14 April 2010 11:28 AM
Kennedy, Nixon, my ex-big-boss and that debate
Plenty of political commentators are this week feeling nostalgia for an American presidential debate almost none of them saw and which took place before most of them were born. I mean of course the Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960. It remains the mother of all televised debates. Every commentator knows about the impact of the debate. And every commentator is hoping -- vultures that we are -- that one of the players on Thursday night will make the same sort of fatal mistake made by Nixon 50 years ago. Which is to say, we're all hoping for a make-up moment.
That of course was the famous Nixon mistake. Kennedy had arrived at the television studio after campaigning in southern California in an open-topped car. The producer asked him if he wanted make-up and he said 'No.' Obviously he didn't want it, or need it: he was tanned as an L.A. lifeguard. The producer then asked Nixon if he wanted make-up. The then-vice-president said 'No.' The rest is history: bronzed Democrat makes Republican look like pasty-faced loser on coast-to-coast television.
But what I always remember about that story is just who the producer was. He was Don Hewitt. I am lucky enough to say Hewitt was my big boss in the 1980s, when I worked at the CBS News London bureau as a researcher and then associate producer for the current affairs programme, 60 Minutes. Hewitt, who died last year aged 86, didn't just create the modern format of presidential debates, he created 60 Minutes, too. And when I worked there, it wasn't just the top US current affairs show, by most ratings it was the top television show, full stop.
Hewitt was the executive producer with the corner office at CBS in Manhattan, and I was down with the foot soldiers in London, but he made sure he knew each of us -- and each of us knew that our job was to deliver films that would give him what he wanted.
Because that was the genius of the man. His antennae were tuned to what American viewers by the tens of millions wanted. If one of our 14 minutes films pleased Hewitt in the viewing room, it was certain to be a hit with those tens of millions. If it didn't -- well, if it didn't it would be a lot of re-cutting and re-writing until it made Hewitt happy.
So here is a youtube clip of Hewitt being interviewed about the Kennedy-Nixon debate, and the background to it (Hewitt reckons Nixon turned down make-up because he feared the news story next day would be that he used make-up while Kennedy didn't.)
Hewitt is the man who made history, and who ultimately is responsible for the Brown-Cameron-Clegg debates we are about to see. The best thing about him? That he never lost the capacity to say, 'Gee-whiz' when he came across something new. He never became blasé.
As producers go, I'd say he's never been bettered. But then, I'm biased. He was my big-boss, but he managed to make all of us feel like our work was the big-deal. It's called 'leadership.'
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