Don Hewitt's Favorite 60 Minutes Moments
Whenever Don Hewitt spoke in front of audiences, he'd get the inevitable question: "What was your favorite story on 60 Minutes?"
As correspondent Lesley Stahl explains, he had many of them after 36 years and he liked to re-live the most memorable moments - the larger-than-life personalities and the classic confrontations.
The correspondents and Hewitt all sat in a circle when he retired in 2004, and reminisced about his favorite 60 Minutes pieces.
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"Mike, you've had a lot of great moments in television. I don't think there is one that will ever even approach your walking into the lion's den of the Ayatollah Khomeini right after he took 50 Americans hostage and facing him with the fact that...," Hewitt said to Mike Wallace.
"That he was a lunatic," Wallace said.
"The thing I remember most is your getting young Ron Reagan to tell you that if it weren't for his mother…," Wallace said to Stahl.
"I don't think he'd be where he is. I don't think he would have gotten to where he got to," Ron Reagan told Stahl.
Reagan even told Stahl he doubted his father would've become president, were it not for his mother. "I think if left to his own devices, he might, you know, [have] ended up hosting 'Unsolved Mysteries' on TV or something."
"That's the secret of this broadcast, it's the people," Hewitt said. "It is the ability to find people who can tell their own story better than you can. And your job is to bring it out of them."
Don's talent was more instinctual than intellectual, as he once admitted to Barbara Walters.
Asked what he thought his talent had been all these years, he told Walters, "Boy, if I knew I'd package it. I haven't the slightest idea. I don't think much comes from up here. I'm not very well read. I flunked out of college. I think it all comes from here. And I can't explain that either."
"I remember the day, I wandered into his office and I said, 'Muhammad Ali, the most virile man on Earth, is a shell. He can't even talk anymore. That's got to be a story.' He says to me, 'How am I going to interview him if he can't talk?' I said, 'Stupid, if he could talk, there wouldn't be a story. The story is that he can't talk,'" Hewitt said, recalling an exchange with Ed Bradley.
Over lunch, Ali's wife Lonnie told Ed that her husband was having flashbacks in his sleep, and that she was frightened because he would throw punches.
Ali, pretending to snore at the table, jokingly threw a punch at Bradley.
Don liked the profiles of sports legends and movie stars, but the big stamp he put on 60 Minutes was his pushing his producers and correspondents to take on controversial subjects, like Dr. Jack Kevorkian.
And Don wanted his team to be fearless.
"People are sitting out there, voters, and they're saying, 'Look, it's really pretty simple. If he has never had an extramarital affair, why doesn't he just say so?'" Steve Kroft asked then-Gov. Bill Clinton and his wife in 1992.
Hewitt said his broadcast is not beholden to anyone. And if anyone ever suggested that 60 Minutes was elitist, Don became a feisty lion, defending his offspring.
"You see, there's an exclusionary sense that the network news only deals with the intelligentsia," Fox News host Bill O'Reilly once told Hewitt.
"Hey, I consider myself as much a regular American and a blue collar American as you do," Hewitt shot back.
"Well, I am glad you do," O'Reilly said. "But, those people's concerns aren't dealt with as much as they could be. Any validity to that?"
"No validity," Hewitt replied. "I do this broadcast for cops and firemen and hard hats."
And he knew that those cops and firemen and hard hats loved it when he had his team going after the bad guys.
"I always remember being in Philadelphia and a guy got up and he said, 'Why does someone who's quite obviously a crook decide to go on '60 Minutes'?' And Morley said, 'A crook doesn't believe he's made it as a crook until he's been on '60 Minutes,'" Hewitt recalled.
But if they refused to talk to 60 Minutes, Don would send his correspondents and producers out with a hidden camera.
60 Minutes also used the "ambush interview," and Don came under criticism for it.
"What does that add to a piece? What is it doing there, aside, in my view at least, imply that the guy has something to hide?" Jeff Greenfield asked Hewitt.
"Well, it's more than implying that he has something to hide, it's showing he's got something to hide. But, it is the only way you get to see the man about whom we are doing the story," Hewitt said.
But Don came to think the broadcast was overdoing these kinds of stories - that they were becoming a parody of TV news. After that, he rarely gave permission to use techniques like a hidden camera.
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Don Hewitt's Favorite 60 Minutes Moments
Timeline: Hewitt's Life and Career
It's easy to forget how much of a revolutionary Don Hewitt was. When he thought up the idea of 60 Minutes in 1968, he changed the very definition of television news.
"Up to that point, television news was always very, very serious, very ponderous, very important, and the light stuff was Jackie Gleason, Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore, and news never wanted to delve into the lighter side of life, and I think if you put them both in the same mix, you got a winner, and it turned out to be right," Hewitt said.
"I remember, Ed, your getting Lena Horne to tell you some secrets about her sex life," Hewitt told Bradley.
Even when 60 Minutes went to "the lighter side" in terms of subject matter, Don still wanted his correspondents to bore in, and ask the real shockers.
For example, Steve Kroft once asked Jerry Seinfeld if he though he was immature.
Asked if he was sexually immature, Seinfeld ended the conversation by saying, "I am not going to talk about being sexually immature on Minutes."
"Somebody once said to me, 'Would you do Britney Spears on 60 Minutes?' I said, 'Of course I would do Britney Spears on 60 Minutes if she had something to say,'" Hewitt explained.
Don felt that a 60 Minutes profile was a mark of achievement, that it meant someone had a body of work, of accomplishments worthy of our attention.
"You say that you are having a terrible time coming to terms with the 21st century," Barbara Walters asked Hewitt. "What's the trouble?"
"It's not familiar to me. You know, I'm still living Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. I live in another world," Hewitt replied.
"Yet you produce a news magazine that has to be up to date," Walters pointed out.
"Well, maybe having a foot in the past helps you deal with the present better," Hewitt said.
One thing that kept him fresh was that, from time to time, he would join his producers and correspondents on the road, and take over. For example, he joined Steve Kroft when Kroft interviewed Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1992.
"I think at some point you're going to have be as candid as you know how and then from there on you say, 'I said it on 60 Minutes. If you want to know what I think or said on the subject, go get the tape and run it again. I've said it all," Hewitt said.
Forty minutes into the interview, the hot television lights crashed down from the ceiling, nearly hitting the Clintons and scaring everyone in the room. Don suggested getting on with the interview.
On another occasion, Don decided to accompany Stahl to interview Boris Yeltsin.
"We get there, he's in his tennis clothes. 'Nyet,' he says. 'Nyet. No interview. No interview,' like that. I said, 'Okay. I'm out of here.' I'm walking away," she remembered.
"That's right. She's going to leave. I said, 'Go up to the tennis courts for Christ sakes," Hewitt remembered.
When the correspondents and producers revealed something about a person, he'd praise us with his highest compliment: "Wow," he'd say. "I didn't know that."
"It's sensational," Hewitt would praise.
"I have never had the slightest interest in an issue," Hewitt said. "I only want to get stories of people dealing with issues whose lives are affected by issues. And we narrowed them down to bite sized where you could understand it and digest it. "
60 Minutes was Don Hewitt's life. "If I were gonna trade jobs with anybody in the world I'd trade 'em with Mike, and I wouldn't trade jobs with Mike. I get a better job than Mike, I'm Mike's boss," he said.
He never burned out, never ran out of energy for the telling of stories - he simply loved what he did. "You know, you look back on all these things, and you can't believe you lived through all this," he said.
Produced by Karen Sughrue