Jack Smith, 58; Veteran ABC News Reporter, A&E; Host

Jack Smith, an Emmy award-winning correspondent for ABC News who reported on the Iran-Contra affair, the fall of the Berlin Wall and, more recently, technology in the Silicon Valley, died Wednesday of pancreatic cancer at a hospital in Marin County, Calif. He was 58.

ABC News President David Westin said, “Jack knew how to communicate as few others do and did it with eloquence, wit and grace. He made an invaluable contribution to ABC News, and we mourn his loss.”

The son of the late television news pioneer Howard K. Smith, Jack Smith joined ABC in 1976 and served as its Washington correspondent from 1980 until he left in 2001. He returned to California to become a media consultant.

For nine years, he was the principal correspondent for the Sunday morning news program “This Week With David Brinkley.” In that capacity, Smith filed background reports on a wide array of subjects and covered two presidential elections.

Before joining the Washington bureau, he was the network’s Paris correspondent. He also covered the fighting in Beirut during the Israeli siege of the Lebanese city in 1982.

Smith, born in Paris, was a highly decorated U.S. combat veteran of the Vietnam War. As a private in an Army rifle company, he was wounded in the battle of the Ia Drang Valley, one of the key American engagements with North Vietnamese regular forces. Smith was awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.

Years later, he returned to the Vietnam battlefield for special reports for ABC’s “Nightline” and “Day One.”

After the war, Smith received a bachelor’s degree from Carnegie-Mellon University and another degree at Oxford University. He worked as a television news writer and producer in Pittsburgh and producer-reporter in Chicago, and received an Overseas Press Club citation for magazine reporting.

Smith also narrated and was host for programs for the A&E; cable network series “Biography” and documentaries for the Discovery Channel and the Learning Channel. He was host of “The Soldiers’ Story,” an award-winning, three-part series on the Vietnam War that aired on the Learning Channel.

Smith is survived by his wife, Pamela Peffer Smith; his son, Alexander Kingsbury Smith; his mother, Benedicte Smith; and his sister, Catherine Smith.

His father died in February 2002 at the age of 87.