Pioneering Newscaster Howard K. Smith Dies

Howard K. Smith, the former CBS and ABC newsman and commentator, whose daring, analytical reporting from the front lines of World War II helped launch a golden age in broadcast journalism, has died. He was 87.

Smith died Friday night at his home in Bethesda, Md., his family said Monday. The cause of the death was pneumonia aggravated by congestive heart failure.

The broadcaster, who spent 20 years at CBS and 18 years at ABC, covered nearly every major event of his era, including the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and the Watergate scandal.

One of the last of a breed, he was known for uncompromising journalistic ethics and strong opinions, which eventually destroyed his relationship with his first network and caused troubles at his last.

“He was a leading light in journalism because he espoused this idea that journalism was more than just the facts, ma’am,” said Daniel Schorr, the Emmy-winning former CBS correspondent.

“The great value that Howard Smith represented was that journalism . . . has to instruct and journalism has to inspire. That was not a widely accepted theory of what journalism was, but he believed in that.”

One of Elite ‘Murrow’s Boys’

Smith belonged to an elite band of proteges of Edward R. Murrow, the legendary CBS newsman. Erudite and adventure-seeking, “Murrow’s boys,” as they were known, included the late Eric Sevareid and Charles Collingwood. Along with a handful of other reporters whose careers Morrow nurtured, they formed what many critics considered the greatest broadcast news team in the history of the medium.

Originally a print reporter who moved into radio, Smith covered the surrender of the German army in 1945 and the Nuremberg war crimes trials. In succeeding years, the reluctant convert to television moderated the historic first televised presidential debate, between Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, in 1960. A decade later, he had the first one-one-one television interview with a sitting president after Nixon took office. He also became the first major broadcaster to demand Nixon’s resignation over Watergate.

The slender, scholarly looking Southerner also was probably the only journalist who ever lost his job over quoting 18th-century political theorist Edmund Burke.

“He was a class act. He cared deeply about what he did. It’s very hard to explain that without sounding silly these days,” said Marvin Kalb, another longtime former CBS correspondent.

He was born Howard Kingsbury Smith Jr. in Ferriday, La., of aristocratic stock. The family wealth was lost at the turn of the century, so Howard Sr. worked as a railroad conductor. He settled in New Orleans after marrying a part-Cajun woman named Minnie Cates.

A lackadaisical student through most of high school, Howard Jr. suddenly awoke to the realities of the Depression during his senior year. He brought up his grades, became editor of the school paper, and graduated with a scholarship to Tulane University.

In high school he discovered that he could get paid for writing. So he majored in journalism, but also studied French and German. After graduating in 1937, he won a tuition-free summer at Heidelberg University and worked his way to Germany on a freighter.

His horror at the ardor of German anti-Semitism and invincibility instilled in him, he later said, “a sense of fright that did not leave me for many years.” He returned to the States briefly for a $15 a week job at the New Orleans Item. A Rhodes scholarship became his ticket back to Europe, where, through pluck and luck, he became a foreign correspondent.

While studying at Oxford, he plunged into Labor Party politics, literally painting the town with protests against the British government’s inaction against the Nazis. He met the chief of United Press’ London bureau, who promised he would hire him if war broke out.

On the day the war began, Smith became a United Press correspondent and, because of his fluency in German, was soon dispatched to Berlin. He worked for the New York Times before he was lured away, in 1941, to CBS Radio.

In Berlin, life for Americans grew increasingly difficult as the United States began aiding Britain against Hitler. Smith’s reports were shredded by Nazi censors and his typewriters were confiscated. Fearing he would be jailed, he spent what seemed the longest week of his life trying to obtain a permit to travel to Switzerland.

When his permit finally was granted, he celebrated so heartily with colleagues that he delayed his departure a day--to Dec. 7, 1941. By the time he reached Bern, the U.S. had been attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor and his colleagues back in Germany had been interned. He was the last American correspondent to leave Berlin.

Although he was marooned in Switzerland for the next two years because its borders were closed, he developed extensive contacts in underground Europe and was the first reporter to describe the activities of Tito, the leader of the Yugoslav partisans. He also wrote a nonfiction book, aptly titled “Last Train from Berlin,” which became a bestseller in the U.S. and Britain.

Once the Allied liberation of France began, Smith was able to leave Switzerland and spent the remainder of the war at the front lines. He covered the Battle of the Bulge, witnessed the German surrender in Berlin and, later, the Nuremberg trials.

A muscular writer, he delivered evocative battlefield reports. “On the roadside lie skeletons of streamlined gray Wehrmacht cars which careened to conquest over every highway in Europe,” he said in a broadcast on reentering Germany in late 1944. “Now they lie, belly to the sky, burned out and red with rust from the autumn rain. The whole desolate scene is one of crushed power.”

At war’s end, Murrow made Smith his successor as CBS’ chief European correspondent and left to become vice president of CBS News in New York.

Over the next few years, Smith made the transition to television. He and the other Murrow acolytes became heroes to the new generation of broadcast journalists.

With values forged at the front lines of World War II, the Murrow team shared their mentor’s belief that broadcast news played an essential role in a democracy and should inform citizens of government’s failures as well as its successes.

As a foreign correspondent under Murrow, Smith had relatively free rein to air his opinions without worrying about ruffling the bosses back home. But that freewheeling era at CBS was to end.

In 1961, Murrow announced he was leaving the network for a job in the Kennedy administration. Before departing, he asked Smith, by then chief Washington correspondent, to take over a documentary on racial tension in Birmingham.

In the city that Martin Luther King Jr. had called the most segregated in the U.S., Smith witnessed the ferocious beating of a busload of Freedom Riders by a band of Ku Klux Klan members. As if on cue, the Birmingham police arrived as soon as the mob dispersed.

Smith felt he had seen something out of Nazi Germany. He took three bleeding black youths back to his motel and interviewed them, broadcasting every hour for the rest of the afternoon. One of his eyewitness reports was reprinted verbatim on the front page of the New York Times. He had been the only national reporter on the scene.

The unfavorable attention his coverage brought to Birmingham led to death threats and mysterious technical problems that blocked further transmission of his stories. The CBS affiliate there severed its relationship with the network.

Undaunted, Smith returned to New York to write a stinging Sunday radio commentary blaming the Klan and Bull Connor, Birmingham’s police chief, for the violence.

Wanting to conclude the TV documentary with a similar message, he chose this line from Burke, the 18th-century British parliamentarian: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

CBS brass opposed the quote as flagrant editorializing and ordered Smith to cut it. When “Who Speaks for Birmingham?” was aired, the line was gone.

News of CBS’ suppression of Smith made the New York Times. The criticism so infuriated CBS founder William S. Paley that he summoned Smith to his office for a fateful meeting.

Smith insisted on his right to air his opinions. Paley insisted that he, not his employees, had final say on the network’s editorial positions. The CBS chief then pulled out a memo Smith had written on the dispute, hurled it on the table and denounced it as “junk.”

“If that is what you believe, you had better go somewhere else,” Paley said, according to Smith.

Others gave different accounts of why Smith was fired. Richard Salant, who headed CBS News through the 1960s, said the final confrontation was over Smith’s unwavering on-air assault on a Senate proposal to raise the ceiling on the national debt.

In the year following Smith’s dismissal, the civil rights movement gained momentum. Smith noticed that other CBS correspondents were using the Burke quote without interference from network brass. It had become a fair comment.

“I remembered the old adage that it is smart to be right, but it is stupid to be right at the wrong time,” Smith wryly noted.

Gets His Own Program at ABC

His firing was viewed by some as a watershed in the history of CBS News. “[A] great fissure seemed to open under the feet of the correspondents who remained,” Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson wrote in their 1996 book, “The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism.” The freewheeling Murrow era was over.

Then an offer came from Nationwide Insurance Co. to sponsor him on a news and commentary program. He took the proposal to ABC, which hired him and included a clause in his contract promising that the network and the sponsor would not infringe on his “independence of mind and spirit.”

The show, which debuted on Feb. 14, 1962, was called “Howard K. Smith--News and Comment.” Newsweek soon was calling it “the most stimulating news show on television.”

Smith ranged far and wide for topics. He analyzed the progress of the Kennedy administration. He interviewed Brigitte Bardot, Malcolm X and Jimmy Hoffa.

Then came his piece on Nixon’s 1962 defeat in the race for governor of California that had ended on Nixon’s lament about the press not having him to “kick around” anymore.

Smith chose to include in “The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon” an interview with Alger Hiss, the alleged Soviet agent whom Nixon, as a young congressman, had investigated in the 1940s.

The interview brought tens of thousands of protest calls and letters from viewers sympathetic to Nixon who thought Smith guilty of kicking a man when he was down. Sponsors threatened to cancel their support of other ABC shows.

An unrepentant Smith said he “would use a prostitute on the program, if she had an important role in history.”

Eight months later, Smith’s sponsor quietly withdrew from his show and ABC canceled it.

After a few years of uncertainty, Smith’s career took off again. In 1969, he was made co-anchor of the evening news with Frank Reynolds. ABC’s ratings rose. Smith later was teamed with the easygoing Harry Reasoner, and their ratings zoomed to No. 1 in some major markets.

He remained in the anchor chair until 1975, when his role was reduced to commentary. When Roone Arledge took over as head of ABC News in 1978, he dumped Smith’s commentaries entirely.

A disgusted Smith pinned a terse resignation letter on the bulletin board several months later. At 65, he ended his broadcasting career.

Smith won many honors, including an Emmy and a Peabody. He also earned six Overseas Press Club awards.

Smith is survived by his wife of 60 years, Bennie; a son, Jack, of San Francisco; a daughter, Catherine, of Los Angeles; and three grandchildren.