[msb-alumni] Sixty Minutes and CBS News Reporter Morley Safer Dead at 84

From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 19 May 2016 12:40:30 -0400

Blank60 Minutes' Morley Safer dies at 84

Longtime CBS newsman Morley Safer of "60 Minutes" and Vietnam War reporting
fame
dies at 84

safertedescorelease.jpg

Morley Safer

CBS News

Morley Safer, the CBS newsman who changed war reporting forever when he showed
GIs burning the huts of Vietnamese villagers and went on to become the iconic
60 Minutes correspondent whose stylish stories on America's most-watched news
program made him one of television's most enduring stars, died today  in
Manhattan.  He was 84.  He had homes in Manhattan and Chester, Conn.

Safer was in declining health when he announced his retirement last week;
CBS
News broadcast a long-planned special hour to honor the occasion on Sunday May
15 that he watched in his home.

Newsmakers

Morley Safer: A Reporter's Life
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-morley-safer-a-reporters-life/

A huge presence on 60 Minutes  for 46 years -- Safer enjoyed the longest run
anyone ever had on primetime network television. Though he cut back a decade
ago, he still appeared regularly
until recently, captivating audiences with his signature stories on art,
science
and culture.  A dashing figure in his checked shirt, polka dot tie and
pocket square, Morley Safer -- even his name had panache -- was in his true
element playing pool with Jackie Gleason, delivering one of his elegant essays
aboard the Orient Express or riffing on Anna Wintour, but he also asked the
tough questions and did the big stories.  In 2011, over 18.5 million people
watched him ask Ruth Madoff how she could not have known her husband Bernard
was
running a billion-dollar Ponzi scheme. The interview was headline news
and water cooler talk for days.

In some of his later 60 Minutes pieces, Safer profiled the cartoonists of The
New Yorker, interviewed the founder and staff of Wikipedia and reported on
a billion-dollar art trove discovered in a Munich apartment.  In his last story
broadcast on March 13, he profiled the visionary architect Bjarke Ingels.

"Morley was one of the most important journalists in any medium, ever," said
CBS
Chairman and CEO, Leslie Moonves. "He broke ground in war reporting and
made a name that will forever be synonymous with 60 Minutes. He was also a
gentleman, a scholar, a great raconteur - all of those things and much more
to generations of colleagues, his legion of friends, and his family, to whom
all
of us at CBS offer our sincerest condolences over the loss of one of CBS'
and journalism's greatest treasures."

"This is a very sad day for all of us at 60 Minutes and CBS News. Morley was a
fixture, one of our pillars, and an inspiration in many ways. He was a master
storyteller, a gentleman and a wonderful friend. We will miss him very much,"
said Jeff Fager, the executive producer of 60 Minutes and Safer's close friend
and one-time 60 Minutes producer.

CBS News President David Rhodes said, "Morley Safer helped create the CBS News
we know today.  No correspondent had more extraordinary range, from war
reporting to coverage of every aspect of modern culture.  His writing alone
defined original reporting.  Everyone at CBS News will sorely miss Morley."

Safer was a familiar reporter to millions when he replaced Harry Reasoner on 60
Minutes in 1970.  A much-honored foreign correspondent, Safer was the first
U.S. network newsman to film a report inside Communist China.  He appeared
regularly on the
CBS Evening News
from all over the world, especially Vietnam, where his controversial reporting
earned him peer praise and government condemnation.

Safer's piece from the Vietnamese hamlet of Cam Ne in August of 1965 showing
U.S. Marines burning the villagers' thatched huts was cited by New York
University
as one of the 20th century's best pieces of American journalism. Some believe
this report freed other journalists to stop censoring themselves and tell
the raw truth about war. The controversial report on the "CBS Evening News with
Walter Cronkite" earned Safer a George Polk award and angered President
Lyndon Johnson so much, he reportedly called CBS President Frank Stanton and
said, "Your boys shat on the American flag yesterday."  Some Marines are said
to have threatened Safer, but others thanked him for exposing a cruel tactic.
Safer said that the pentagon treated him with contempt for the rest of his
life.

He spent three tours (1964-'66) as head of the CBS Saigon bureau. His
helicopter
was shot down in a 1965 battle, after which Safer continued to report
under fire. In 1990, he penned a memoir of his Vietnam experience, Flashbacks:
On Returning to Vietnam (Random House), in which he goes back to reminisce
and to interview the enemy's veterans.

When he joined Mike Wallace at the beginning of 60 Minutes' third season, they
toiled to put stories on the air for a program that dodged cancellation
each season. But their work was immediately recognized with an Emmy for Safer's
1971 investigation of the Gulf of Tonkin incident that began America's
war in Vietnam.  The two pressed on for five years, moving the broadcast from
the bottom fourth to the middle of the rankings. Then in August 1975, with
a new Sunday evening timeslot, Safer put 60 MINUTES on the national stage.
Interviewing Betty Ford, the first lady shocked many Americans by saying she
would think it normal if her 18-year-old daughter were having sex. The historic
sit-down also included frank talk about pot and abortion.

By 1978, the broadcast was in Nielsen's Top 10.  Safer's eloquent, sometimes
quirky features balanced out the program's "gotcha" interviews and
investigations,
perfecting the news magazine's recipe.  It became the number-one program for
the
1979-'80 season -  a crown it won five times. 60 Minutes remained in the
top 10 for an unprecedented 23 straight seasons.

It was another Safer story that would become one of the program's most honored
and important. "Lenell Geter's in Jail," about a young black man serving
life for armed robbery in Texas, overturned Geter's conviction 10 days after
the
December 1983 segment exposed a sloppy rush to injustice. Safer and 60
Minutes were honored with the industry's highest accolades: the Peabody, George
Polk and du Pont-Columbia University awards.  60 Minutes founder Don Hewitt
often pointed to the story as the program's finest work.

Safer hit more journalistic home runs, but sought out the odd stories that
piqued his curiosity. The offbeat tales were more suited to his raconteur style
and cultural sensibility.  He found esoteric subjects all over the world and
here in the U.S., ranging from a tiny Pacific island nation economically
dependent
on guano to the strange choice of tango dancing as a national hobby for the shy
people of Finland to the strange yet harmonious stew of cowboys and artists
in the Texas town of Marfa -- all narrated in his drolly delivered and precise
prose.  His conversational wit with his subjects was just as sharp as his
written word. In a profile of the prim Martha Stewart, a smirking Safer passed
her livestock pen and said to the domestic diva, "Your barnyard?  It's
remarkably
odor-free."

Some of these features had national impact, however, like his November 1991
report, "The French Paradox," which connected red wine consumption to lower
incidents of heart disease among the free-eating French. Wine merchants say
this
report was single-handedly responsible for starting the red wine boom
in America.  His 1993 segment "Yes, But is it Art?"  enraged the modern art
community when it criticized expensive, contemporary installations featuring
household items like toilets and vacuums.  The Museum of Modern Art in New York
City may have held a grudge; years later, it refused to allow Safer onto
its premises to review a Jackson Pollock retrospective for CBS Sunday Morning.

Safer's life was a work of art into which 60 Minutes fit seamlessly. He
vacationed in Europe, often combining field trips for his stories.  He made a
regular
pilgrimage to The American Academy in Rome to hone his painting skills, a hobby
he began from an early age.   He mounted a small exhibition of his paintings
in 1985.  He also had a special affinity for cars and did 60 Minutes segments
on
England's Rolls Royce and Italy's legendary Lamborghini.  He owned a silver
1985 Ferrari convertible, which he had raced occasionally and also owned a
Bentley when he lived in London, bought with his winnings from a card game.

Other highlights from Safer's 60 Minutes work  include a poignant segment in
1978 called "The Music of Auschwitz," about an inmate who played in an orchestra
to avoid the Nazi gas chambers; his 1979 profile of Katharine Hepburn; "The
Beeb," a 1985 Emmy-winning take on BBC Radio; "The Enemy," the 1989 story for
which Safer returned to Vietnam; and in 1979, "Marva," about Chicago teacher
Marva Collins, whose alternative school for disadvantaged kids proved such
students could excel.  Safer's follow-up on "Marva" in 1996, in which he
debunked a subsequent book that claimed Collins' students would not succeed in
the long run, earned him his fourth du-Pont Columbia University award.

In addition to the four du Ponts, Safer won every major award, including the
Paul White Award from the Radio and Television News Directors Association
in 1966 when he was only 35 -- an award usually given for lifetime achievement.
The other awards given to Safer over his long career include three Peabody
awards, three Overseas Press Club awards,  two George Polk Memorial awards, a
Robert F. Kennedy Journalism first prize for domestic television, the Fred
Friendly First Amendment award, 12 Emmys and a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts
et des Lettres from the French Government.

CBS News hired the Canadian-born Safer in 1964 in London, where he was a
correspondent for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He got the job in an
odd turn of events. One of Safer's CBC colleagues seeking a job with CBS sent a
demo tape of a roundtable he anchored that included Safer.  CBS news executives
liked Safer better and gave him a job in the London Bureau. The young
correspondent took over his new job behind the desk once occupied by another CBS
legend, the late Edward R. Murrow.  After a year, he was asked to open the
Saigon Bureau to report on the simmering conflict in Vietnam.  He was then named
bureau chief in London in 1967 and reported on a variety of foreign stories
beyond Britain, many of them risky assignments, including the Nigerian-Biafran
War, the Middle East conflict and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia.

During this period he also filmed the historic CBS News Special Report "Morley
Safer's Red China Diary" (August 1967), the first broadcast by a U.S. network
news team from inside Communist China. Safer's Canadian citizenship helped get
him into the country posing as a tourist interested in archeology. He and
his cameraman, John Peters, were able to film the everyday lives of Chinese
with
a home movie camera. In a close call, suspicious authorities took Safer
and Peters to meet an archeologist, who tested his knowledge.  Safer knew
enough
about China's archeological periods to avoid arrest.

Safer's reporting and writing also appeared on the CBS News documentary series,
"CBS Reports." He had a regular feature on CBS Radio, "Morley Safer's Journal,"
that ran in 1970s. In May 1994, he hosted "One for the Road:  A Conversation
with Charles Kuralt and Morley Safer," a CBS News special marking Kuralt's
retirement.

Safer was born Nov. 8, 1931 in Toronto and eventually became an American
citizen, holding a dual citizenship.  Telling MacLeans he felt "stateless," he
believed this status was an advantage. "I bring a different perspective and I
have no vested interests," he told the magazine in 1998.

Growing up, he was influenced by the writing of Ernest Hemingway and decided he
would be a foreign correspondent.  He attended the University of Western
Ontario for only a few weeks when he dropped out to begin writing for
newspapers. He first wrote for the rural Woodstock Sentinel-Review before
landing
a job with the much larger London (Ontario) Free-Press.  He then went on to
England with the help of the Commonwealth Press Union, which promised to place
him in a job there. After a short stint on the Oxford Mail and Times, Reuters
hired Safer in London in 1955.  When he returned late that year, he found
work as an editor and reporter in the Toronto headquarters of the CBC. He was
chosen to produce  "CBC News Magazine" in 1956, on which he also occasionally
appeared . His first on-camera work was on assignment for the CBC covering the
Suez Crisis in November 1956.

The CBC sent him back to London in 1961, from which he covered major stories in
Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, including the war for Algerian
Independence, until he joined CBS. He was the only Western correspondent in
East
Berlin the night the Communists began building the Berlin Wall in August
1961.

Safer was asked to characterize his legacy as a journalist in a November 2000
interview with the American Archive of Television.  "I have a pretty solid
body of work that emphasized the words, emphasized ideas and the craft of
writing for this medium. It's not literary, I wouldn't presume to suggest that.
But I think you can elevate it a little bit sometimes with the most important
part of the medium, which is what people are saying -- whether they're the
people being interviewed or the guy who's telling the story. It's not
literature, but it can be very classy journalism."

He is survived by his wife of 48 years, Jane (nee Fearer) one daughter, Sarah
Bakal, her husband, Alexander Bakal, three grandchildren, a sister, and brother,
both of Toronto.

Funeral arrangements are private.  A memorial service will be announced at a
later date.

© 2016 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Follow-Ups:
- [msb-alumni] Re: Sixty Minutes and CBS News Reporter Morley Safer Dead at 84
  - From: Kalan J. Weingartz

[msb-alumni] Sixty Minutes and CBS News Reporter Morley Safer Dead at 84

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