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Chapter 3
    Did You Ever Think About Two Guys?
    Inside the news division—under Friendly’s brief, stormy leadership and later, after the return of Richard Salant to the president’s office in 1966 —the trend had moved away from Hewitt’s news-gathering methods. Serious attention was given to making and obeying new rules to govern the growing influence of news coverage. As the technology changed (thanks in part to Hewitt’s endless stream of ideas), reporters had new ways to make stories more interesting—at the possible expense of fairness and ethics. The leaders of the news division wanted to cover themselves in case of attack from the growing number of watchdogs and critics assigned to monitor television.
    Hewitt had to watch all this from the sidelines, pacing impatiently as history was made, both inside CBS News headquarters and in the world at large. He’d been booted pretty far from the halls of power—the news division moved to new headquarters in a converted milk barn on West 57 th Street near the Hudson River, and Hewitt’s new office was about as far from Walter Cronkite as you could get. Most people figured that’s where he’d stay.
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    Let other people do the serious documentaries about drugs and war and poverty; Don Hewitt turned his attention to Frank Sinatra.
    There was little dispute that Sinatra, a one-hour Hewitt-produced profile of the singer that aired in November 1965 , was the finest hour of TV he’d ever produced. He somehow recruited Cronkite as his interviewer and host; he got his World War II pal Andy Rooney to write the narration. Hewitt delivered Sinatra at a recording session, on a movie set, at a benefit party, crooning to prisoners, and relaxing at a New York saloon owned by his good friend Jilly Rizzo, with friends like Sammy Davis Jr. at the table. This was front-row access to the most famous man in America.
    The interview at Sinatra’s Palm Springs home had gone well enough at first. In fact, the two men were hitting it off so well that Hewitt, standing behind the camera, decided to push the performer a little. He stopped the filming and walked across the room. “Ask him about Mia Farrow,” Andy Rooney recalled him whispering to Cronkite. The anchorman, unaccustomed to celebrity interviews of this nature, did as he was told.
    At which point Sinatra glared over at Hewitt. “You broke the rules and I ought to kill you,” Sinatra said, his blue eyes narrowing. (Sinatra later claimed that Hewitt had previously agreed not to include those questions—an agreement Hewitt once again denied having made.)
    â€œWith anyone else that’s a figure of speech,” Hewitt said. “You probably mean it.”
    â€œI mean it,” Sinatra growled.
    â€œWell, if I had a choice,” Hewitt said, “I’d rather you didn’t.”
    Hewitt was beginning to see the risk involved in his approach to journalism. Maybe it was more fun running a show than producing it. After all, he liked life in the power seat, shaping the work of others. So in spare moments between his prosaic producing chores, Hewitt started looking around for something else to do at CBS.
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    â€œPerhaps I have been mis-titling my proposal for a new Tuesday night concept,” Don Hewitt conceded to his boss, CBS News vice president Bill Leonard, in the fall of 1967 , in a memo riddled with typos and cross-outs. “It may be that ‘magazine’ is not the proper word,” he added in a rare moment of modesty.
    For months, Hewitt had bombarded Leonard with memos about his idea to create a weekly newsmagazine—a show that would allow pieces more complex than an evening news story but not worth a full hour. Hewitt knew he was staking out uncharted territory in a business still committed to the documentary form, and in his early memos, he hedged his bets. In one, he proposed putting together a staff to produce three