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didn’t mesh on television, and the ratings showed that viewers still felt more comfortable with the Huntley-Brinkley team. The experience proved the difficulty of casting Hewitt’s made-for-TV dramas: anchormen weren’t actors, nor did they like being told how to perform by some maniacal producer swearing at them from on high in the control booth.
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    No drama ever compared to the one that kept Hewitt from going out to lunch on Friday, November 22 , 1963 , when he heard the bulletin that President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Hewitt took control of the news coverage that afternoon and stayed firmly in charge until the network finally resumed regular programming the following Tuesday.
    A few hours after the president was assassinated, Dan Rather (then a CBS reporter based in New Orleans) called Hewitt from Dallas with an astonishing scoop.
    â€œDon! Somebody filmed it. The assassination. A man named Abraham Zapruder, he had a camera, he got the whole thing.”
    Hewitt was stunned; he recognized immediately the historical significance of what his reporter had just told him, and the incredible value of being able to have the film.
    â€œGo to Zapruder’s house!” Hewitt yelled at Rather, thinking fast—possibly too fast. He then recalled instructing Rather to sock him in the jaw, take him to the CBS affiliate in Dallas, copy it onto videotape, and let the CBS lawyers decide whether it could be sold or whether it was in the public domain.
    A moment’s silence at the other end. “Great idea, I’ll do it,” the 32 -year-old reporter said obediently.
    As Rather prepared to race across town to Zapruder’s house and assault him, Hewitt sat in the control room and reconsidered his instructions. Giving in to a rare moment of self-doubt, he picked up the phone and called Rather back. “For Christ’s sake, don’t do what I just told you to,” Hewitt said.
    It ultimately took more than 30 years for the entire Zapruder film to be shown on network television, much to Hewitt’s consternation.
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    No matter how many rules Hewitt broke or bent in the late 1950 s and early 1960 s, he was unable to tell stories the way he wanted to, thwarted by the primitive technology that just could not accommodate the complex pieces Hewitt yearned to produce.
    One day in 1963 , as he dealt yet again with the frustration of being stuck with good pictures that arrived with bad audio, he began tinkering and soon came up with a way to separate the sound track from the picture track—he called them the A and B rolls, terms that have survived to the present. It gave television, at last, a bit of leeway in playing with the mix of pictures and sound.
    For Walter Cronkite, Hewitt’s effort to make the news entertaining went counter to his own straightforward approach. Hewitt was executive producer of the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite from its debut in 1962 through its expansion to a 30 -minute broadcast on September 15 , 1963 . Anticipating problems with Hewitt, Cronkite made sure he was given the title and duties of managing editor before he agreed to replace Edwards in 1962 . Cronkite was far more hot-blooded than he appeared on television, prone at times to explosive rage. And by 1964 he was running out of patience with Hewitt’s style.
    At the same time, CBS News was losing in the ratings to NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report , and CBS executives, now under the leadership of Richard Salant, figured they needed new leadership if they had any chance of beating the NBC juggernaut. As experienced as he was, Hewitt just wasn’t delivering the numbers.
    During preparations for the 1964 political conventions, Cronkite and Hewitt were in regular conflict. Adding to the tension was the fallout from Hewitt’s latest stunt. An NBC news producer left an internal guide to the network’s coverage of the Republican National Convention in San Francisco lying