Morley Safer (November 8, 1931 – May 19, 2016) was a Canadian-American broadcast journalist, reporter, and correspondent for CBS News. He was best known for his long tenure on the news magazine 60 Minutes, whose cast he joined in 1970 after its second year on television, and where he became its longest-serving reporter.
During his 60-year career as a broadcast journalist, Safer received numerous awards, including 12 Emmys. In 2009, he donated his personal papers to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.
Jeff Fager, executive producer of 60 Minutes, said "Morley has had a brilliant career as a reporter and as one of the most significant figures in CBS News history, on our broadcast and in many of our lives. Morley's curiosity, his sense of adventure and his superb writing, all made for exceptional work done by a remarkable man." Safer died a week after announcing his retirement from 60 Minutes.
Early life
Safer was born to an Austrian Jewish family in Toronto, Ontario, the son of Anna (née Cohn) and Max Safer, an upholsterer. He had an older brother, Leon, and an older sister, Esther. After reading works by Ernest Hemingway, he had decided in his youth that, like Hemingway, he wanted to be a foreign correspondent. in Toronto, Ontario, and briefly attended the University of Western Ontario, before he dropped out to become a newspaper reporter. He has said, "I was a reporter on the street at 19 and never went to college."
International news and war correspondent
One of his first jobs with CBC was to produce CBC News Magazine in 1956, where his first on-screen appearance as a journalist was covering the Suez Crisis in Egypt. the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. United States President Lyndon Johnson reacted to this report angrily, calling CBS's president and accusing Safer and his colleagues of having undermined America's role there. Safer's report received the George Polk Award in 1965.
Some ex-Marines who saw Safer's story on television during the war shared President Johnson's opinion. They claim that Safer never had time to be properly briefed on the operation, and was therefore not aware that four Marines had already been killed there and 27 wounded. Ex-Marine Larry Engelmann, author of a story on the Vietnam War, claimed Safer's story was "highly sensational". Justifying collective punishment, he alleged: "The fact is that this village had been a pretty tough village and these people had been warned repeatedly that the village would be torched if they continued to shoot at Marines … But there was none of that in Morley Safer's story."
In the PBS series Reporting America At War, Safer himself said, " … the denials themselves were absurd. [Officials claimed] I had gone on a practice operation in a model village—a village the Marines had built to train guys how to move into a village. Or the whole thing was a kind of 'Potemkin' story that I had concocted. There are still people who believe that." After the incident was broadcast, Marines were forbidden from burning any more villages. Brig. Gen. Joe Stringham, who commanded a Green Beret unit, commented that Safer "was all business and he reported what he saw… We looked at eternity right in the face a couple of times … and he was as cool as a hog on ice."
During his career as a war correspondent, Safer covered over nine wars. His trip was the basis of a 60 Minutes show in 1989, which Safer said got a reaction of annoyance from some veterans, and a positive reaction from others.