Tom Cassidy; CNN Business Correspondent

Tom Cassidy, an award-winning Cable News Network correspondent whose struggle with AIDS was chronicled in agonizing detail on television, died Sunday.

He was 41 when he died in a Manhattan hospital.

Cassidy, an anchorman and senior business news correspondent for the network since 1981, was one of CNN’s first reporters.

He was first diagnosed as having acquired immune deficiency syndrome in October, 1987, said Bill Tucker, deputy news editor at CNN.

Cassidy was the subject of a number of magazine articles and became well known through a series of television reports in which he spoke candidly of his deteriorating condition.

A Boston native, he attended Bowdoin College in Maine and earned a master’s degree in 1978 from Columbia University’s School of Journalism.

In 1984, three years after joining CNN, Cassidy became host of the network’s “Pinnacle” program, which focused on the professional and private lives of prominent figures in the business world. He held that position until 1988.

Earlier this year, the dying Cassidy became the subject of the show and became the focus of a continuing series of special reports on WCBS-TV in New York City.

He said on those shows that Americans were beginning to realize that because of AIDS, the country was getting “a little more dull. . . . We’re losing a lot of creative, sensitive, bright people and they just happen to be gay.”

Cassidy also said in one of his last TV appearances that many of the hundreds of supposedly hardened leading business executives he had interviewed over the years had called in tears when they learned of his illness.

He continued to be optimistic about his chances of survival.

“You know people assume AIDS is a death sentence. I’ll let you know.”