Don Hewitt.
Produced by L. Franklin Devine