Don Hewitt, who changed the course of broadcast news by creating the television magazine â60 Minutes,â fusing journalism and show business as never before, and who then presided over the much-copied program for nearly four decades, died Wednesday at his home in Bridgehampton, N.Y. He was 86 and also had a home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
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Don Hewitt in 1999. More Photos »
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Don Hewitt, 1922-2009
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The cause was cancer, his wife, Marilyn Berger, said. Mr. Hewitt said in an interview on March 18 that doctors had detected a cancerous tumor on his pancreas, and that he was being admitted to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center for treatment.
During a career at CBS News that lasted more than half a century, Mr. Hewitt served as a living bridge â from the birth of television journalism in the long shadow of radio, through its golden-age as an unrivaled fixture in dens and family rooms, to its middle-age present, under siege from the Internet. As a director and producer, Mr. Hewitt helped shape the early broadcasts of pioneers like Edward R. Murrow, Douglas Edwards and Walter Cronkite, and presided over CBSâs coverage of such watershed moments as the presidential debate between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960; the assassination of Mr. Kennedy in 1963; and the NASA space missions of the late 1960âs
