Journalist Morley Safer dies a week after retiring

Morley Safer, the longtime 60 Minutes correspondent whose reporting from Vietnam changed war reporting forever, died today. He was 84.

Safer worked until last week, when he announced his retirement due to failing health. 60 Minutes ran an hour-long tribute to his work, marking the end of a 61-year career in journalism.

“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.”

Born in Toronto in 1931, Safer began his career at news organizations in Canada and England. He worked at CBS’ London bureau in 1964 before being tapped to open a bureau in Saigon, Vietnam. In August 1965, The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite aired a report by Safer that showed Marines torching the huts of villagers in Cam Ne, Vietnam. The piece angered many supporters of the Vietnam War and led others to question the United States’ mission there.

Safer received death threats after the report aired, and then-CBS president Frank Stanton got an angry phone call from President Lyndon B. Johnson, who threatened to out Safer as a communist, according to CBS.

“And the president was reminded that I was not a communist, I was a Canadian. And he said, ‘Must be the same thing,’” Safer once recalled during an interview with CBS.

Safer joined 60 Minutes as co-host in 1970 and continued filing reports from around the world. He was the first U.S.-based journalist to report from communist China, according to CBS. He interviewed First Lady Betty Ford, who shocked viewers with her acceptance of premarital sex. And his 1983 report on Lenell Geter, a black Texas man serving a life sentence for armed robbery, won Geter’s release by exposing his wrongful conviction.

Other memorable stories Safer told included a critique of abstract and modern art that outraged many art lovers, a report on the health benefits of drinking red wine that caused a nationwide increase in its demand, and a profile of a prisoner at Auschwitz who played in an orchestra to avoid the Nazi death chambers.

“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,” said CBS News president David Rhodes.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.