: Is that long enough to be king?
W INDSOR : No.
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Two weeks later, though, 60 Minutes was back to its mix of the profound and the predictable, including a report about heavy snowstorms in the Northeast; a timely interview by Mike Wallace of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the 23 -year-old French student-rebel; and a piece by CBS sports reporter Heywood Hale Broun about the high cost of skiing, the kind of fluff one imagines being ordered up by some high-level CBS executive whoâd recently been to Aspen and found himself horrified at the bill. The inclusion of Broun also showed a lack of fidelity to the showâs basic concept of using only its full-time stars; while Broun had an on-screen persona perfected by years on the evening news, his presence on 60 Minutes did nothing to enhance the showâs intended point of view.
By the spring, as the show settled into a biweekly rhythm, its stories began to feel more in line with Hewittâs grand idea. The April 1 , 1969 , broadcast included stories about infants born addicted to heroin, Texas billionaire H. L. Hunt, and fatherless German war babies. Wallace, in particular, was hitting his stride, with his interviews demonstrating a refreshingly pointed style. His Hunt interview elicited responses unlike any heard elsewhere on prime-time television.
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W ALLACE : Give us a horseback guess as to how much H. L. Hunt is worth.
H UNT : Well, it would be soâso misleading no one would believe it, so letâs donât.
W ALLACE : What do you meanâwhy misleading?
H UNT : Well, you see, they talk about that I have an income of a million dollars a week.
W ALLACE : Yes.
H UNT : And that is a lot of percent erroneous.
W ALLACE : Is it erroneous? Itâs bigger or smaller than that?
H UNT : As far as I know, I would starve to death with an income of a million dollars a week.
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Hewitt sometimes ran out of original material in those early episodes. Two weeks later, 60 Minutes included another short film by Saul Bass, alongside a freelance interview done for British television with Teddy Rooseveltâs oldest daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, now 85 years old. A livelier, homemade May 13 , 1969 , report focused on young American draft resisters who moved to Canada. During the final episode of the first season of 60 Minutes on June 24 , 1969 , a look at the slow, steady sinking of Venice into the sea was sensationally (though perhaps with some prescience) called âThe Death of Venice.â
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Hewitt, as always, wanted headlines. From his earliest days in television Hewitt knew and respected the capacity of print to promote the cause. For all of televisionâs supposed power, its impact couldnât be quantified by the size of its audience. He wanted to see the impact of his stories on the front page of the newspaper, with copious coverage of his show and its ambitious agenda. He craved reviews and praise but would just as soon settle for controversy and outrageâeither produced headlines. It frustrated Hewitt that, for its first year, the show generated hardly any press at all.
But the mere existence of 60 Minutes on the CBS schedule in the fall of 1969 for a second season somehow seemed to make the show more newsworthyâand perhaps its survival was itself amazing, considering how few people watched it. The show ranked 83 rd out of 103 prime-time shows that season. But the network still had nothing more noteworthy to put in the Tuesday 10 : 00 P.M. slot, and this season ABC had developed a new medical drama with Robert Young that looked like it might work, a little something called Marcus Welby, M.D.
Repeating his first-season pattern, Hewitt launched the second year of 60 Minutes with a yawn-inducing episode that tried too hard to attract attentionâwhich in itself showed Hewittâs apparent bias toward Wallace, despite Reasonerâs seniority.
The show opened with a Wallace investigation into a battle over valuable
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