Richard Salant; Former President of CBS News

Richard Salant, the retired CBS News president whose tenure included the introduction of “60 Minutes,” who defended the network against White House and congressional attack over its Vietnam coverage, and who generally was credited with a major expansion of reporting and programming, died Tuesday.

Salant, a scholarly lawyer who was a staunch advocate of a free press, died of a heart attack while making a speech to a senior citizens group here, a CBS spokesman said.

He was 78.

“Dick was doing what he loved best. He was talking about covering news and the difficulties reporters face in getting to the heart of a story,” said Mike Wallace, the co-editor of “60 Minutes,” television’s most successful news magazine show.

Salant served two terms as president of CBS News, from 1961 to 1964 and from 1966 to 1979, when he retired.

Under Salant, CBS News expanded its nightly news broadcast from 15 minutes to 30, making it the first half-hour nightly national news show. The programs he created also included the “CBS Morning News” and “Sunday Morning.”

Former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite remembered him as “a pillar of our profession.”

Said Dan Rather, the current CBS anchor: “For television news, Dick Salant wrote the book on integrity, ethics and excellence. During his time at CBS, he set the world’s standard for broadcast news leadership, and he managed to change television without actually appearing on it.”

Salant directed CBS coverage of the Vietnam War, the Apollo 11 moon landing and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

He also approved the controversial documentary “The Selling of the Pentagon” in February, 1971, that brought CBS into conflict with Congress and Richard Nixon’s White House.

Some forces in Congress were so unhappy with the report on the close relationship between businesses and the Pentagon that they wanted to cite Salant’s boss, CBS President Frank Stanton, for contempt but the move failed.

The Nixon White House put pressure on Salant to censure his broadcasters and replace his reporters. But as longtime CBS newsman Charles Kuralt recalled, “Nobody got censured, nobody got replaced.”