Longtime CBS journalist Morley Safer died at the age of 84 at his Manhattan home on May 19, a week after he said he was retiring. CBS’ announcement did offer up that the astute reporter was in declining health last week when he announced his retirement from 60 Minutes, according to so its possible that had a part to play in it.
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On Sunday, the network screened an hour-long retrospective about his career. That consisted of Harry Reasoner, Mike Wallace, and Ed Bradley and producer Don Hewitt. “But most of all, I thank the millions of people who have been loyal to our broadcast”.
Born in a working-class neighborhood of Toronto in 1931, Safer began his career as a print reporter for Canadian newspapers.
His 1965 report depicting USA marine actions in Cam Ne, including the torching of villagers’ huts, is often cited as the story that first brought the gravity of the conflict into the American public consciousness, making Vietnam “the living room war”.
Safer’s 1970 report on the training of U.S. Sky Marshals was his first for “60 Minutes”. Safer has the longest span of any 60 Minutes correspondent with 46 years of documenting reality behind him, and hes earned 12 Emmy Awards, with a Lifetime Achievement Emmy awarded to him also.
Survivors include his wife of 48 years, the former Jane Fearer; a daughter, Sarah Bakal; one sister, one brother and three grandchildren. Over his seven decades as a journalist, it seemed Safer covered everything, and traveled everywhere doing it.
“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.
CBS chairman and CEO Leslie Moonves said Safer broadly impacted the news industry: “Morley was one of the most important journalists in any medium, ever”.
“After four or five different wars, I grew tired of that work, partly because in an open war, open to coverage, as Vietnam was, it’s not that hard, really”, he said. He was a master storyteller, a gentleman and a wonderful friend. “His writing alone defined original reporting”, CBS News President David Rhodes said Thursday.
Between 1964 and 1966, Safer spent three tours in Vietnam as the head of CBS’ Saigon bureau.
In addition to his body of work on “60 Minutes”, he wrote the best-seller “Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam” in 1990.
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He remained there until 1967, at which point he went back to London where he had been named bureau chief. “The report earned Safer a George Polk Award, although he came under fire from several Marines, and even from President Lyndon B. Johnson, who reportedly told CBS President Frank Stanton that, ‘Your boys s-t on the American flag yesterday”.
