Howard K. Smith
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Howard Kingsbury Smith (May 12, 1914 – February 15, 2002) was an American journalist and radio reporter.Born in Ferriday, Louisiana, Smith graduated from Tulane University in 1936. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University (Merton College) from which he graduated in September 1939. He immediately went to work for United Press as their London reporter and in January 1940 was sent to Berlin where he soon went to work for CBS. He visited Hitler's mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden and interviewed many of the most prominent Nazis, including Hitler himself, SS leader Heinrich Himmler and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
In December 1941 Smith was one of the last American reporters to leave Berlin before Germany and the United States went to war. Smith's 1942 book, Last Train from Berlin: An Eye-Witness Account of Germany at War describes the reporter's observations from Berlin in the year after the departure of Berlin Diary author William L. Shirer. Last Train from Berlin became an American best-seller and was reprinted in 2001, shortly before Smith's death.
Unable to leave Switzerland, Smith reported what he could when the Swiss government would let him. After the liberation of France in 1944, Smith reported on the war effort on the frontlines of Europe for CBS News. He was by then a significant member of the "Murrow Boys" (after Edward R. Murrow) that made CBS News the dominant broadcast news organization of the era. In May 1945 he returned to Berlin to recount the German surrender.
After the war Smith continued to work for CBS, presenting various documentaries and chairing the first televised presidential debate between Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon. In 1962 he left his job at CBS over a dispute about the reporting of the civil rights movement. Smith moved to ABC at a time when that network's news division was a distant third among the "Big Three" networks. In 1969 the veteran reporter became the co-anchor of the network's evening news, first with Frank Reynolds, then with Harry Reasoner. Smith, Reynolds and Reasoner were allowed to do commentaries during the broadcasts, unusual for network evening news programs but seen by ABC as a way to differentiate its show from the competition. During the 1972 Presidential campaign a letter was published using ABC stationery that he had written to candidate Edmund Muskie indicating his full support for his campaign. This was during a contentious period when the Nixon Administration claimed that the press was biased in its news coverage. Smith remained as co-anchor at ABC until 1976 and stayed briefly as an analyst, but did not last into the Roone Arledge era of ABC News.
Smith also appeared in a number of films, often as himself. The films include The Candidate (1972), Nashville (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and the television series V (1984).
Along with "Last Train from Berlin," he wrote two other books: a memoir, "Events Leading Up to My Death: The Life of a Twentieth-Century Reporter" in 1996 and a children's book, "Washington, D.C.; the story of our Nation's Capital," in 1967.
His son, the late Jack Smith, was a longtime ABC correspondent.
| Preceded by: Howard K. Smith and Frank Reynolds | ABC Evening News anchor 1970-1975 | Followed by: Harry Reasoner and Barbara Walters |
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