Burton Benjamin; CBS News Producer

Burton (Bud) Benjamin, a respected CBS news producer who headed his network’s internal inquiry into a controversial Vietnam documentary that resulted in a libel suit by Gen. William C. Westmoreland, died Sunday at age 70.

Benjamin, stricken in July by a brain tumor that finally claimed his life at his home in Scarborough, had retired from CBS News in 1985 after a 29-year career as a writer, producer and executive. He almost was its president, a job he declined.

CBS Broadcast Group President Howard Stringer on Monday praised him as “the classic kind of old-fashioned leader. His gift was really a matchless enthusiasm for everything he was doing,” said Stringer, to whom Benjamin in 1973 gave his first job as a CBS News producer on a documentary about the Rockefeller family.

Won 8 Emmys

A pipe-smoking man who wryly referred to himself as “one of the usual suspects” whom reporters called during CBS’ much-publicized inner turmoil several years ago, Benjamin had eight Emmys and a Peabody award.

He produced a number of “CBS Reports” documentaries, helped develop what became “CBS News Sunday Morning” and was executive producer of the “CBS Evening News” for three years when Walter Cronkite anchored it.

But Benjamin, who Cronkite on Monday said “exemplified absolute, total integrity,” liked to joke that he would probably be most remembered “as the guy who wrote the Benjamin Report.”

He meant his probe of a controversial 1982 Vietnam documentary--Stringer was its executive producer--that aired in 1982 and prompted a $120-million libel suit by Westmoreland.

Benjamin’s internal investigation, ordered admitted as trial evidence over CBS objections, criticized the documentary as seriously flawed and said it had violated CBS News guidelines.

Among other things, it said that the program’s use of the word “conspiracy” over the disparity in actual and reported enemy kills was not warranted and that there had been “coddling” of witnesses sympathetic to the program’s premise.

But the report also said the premise stood up. The program contended that Viet Cong and North Vietnamese strength had been intentionally under-counted when Westmoreland was senior U.S. military commander in Vietnam.

Lawsuit Dropped

Westmoreland, who emphatically denied that, subsequently dropped his lawsuit after 18 weeks of trial, shortly before the case was to face a jury verdict, when CBS said it never meant to impugn his patriotism.

Benjamin, later named a senior executive producer for CBS News, nearly became its president, although as an interim appointee, shortly after the corporate upheaval two years ago that led to the ouster of CBS Chairman Thomas H. Wyman and CBS News President Van Gordon Sauter.

Benjamin has written that he rejected the job and recommended Stringer for it in a meeting with CBS chief William S. Paley, and the then-new CBS president, Lawrence Tisch.

That account, the Westmoreland lawsuit and more are in a book, “Fair Play,” that Benjamin wrote last year while a senior fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University.

Cronkite, who wrote the foreword for the book, called Benjamin one of his closest friends and colleagues who, in addition to his integrity, “was undoubtedly the finest documentary producer with whom I was ever privileged to work.”

Benjamin, born in Cleveland, briefly worked for United Press after college. He was a Coast Guard officer in World War II and a free-lance writer and documentary producer before joining CBS News.

He began as a writer, then began rising in the ranks, starting in 1957 as executive producer of the CBS News series, “The Twentieth Century,” in collaboration with Cronkite.