Bruce Morton, veteran TV newsman, dies
Bruce Morton, a news correspondent for CBS and then CNN who covered Washington politics with a low-key but authoritative style for more than four decades and who co-hosted a droll morning show and reported on overseas massacres with equal skill, died Friday at his home in Washington. He was 83.
The cause was complications from lymphoma, said his daughter, Sarah Morton, a former CBS News producer.
Morton joined CBS in 1964 and became one of its most prominent and well-regarded correspondents. He shared six Emmys and a slew of other awards during his 29 years at the network.
After a rotation through Vietnam for CBS in 1966 and 1967, he covered the court-martial trial of Army officer William Calley Jr. for the massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. soldiers at My Lai. (Convicted of murder in 1971, Calley was sentenced to life in prison but served three years under house arrest after President Richard Nixon reduced the sentence.)
Morton reported on NASA space missions and racial unrest after the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., but he was primarily a political correspondent, focusing on presidential and congressional campaigns and analysis of election results.
With the wry Hughes Rudd, Morton co-anchored the CBS Morning News in the mid-1970s. Both were noted craftsmen of language and they shared a prestigious Peabody Award in 1976. The citation cited "their incisive writing, their choice of both the significant and the insignificant to report, and their ability to see something bright - and, yes, even humorous - amongst the heavy-handedness of most of the day's news."
Morton, who contributed to coverage of the bloody 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in China, became a chief political correspondent for the network and a commentator for CBS weekend news programs, including "Sunday Morning."
He jumped to CNN in 1993 as a national correspondent, covering a wide variety of stories including the 1995 O.J. Simpson trial and delivering longer analytical pieces and historical reminiscences, often about politics.
He hosted a CNN special in 1994 - "The Decline of Civilization" - that observed "the absence of conventions that keep Americans from punching each other out" as civility plummeted in politics, on the gridiron and even on television sitcoms.
On the Sunday public affairs program "Late Edition," hosted by Wolf Blitzer, Morton offered commentary for a segment called "The Last Word." He retired in 2006.
Bruce Alexander Morton was born Oct. 28, 1930, in Norwalk, Conn., and grew up in Chicago. He graduated from Harvard University in 1952, then served three years in the Army, learning Russian at a military language school.
He began his journalism career while at Harvard, writing and reading newscasts for a local radio outlet. He later worked for an NBC affiliate in Pittsburgh and for a radio news syndicate in London before joining ABC News in 1962 as a London correspondent, mostly filing stories for radio stations.
His marriage to Margaret Foster ended in divorce. Survivors include two children, Alexander "Alec" Morton and Sarah Morton, both of New York City.
Marvin Kalb, founding director of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and a former reporter for CBS and NBC News, called Morton a "beautiful writer . . . capable of blending words with the picture in a way that truly elevated the content."
Kalb recalled that Morton was covering an anti-Vietnam War protest in Washington that went by the Daughters of the American Revolution building near the White House.
"A number of the older women were standing there looking at the antiwar, bearded types, and the women did not realize that most of them were Vietnam veterans," he said. "Bruce got a hold of a woman who screamed out at them, 'Oh if only Vietnam veterans were here to tell you the truth,' or something like that. Bruce would find that phrase, that woman, that quote, mixed with the picture that truly elevated that content."