Reasoner to Cut Back His ’60 Minutes’ Duties : Television: Longtime correspondent plans occasional essay-style pieces.

Harry Reasoner, the longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent, will be leaving the show as a regular correspondent at the end of this season. Reasoner will become “editor emeritus,” contributing occasional pieces to the high-rated CBS News program.

“It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a couple of years,” the 67-year-old Reasoner said in an interview. “I’ve been at work for 53 years, half of that with ’60 Minutes.’ I’ll still be with the show, but I’ll come in irregularly.”

He said that he expects to do essay-style pieces rather than reporting for the program.

No replacement for Reasoner is planned on “60 Minutes,” which now has five correspondents, including the additions last year of Meredith Vieira and Steve Kroft.

Reasoner’s contract--estimated at $1 million annually--expires in July. The decision to leave, he said, “was entirely my own.”

Reasoner has had surgery for lung cancer twice in recent years. “I’m not symptomatic now, but I suppose (the surgery) was unconsciously part of my decision,” he said. “If I want to have some years in the sun, maybe I ought to get started on them.”

“Everybody who comes into broadcast journalism should make even one-tenth the contribution Harry has made,” “60 Minutes” executive producer Don Hewitt said. “I could say, ‘He will be missed,’ but he won’t be. He’ll be right here looking over my shoulder and keeping us on the straight and narrow.”

Reasoner began his career in journalism in 1942 as a reporter on the Minneapolis Times. After working as a news writer for WCCO-TV in Minneapolis, he joined CBS News in New York in 1956 and went on to win three Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award.

He was the anchor for “CBS Sunday News” from 1963 to 1970 and was a floor reporter and co-anchor for the network’s election-night coverage during several campaigns. When CBS began “60 Minutes” in 1968, Reasoner and Mike Wallace were the first two correspondents.

In 1970, however, Reasoner was lured away to anchor the ABC evening news. His 1976 shotgun marriage to Barbara Walters as co-anchor on the newscast proved to be an unhappy pairing for the two of them, and Reasoner came back to “60 Minutes” in 1978.

“I was hoping that Mike Wallace would retire first, but it became obvious that he was never going to retire,” Reasoner joked. Wallace, who is 72, has said that he will leave “60 Minutes” “when my toes turn up.”