Legendary television journalist and author Don Hewitt passed away today. Hewitt spent his entire life in the television news business: covering the first televised political conventions, the 1960 presidential debates between Kennedy and Nixon, and most importantly, created the long-running news program, 60 Minutes.
He wrote a 2002 memoir about his creative lifetime, a book entitled “Tell Me a Story: Fifty Years and 60 Minutes in Television.” According to TVNewser, the 86-year-old journalist was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in March.
Here’s more from his memoir: “For the first time, there could be a way for a television show to feed the network’s soul and, simultaneously, its pocketbook. 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. That, in essence, was the genesis of 60 Minutes.”