The Venerable “60 Minutes” Correspondent Morley Safer has passed away today, he was 84 years old. He was one of the network’s most familiar faces, often wearing trench coats and field jackets while reporting from war-torn regions and other hot spots.
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While all of the major broadcast and cable news networks covered Safer’s death, ABC took a moment to personalize his passing and offer condolences to his colleagues. He was a mainstay, over 46 years, of TV’s best newsmagazine.
In declining health, he died at his home in Manhattan. He filed his last report in March, and CBS formally announced his retirement May 11. He claimed the co-host chair alongside Mike Wallace. Also featured was a 1983 60 Minutes investigation that freed Lenell Geter, an African American Texan wrongly convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to life in prison.
During his career Safer won three George Foster Peabody awards, 12 Emmys, two George Polk Memorial Awards, and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.
Between 1964 and 1966, Safer spent three tours in Vietnam as the head of CBS’ Saigon bureau.
In his 52-year career at CBS News, Mr. Safer became a model of the correspondent who is urbane, yet accessible to the average viewer.
But what he encountered there, and captured on film, was the spectacle of American soldiers employing their Zippo lighters to burn the thatched-roof, mud-plastered huts to the ground, despite having met with no resistance from village residents. They provoked an angry outburst from President Lyndon B. Johnson, who excoriated Frank Stanton, the president of CBS, in a midnight phone call and ordered Mr. Safer investigated as a possible communist.
Safer – who was born in Toronto Nov. 8, 1931 – began his career in newspapers shortly after dropping out of the University of Western Ontario after only a few weeks.
Not only was 60 Minutes a ratings hit, but it provided a tutorial about investigative journalism.
By 2006, Safer had reduced his output, accepting half-time status. “I turn on Johnny Carson, I pick up my paints, and it wipes my mind out”.
Hewitt, in his memoir, “Tell Me a Story”, recalled Safer agreeing to the job with one condition: “When “60 Minutes” folds, I go back to London”.
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“By the third or fourth year of being on at 7 o’clock on Sunday, we became something like what life magazine as to our house when I was a kid: you expected it through the mailbox”, he said. Fager shared, “We are so fortunate and happy that he was able to see it. He felt the love and the appreciation”.
