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.
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. He attended Harbord Collegiate Institute and Bloor Collegiate Institute 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."
Safer began his journalism career as a reporter for various newspapers in Ontario (Woodstock Sentinel-Review, London Free Press, and Toronto Telegram) and England (Reuters and Oxford Mail), in 1955. He later joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) as a correspondent and producer.
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. Still with the CBC, in 1961 he worked from London where he was assigned to cover major stories in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, including the Algerian War of independence from France. Also in 1961, he was the only Western correspondent in East Berlin at the time the Communists began building the Berlin Wall.
In 1964, CBS hired Safer as a London-based correspondent, where he worked at the same desk that had once been used by Edward R. Murrow. The following year, in 1965, he became the first full-time staff reporter of the CBS News bureau in Saigon to cover the growing military conflict in Vietnam. By 1967, he was made the CBS bureau chief in London where he reported on numerous global conflicts, including the Nigerian Civil War, the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. With the help of some clandestine skills, Safer and his news team became the first United States–based journalists to report from inside Communist China, broadcast in 1967 as a Special CBS News Report, "Morley Safer's Red China Diary".
Safer's Vietnam report, "The Burning of Cam Ne," broadcast on August 5, 1965, was notable and controversial because he had accompanied Marines to the village for what was described as a "search and destroy" mission. When the Marines arrived, they were fired on by snipers. They told the inhabitants to evacuate the village, which the Marines then burned down. Safer's report was among the earliest to paint a bleak picture of the Vietnam War, showing apparently innocent civilians as victims. However, many American military and political leaders judged the story to be harmful to United States interests and criticized CBS News for showing it. 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.
While reporting another story from Vietnam, Safer and two CBS cameramen were shot down in a helicopter by Vietcong ground fire, although they all escaped serious injury. 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."
Safer received an Emmy Award in 1971 for his investigation and reporting of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Although the war reports were consistently broadcast on television, Safer said it was the country's inability to clearly explain to the public why they were at war that became the main source of people's "disillusionment":
I've heard people say that if World War II had been televised we never would have stuck the course. That's bullshit. I think there was a pretty strong determination by most people in this country, not all, that this really was a war of survival of the most important things we hold dear, to put it in simple terms, including of our own democracy.
During his career as a war correspondent, Safer covered over nine wars. He authored the bestselling book, Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam. It describes his 1989 return to Vietnam and features his interviews with known and less-well-known Vietnamese people, most of them veterans of the war. 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.
In 1970, CBS producer Don Hewitt asked Safer to replace Harry Reasoner on 60 Minutes, as Reasoner had just left to anchor the ABC Evening News. Hewitt had created 60 Minutes, and he was, according to Diane Sawyer, the program's "guiding, self-renewing, revitalizing genius." 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."
Over the subsequent decades, along with Safer, the other veteran reporters for the program included Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, Walter Cronkite, Ed Bradley, Charles Kuralt, Diane Sawyer and Bob Simon. Reasoner had also returned to do some 60 Minutes segments before he retired. 60 Minutes eventually became the most-watched and most profitable program in television history.