Sander Vanocur, a television reporter who covered Kennedy, died at age 91



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TV journalist Sander Vanocur, who became familiar with US viewers as a White House correspondent under the Kennedy regime and as a questioner in presidential debates, died Monday night at a hospice in Santa Barbara, California. He was 91 years old.

His son Christopher said that the cause was complications of dementia. Mr. Vanocur lived in Montecito, not far from there.

Vanocur (pronounced van-OH-kur) was the last surviving journalist of the four who interviewed Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon during the first televised Presidential Debate in the United States on September 26. , 1960. (Others were Robert H. Fleming of ABC, Stuart Novins of CBS and Charles Warren of Mutual Broadcasting, Howard K. Smith, then of CBS, was the moderator.)

In a memorable moment, Mr. Vanocur questioned Nixon about a damaging remark that President Dwight D. Eisenhower had made about his vice president – that he could not remember a single idea of ​​Nixon that had been passed .

Nixon replied that it was "probably a facetious remark". But in his 1962 book, "Six Crises," Nixon admitted that Mr. Vanocur's question had hurt.

"I'm sure," he wrote, "for millions of viewerc, this question allowed them to doubt one of my strongest themes and campaign assets: my experience as vice president. "

Mr. Vanocur also asked Kennedy a difficult question: how could he keep his promise to pass laws through Congress when he failed to do so as a member of Parliament and then in the Senate? (Kennedy skilfully blamed the Republicans, claiming that the main reason for his meager legislative summary was the threat of a Republican presidential veto suspending legislation proposed by the Democrats – a situation to which it will be remedied by the government. election of a democratic president.)

Mr. Vanocur then covered the Kennedy White House, becoming a regular presence at the president's frequent television news conferences. He was granted the first televised interview with Jacqueline Kennedy, the first lady, which prompted some competitors to consider his access as evidence of a dubious proximity to the Kennedys.

Mr. Vanocur was the first journalist to question Kennedy on the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion by a Cuban paramilitary group sponsored by the CIA in 1961. This issue sparked one of the Most memorable quotes from the president: "The episode," he said. , recalled "an old adage that the victory has one hundred fathers and the defeat an orphan".

Mr. Vanocur, with John Chancellor, Frank McGee and Edwin Newman, were one of NBC's "Four Horsemen" – correspondents who marched through national conventions in the 1960s in search of new news and interesting temptations to report. (He was also the last survivor of these four.)

For a time, NBC prepared him for more visible roles, making him his presenter for the weekend of the first half of the 1960s and, in 1969, hosting a new monthly news magazine, "First Tuesday ", To partly compete with the weekly" 60 minutes "on CBS. The "first Tuesday" lasted until August 1973.

Mr. Vanocur was also Washington correspondent for the "Today" show. Hoping to be promoted to NBC's anchor position in 1971, Mr. Vanocur, disappointed, left the network to join PBS when Mr. Chancellor was appointed to the position.

Mr. Vanocur had a tense relationship with President Nixon. Patrick J. Buchanan, a Nixon contributor, told reporters that Vanocur was "a notorious Kennedy sycophant".

When Nixon heard that Mr. Vanocur and Robert MacNeil was to co-host a weekly program of PBS on the 1972 presidential campaign, reacted angrily, remembering that Mr. Vanocur – in interviews, not in his reporting – had declared that the conduct of the Vietnam War was "dumb". Mr. Vanocur had lambasted the secret of the administration, according to the book of 1998 "made possible by …: the death of the public broadcasting in the United States" of James Ledbetter.

The book reports that after Nixon staff found Mr. Vanocur and Mr. MacNeil ($ 85,000 and $ 65,000 respectively, the equivalent of about $ 530,000 and $ 405,000 today. The White House encouraged caricaturists and columnists to criticize their remuneration as excessive.

Under pressure from the White House, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting voted against the funding of news, analysis of information and political commentary on PBS, which actually killed the election platform before it was broadcast. Mr. Vanocur left PBS.

"I could not work on television for a long time," he said.. "Richard Nixon has driven me out of public broadcasting."

After a two-year stint at the Washington Post, Mr. Vanocur was hired by Roone Arledge, president of ABC News and Sports, will set up a special political reporting and investigative unit in Washington. He became a member of a team of journalists who pushed ABC's evening news to the top of the hearings in the 1970s.

He was born January 8, 1928 in Cleveland, Sander Vinocur, Louis and Rose (Millman) Vinocur. His father was a lawyer. After her parents' divorce in 1941, her mother took Sander and her sister, Roberta, to live in Illinois, and changed the spelling of their family name to Vanocur because she "was angry with the old man, "Vanocur told The Evening Independent of St. Petersburg, Florida

He graduated from the Western Military Academy in Alton, Illinois, now closed, in 1946, and then from Northwestern University with a degree in Political Science. He studied at the London School of Economics in 1951 and 1952.

After spending two years in the German and Austrian army, he was dismissed from his first lieutenant duties and returned to England to be a reporter at the Manchester Guardian (now The Guardian). He has also worked freelance for CBS News. ("What other work can you drink beer and read newspapers all day while getting paid?" He told The Evening Independent.)

Still in his mid-20s, he was hired by the New York Times in 1955 after a series of well-placed journalists led the way with their endorsement: the head of the London newspaper's office, Drew Middleton; columnist James Reston of Washington; and CBS commentator Eric Sevareid.

In his 1966 book on the Times, "The Kingdom and the Power," Gay Talese described Mr. Vanocur as appearing in front of the editor's office, Turner Catledge, for an interview.

"He was tall, hoarse, black-haired, and pretty handsome," Mr. Talese writes, "and he wore a well-fitting suit and British brown suede shoes. Catledge was impressed.

His time at the Times, as a reporter for the New York Metropolitan Staff, was relatively short. He joined NBC News in Washington in 1957 and was sent to Chicago the following year to cover the Midwest. He met John Kennedy and his family when the latter, then Senator from Massachusetts, went to Wisconsin to attend the presidential primary of the country in 1960.

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