THE SURVIVOR

Tell Me a Story: 50 Years and 60 Minutes in Television
by Don Hewitt
Public Affairs. 304 pages. $26.00

BY MARVIN KITMAN

Don Hewitt is one of those people with a low threshold of criticism. Anything less than unstinting praise he finds painful. I once made the mistake in a column of finding him a step or two shy of canonization. The next morning he called my office six times trying to correct my error of judgment. He is what we know as a serial phonecaller, relentless in his pursuit of what he calls "sappy TV critics" who didn't get it.

Hewitt will find no fault with Tell Me A Story, a candid, incisive, and as self-critical a story as he can take about his first fifty years in television. It's the real Don Hewitt story, as told by Don Hewitt to himself.

As you may guess, it is self-serving to some extent. Basically, it tells us what a great guy he is, and how he has been responsible for some of the greatest moments in television history, including the first Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960 and the first thirty-two years of 60 Minutes.

Since his book is an autobiography, he has every right to blow his own horn. Who knows the story better? And, after a half century in TV, in which he candidly admits he "has seen it all and done it all," he has much to be proud of.

He is the founding father of 60 Minutes, "the most successful program in television history," as he puts it without false modesty. Without doubt, the show has played a major role in TV journalism.

Among other things, it developed techniques widely seen on all magazine shows, such as the use of ambush interviews, characterized by Mike Wallace hiding behind the potted palms, one-way mirrors, hidden cameras, and aggressive questioning. They don't do those ambushes and confrontations as much today, as Hewitt explains. They have become clichés, being so widely used by all his imitators.

The godfather of TV magazines, the Don who made possible Dateline NBC, which was seemingly on eight nights a week by 1999, Hewitt also was responsible, in his way, for killing the hour-long documentary, which he cheerfully explains needed a bullet in the back of the head. "People don't like reading documents. Why would they want to watch something called a documentary?"

Hewitt's perhaps greatest achievement is that he was the first to make news pay -- "Maybe two billion over the thirty-plus years" for CBS. He did it by coming up with the notion that journalism could be both compelling and entertaining. The format was inspired, he says, by Ye Olde Life magazine. "You'd have a story for a few pages, then some ads, then another story . . . . If we split the public affairs hour into three parts to deal with the viewers' short attention span -- not to mention my own -- I was willing to bet, that we could take informational programming out of the ratings cellar."

In content he would be combining what was called at CBS News "High Murrow" (CBS Reports) with "Low Murrow" (Person to Person). We could look "into Marilyn Monroe's closet, so long as we looked into Robert Oppenheimer's laboratory, too. We could make the news entertaining without compromising our integrity."

The idea of having multiple reporters had equally humble origins, being inspired by Four Star Playhouse, in which Dick Powell, Ida Lupino, David Niven, and Charles Boyer formed a repertory company and each week played different parts. Hewitt's plan was to assemble a rep company of "free-lance journalists, each dedicated to his or her story, but there would be no star out front, no master of ceremonies, no Ed Sullivan introducing the acts."

With all of his candid attributions to other art forms, the fact is the magazine concept Hewitt invented actually had been under everybody's nose. In TV terms, the magazine format dates back to the BBC's Panorama with Richard Dimbleby. The first magazine at CBS, anyway, was See It Now (1951) on which Hewitt was the studio director -- a three-story, half-hour documentary with a staff of reporters. But why quibble? Anyway, there is no denying that Hewitt and his team of producers and correspondents do it better than anybody else.

What I liked most about Tell Me a Story was that it also tells the story behind a lot of the show's most famous stories, long since forgotten, given our limited attention spans. I found exciting the account of how Morley Safer and his producer, Joe Wershba, blew the whistle on the phony Gulf of Tonkin attack tale, the start of the domino effect in Vietnam, which ended in such disaster. And the postscript, with LBJ phoning CBS president Frank Stanton in the middle of night telling him that "your boys shat on the American flag."

Especially fascinating are the stories about how he assembled his first team, starting with Harry Reasoner, and about how he talked Mike Wallace out of becoming President Nixon's press secretary.

He also tells us about his private life. No, he wasn't born in a log cabin in 1922, but in an apartment in Manhattan. He did not grow up wanting to be network president some day during the Depression in New Rochelle. He is brutally frank about his education: a jock in track, forced to drop out of NYU because "my grades were so lousy." Though he was Jewish, he was never bar mitzvahed. "Being Jewish wasn't a big deal."

He tells about his wild stunts as a competitive TV journalist and how bored he was covering early presidential conventions for CBS News. (His idea of fun was stealing the NBC press book.)

Here again is the tale of how he helped Ed Murrow rebut McCarthy. He reveals how tough he was in his famous Frank Sinatra "No Ground Rules" interview and why Frank felt compelled to say he ought to kill him.

He acknowledges mistakes: he wanted to team Cronkite and Murrow in 1960 to deal with Huntley and Brinkley at NBC; he confesses he was against the thirty-minute news concept; he let the White House strong-arm him into using a CBS interview with JFK to send a message to the government of South Vietnam.

During the Great Red Scare of the 1950s, he doesn't look so good. His defense of Winston Burdett naming names should raise a few hackles; so should his put-down of David Schoenbrun for being a journalist of principle.

But in his view of things, he always comes out smelling like a rose. He even manages to escape blame for the firing of Meredith Viera (David Burke done it, he explains). Don Hewitt is the Teflon Man of journalism.

Throughout his life story you see Hewitt as if on a radio beam keeping out of trouble. He didn't let principles stand in his way. He freely admits to making compromises. Everybody has to make compromises with "the Corporation," as he calls management. Otherwise how would they have money to pay everybody's big salaries?

In his fifty years, he's all over the lot politically, philosophically, morally, ethically, as he details -- the reason he has stayed alive and managed to survive and prosper in a business where executives have the life expectancy of kamikaze pilots.

All of this is foreplay leading up to the chapter dealing with the Jeffrey Wigand non-story, which some consider not 60 Minutes' shining hour. He gets a chance to tell the story of the controversy over the movie The Insider again, how glorious he and 60 Minutes acted under the circumstances.

Despite the egomaniacal tendency of the author, Hewitt does a lot of good things in the book. He gives credit to his lieutenants, Phil Scheffler and the late Palmer Williams. He gives credit to producers, who always got co-star billing on stories with the better-paid correspondents. He is lavish with praise for corporate executives like Frank Stanton and Sig Mickelson, a former president of CBS News, who served as heat shields. And he even has a few good words for Fred Friendly, who wasn't one of his favorite people. "Hell, the bastard fired me from the Evening News -- but he taught me how to tell stories."

Also on the plus side, he has a lot of great advice for neophyte TV journalists, especially about the importance of not getting hung up on pictures. "The best way I know to help people from walking out is to catch their ear even more than their eye," he explains. "Too many people in television forget this."

Hewitt is at his best in the final chapter with his outrageous proposal on how to fix the dying network evening news: pooling coverage. It probably will be called "a lousy idea," as Fred Friendly and others once called 60 Minutes.

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Marvin Kitman is media critic at Newsday.