Don Hewett's 59th Minute

New York Magazine ^ | ept. 20, 2004 | David Blum

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Don Hewitt's 59th Minute This will be the ?rst season of 60 Minutes without its legendary creator and executive producer. A look at the last days of a network-news King Lear.

By David Blum

Hewitt and his 60 Minutes team at a surprise going-away party. (Photo credit: Jeffrey Smith)

On the morning of October 7, 2001—the day the United States began a rigorous bombing campaign in Afghanistan—Don Hewitt woke up in the hospital. He was there for an angioplasty. Nothing serious—just a tune-up to keep the old man moving.

It was less than a month after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Looking back on the previous four weeks of 9/11 coverage from his hospital bed, Hewitt had to admit to himself that the 60 Minutes crew didn’t do crash reporting as well as they used to. Sure, he could still count on Steve Kroft for a great hard-hitting story. And Lesley Stahl knew Washington better than any of them. But his top guys weren’t what they used to be. Any way you looked at it, Mike Wallace was too old to cover a story as aggressively as a decade ago. Same with Morley Safer.

Hewitt needed to figure out how to distinguish himself and his show—not only for the show’s benefit but also for his own. He knew that sooner or later, CBS News president Andrew Heyward wanted to replace him at 60 Minutes. No one had yet raised the issue directly, but he’d heard the rumblings. Was Les Moonves gunning for him? It probably wasn’t Mel Karmazin, then the No. 2 at parent company Viacom. Karmazin was a pal. Still, Hewitt realized he had to put together some classic 60 Minutes

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Long expose of "60 Minutes"

[DaveMSmith]

Newsflash: This IS NOT a photograph! Is it a forged photo?

[DmBarch]

Geez - The author, David Blum, grew up the next block from me and we were about the same age. Like many in the neighborhood, his father and mine were professors at Michigan State University. I last ran into him in Chicago, about 1980, where he had the prized job of writing some of the middle column stories on Page 1 of the Wall Street Journal.

He became notorious for an Vanity Fair article about the "brat pack", young actors in Hollywood who were in films like St. Elmo's Fire. The E True Hollywood story had a show on the brat pack where his article was mentioned - though they mispronounced his name as "bloom" instead of Blum - as in plum.

I'll have to get the book. But you can see from the excerpt that these guys are used to doing things only their way - without "adult supervision". Add Dan Rather who in 1988 had fake Vietnam Combat veterans living in the woods. Most of the Veterans had never been near Vietnam, and spent a good part of their military time is the stockade for going AWOL.

David Blum also has written for Esquire, New York, and The Sunday New York Times. He is on the Faculty of the Columbia School of Journalism.