Don Hewitt Dies

Don Hewitt, legendary newsman and creator of much of what we know of 20th Century Television Journalism, dies at 86. The Times has a comprehensive obituary of this legend.

It was as creator and executive producer of “60 Minutes” that he had his biggest impact — imagining, in effect, what an electronic version of “Life” magazine would be like, and then bringing that confection to the screen with a mix of hard-hitting investigative pieces and celebrity profiles. As tour guides, Mr. Hewitt recruited a cast of reporters that included Mike Wallace and Dan Rather, and later Lesley Stahl, who were soon as recognizable as the politicians they confronted and the entertainers they interviewed. Whatever their line-up in a particular television season, they were presented to their Sunday night audience as equals.

As in a general-interest magazine, Mr. Hewitt reasoned, “60 Minutes” — named for the hour of prime time the network would give him each week — would toggle between hard news and soft. “We could look into Marilyn Monroe’s closet, so long as we looked into Robert Oppenheimer’s laboratory, too,” he wrote in his 2001 memoir, “Tell Me a Story.” “We could make the news entertaining, without compromising our integrity.”

Behind the scenes, where he could be a stern, hyperkinetic taskmaster, Mr. Hewitt embossed the program with the fundamental elements that would become its calling cards: a relentless emphasis on compelling narrative; interviews in which the questions (and questioners) were often more interesting than the subjects themselves; occasional gotcha moments that snared wrongdoers like Watergate co-conspirators or cigarette manufacturers; and, in respites as welcome as an elementary-school recess, revealing conversations with figures like Barbra Streisand, Lena Horne, Robin Williams and Bruce Springsteen.