TV reporter bludgeoned with an axe handle while covering Alabama civil rights protest
Richard Valeriani, who has died aged 85, was an NBC News correspondent who was once clubbed by an axe-wielding assailant at a civil rights demonstration, earned the ire of the Johnson and Nixon White Houses for his television reporting, and later worked on the other side of the camera, advising corporate executives and celebrities as a media consultant.
As an NBC reporter from 1961 to 1988, Valeriani covered the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, rallies for voting rights in the South, the globe-trotting diplomat Henry Kissinger and the United States’ response
Richard to the Iran hostage crisis under President
Valeriani Jimmy Carter.
He also worked as a Washington-based Journalist correspondent for the b August 29, 1932 Today show, the d June 18, 2018 network’s flagship morning news programme, although he expressed little pleasure in assignments that took him away from breaking news and scooping his competitors.
‘‘I was sure that Dick Valeriani of NBC was sneaking around behind my back – and of course, he was! – getting stories that would make me look bad the next day,’’ the revered CBS reporter Charles Kuralt once said.
Valeriani was NBC’s senior White House correspondent when he reported on an upcoming, then-secret 1967 summit between President Lyndon B Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, in a story that apparently led the president to unleash a fusillade of profanity.
‘‘Johnson called him into his office at the White House and said, ‘There is no . . . way that you could know this if you are not [sleeping with] a Russian broad,’’ Valeriani’s wife, Kathie Berlin, recalled. ‘‘And Dick said, ‘Mr President, I’m a married person.’ And he said, ‘That doesn’t mean [anything] with you Italians.’ ’’
In a memoir, the former Soviet spymaster Oleg Kalugin – then working undercover as an embassy press attache – wrote that he was the one who told Valeriani about the meeting.
Valeriani later covered the Nixon administration during the Watergate investigation, and as a State Department correspondent travelled widely with Kissinger, the national security adviser who later became secretary of state. The two developed a warm relationship, and in 1979 Valeriani published Travels With Henry, a breezy account of Kissinger’s approach to statecraft, fondness for junk food and rapport with the press. ‘‘If it’s Thanksgiving,’’ Kissinger quipped during one long tour through the Middle East, ‘‘it must be Damascus.’’
Although Valeriani spent most of his career in Washington, he said his most important work occurred in Mississippi and Alabama, where he helped bring images of peaceful civil rights demonstrators, streets full of tear gas and police attack-dogs to a national audience.
He became a part of the story himself on the evening of February 18, 1965, while reporting on a voting rights march in Marion, Alabama, a