In the spring of 1963, Eyewitness was canceled after the news division was given permission for a 30-minute nightly newscast. It was canceled not just to return time to the network schedule but also to shift executive producer Leslie Midgley and many of his producers to work on the CBS Evening News, assisting Don Hewitt, executive producer of the news program.

Midgley took pride in airing on Friday stories that would appear in the national newsmagazines on Monday. The series pioneered construction of a program with combinations of live telecast, videotape, and film and broke through many self-imposed limitations of news reporting. For the first time, video cameras were shipped and used overseas, covering Eisenhower. Unfortunately, the bulk nature of these cameras, difficult to move once optimally positioned, posed problems when crowds did not cooperate. In the United States, video cameras were used extensively to cover Khrushchev’s visit in 1959, but the use of cameras in crowds again disrupted coverage on such historic programs as “Khrushchev on the Farm.” The series also struggled with the early uses of two-inch videotape. The tape was fed to New York with specific time cues signaling when to start and stop. Unable at that time to edit two-inch tape electronically, the film editors would actually cut two-inch tape, compiling the necessary sections. According to the producers, what initially made the series as historic as the events themselves was the use of a jet airplane to ship back tape and film of Eisenhower in Italy, India, Brazil, West Germany, England, Paris, Iran, Greece, and Japan.

As the series pushed for coverage of events with multidimensional background stories, the production crew developed appropriate strategies. Editors cut negative film and projected it directly over the air by reversing the polarity in the control room. Certain stories aired only because the unit employed a two-projector system, switching between one projector, the studio camera, the other projector, and sometimes the video projector. Realizing the historical value of two-inch tape, Midgely asked Sig Mickelson, president of CBS News, to start a tape archive. He refused, preferring to reuse the tape–and part of the video record of significant historical, social, and cultural events was lost.

In its second season, the series quickly gained a reputation for changing the announced topic, sometimes as late as Friday morning. Midgely began to send “field producers,” a term that included unit members with other official titles, to different locations, sometimes holding open the possibility of any one of the five stories. The series production relied heavily on new judgements of the field producers, who included Barnie Birnbaum, Russ Bensley, John Sharnick, Av Westin, and Philip Scheffler, individuals who would go on to major roles in the television news industry. Their decisions led to crucial alterations in plans and schedules. Twice, for example, in the second season, last-minute developments growing out of tension over school integration in New Orleans, Louisiana, were given precedence over already developing stories. Similarly, on the day when the production unit was taping John F. Kennedy’s announcements and introduction of cabinet appointments, two jet airliners crashed over New York City, and Midgley decided to cover the crash. The resulting journalism illustrated the production unit’s expert response to such events–they were faster than units in news divisions in New York. Even late-breaking international stories received the unit’s attention. They covered Yuri Gagarin orbiting the Earth, causing cancellations of two shows on the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel, and another on the events surrounding the Bay of Pigs and the return of prisoners. When antigovernment factions seized the cruise ships Santa Maria off the coast of Brazil, Charles Kuralt was dispatched on another ship to intercept and film the incident, providing coverage for two weeks. If events surrounding a story halted, as they did during negotiations with the hijackers of Santa Maria, or if two events were simultaneously breaking, the series sometimes aired two 15-minute segments. After the second year, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) television network illustrated to potential advertisers the timeliness of the program by citing listings of the stories the series was preparing to cover.

Although the title changed, Eyewitness remained committed to covering presidential trips and diplomacy, keeping the production unit on tight deadlines according to the president's schedule. Certain shows, such as “Spring Arrives in Paris” and “The Big Ski Boom,” were prepared over a two- or three-week period and were aired on the basis of the happenstance of events unfolding and to the logistics needed to cover the president. After the title change, coverage of diplomacy changed only slightly, as the flow of events became placed in something of a larger context, such as “En Route to Vienna” and “The President in Mexico.” This shift was made possible by the developing expertise of the unit.

During its first year, Eyewitness to History highlighted correspondents Robert Pierpoint, Alexander Kendrik, Robert Trout, David Schoenbrun, Lou Cioffi, Ernest Lieser, Daniel Schorr, and especially Charles Collingwood, assigned to accompany the president. With Walter Cronkite as anchor in New York, two or three additional correspondents appeared in programs, from Washington, D.C., and from different parts of the world determined according to an event’s implications. This structure remained constant throughout the series for coverage of presidential trips as well as for international incidents, such as “The Showdown in Laos” and “India at War.” Midgely utilized CBS reporters around the world, even those assigned to the CBS Evening News, setting the stage for Eyewitness’s own cancellations and the unit’s reassignment as a support mechanism for Walter Cronkite’s 30-minute broadcast.

Network politics at this time occasioned a period of instability with regard to the anchor seat. Charles Kuralt was named anchor for the second season of Eyewitness to History. Midgley and others inside CBS perceived Kuralt as following in the footsteps of Edward R. Murrow. But James Aubrey,  president of CBS,  disliked Kuralt’s on-camera appearance and convinced Midgley to return Cronkite as anchor in January 1961. Cronkite’s role as New York correspondent provided a scope of credibility absent from his other projects. When Cronkite went to the CBS EVening News on April 16, 1962, Charles Collingwood became anchor of Eyewitness.

At the series start, a critical dimension was added to the objective task of presenting news, with Howard K. Smith’s commentary on programs focused on diplomacy. In covering certain issues, the distinct perspectives and arguments between producer and reporter became evident, as in the case of “Diem’s War–Or Ours” and other reports on Vietnam.

Critics and the public were engaged by the urgency and depth Eyewitness brought to contemporary issues. Even when considering the new trend in jazz music, bossa nova, the producers presented a “critical look” at jazz. Even so, the announcement of the program “Who Killed Marilyn Monroe?” brought such an outcry from Hollywood that Midgley changed the title to “Marilyn Monroe, Why?”

For three years, Eyewitness to History aggressively pursued such topics as changes in the labor movement, government fiscal policy, the medical establishment, and U.S. foreign relations. It was the training and proving Ground for television journalists whose careers spanned most of the second half of the century they covered. And the series signaled CBS’s turn to prominence in network television journalism.