Remembering "60 Minutes" Creator Don Hewitt: Inside His Groundbreaking Show

In 1968 a former CBS producer named Don Hewitt launched 60 Minutes, a flashy news program that combined documentary-style reporting with the present-tense excitement of daily news. The series went on to become a lasting success for the network, and Hewitt produced it until 2004 — for a staggering total of 36 years. As we remember Hewitt, who died today at age 86 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, look back at Rolling Stone's 1978 profile that examined his game-changing show.

You bring the suspected ringleader of a murder conspiracy to camera but you don't tell him you've already got the goods on him. It's called "confrontation journalism" and they do a lot of it on this show. Is it fair? Well, decide for yourself.

You're running a TV news show and a guy comes into your office promising to lead you to the body of Jimmy Hoffa. What would you do? What they did was pay him … and asked questions later.

You see Mike Wallace, Morley Safer and Dan Rather's faces every week on this show. But do you know who's calling the shots at the other end of the camera? His name is Don Hewitt, and if a story idea is sexy enough, he'll spare no expense in getting it on the air.

Don Hewitt delights in saying that he has the shortest attention span in television. "The trick," says the executive producer of 60 Minutes, TV's top-rated news program, "is to grab the viewer by the throat, not let his mind wander and start thinking about what else might be going on."

Take a recent Thursday afternoon, for example, when Hewitt pointed to a television set in his office and said, "Watch this. You won't believe it."

We both stare at the tube as Mike Wallace appears and informs us that the following piece is "not ordinary family fare," the kind of "warning" that makes it impossible to turn off your set.

The piece is called "Kiddy Porn," and it is vintage 60 Minutes: a gut-grabbing story featuring sleazy characters and shot with hidden cameras. This one may be a little too visceral; in fact, the reason it's on in Hewitt's office this Thursday afternoon is that the network is feeding it to all the CBS affiliates three days early so they can decide whether to air it.

Hewitt runs to the corner and turns the volume up full blast, as if sheer volume is needed to cut through all the distractions and hold his attention for the next twenty minutes. It doesn't. As producer Barry Lando is seen through a concealed camera buying an illicit "chicken film" from a Los Angeles porn shop, Hewitt starts reading a newspaper.

"There are times when I'll say to a producer, 'I see it and I hear it, but I don't feel it in the pit of my stomach.' And when I get bored, I figure other people will too."

In the cautious world of television, Hewitt runs on instinct, trusting his producers to take a "sexy" (TV for a good story) news idea and spin it into a tight little visual narrative. "It's like a floating crap game around here," says one producer. "There are no formal editorial meetings. It all happens in the corridors or the men's room. You follow him into the john and say, 'Don, I've got this terrific idea,' because while you're both standing at the urinal you've got him for thirty seconds. It puts the women producers at a disadvantage.