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  One night in the middle of the war, in his capacity as a Merchant Marine in training, Hewitt was a passenger in a supply convoy in the Atlantic Ocean taking heavy enemy fire. All around him, ships were sinking; as the night wore on and the battle raged, Hewitt watched helplessly as one ship after another disappeared beneath the ocean surface. By dawn, according to Hewitt’s own highly theatrical account, his was the only boat still afloat, the only one to escape enemy fire. Then came two Royal Air Force planes out of Scotland—and the realization that rescue was near.

  “Where’s the music?” Hewitt said to himself as he watched the planes head toward them. “This can’t be happening unless Dimitri Tiomkin writes the score.” Even in the middle of a war, Hewitt figured the action could be more thrilling with just a few small improvements.

  Hewitt may not have quite realized it that night, but despite all his fantasies of a career as a dashing correspondent, he seemed to be missing the basic reporter gene. He had the flamboyant personality and the wild ideas, and he liked being near the action. But he appeared to shy away from the hard, gritty work that came with the job description. While his pals Rooney and Cronkite—and other future TV stars like Edward R. Murrow and Eric Sevareid—tore up the continent with their confidence and tenacity, Hewitt hurried back to the United States and got himself a job as the night editor of the Associated Press bureau in Memphis, Tennessee.

  It was in Memphis in 1945 that Hewitt met his first wife, Mary Weaver, who had the ambition to prod him out of that $50-a-week dead-end job to take a position as editor-in-chief of the Pelham Sun, a suburban New York weekly he’d been writing for before the war. It wasn’t the Herald Tribune, but it gave Hewitt some geographic proximity to the world he’d dreamed of as a kid.

  Six months later he found his way back inside the New York city limits, with a job as night telephoto editor of Acme Newspictures. His job was to choose and write captions for photographs to be sent out on the Associated Press wire. But he quickly discovered that he’d traded one boring job for another—again—and this was the worst one yet. When a friend told him about a job at CBS News, he was interested, even though he’d never exactly heard of CBS News before.

  “Not radio,” the friend explained. “Television.”

  “What-a-vision?” Hewitt asked (or so he’s claimed repeatedly ever since).

  Hewitt got the job—taking a $20-a-week cut in pay—and in August 1948, at the age of 25, went to work for the fledgling news division of the network, then headquartered in the rafters above Grand Central Station, in the heart of New York City.

  At 6:45 every weeknight in those days, a mild and unassuming gentleman named Douglas Edwards sat at a desk in Studio 41 above Grand Central Terminal and read the news. This was before market research revealed to TV executives that “mild and unassuming” were two characteristics viewers didn’t want in their TV newsreaders. Edwards read headlines off a script and into a camera, resulting in a resoundingly dull broadcast seen only by the tiny handful of Americans who owned televisions—1.4 million people watching 254,000 TV sets in 12 large American cities. Douglas Edwards With the News began broadcasting on August 15, 1948. Each show was supposed to last 15 minutes, but who was going to complain if they ran over a little bit?

  These were the dark ages of television. It wasn’t until much later that 1948 emerged as a turning point in the history of the medium. Sure, new cities and sets were constantly being added to the coaxial cable, delivering the programs of CBS, NBC, ABC, and DuMont. But Douglas Edwards was typical of the personalities that TV attracted at that point—pedestrian types with little glamour or star power. On June 20, 1948, a few weeks before Hewitt got hired, CBS gave a Sunday-night timeslot to a variety show hosted by a squat, greasy New York Daily News gossip columnist named Ed Sullivan, whose singular lack of charm did not preclude a 23-year career on CBS as an entertainment ringmaster.

  CBS handed Hewitt the title of associate director and hoped that this hyperkinetic young man might jazz up their nightly newscast a little bit. (He shared the title with some other talented young men, including actor Yul Brynner and future movie directors Sidney Lumet and John Frankenheimer.) In those days videotape wasn’t in wide use—the broadcast was redone live every night at 9:45 P.M. for the West Coast audience.

  Hewitt was in his element at last. His idea-a-minute personality perfectly suited a fledgling medium in need of new ideas. Even better, no one cared if he broke the rules; in 1948, there weren’t any rules to break. It was as close to Hildy Johnson’s chaotic newsroom as Hewitt had yet come.

  One of Hewitt’s first missions as a TV news director was to find a way to keep Douglas Edwards from spending the entire newscast staring dully at the script in front of him.

  At first Hewitt tried to cajole Edwards into memorizing the text. When this didn’t work out (Edwards not being a trained Shakespearean actor capable of committing 15 minutes’ worth of news copy to memory every night), Hewitt had the script written on poster cards held by a technician just to the side of the camera. It would look like Edwards had it memorized, even if he was in fact reading it. And it worked well enough.

  But one morning Hewitt arrived at work with yet another brainstorm: What about braille? If Edwards could learn braille, he could just run his fingers over the script while looking directly into the camera. Hewitt’s colleagues reacted with stupefaction and annoyance. Edwards wasn’t about to learn braille, and CBS News wasn’t about to pay for the conversion of scripts into braille on deadline.

  With his braille proposal, Hewitt revealed not only a propensity for offbeat and impractical ideas but also an inordinate loyalty to them in the face of rejection. He pushed the notion for years; even Walter Cronkite heard the pitch. “Gosh, he was serious but nobody else took it very seriously,” Cronkite remembers. “But it sure shook everybody up for a while.” Ultimately, in the early 1950s the TelePrompTer was invented—a running strip of text that would appear directly above the camera lens. That sent the braille idea into the dustbin of television history, along with several other Hewitt brainstorms.

  Nevertheless, Hewitt kept impressing people with his energy and ideas. In June 1951, Edward R. Murrow and his producer, Fred Friendly (born with the slightly less amicable name of Ferdinand Friendly Wachenheimer), agreed to move their popular Hear It Now radio show to TV, and they hired Hewitt to run the control room. See It Now debuted on November 18, 1951, with Murrow admitting to his audience, “This is an old team trying to learn a new trade.” Hewitt, who after three years in television was one of its most experienced directors, appeared on camera during that show’s control room opening; but it was Murrow and Friendly, not the 28-year-old Hewitt, who determined the show’s direction.

  See It Now was a show that needed only one boss—not a good arrangement for Hewitt, who was already accustomed to calling the shots. And further complicating matters, Hewitt, with his push-the-limits style, and Friendly, the ultraserious documentarian, hated each other instantly. “Don Hewitt’s idea of news,” Friendly used to say, “is an elephant on water skis in Cypress Gardens.”

  One morning during the 1952 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Hewitt went for breakfast in a local diner, and as he sat at his table his eyes lit on the blackboard listing that day’s specials. The restaurant had mounted white letters onto the black background, and it occurred to Hewitt—staring at the word “hamburger”—that if he pointed a camera in the direction of such a sign, and then superimposed that shot onto a picture of a hamburger, the black background would “disappear” and only the white letters would show. “What if we did the same thing with, say, Adlai Stevenson?” he wondered. Hewitt immediately convinced himself that he’d come up with another idea to change television forever. His new technique would enable the viewer at home to know the identity of the presidential candidate on screen without the help of the on-air correspondent, freeing up considerable time for commentary and making broadcasts easier to follow.

  “I’ll have the board,” Hewitt t
old the perplexed waitress when she asked for his order, or so he recalled in his 2002 memoir, Tell Me a Story. Paying $45, he walked out the door with the blackboard and carried it back up to the CBS News broadcast booth at the convention.

  “Hey, look at this!” Hewitt shouted to his colleagues, lifting up the blackboard. Within minutes, a camera had filmed his new possession with names of various Democratic dignitaries now listed upon it; technicians then superimposed those shots onto the screen as the politicians showed up. By the end of the day, Hewitt’s breakfast brainstorm had become an essential ingredient of all news broadcasting. Eventually this technique would come to be called a “chyron,” or “super.”

  Hewitt understood the need for shorthand terms in a fast-paced industry—and either dreamed them up himself or popularized them to the point where people assumed they were his creations. For years, his colleagues recall he took credit for applying the relay-racing term “anchorman” to the role Cronkite played at the 1952 conventions—the notion being that while other reporters roamed the convention hall in search of stories, he would remain “anchored” to the news desk. “He always said it was his term, even though we all heard different stories,” recalls Sanford Socolow, who joined CBS News as a news writer in 1956 and later worked as a producer alongside Hewitt on the CBS Evening News. Hewitt now backs off the claim; Cronkite himself credits the term to a junior CBS News producer named Paul Levitan. “Hewitt would be glad to take credit for that, but it’s not so,” Cronkite says firmly. “He may have picked it up instantly and made it the word that was used, but it was used in conversation before that.”

  Nonetheless, these household words would never have emerged from backstage without Hewitt to promote them. He knew the value of quick, catchy terms like “anchorman” for the nascent TV viewer. As producer, Hewitt was the advocate for the guy at home—the one in the Barcalounger, with the beer and the potato chips and the short attention span to rival his own. Hewitt wanted that guy, and he was always ready to do whatever it took to get him.

  Chapter 2

  You Son of a Bitch!

  Don Hewitt flew to Iowa with the noblest of intentions. It was September 1959, and he was now the most powerful man at CBS News. As executive producer of Douglas Edwards and the News, the frenzied Hewitt made all the crucial decisions governing each night’s broadcast and shaped the network’s coverage of news events more than any other employee. At 37, Hewitt’s dogged personal style colored every aspect of CBS’s daily coverage; he often held two telephones to his ears at once, the better to bark commands at underlings. His terrified but fiercely loyal team of reporters worked nonstop to deliver better pictures, bigger scoops, and fresher stories to their demanding boss. That said—all the power and noise notwithstanding—CBS was losing to NBC’s more popular newscast anchored by emerging stars Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. And Hewitt didn’t like to lose.

  He traveled to corn country that September with Harry Reasoner and Charles Kuralt, two of the most formidable young members of the CBS News reporting team. They were going to cover the first visit of Nikita Khrushchev, then premier of the Soviet Union, to the farm of Roswell Garst of Cumberland, Iowa. A Soviet leader was touring the United States for the first time since the advent of communism and the explosion of television, and he cleverly saw the potential for creating goodwill through a staged media event.

  Khrushchev’s trip to the heartland handed TV networks the chance to vie for a new kind of broadcast coup—a contest seemingly made for Don Hewitt, who loved nothing more than the adrenaline rush of fighting over a breaking news story with great pictures.

  On Friday, shortly after Hewitt got to Cumberland, he and his colleagues dropped in on the local police chief to say howdy. They were also looking for help in finding a driver to take them around town and hoped the officer might oblige. He connected them with the recently retired chief of police, who happily signed on for the job and agreed to wear his old uniform—giving Hewitt the benefit of a badge in making his way around town. Hewitt could barely contain his excitement, and then he pushed his luck even further. “What should we do when he’s not available?” he gently inquired of the police chief.

  “Oh, we’ll make you honorary sheriff,” the chief replied and gave Hewitt a badge.

  The next day, Hewitt ran into an NBC camera crew from Omaha sent to help with that network’s coverage and flashed his badge. “Howdy, folks,” Sheriff Hewitt said as he approached the crew, who had no idea who he was.

  “Morning, Sheriff,” a crew member said to Hewitt.

  “Mornin’, boys,” Hewitt replied. “What’s goin’ on?”

  Whereupon the camera crew began to outline the details of NBC’s coverage plans—until an NBC executive spotted Hewitt from a distance. Hewitt quickly excused himself and raced to spill the secrets to his CBS pals.

  On the Saturday morning Khrushchev was to arrive, Hewitt roused his two correspondents before dawn and loaded them into a car, along with a young desk assistant named Robert Wussler, who went on to become president of CBS. They began driving around Cumberland in search of fresh new angles for the story.

  “What’s that over there?” he asked, as they drove along a dirt road alongside the Garst farm. He’d spotted a large truck parked in the distance. The side of the truck was clearly marked with the letters “NBC.” Noting its size, Hewitt quickly deduced that the truck contained the mobile control room his primary competitor would need to broadcast its own coverage live.

  Hewitt parked his car and walked over with Reasoner and Kuralt to take a look. “Hey, look,” he said. “The keys are inside!”

  Hewitt looked at Wussler and smiled.

  “You wouldn’t dare,” Wussler said.

  “Try me.”

  “You wouldn’t have the guts.”

  “I have the guts, but what in hell would we do with it?”

  “Hide it in a cornfield,” said Wussler. “They won’t find it until they harvest the corn in August.”

  With his reporters watching incredulously, Hewitt opened the door on the driver’s side of the truck and hopped in. He turned the key and the engine started. With a big smile for his colleagues, Hewitt prepared to drive the short distance down the road, to an area of trees big enough to camouflage the truck. (It was as though Hewitt was hoping to duplicate, in spirit, the famous scene from The Front Page in which Hildy Johnson stashes the prisoner in the rolltop desk.) Only at the last minute did he reconsider and return to his own vehicle. Wussler wiped Hewitt’s fingerprints off the steering wheel, and the four men drove off.

  Of course, the news division executives were apoplectic over Hewitt’s various stunts. But how do you punish your top producer, particularly when he was delivering great TV to a growing audience? A stern reprimand was all he ever got. And as frequently as Hewitt annoyed his bosses with his antics, he also pushed his notions of news as entertainment by devising ingenious ways to circumvent the normal methods of news gathering. His methods ranged from the benign to the extreme—from hiring a Navy plane to film the sinking of the Andrea Doria in 1956 to making an off-camera obscene gesture at prisoners to get them angry enough to re-create the scene of a New Jersey prison riot for film cameras, after the riot had already been quelled. Hewitt had an image in his mind of news that didn’t always conform to the pictures he got.

  Hewitt rankled most of his bosses, from Sig Mickelson, who ran CBS News in the 1950s, to his replacement, Richard Salant, a lawyer for CBS who had no previous news experience when he took over the news division in 1961. With his literate memos and aggressive adherence to ethical standards, Salant was a gentlemanly adversary for Hewitt, who wasn’t about to change his ways. And despite the controversy around Hewitt, there was no doubting his talents as a visionary news producer who was attracting attention to a news show that desperately needed it.

  To Salant, Hewitt’s primary failing as a showman was his allegiance to Douglas Edwards, the stolid anchorman of the broadcast who couldn’t compete with the combined ch
arisma of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, NBC’s more successful news anchors. It seemed to Salant and others that Hewitt championed Edwards because the anchorman never contradicted Hewitt’s own demanding point of view. “Edwards was Don’s puppet,” recalls Dan Rather, who joined CBS News as a reporter in 1961, just before Edwards was replaced in April 1962 with a popular TV journalist from Missouri by the name of Walter Cronkite.

  Hewitt agreed to continue as executive producer of the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, but neither man was overjoyed with the prospect. Radically different in their approach, the two men had already worked together a number of times since their days in London during World War II. Cronkite, a former United Press war correspondent and one of the fabled “Murrow’s boys,” was yet another CBS News employee with little patience for Hewitt.

  On the night of Tuesday, April 5, 1960, Hewitt was in the control room calling the shots as Walter Cronkite sat behind the broadcast desk in the studio of CBS’s Milwaukee affiliate, reporting on the returns from the all-important Wisconsin primary, which Senator John F. Kennedy had just won with 56 percent of the vote—bolstered by the state’s substantial Catholic population.

  Religion was a hot media topic that spring, as pundits and reporters speculated about how Kennedy’s Catholic heritage would help or hurt his campaign, given that no Catholic had ever been elected president. Kennedy had grown sensitive on the subject, declaring in West Virginia at one point, “I don’t think my religion is anyone’s business.” On this primary day in Wisconsin, Hewitt had assigned reporters to canvass voters in two key precincts—one Catholic, one not—to compare the candidates’ strengths in these areas.