Morley Safer, the veteran CBS newsman who had been with the network since 1964 and with its flagship program 60 Minutes since 1968 before announcing his retirement last week, has died. He was 84.
The last of the 60 Minutes giants is gone. Andy Rooney, Mike Wallace, Ed Bradley, producer Don Hewitt and now Safer have all died within the past decade.
What many people don’t know is that Safer was born and raised in Toronto and worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) before joining CBS. Early in his tenure with CBS, he dispatched a series of reports showing that all was not going well in Vietnam much to the anger of LBJ who thought he was a Communist. Alas, Safer was no Communist, just Canadian.
Although 60 Minutes often annoys me, I still watch it fairly regularly and Safer’s reports in recent years have usually involved lighter fare. My roommate Christopher Kain and I would constantly joke about how Safer got all the tough assignments of visiting Italian vineyards and interviewing beautiful women.
Given that Safer died so soon after his retirement, I cannot help but wonder if he had been diagnosed with an illness recently and wanted to retire before his time was up or if he was just one of those people who wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they had nothing to do. Either way, a giant in Canadian and American journalism is gone.