Don Hewitt, 86; in creating ‘60 Minutes,’ altered TV

The 1960 televised debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon was watched by 70 million Americans. It proved a turning point in the presidential race, in large part because an ailing Nixon rejected Mr. Hewitt’s advice to use professional makeup instead of a cheaper product. Nixon’s sickly appearance while recuperating from a staph infection, in contrast to the tan and vigorous Kennedy, was credited with helping to turn the election in Kennedy’s favor.

“From that day on,’’ Mr. Hewitt said later, “you can’t even think of running for office in the greatest democracy on earth unless you’ve got the money to buy television time.’’

Mr. Hewitt, who spent his career at CBS News, also directed programs of news giants Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. He led coverage of political conventions, royal weddings and coronations, papal installations, and national days of mourning for assassinated leaders including Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

With the debut of “60 Minutes’’ in 1968, Mr. Hewitt merged elements of news and entertainment and shattered the traditional view that news divisions were run as a public trust with little concern for how much money they made.

Mr. Hewitt also was a central voice in the 1990s debates over corporate censorship in journalism, when network executives interfered with a “60 Minutes’’ segment on a tobacco industry whistle-blower.

Mr. Hewitt’s impact on television was almost unparalleled, said Marvin Kalb, founding director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy and a former reporter for CBS and NBC News.

“We never made money before ‘60 Minutes,’ ’’ Kalb said of news and public affairs programs. “That had probably, with the exception of the introduction of the Internet, the most profound impact on television news. It meant that everybody else had to make money, and in the quest for profit, standards began to fall.’’

In starting “60 Minutes,’’ Mr. Hewitt combined the prestige surrounding the network’s documentary unit with the editorial and visual pacing of an entertainment show. He likened his proposal to a “Life magazine of the air.’’

“We could look into Marilyn Monroe’s closet so long as we looked into Robert Oppenheimer’s laboratory, too,’’ he once wrote, referring to the sexy film star and the atomic scientist. “We could make the news entertaining without compromising our integrity.’’

The program, with its trademark ticking stopwatch, was one of the highest-rated prime-time series ever, and its weekly viewership reached 40 million at the peak of network television audiences in the early 1980s. It spawned many imitators and won the top honors of the profession.

When Mr. Hewitt joined CBS as an associate director in 1948, radio was still the dominant broadcast medium, and television news was little more than a person on camera for 15 minutes reading headlines from a piece of paper.

Mr. Hewitt swept into the medium with a series of bold editorial and technical ideas. He was a leading champion of location shooting to cover spectacular breaking stories. He introduced cue cards that forced anchors to look directly into the camera, only after his experiment with Braille went nowhere.

In his memoir, “Tell Me a Story,’’ Mr. Hewitt wrote that his tendency toward dirty tricks did not always suit other CBS officials.

Covering Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to Iowa in 1959, Mr. Hewitt and a colleague hijacked an NBC van with broadcast equipment sitting idle on a roadside and hid the vehicle in a cornfield. Another time, he rented a tugboat on which a press conference was being held so he could boot off the other correspondents.

CBS News president Fred Friendly questioned Mr. Hewitt’s “depth and intellectual commitment,’’ as one former CBS News executive recalled. The two men did not get along, and in 1964 Friendly reassigned Mr. Hewitt from executive producer of Cronkite’s “CBS Evening News’’ to the network’s documentary unit.

During that period, Mr. Hewitt thought of “60 Minutes’’ as a way of dividing an hourlong documentary on weighty topics into three shorter segments varying between the serious and the frivolous. He said this approach would cater to his own short attention span.

“60 Minutes’’ aired some of the most riveting moments in television news, including Wallace’s adversarial 1979 interview with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran shortly after his followers seized the US Embassy in Tehran and took American hostages.

Donald Shepard Hewitt was born in Manhattan and raised in New Rochelle, N.Y. His father was an advertising salesman for the Hearst newspaper company. After nearly flunking out of New York University in 1942, Mr. Hewitt left school and used his father’s connections to find work briefly as a $15-a-week copy boy at the New York Herald Tribune.

He wrote for the Army publication Stars and Stripes later in World War II, hoping that his experience would lead to a full-time Herald Tribune reporting job. He was bitterly disappointed when it did not, and he was working as a wire service photo editor when a friend told him of an opening at CBS News that required “picture experience.’’

As a young director, he worked on the public affairs program “See It Now’’ hosted by Murrow, as well as the evening newscast. He advanced rapidly at the network, later telling the New Yorker: “I am not an intellectual. I operate by my guts and my fingertips. . . . I have a kind of sixth sense for seeing a piece of film and knowing what’s wrong about it and what’s right.’’

What is often seen as the greatest blow to Mr. Hewitt and his show’s prestige was the network’s interference with a “60 Minutes’’ report about a tobacco industry whistle-blower who said he could prove that cigarette executives were lying when they publicly declared they knew of no evidence to prove the addictive nature of nicotine.

When the whistle-blower, Jeffrey S. Wigand, came to Mr. Hewitt’s attention in 1994, CBS was in the middle of a takeover by Westinghouse, and the network feared that Wigand’s confidentiality agreement with his old employer made CBS susceptible to a multibillion-dollar lawsuit.

In the end, “60 Minutes’’ aired in 1995 only a small portion of Wigand’s interview and hid his identity and face. Wallace, who conducted the interview, mentioned the limitations imposed by CBS management.

Segment producer Lowell Bergman, a respected investigative reporter, was furious about what he regarded as a cowardly act by the network and leaked word of what he called “self-censorship in major media’’ to media outlets.

Mr. Hewitt told The Washington Post: “Short of a bunch of guerrillas with guns taking over the CBS transmitters, there was no way for us to put it on the air the first time. CBS owns the means of getting that story to the public.’’

He was married three times. He leaves his third wife, Marilyn Berger, a former Post and network television reporter, along with two sons from his first marriage, two daughters from his second marriage, and three grandchildren.