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1 -hour Tuesday night magazines a month—“every third one to be devoted to a single subject.” In another, he proposed the notion of guest columnists. He also pitched a sensibility relatively untouched by anyone else in television at the time, except perhaps the producers of Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
    â€œThe magazine should be very ‘with it,’” Hewitt wrote, “and in today’s world being ‘with it’ connotes a certain amount of irreverence for established institutions.”
    But who would host this new show? Hewitt’s first idea acknowledged his awareness of where he stood in the hierarchy of CBS News, reaching out to a correspondent who—like himself—had plateaued at a level of success that didn’t match his own self-perception.
    â€œI think Harry Reasoner should be the on-air editor of the magazine,” Hewitt wrote, referring to the white-haired correspondent who was Cronkite’s chief substitute as anchor of the CBS Evening News. Reasoner was an Iowa farm boy who’d risen through the ranks of radio and television by virtue of his classic middle-American manner and his clear intelligence. He smoked, drank, and fancied himself the dashing correspondent, even though he had a wife and children at home in Connecticut. He’d covered civil rights marches, space launches and political conventions for CBS News and ranked among the top TV news personalities of the day. But Reasoner was waiting for something bigger—like the day Cronkite would step aside and CBS would choose him to take over CBS Evening News. In 1967 , that day was nowhere in sight and Reasoner was ready to consider other possibilities.
    Meanwhile, Hewitt kept flooding his bosses with potential 60 Minutes story ideas. At one point, he even suggested a segment called “Good Idea!” based on having seen travelers at the Copenhagen airport using scooters to get around. “I thought, ‘What a good idea!’” Hewitt wrote. “And then I thought that all we’d have to do is film thirty seconds or so of people riding the scooters and label it this week’s GOOD IDEA!” Okay, so it wasn’t a good idea—but if you didn’t like it, he had several thousand more.
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    Hewitt got the green light to make a rough pilot with Reasoner in early 1968 , made up of edited portions of hour-long CBS documentaries, some never-used footage, and stale chunks of an old Charles Kuralt profile of Henry Ford. Hewitt showed it to everyone he could buttonhole in the hallway and drag into an editing room.
    When the lights came up after Hewitt finally showed the pilot to management, there was modest enthusiasm. “Pretty damn good,” Bill Leonard allowed. He looked over at Bob Chandler, a vice president working under Bill Leonard, who sat in on the screening.
    â€œDid you ever think about two guys?” Chandler said.
    â€œYeah, like who?” Hewitt demanded.
    â€œMike Wallace,” Chandler replied.
    At the time of Chandler’s suggestion, Mike Wallace wasn’t particularly hot; in fact, the 49 -year-old reporter was far less successful than Reasoner, having been pushed aside by a management team that found him too abrasive to be a major player in the TV news business. He was a general-assignment reporter for the CBS Evening News , and as he covered the early stages of what looked like a long-shot Nixon presidential campaign, no one considered him as the Next Big Anything. Like Hewitt, Mike Wallace was desperate for a way back to the top.
    Hewitt immediately saw Chandler’s point: 60 Minutes might benefit from two hosts balancing off each other, a black hat–white hat arrangement that perfectly suited their sensibilities.
    One weekend that spring, Hewitt visited Wallace at his apartment to pitch the possibility of joining 60 Minutes . Wallace, then covering the early days of the Nixon presidential campaign, figured