Morley Safer, who helped create CBS News, dead at 84
|
| FILE
- In this Nov. 10, 1993 file photo, The "60 Minutes" team, from left,
Andy Rooney, Morley Safer, Steve Kroft, Mike Wallace, executive producer
Don Hewitt, Lesley Stahl, and Ed Bradley pose at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York celebrating their 25th anniversary. Safer, the
veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent who exposed a military atrocity in
Vietnam that played an early role in changing Americans’ view of the
war, died Thursday, May 19, 2016. He was 84. |
NEW YORK (AP) -- Viewers didn't need to see Morley Safer's reporting to feel its effects.
They
could have almost heard the yowling from the Oval Office and the
Pentagon after Safer's 1965 expose of a U.S. military atrocity in
Vietnam that played an early role in changing Americans' view of the
war.
They may have felt a flush of gratitude
on learning that Safer's 1983 investigation of justice gone awry
resulted in the release of a Texas man wrongfully sentenced to life in
prison.
Perhaps they headed to their wine shop
with a heightened sense of purpose after word spread of Safer's story
that quoted medical experts who said red wine can be good for you.
Safer's
far-flung journalism got reactions and results during a 61-year career
that found him equally at home reporting on social wrongs, the Orient
Express, abstract art and the horrors of war.
That
career came to an end this week, with a "60 Minutes" tribute on Sunday
and, then, with Safer's death, at age 84, on Thursday.
He is survived by his wife, the former Jane Fearer, and his daughter Sarah Safer.
Safer,
who had been in declining health, watched Sunday's program from his
Manhattan home, CBS said, and shortly thereafter tweeted what would be
his last dispatch: "It's been a wonderful run, and I want to thank the
millions of people who have been loyal to our 60 Minutes broadcast.
Thank you!"
NBC News Special Correspondent Tom Brokaw visited with Safer last Friday, two days after his retirement was announced.
They
spoke about the towering journalists of Safer's era, men like The
Washington Post's Ben Bradlee and
"60 Minutes" creator-executive
producer Don Hewitt.
Safer said quietly, "All the great ones are gone," Brokaw recalled in an email.
"No Morley, you're still with us," Brokaw replied before kissing Safer on the forehead.
During
his 46 years on "60 Minutes," Safer did 919 stories, from his first in
1970 about U.S. Sky Marshals to his last this March, a profile of Danish
architect Bjarke Ingels.
Along the way, he
exhibited style, toughness and, when it suited, a bit of mischievous
wit, such as with his 1993 essay, "Yes, But Is It Art?", which examined
the relative merits of representational and abstract art, and outraged
the contemporary art world.
He famously said, "There is no such thing as the common man; if there were, there would be no need for journalists."
Safer
was no common man. He cut a dashing figure as a bon vivant who for a
time drove a Bentley bought with poker winnings. He seemed to bridge the
gap between the glory ink-stained-wretch days of foreign correspondents
(Ernest Hemingway was an early inspiration) and the blooming electronic
age of TV news.
"Morley Safer helped create the CBS News we know today," said CBS News President David Rhodes.
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."
"Morley was a fixture, one of
our pillars, and an inspiration in many ways," said Jeff Fager, "60
Minutes" executive producer. "He was a master storyteller, a gentleman
and a wonderful friend. We will miss him very much."
Safer
was outspoken in his allegiance to words more than pictures - heresy
for most TV professionals, though comfortably in synch with Hewitt's
mandate at "60 Minutes."
"What you're aiming
at are people's ears rather than their eyes," said the man who claimed
to "not really like being on television," yet made his peace with this
"intimidating" medium: "The money's very good," he noted with a sly
smile.
It was in 1970 that Safer joined "60
Minutes," then just two years old and far from the national institution
it would become. He claimed the co-host chair alongside a
talk-show-host-turned-newsman named Mike Wallace.
During
the next four decades, Safer's rich tobacco-and-whiskey-cured voice
delivered stories that ranged from art, music and popular culture, to
"gotcha" investigations, to one of his favorite pieces, which, in 1983,
resulted in the release from prison of Lenell Geter, the engineer
wrongly convicted of a holdup at a fast food restaurant and serving a
life sentence.
A memorable 1984 profile of
Jackie Gleason took place in a bar around a pool table, where "the Great
One" showed Safer and his viewers how it's done - but not before Safer
nearly ran the table.
And in 2011, he scored a
sit-down with Ruth Madoff, who offered her first public description of
the day she learned from her husband, Bernard, that he was running the
biggest Ponzi scheme in history. More than 18.5 million viewers tuned
in.
Safer won a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism
Award for his 2001 story on a school in Arizona specifically geared to
serve homeless children.
Other honors include three George Foster Peabody awards, 12 Emmys and two George Polk Memorial Awards.
Safer,
who was born in Toronto in 1931, insisted he was "stateless" and, as a
reporter chasing stories around the globe, claimed, "I have no vested
interests." He eventually became an American citizen, holding dual
citizenship.
He began his career at several
news organizations in Canada and England before being hired by Reuters
wire service in its London bureau. Then, in 1955, he was offered a
correspondent's job in the Canadian Broadcasting Company's London
bureau, where he worked nine years before CBS News hired him for its
London bureau.
In 1965 he opened CBS' Saigon bureau.
That
August, "The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite" aired a report by
Safer that rocked viewers, who, at that point, remained mostly
supportive of the U.S. war effort in Vietnam. Safer had been invited to
join a group of Marines on what a lieutenant described as a
search-and-destroy mission in the tiny villages that made up Cam Ne.
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.
Safer's expose ignited a firestorm.
President
Lyndon Johnson gave CBS President Frank Stanton a tongue-lashing. "Your
boys shat on the American flag yesterday," he reportedly roared, and
intimated that Safer had "Communist ties" and had staged the entire
story. Safer feared for his safety in the company of angry U.S. soldiers
and said the Pentagon treated him with contempt for the rest of his
life.
"The Cam Ne story was broadcast over and
over again in the United States and overseas. It was seized upon by
Hanoi as a propaganda tool and by scoundrels of the left and right, in
the Pentagon and on campuses," Safer wrote in his 1990 memoir,
"Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam."
Safer rotated in and out of Vietnam three times, then, in 1967, began three years as London bureau chief.
In
1970, he was brought to New York to succeed original co-host Harry
Reasoner (who was moving to ABC News) on an innovative newsmagazine
that, in its third season, was still struggling in the ratings, and
would rely on Safer and Wallace as its only co-anchors for the next five
years.
In 1971, Safer won an Emmy for his "60
Minutes" investigation of the Gulf of Tonkin incident that began
America's war in Vietnam.
He quickly became a
fixture at "60 Minutes" - and part of that show's rough-and-tumble
behind-the-scenes culture as the stature and ratings of the show took
off.
Jeff Fager, then a producer for Safer,
has kept on display a framed remnant of the curtain that was the landing
place for a cup of coffee Safer once threw at him.
But Safer had an especially combative, if ultimately respectful, relationship with fellow "60 Minutes" pioneer Wallace.
Sunday's
tribute to Safer's career - which notably contained no new interview
footage with him - featured outtakes from an interview that Safer
conducted with Wallace upon the latter's retirement. During the
sequence, the two of them were quarrelling even as they praised each
other.
By 2006, Safer had reduced his output,
accepting half-time status. But he remained after the departures of
Wallace - who retired in 2006 at age 88, and died in 2012 - as well as
Don Hewitt, who stepped down in 2004 at 81, and died in 2009, and Andy
Rooney, who, at 92, ended 33 years as the resident essayist in October
2011, and died a month later.
"Mind if I
smoke?" Safer asked an Associated Press reporter a few years ago as he
closed his office door at "60 Minutes" while flouting health laws,
inasmuch as his cigarette by then was halfway done. It felt
appropriately old school, given Safer's link to the days when legends -
as well as smoke - filled those hallways.
"60 Minutes" carries on, but now the legends are gone.
