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LOS ANGELES – Sander Vanocur, a television journalist who has covered memorable events for decades, ranging from political campaigns to assassinations, from the war in Vietnam to the civil rights movement, has died, his son said on Tuesday.
Vanocur died Monday night in Santa Barbara, California, said Chris Vanocur. He was 91 years old. He had dementia in recent years.
As the NBC's national political correspondent in the 1960s, Vanocur was a speaker at the first presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960, then covered Kennedy's administration as a correspondent for the House. white.
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"His historical career has brought to the fore the biggest political stories of the 1960s, the first news being televised for many of us," NBC News political director Chuck Todd said Tuesday.
Vanocur was one of the last people to question Senator Robert F. Kennedy at the Embassy Hotel in Los Angeles, where he was murdered shortly after winning the California Democratic primary in his run for president in 1968.
Vanocur was probably the most familiar of viewers because of his reports in political conventions, including the violent Democratic convention of 1968 in Chicago. Frank McGee, John Chancellor and Edwin Newman, three NBC colleagues who reported on the congresses, are now known as the Four Horsemen. Vanocur was the last survivor of the four.
He was also the last survivor of the four speakers in the Nixon-Kennedy debate. Mr. Vanocur stated that, while he was occupying one of the most important places of twentieth-century politics in the front row, he felt he had not seen it. because he had not seen it as the viewer would have done.
"We did not know what it was like," Vanocur said in an interview in 2011. "You did not see it on TV when you were on the panel."
In 1977, Vanocur was hired by ABC News, where he was a correspondent until 1991. He was the moderator of another historic debate about the 1984 Vice President's race between George HW Bush and Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to run for the vice presidency of a large party.
Born in Cleveland, Vanocur moved to Peoria, Illinois at the age of 12, and graduated in political science from Northwestern University in 1950.
He served in the US Army in Europe and attended the London School of Economics, beginning his journalism career in England. His son stated that he had been sold when he had written a letter to the editor published in the Manchester Guardian.
"Once his name is printed, his career has changed," said Chris Vanocur, a television reporter.
Vanocur returned to the United States and covered the news of the city for the New York Times before landing at NBC in the late 1950s.
Politics and war took up a lot of his time, but his problem was Vanocur's favorite subject, his son said, because he believed in the cause.
In 1967, he interviewed Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, 11 months before King's assassination, dragging King into a lengthy discussion about the struggles to advance his cause after a decade.
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Vanocur left NBC in 1971 and worked for PBS and the Washington Post before landing at ABC News, where he would serve as a correspondent for Buenos Aires, host the weekly "Business World" and cover several other conventions and elections. .
He married fashion designer and writer Edith Pick in 1956 and had two sons, Chris and Nicholas, who died in 2015. Pick passed away in 1975 and soon after, Vanocur married Virginia Backus Vanocur, who was his wife for 44 years until his death.
Vanocur also leaves a daughter-in-law, Daphne Wood Hicks.
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