Bill Shadel, 96; Broadcaster Covered D-Day, Moderated Nixon-JFK Debate

Bill Shadel, who covered D-day as a CBS Radio reporter during World War II and moderated the third televised presidential debate between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy as an ABC News anchor in 1960, has died. He was 96.

Shadel, who had prostate cancer, died Saturday at an assisted living home in Renton, Wash., a suburb of Seattle, said his son Doug.

A native of Milton, Wis., Shadel was editor of the National Rifle Assn. publication the American Rifleman in 1943 when he went overseas to cover the war in Europe. Once there, he was recruited by CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow to help cover the war for the radio network.

“He sort of stumbled into broadcasting,” Shadel’s son told The Times on Monday. “He had a very commanding presence, whether it was his voice on the air or in a room. He just had one of those voices that you paid attention to.”

As one of CBS’ self-styled “Gang of Eight” that covered D-day, the Allied invasion at Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944, Shadel joined colleagues such as Charles Collingwood, who landed on the beach with the Allied forces; and Richard C. Hottelet, who flew over Omaha Beach aboard a Marauder bomber. Murrow co-anchored CBS’ coverage in London with Charles Shaw.

Shadel, who was aboard a U.S. Navy vessel during the invasion, later covered the Battle of the Bulge, and he and Murrow were the first reporters inside the Buchenwald concentration camp. For his Buchenwald reporting, Shadel received a “Witness to the Truth” award from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 1990.

After the war, Shadel reported for CBS Radio in Washington, D.C., before moving into the new medium of television as a reporter for the local news program anchored by Walter Cronkite on WTOP-TV.

For Shadel, being on camera took a period of adjustment.

“I never looked up,” he told a Seattle Times reporter in September. “My old bald head was all you could see.”

An Arthur Godfrey television show producer offered the TV newcomer a piece of advice, saying that Shadel wouldn’t be taken seriously unless he improved his on-camera appearance.

“He got a toupee and wore it for the rest of the time he was on television,” Shadel’s son said.

Before moving to ABC in the late 1950s, Shadel was a periodic questioner on “Face the Nation,” at a time when the weekly news program had a moderator and three questioners.

Shadel was one of the rotating anchors for the ABC evening news in 1960 when he moderated the third presidential debate between Nixon and Kennedy.

Shadel moderated the debate from a studio in Los Angeles, where Nixon was in a separate studio. Kennedy was on a set built on a New York soundstage, and the journalists on the panel were in studios separate from Shadel.

Although it was considered a technical achievement at the time, Shadel recalled in the Seattle Times interview last fall that “the third debate was a nothing.”

Much to his annoyance, the candidates spent much of their time responding to the panelists’ questions about two Taiwanese-controlled islands -- Quemoy and Matsu -- a carry-over topic from the second debate in which Nixon had said Kennedy would give up control of the islands to Communist China.

The panelists “thought they had something hot,” Shadel recalled. “They were separated from me. I couldn’t tell them to shut up. And it just kept on and on and on.”

After the debate ended, Nixon accused Shadel of failing to enforce a debate rule against using notes, which he said Kennedy had done.

Shadel recalled that the three TV network presidents confronted him after they went off the air and told him that Nixon was surrounded by reporters in his studio.

“The crowd parted for me like the Red Sea,” Shadel recalled. “And Nixon said, ‘Oh, here comes the impartial moderator. Damn it, Shadel, you knew. You knew Kennedy was using notes. It was your job to stop him.’ ”

But there was no such rule, Shadel recalled. Nixon had written Kennedy proposing that they prohibit notes, he said, but Kennedy never responded.

As ABC News anchor, Shadel covered other memorable events, including spending 12 hours in the anchor chair when astronaut John Glenn made his three-orbit flight in 1962.

Shadel left the television news business a year later, a time when, as he told the Seattle Times, “my ulcers were getting ulcers.” He taught journalism at the University of Washington until retiring 12 years later.

In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife of 54 years, Julie; two other sons, David and Gerald; and two grandchildren.