Morley Safer, a CBS television correspondent who brought the horrors of the Vietnam War into the living rooms of America in the 1960s and was a mainstay of the network’s news magazine “60 Minutes” for nearly 50 years, died Thursday in New York. He was 84.
CBS announced his death, saying he had been in declining health.
Safer was one of television’s most celebrated journalists, a durable reporter familiar to millions on “60 Minutes,” the Sunday night staple. By the time CBS announced his retirement on May 11, Safer had broadcast 919 “60 Minutes” reports, profiling international heroes and villains, exposing scams and corruption, giving voice to whistle-blowers and chronicling the trends of an ever-changing America.
Safer joined the program, created by Don Hewitt, in 1970, two years after its inception, and eventually outlasted the tenures of his colleagues Mike Wallace, Dan Rather, Harry Reasoner, Ed Bradley and Andy Rooney, becoming the senior star of a new repertory of reporters on what has endured for decades as the most popular and profitable news program on television.
But to an earlier generation of Americans, and to many colleagues and competitors, he was regarded as the best television journalist of the Vietnam era, an adventurer whose vivid reports exposed the nation to the hard realities of what the writer Michael J. Arlen, in the title of his 1969 book, called “The Living Room War.”
With David Halberstam of The New York Times, Stanley Karnow of The Washington Post and a few other print reporters, Safer shunned the censored, euphemistic Saigon press briefings they called the “5 o’clock follies” and got out with the troops. Safer and his Vietnamese cameraman, Ha Thuc Can, gave Americans powerful close-ups of firefights and search-and-destroy missions filmed hours before air time. The news team’s helicopter was shot down once, but they were unhurt and undeterred.
In August 1965, Safer covered an attack on the hamlet of Cam Ne, which intelligence had identified as a Viet Cong sanctuary, though it had been abandoned by the enemy before the Americans moved in. Safer’s account depicted Marines, facing no resistance, firing rockets and machine guns into the hamlet; torching its thatched huts with flame throwers, grenades and cigarette lighters as old men and women begged them to stop; then destroying rice stores as the villagers were led away sobbing.
“This is what the war in Vietnam is all about,” he reported. “The Viet Cong were long gone. The action wounded three women, killed one baby, wounded one Marine and netted four old men as prisoners. Today’s operation is the frustration of Vietnam in miniature. To a Vietnamese peasant whose home means a lifetime of backbreaking labor, it will take more than presidential promises to convince him that we are on his side.”
Broadcast on the “CBS Evening News” with Walter Cronkite and widely disseminated, the report and its images stunned Americans and were among the most famous television portraits of the war. 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 Safer investigated as a possible communist. He was cleared.
For three weeks in 1967, Safer toured China, then in the throes of Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution, posing as a Canadian tourist (he was born in Canada) because Western reporters were banned. Then, as CBS London bureau chief, he covered a war in the Middle East, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, strife in Northern Ireland and civil war in Nigeria, where he was expelled for reporting thefts from relief supplies intended for Biafran refugees.
In 1970 he swapped the foreign correspondent’s fatigues for the dapper suits and silk handkerchiefs of “60 Minutes,” American TV’s first news and entertainment hybrid with a magazine format, and was soon contributing celebrity interviews and stylish essays to complement the investigative exposés of Wallace, the veteran CBS inquisitor, who died in April 2012.
Over the next four decades Safer profiled writers, politicians, opera stars, homeless people and the unemployed, and produced features on shoddy building practices, strip mining, victims of bureaucracy, waterfront crime, Swiss bank accounts, heart attack treatments, problems of sleeplessness, cultural nabobs and other subjects, many suggested by staffers and viewers.
In contrast to the often abrasive Wallace, Safer produced witty pieces on the lighter side of life: the game of croquet, Tupperware parties, children’s beauty pageants, experiments to communicate with apes, and oil-rich Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, “a place,” as he put it, “with free housing, free furniture, free color television, free electricity, free telephones, no property taxes, no sales taxes — no taxes, period.”
His serious journalism included a 1983 investigative report in which he cited new evidence that helped free Lenell Geter, a black engineer wrongly convicted of an armed robbery and sentenced to life in prison in Texas. Safer’s report was not the first on the case, but it drew national attention that led to its official reconsideration.
In the studio or reporting on the road — he often traveled 200,000 miles a year for “60 Minutes” — Safer was an affable interviewer, asking questions the man in the street might if he had the chance. He was well aware of television’s power to exploit emotions and was typically moderate, if persistent, in his commentaries.
Still, Safer sometimes raised hackles, as when he questioned the basic premise of abstract art in a 1993 report, calling much of it “worthless junk” destined for “the trash heap of art history” and saying it was overvalued by the “hype” of critics, art dealers and auction houses. The art world recoiled, but Safer, who described himself as a “Sunday painter,” stood his ground.
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