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Don Hewitt's 59th Minute

“Goddamn it! God-fucking-damnit!” Don Hewitt screams into the phone at producer Michael Radutzky. “Where the fuck is the piece?!” Hoarse from yelling, Hewitt starts banging the phone against the control-room table. “Don, how am I supposed to finish the story with you yelling at me?” Radutzky yells back, but to no avail—Hewitt is too enraged to listen.

The piece in question is an exclusive interview with Michael Jackson that has been the focus of feverish planning and negotiation for weeks. Hewitt has been obsessed with the piece. And in this, the last year of Hewitt’s stewardship of 60 Minutes, it’s come down to the last second. There is one bright spot amid the panic that has quickly enveloped the control room at CBS News. CBS is broadcasting a professional football game that is running late, and it now appears likely that 60 Minutes won’t go on the air much before 7:30 p.m., giving Radutzky and Bradley another half-hour. In the end, with not a minute to spare, the show goes on the air that Sunday night—as though nothing had happened. But clearly something has happened. The night has proved pivotal for Hewitt. Everything he loves and hates is on the table: Hollywood, news, drama, celebrity, sex, ratings, deadlines, and rules. It is a quintessential Hewitt moment, and one that has disrupted the smooth and uneventful final year at 60 Minutes he planned for himself. If Hewitt is lucky, good ratings will distract everybody from the problems facing the show itself.

The next morning, Hewitt gets the overnight numbers. The episode reached the highest number of the 18-49 audience in almost four years. It scored a 12.0/20 household rating and share and a total audience of 18.8 million viewers, making it the No. 1 show of the week. This marks the first time that 60 Minutes has been No. 1 on television during the regular season since the March 1998 broadcast that featured Bradley’s interview with the Clinton accuser Kathleen Willey—by coincidence, another Bradley-Radutzky collaboration that 60 Minutes had been accused of rushing onto the air without adequate reporting.

At 4 a.m. on December 31, Hewitt is back on the phone with Radutzky, yelling again. “What the fuck is this about?” Hewitt demands. In that morning’s edition, the New York Times is reporting that in addition to the $5 million that CBS had paid Michael Jackson for an entertainment special, the network kicked in $1 million for the 60 Minutes interview, and alleging that Ed Bradley promised Jackson money at their Neverland encounter the previous February. The sources for the Times story included a business associate of Jackson’s and a CBS executive, both anonymous.

Radutzky tries to calm Hewitt down. “I don’t have any idea,” he says. “We didn’t pay them anything.” Over the next several days, Hewitt launches an angry counterattack against the Times, insinuating a lack of ethical standards in its reporting.

The internal bruises from the Jackson story have been slow to heal, and questions about the broadcast and the alleged payments remain unanswered to the satisfaction of everyone at 60 Minutes. One correspondent, requesting anonymity, expressed uncertainty about Hewitt’s role. Like the rest of the tigers, this correspondent has an ongoing love-hate experience with Hewitt. “I’m not sure how much Don knew about this,” the correspondent said. “We were just on a roll, and Don wanted to get ratings, and I don’t think he even knew about most of this stuff. I don’t think he knew anything about deals. I don’t think anybody in the front office would have raised that with Don because his reaction would have been so unpredictable.”

The correspondent pauses for a moment and then adds: “I think that maybe I’m underestimating. Maybe Don was in it up to his ears, you know?”

On the Tuesday afternoon before his final 60 Minutes broadcast on May 30, 2004, Don Hewitt’s belongings are being removed, against his will, from his corner office. All of his possessions have been packed away: his Emmy statuettes, his framed autographed photographs with presidents from Truman to Bush, his Thomas Kent wall clock, even his huge glass-topped office desk—the one at which he’d lately been telling everyone he wanted to die. It has been a difficult winter and spring at 60 Minutes. Hewitt has alternated between accepting his fate and denying it, frequently complaining that he still doesn’t understand the reasons for his forced resignation.

After returning from lunch, the 81-year-old Hewitt had been summoned to Screening Room 164 for what he thinks will be his last look at a 60 Minutes segment. Instead, the correspondents and a few dozen staffers greet him for a champagne toast out of plastic glasses. When Hewitt enters the screening room, his eyes mist up as he recognizes the reporters he has alternately loved and loathed—a Mount Rushmore–like gathering of the 60 Minutes correspondents, lined up against the wall to say good-bye. There stands 86-year-old Mike Wallace, looking dapper in a gray business suit, flanked by Lesley Stahl in a pink leather jacket and Steve Kroft in an open-collar shirt. At the other side of the room stands Ed Bradley in his usual dark T-shirt.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Hewitt says, after a brief round of applause dies down. “I’m going downstairs.” He is referring to the spacious office directly below his current one that will be his new home as an executive producer of CBS News, the consulting gig the network gave him in return for letting go, at last, of 60 Minutes.

“You gonna put a spiral staircase in?” asks Bradley.

“I’m never coming up here again,” Hewitt says.

“No matter what happens in anybody else’s career,” Kroft predicts confidently, “I think at the end of it we’ll all remember when we worked with Don Hewitt.”

“Cheers!” Stahl says.

“Anybody want to go down and tell that to Heyward?” Hewitt asks, almost as though he hasn’t heard what anyone has been saying. “Frazier Moore of the AP asked me the other day, ‘Why are they doing this?’ I said, ‘Nobody ever explained it to me.’ I have never had an explanation. Never. But it happened.”

Hewitt’s evident bitterness—running on a seemingly endless loop in his brain—causes an anguished moment, until Stahl breaks the silence.

“So you have gotten over it,” Stahl deadpanned.

As the laughter dies down, the unmistakable voice of Mike Wallace returns the party to rapt attention. “Thirty-six years ago,” Wallace says, casting his eyes over the crowd of young assistants and producers, many of them barely born when 60 Minutes began. “Out of a job. In a room about a quarter the size of this room. With a good-looking assistant—what was her name?”

“Suzanne Davis,” Hewitt says.

“That’s right. Suzanne Davis. He effectively had been fired. Told, ‘Hey, come up with an idea.’ They’d already gotten rid of him because of some of his ideas. And on a Sunday he said, ‘Can I come over?’ And he came over to 74th Street. And we went upstairs. . . . He said, ‘Listen. I’ve got an idea. I’ve got an idea for a show.’

“I wanted to go to the White House,” Wallace goes on. “I hadn’t the slightest desire . . . but I figured, What the hell. I felt sorry for him.”

“Who was president then?” Stahl interjects. “Coolidge?”

Wallace continues, unamused. “Nixon,” he says. “Nixon. In any case, this man . . . somebody said it before. He put our kids through school. He made some of us much richer than we should be. But mainly, we had such a ball. For the first ten or fifteen years. We worked seven days a week, twelve hours a day. Everybody saw everybody else’s piece in the screening room. It was . . . Jesus, it was . . . ”

Wallace stops, his reverie finished in midthought. He has remembered enough. Hewitt doesn’t mind; he’s dying to repeat for the millionth time his own memory of the early days, when the two men who still call each other “kid” really were just kids, playing with the power of television.