Jack Webb's most famous public persona, Sgt. Joe Friday of the Los Angeles Police Department, seemed to be a man with virtually no personality. Yet, paradoxically, this amazingly versatile actor-director-writer-producer-editor-e xecutive was one of the most influential personalities to work in television during the 1950s and 1960s—the heyday of the Big Three networks and the formative period of the Media Age. He did so by speaking directly to the hitherto unexploited American appetite for unemotional professionalism. He was, as Norman Mailer said of the astronaut Neil Armstrong, "apparently in communion with some string in the universe others did not think to play." His not-so-secret weapon was an intense and exclusive focus on surface reality, a focus summed up in the most famous (and endlessly lampooned) line from his television series, Dragnet : "Just the facts, ma'am."

Born April 2, 1920, in Santa Monica, California, Jack Webb...