Morley Safer

Morley Safer (November 8, 1931 – May 19, 2016) was a Canadian-American broadcast journalist, reporter, and correspondent for CBS News. He was best known for his long tenure on the news magazine 60 Minutes, whose cast he joined in 1970 after its second year on television, and where he became its longest-serving reporter.

During his 60-year career as a broadcast journalist, Safer received numerous awards, including 12 Emmys. In 2009, he donated his personal papers to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Jeff Fager, executive producer of 60 Minutes, said "Morley has had a brilliant career as a reporter and as one of the most significant figures in CBS News history, on our broadcast and in many of our lives. Morley's curiosity, his sense of adventure and his superb writing, all made for exceptional work done by a remarkable man." Safer died a week after announcing his retirement from 60 Minutes.

Early life Safer was born to an Austrian Jewish family in Toronto, Ontario, the son of Anna (née Cohn) and Max Safer, an upholsterer. He had an older brother, Leon, and an older sister, Esther. After reading works by Ernest Hemingway, he had decided in his youth that, like Hemingway, he wanted to be a foreign correspondent. in Toronto, Ontario, and briefly attended the University of Western Ontario, before he dropped out to become a newspaper reporter. He has said, "I was a reporter on the street at 19 and never went to college."

International news and war correspondent One of his first jobs with CBC was to produce CBC News Magazine in 1956, where his first on-screen appearance as a journalist was covering the Suez Crisis in Egypt. the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. United States President Lyndon Johnson reacted to this report angrily, calling CBS's president and accusing Safer and his colleagues of having undermined America's role there. Safer's report received the George Polk Award in 1965.

Some ex-Marines who saw Safer's story on television during the war shared President Johnson's opinion. They claim that Safer never had time to be properly briefed on the operation, and was therefore not aware that four Marines had already been killed there and 27 wounded. Ex-Marine Larry Engelmann, author of a story on the Vietnam War, claimed Safer's story was "highly sensational". Justifying collective punishment, he alleged: "The fact is that this village had been a pretty tough village and these people had been warned repeatedly that the village would be torched if they continued to shoot at Marines … But there was none of that in Morley Safer's story."

In the PBS series Reporting America At War, Safer himself said, " … the denials themselves were absurd. [Officials claimed] I had gone on a practice operation in a model village—a village the Marines had built to train guys how to move into a village. Or the whole thing was a kind of 'Potemkin' story that I had concocted. There are still people who believe that." After the incident was broadcast, Marines were forbidden from burning any more villages. Brig. Gen. Joe Stringham, who commanded a Green Beret unit, commented that Safer "was all business and he reported what he saw… We looked at eternity right in the face a couple of times … and he was as cool as a hog on ice."

During his career as a war correspondent, Safer covered over nine wars. His trip was the basis of a 60 Minutes show in 1989, which Safer said got a reaction of annoyance from some veterans, and a positive reaction from others.

60 Minutes reporter quote=Morley was one of the most important journalists in any medium, ever. He broke ground in war reporting and made a name that will forever be synonymous with 60 Minutes. He was also a gentleman, a scholar, a great raconteur – all of those things and much more to generations of colleagues, his legion of friends, and his family, to whom all of us at CBS offer our sincerest condolences over the loss of one of CBS' and journalism's greatest treasures. Safer, who had been covering the funeral of Charles de Gaulle in Paris, accepted the new position and joined 60 Minutes.

The show had then aired for two seasons, and Safer, who had, until that time, reported and traveled alone, recalled that he accepted the new position on condition that if the show failed, he would be given his old job back, recalling that "I was the new kid, with a lot of pressure, because we were trying something new. We were utterly unheard of. I was utterly a stranger to working in a head office." Until then, said Safer, "my staff, when I was abroad, consisted of only me." The story garnered numerous awards for Safer. In 1994, he hosted a CBS News Special, One for the Road: A Conversation with Charles Kuralt and Morley Safer, which marked Kuralt's retirement from CBS.

Safer narrated several documentaries, including Exodus 1947 (1997), American Experience (1997), American Masters (1996), Bicentennial Minutes (1975), and Saigon (1957).

He retired after 46 years and 919 stories for CBS, a week before his death; by then, Safer had set the record for the show's longest-serving correspondent. A few days after he retired, CBS broadcast an hour-long special, Morley Safer: A Reporter's Life.

Following his death in 2016, the program's executive producer Jeff Fager told The Hollywood Reporter that, during their time at 60 Minutes together, "Some of the most fun I had with Morley was pranking each other or pranking other people", some incidents of which Fager recounts in his 2017 book, Fifty Years of 60 Minutes: The Inside Story of Television's Most Influential News Broadcast, revealing a culture at "60 Minutes, where practical jokes have always been the favorite sport."

Recognition In addition to an Emmy awarded for the Gulf of Tonkin report, he also won Emmys for other 60 Minutes stories, including "Pops" (1979); "Teddy Kollek's Jerusalem" (1979); "Air Force Surgeon" (Investigative Journalism, 1982); and "It Didn't Have to Happen" (Correspondent, 1982).

The Morley Safer Award for Outstanding Reporting In January 2019, the Morley Safer Award was created and sent out a call for entries. A program of The University of Texas at Austin's Briscoe Center for American History, where Safer's archival papers are preserved; the Safer Award seeks to recognize a story or series of stories of creativity, vision and integrity. The award was presented Hannah Dreier for her ProPublica series, "Trapped in Gangland".

Personal life He married Jane Fearer, an anthropology student, in 1968 in London, where he was serving as bureau chief for CBS News. Their daughter, Sarah Alice Anne Safer, is a 1992 graduate of Brown University and a freelance journalist.

Safer maintained dual Canadian and American citizenship.

Death Safer died at his New York home from pneumonia on May 19, 2016, eight days after announcing his retirement from 60 Minutes following 46 seasons with the show. He is buried at Roselawn Avenue Cemetery in Toronto.

Awards

12-time Emmy Award winner 3-time George Foster Peabody Award winner Recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (2003) Received the 2003 George Polk Memorial Career Achievement Award from Long Island University