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.
— Washington Post
