Enrique Cerna Interviews Don Hewitt

Enrique Cerna Interviews Don Hewitt

This is a transcript of an interview with Don Hewitt on Conversations at KCTS 9 which aired on November 28, 2008.

EC: Well, through the years, you’ve received numerous honors for 60 Minutes, but now this honor from Washington State University, the Edward R. Murrow award, named after Murrow who attended the school. In the scheme of things, is it just another award?

DH: I have maybe more Emmys than anybody else in television, and I’d trade them all for one Edward R. Murrow award.

EC: Why’s that?

DH: Because, I don’t know… his name is magic. There have been a couple of magic names as I was growing up in television. There was Edward R. Murrow. There was Walter Cronkite. There were a couple of guys named Huntley and Brinkley. There was a Tom Brokaw and there was a Peter Jennings and they have disappeared. They have gone from the earth.

EC: The two of you worked together quite a bit.

DH: We uh… the first big show I ever did was the 1948 Democrat-Republican Convention. I was in the booth with Ed, and if you think the Democrats are in turmoil now, that’s when the Dixiecrats walked out on Harold Truman.

And the next big thing Ed and I did, which knocks me out when I think about it, was before videotape, before satellites, we did Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in England at Westminster Abby. And the only way to get it on the air, on the same day, in the states, with no satellites, no videotape, was the kinescope, which was the old process filming off the tube, which we did.

We hired and chartered a BOAC Stratacruiser, British Airways, took all the seats out of first class, put editing equipment in, turned the plane into a flying newsroom, and edited it over the Atlantic coming back so it was all ready to go when we landed. It was one of the stunts that I look back on, and as you know, it was magic. And today it’s like, “So what?” You want to pick up a satellite you can talk to somebody in London tomorrow, or tonight, any moment. Couldn’t do it then.

EC: There’s something about the quality of the way he could tell a story, not only deliver it but, let’s face it, the writing.

DH: Writing… the best writing in journalism. Get a hold of Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly’s I Can Hear it Now record album which is a history of our times on radio. It was before See it Now and its… I tell journalism students, “Learn to write the way Friendly and Murrow wrote.” And in talking about the war in the Pacific, they’ve got a line that knocks me out. He said, “If you’ve ever been in the jungle at night, you know, when the howitzer screams, the jungle screams back.” I said, “Wow! Learn to write like that, you’re home free."

EC: Is it writing more than pictures in your point of view?

DH: It is to me. I mean, we were the first broadcast that I said the audio is a lot more valuable than the video. Everybody’s got pictures. You know, everybody’s always trying to do cutaways. Get off the face and show… I said, “No, no… I want to see that face when he says it. I want to see what his face looks like when he said what he said.”

EC: Up close and tight?

DH: Up close and tight. And I always said to them… they... they were always talking about visuals. And I’d say, “Tell me something more visual and better than Katherine Hepburn’s face. You know anything better visually than that?”

Faces are what made, and faces are how I sold 60 Minutes. I wanted 60 Minutes to be a magazine and I said, “How do they sell magazines? The covers sell the magazines. I haven’t got covers. I want to use faces. Mike Wallace, Dianne Sawyer, Leslie Stall, Harry Reisner, Ed Bradly.” And the faces on the cover of that magazine is what attracted the audience. And somehow, they think it’s all about visuals, it isn’t. It’s about telling a story whether you tell it on camera or with visuals.

EC: The one thing I notice with 60 Minutes, it’s not only just the writing, visuals are there no doubt, it’s the talking.

DH: Absolutely. It’s like, you know, good talk is about as good as it gets and uh.. it’s like that great Murrow line. He said, “Don’t think you’re any more intelligent now that your voice goes around your world when it did when it used to go from one end of the bar to the other.” And good talk is.. good talk is gold.

EC: When you were in the process of uh pitching the idea of 60 Minutes, as I understand it, you were not in good graces with CBS.

DH: Oh no. No, I knew Friendly had kicked me off the evening news. I was doing a thing called Town Meeting of the World which was to get a lot of statesmen together. I used to sit in the control room and fall asleep. It was so boring. And then I got this idea to do this magazine. And a guy named Bill Leonard was vice president and Friendly was president of CBS News.

EC: Fred Friendly.

DH: So, Leonard went to Friendly, the famous Fred Friendly of the Murrow days, and said, “I think he’s got a great idea. Let’s stop doing documentaries that nobody looks at and do a magazine called 60Minutes.” And Friendly said, “I read the proposal. I think it’s a lousy idea.” Now Friendly gets fired. Dick Salan becomes president of CBS News. Leonard goes to Salan and says, “I think Hewitt’s got a good idea.” Friendly says, “I think it’s a lousy idea.” Er… Salan says, “I think it’s a lousy idea.” Leonard said, “Well that’s funny. That’s exactly what Friendly said”. He said, “If Friendly thinks it was a lousy idea, it’s gotta be a good one. Let’s do it.” That’s how we got on the air.

EC: The fact that you have aired, that show has aired pretty much consistently on Sunday…

DH: We first went on in 1968. Now it’s been 40 years.

EC: But Sunday at 7 p.m. How critical was that time you picked?

DH: Very, very critical. I don’t kid myself. We caught on because we had no competition. You had to do public affairs or children’s shows at that hour and ours was a public affairs show. So, I didn’t have to worry about I Love Lucy, and I didn’t have to worry about Archie Bunker, and I didn’t have to worry about Gunsmoke or Dragnet. I didn’t compete with them, and I caught on. And one day somebody came to me and said, “You know you’re in the top 10?” I said, “The top ten what?” I didn’t know about, you know I’d been in news, who knew about top ten things? And then we had 23 years in the top 10. I Love Lucy had 12. And I’m awed by that. I can’t believe that that broadcast… that broadcast is now to television what Time and Life were to magazines.

EC: And it’s made a tremendous amount of money.

DH: I…

EC: Spawned the whole magazine era.

DH: 2 and a half billion dollars in the 23 years in the top ten. And.. and.. spawned 20/20…Primetime...um...

EC: Dateline.

DH: Dateline.

EC: And all the others.

DH: And Frontline. Frontline was the only one that I ever thought was a real competitor. Frontline is a class operation. The other ones tried to do what we did and they didn’t do it very well. Frontline did it even better.

EC: Did Frontline do what you wanted to do?

DH: No. Frontline did something other than what I wanted to do but they did what they did as good as we did what we did, maybe better.

EC: Picking Mike Wallace and Harry Reisner to be your two correspondents, your stars for the show.

DH: Yeah. Right.

EC: How did you come to that decision and why those two guys?

DH: Okay. I thought there was a show for Harry Reisner and I did a pilot with Harry Reisner and I showed it to the powers that be and one of the vice presidents said, “Did you ever think about two guys?” And I said, “Well, like who?” And he said, “Mike Wallace.” I said, “My god you’re right. That’s black hat, white hat. That’s Huntley and Brinkley. That’s the perfect combination. That’s the guy you love to love and the guy you love to hate, and the casting just was like magic.

EC: It was casting too.

DH: Yeah it was casting. And it took… it took ten years to catch on. It didn’t catch on right away.

EC: So, you gradually started adding other people to the show. Well, Reisner left.

DH: Reisner left. I got Morley Safer. Morley was the chief correspondent in Europe. I remember the conversation with Morley. I said, “Do you want to come here and do 60 Minutes?” He said, “When?” I said, “Well, can you get here tomorrow?” He said, “No tomorrow I’m burying de Gaulle. I’ll be there the day after.” Which was a funny line. And he came and um…

EC: Which he was the perfect fit because he was a great writer.

DH: Great writer. Had a perfect… it’s like Reisner and Wallace complemented each other. And then we added Ed Bradley, Diane Sawyer, well... for a while before Diane it was…

EC: Meredith Vieira.

DH: Meredith Vieira, Diane Sawyer, I... made a correspondent out of Bob Simon who was in Israel at the time. Bradley was…was magic. You know. What a loss. What a loss. And, uh, we were close, and I... there’s nobody I ever admired more than Ed Bradley.

EC: What was it about his style? He seemed to have a very different kind of style. A listening style.

DH: I told that story at lunch today. When I gave him or made the presentation of the Paul White award as the best broadcaster in television news, I got up in front of a thousand people at lunch and I shocked them. I said, “I want you to know that I hired Ed Bradley because he’s a member of a minority.” And there was this kind of gasp in the room. And I looked at Settle and I said, “He’s a great gentleman, he’s a great broadcaster, and if that ain’t a minority, I never heard of one.” And I sat down and it was perfect. Because… he was... he was kind of my hero among the guys.

EC: Why?

DH: I… he had a way about him… Ed Bradley... there were a lot of people you can’t define what they have. It’s tough to define. It’s tough to define a Murrow, a Cronkite. They just were what they were and they are what they are and definitions are very tough to come by. Bradley was another one in that class. Uh…Mike was in his class. Morley Safer is a wordsmith.

One of the, one of the great wordsmiths that I’ve ever worked with my life was Charles Crowl. Crowl handled copy beautifully and it’s what I’ve said over and over again, most television people don’t realize how important their audio is. They’re all involved in pictures and it’s not about pictures. It’s the... it’s about the copy that goes with the picture.

EC: Morley Safer ever, uh, take up using a computer? I hear that he resisted that.

DH: No… we both did.

EC: You too?

DH: Listen I’m a… I’m a 20th century person. I don’t think that I even belong in the 21st century. I keep saying I wish I had died in the 20th cause I... I had a handle on the 20th century. The 21st century is beyond me. You know, I don’t get email. I… my wife is emailing all day long. I… I just…

EC: You don’t have a cell phone?

DH: I have a cell phone.

EC: You have a cell phone.

DH: Yeah that’s my sop to the times we live in. You can’t live without a cell phone. But... I liked it better before. I’m... I’m a 20th century guy living in the 21st century, happy that I’m still here. Will I be sorry to leave it? I’m not sure I’m going to be sorry to leave the 21st century.

EC: But having said that, you were the guy that came to CBS and you were the idea guy. You were the concept guy, as a producer and a director. You were the one that was always saying, “Well why don’t we try this. Why don’t we move that set over there?”

DH: Yeah. I know that and yet I could not explain to you where all those ideas came from. I have no idea. I have no… I know a lot. And I have no idea how I know what I know, I just knew it. And I don’t know why. It’s like what I told them they should do with the evening news right now. I said, “Katie Couric’s not working very well right now. Why don’t you air 200 other anchors at local stations so, during the broadcast, you cut away, you come to Seattle for a great anchorperson in Seattle, talking about what is of interest to a Seattleites. You do the same thing in Chicago, Pittsburg, Miami, Denver, Los Angeles, and you meld all… they’re very good. The local anchors are very good. So what you do is you meld them into your evening news so it’s...

We’ve always assumed that our ratings come from some…we sell our newspapers some big newsstand up in heaven. The newsstand that we sell our papers in is in Seattle, Tacoma, Denver, Chicago. Without them, we don’t exist. So let’s bring them into the mix.

EC: But isn’t that what the correspondents are for?

DH: The cor… but what I want… the local anchors are stars in their town. So if you find a couple of local anchors in Seattle who are just great but they don’t like them in Chicago, Chicago’s not going to see them. When she cuts away and Seattle goes to its people, Chicago goes to its people, Detroit goes to its people and you build an audience that way. And why I thought it of…what could one.. I said, “You know something, there’s a way to make the evening news better.”

The evening news may have seen its best days. It’s tough to compete with CNN and MSNBC and Fox. They’re on all the time. Um… when I covered the Korean War, we waited a week for the film to get back. There’s a terror attack in London, I’m watching CNN, I’m with the cops in the tube stations looking for terrorists. That’s the kind of stuff I used to wait a week to come back from somewhere. You can’t compete with that. You can’t compete with all news.

EC: I’ve heard you say that the most deadly thing for television these days is the remote.

DH: Yeah. That’s where you compete. I learned that a long time ago. Your competition is that remote. I used to say in the screening room when something got tossed I’d say, “This is the moment when the husband says to his wife ‘Hey honey, where’s the remote? Let’s go see what the score is in the basketball game.’” The minute they think about the remote, you’re dead. That’s who you compete with. You realize there are people sitting at home.. it’s like a gun. Bang you’re dead bang you’re dead. I don’t want to watch you, I don’t want to watch you. Hey, stop here. No, that’s no good.

As I said today at lunch, most people can’t name three movies they ever walked out of. They’ve seen a lot of bad movies, but you’ve made a commitment. You’ve put your clothes on, you got the car out, you went downtown, you found a parking space, you stood in line, you bought a ticket, you sat down. The movie was terrible. You turn to your wife you say, “What do we come here for?” But you don’t leave ‘cause you’ve made a commitment. You don’t make a commitment when you watch television. It’s that easy to get out of it. You click it on, you click it off, and you’ve gotta hold their interest, and I’ve always realized there is a point at which you don’t want them to go looking for the remote cause then you’re dead.

EC: So, with that in mind, whenever you started a broadcast, was that opening montage of what the stories were going to be on that night, the tease, was that…

DH: I wrote that…everyday…I did that. I would take a whole morning to write three ten second teases. And my favorite one was…to get ‘em in the ten. I remember saying we were doing a thing on an old age home. I said, “Suppose your parents are getting old. Suppose you don’t know where they are going to go next. Suppose you’re watching 60 minutes on Sunday.” And those kind of...and it was kind of like advertising copy and…it worked. How I knew how to do that I don’t know.

EC: Was it a fun challenge?

DH: Oh… I loved writing the teasers more than doing the show.

EC: Did you always know that you would be behind the scenes and not in front of the camera.

DH: Yeah. You know why I know? I pride myself on recognizing talent. And I look at myself and I see no talent. So…I can’t broadcast.

EC: When you started doing all this, and again that point of you’re the guy, the idea guy. What was it? Did you wake up every morning and after thinking you know, why don’t we try this?

DH: Yeah. I don’t know why.

EC: Could you not wait to get in there to…

DH: No no. I couldn’t wait to get in there. Listen, I woke up one morning and I said, “What am I going to do now having done 60 Minutes?” And I thought… you know the Radio City Christmas Show with the Rockettes has never been on television. So I called Chuck Dolan, who is head of Cablevision and they own Radio City. I said, “Hey Chuck, you ever thought about doing the Christmas show?” And he said, “I wouldn’t let anybody within a mile of that show. But I’ll make an exception for you. In ten minutes you’ll get a call.” And all of a sudden, I don’t know how I wake up with these crazy ideas.

I woke up with a crazy idea the other day that the evening news had better start using all the attractive young, good looking men and women on local television as part of their whole look instead of having local here and network there, put them together.

EC: I know that you’ve been through the years your favorite stories and I imagine that’s pretty hard to decide, what is the most favorite?

DH: Well, I think the best, the most favorite broadcast I ever did. I did 2 hours called the Entertainers. Of all the entertainers that we put on 60 Minutes, The Katherine Hepburns, the Jackie Gleesons, the Lawrence Oliviers. I sit and I look at that show all the time. It was dynamite. Because that’s all part… that’s the kind of stuff that television news always thought was beneath them.

And the big mistake that Murrow made was doing person to person as one show, which was John Crosby and the Harold Tribune called it Low Murrow, and See it Now, which was called High Murrow. And I said to myself, “If you put those two things in the same broadcast, you’ve got a winner.” You can look in Marilyn Monroe’s closet, if you were also willing to look in Robert Oppenheimer’s laboratory. You’ve gotta marry the Marilyn Monroes, and the Jackie Gleesons, and the Katherine Hepburns to the presidents and the prime ministers and the scientists and Life Magazine did that very well.

EC: I remember seeing a documentary that was on American Masters called 90 Minutes on 60 Minutes, and I remember seeing Don Hewitt and Mike Wallace just yelling at each other. I... I take it that that happened quite a bit when you were in the editing room.

DH: Well as close as we were… but it was never about anything except the story. We... the only thing we every argued about was how to make the story better. And… we were best friends. But we argued a lot. That thing that’s on the American Masters thing was a fight we had about some woman who was arrested in Latin America for smuggling something and she said that she was innocent and Mike said, “You know she was innocent.” And I said, “How do you know if she’s innocent? You can’t say that she’s innocent. You’ve got to say ‘If you believe her story, she’s innocent.’” And Mike and I fought over that one and that was the fight that went on that broadcast. And Mike finally said, “You know, you’re right. Let’s do it that way.”

EC: As you look at the business today, what troubles you?

DH: Well, first I’ll tell you what delights me. The women broadcasters are so good. And… it... it... it all started sorta with Christiane Amanpour. And there are now a couple hundred Christiane Amanpours out there. They’re smart. They’re good reporters. They’re good writers. They’re attractive personalities and I think that that’s a big plus for television. What disturbs me? I guess what disturbs me the most are all of these reality shows that aren’t reality, they’re manufactured reality.

I don’t watch much television. I watch sports. I watch CNN, Fox and MSNBC. I watch some Frontline. I try to catch the McNeil Hour, but I’d rather watch Jeopardy at that hour because I love Jeopardy. Marilyn and I, every night, we have dinner watching Jeopardy.

EC: Making you think.

DH: Yeah.

EC: Keeping the mind active.

DH: Yep.

EC: You’re 85. You do not seem to be slowing down. And you’re still working.

DH: I’m still working. I’m not slowing down. And I have no idea… what, do I got another week to go? Another ten years? I don’t know.

EC: After all these years with 60 Minutes and that great success… have you figured out why it’s worked?

DH: No. I don’t know. I… I… I just know it does, and if I try to dissect it... I don’t, I don’t think I can. I think casting had a lot to do with it. I recall my book telling me a story and that was the whole... everybody else was giving you news. I said, “I don’t want you to give me news. I want you to tell me a story about somebody and why I should be interested in that somebody. Find me off beat people who do things that other people would be fascinated with.” And it worked. And... then nobody else ever really latched on to it is a mystery to me.

As far as the overall documentary style of 60 minutes, Frontline does it even better. Frontline is good. But we did personalities, and whether it was Katherine Hepburn, or some doctor, or Jackie Gleeson, or some singer somewhere, we did ‘em better than anybody else did ‘em.

EC: And knowing that it’s still going on, do you think it still has a good future?

DH: Oh yeah. I mean, it’s still on the top ten. Looking at 23 years in the top ten and Lucy had 12. And there are only 3 shows in the whole history of television that were ever number 1 five separate times. Archie Bunker, Bill Cosby and 60 Minutes. Lucy never was. Gunsmoke never was. MASH never was. MASH was an enormous hit. In fact, Alan Alda is my best friend, so I talk about MASH a lot but it never had as many years in the top ten as we had. I don’t ever tell Alan that.

EC: It’s been a hell of a ride, huh?

DH: What a ride. What a ride.

EC: Don Hewitt, thank you.

DH: This was fun, thank you very much.