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Chapter 1

What-a-Vision

It was a Saturday afternoon in March
1931
, and an
8
-year-old boy named Donald Shepard Hewitt had taken the profits from his part-time job selling magazines in the tree-trimmed New York suburb of New Rochelle and bought himself a frozen Milky Way bar and a trolley car ticket to the neighborhood movie house. That day's feature was
The Front Page,
which had opened to rave reviews—an adaptation of the Ben Hecht–Charles McArthur play about a big-city newspaper and the people who worked there.
The Front Page
had had a great run on Broadway in
1928
and done plenty to glamorize the journalism profession into which young Don had been born. Don's dad wasn't a reporter, exactly; he sold classified advertising, and not even for a New York newspaper, and these days he was selling ad circulars. But that was the black-and-white real world; in the wide-screen, Technicolor world inside young Don's head—where even the best story could stand a little exaggeration—Ely Hewitt might as well have been the editor of the
New York Herald Tribune
. Plus the kid loved the movies, and a comedy about the newspaper business was one he did not intend to miss.

The Front Page
introduced the world to one of the great archetypes in the short history of the movies: Hildy Johnson, the freewheeling, rule-breaking Chicago newspaper reporter preparing to leave the chaotic news business for marriage and a more respectable career in advertising. His last day on the courthouse beat, hell-bent on breaking one last story, Johnson spends every penny of his $
260
in honeymoon booty to buy an exclusive on the prison escape of convicted murderer Earle Williams. With his crusty but benign editor Walter Burns—another archetype built to last—he manages to grab Williams and stash him inside a rolltop desk in the courthouse press room until their scoop is assured.

The movie made a fortune at the box office and resulted in multiple remakes (including Howard Hawks's classic
1940
comedy,
His Girl Friday
) and contributed an enduring stereotype to the culture: Hildy Johnson defined the hard-drinking, intrepid newshound in his broad-brimmed fedora, feet up on the pressroom desk, wisecracking about dames, pols, and the latest big story. He would stand for decades as Hollywood's ultimate reporter—a little shady around the edges, no holds barred—at least until Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman came along and sanctified journalism as a serious business for ethical, hard-working professionals who never stretched the truth.

From the moment young Don stepped out of the theater into the March sunlight, he knew exactly what he wanted to do when he grew up—to get the story, no matter what it took.

 

It didn't take Hewitt long to find a way to turn his Hildy obsession into coin. In the seventh grade, while his pals were playing baseball and chasing girls, the opinionated and boisterous teenager won a
Junior Scholastic Magazine
contest for “best editorial” with a piece he'd titled, “Press Drives Lindbergh to Self-Exile.” He put his moviegoer's sense of story and drama to use in the student paper at New Rochelle High School, in a sports column with the somewhat catchier title of “Athlete's Footnotes.” After that he set his media obsession aside just long enough to join the track team and earn an athletic scholarship to New York University.

At
19
, Hewitt's already well-developed short attention span got the best of him; he dropped out of NYU and found what looked like his dream job—night copyboy at the fabled
New York Herald Tribune.
But sharpening pencils for other Hildy Johnsons wasn't quite the fulfilling experience Hewitt had dreamed of back in the movie house. After several months racing around the newsroom in the service of other reporters' stories, Hewitt found a ticket to bigger and more exciting opportunities: World War II. He enrolled at the Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York, in
1943
, and by the next year he was working public relations for the Merchant Marine in London. There he finally got the chance to work with real reporters—among them two young journalists named Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite.

“He was a young fellow, as we all were, much younger than we are now, anyway,” Cronkite remembers. “It seemed that he was enjoying hanging out with the news people more than he was busy. . . . I think many of us questioned whether he was busy doing anything, except kind of enjoying the war.” Andy Rooney's recollections were a bit more specific: “He used to come into the
Stars and Stripes
office all the time. . . . He was very good, he did good pieces for us. He submitted pieces about the Merchant Marine, and we often ran them.”

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
1950
s 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 N
ow 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.