Richard Pyle, accomplished AP reporter for 50 years, dies

NEW YORK » Journalist Richard Pyle, whose long and accomplished Associated Press career spanned the globe and a half-century of crisis, war, catastrophe and indelible moments in news reporting, died at age 83.

He died Thursday at a hospital of respiratory failure due to lung fibrosis and obstructive lung disease, said his wife, actress-writer Brenda Smiley.

Pyle was there when President John F. Kennedy learned of the Cuban missile challenge and when President Richard Nixon waved goodbye to the White House, when the World Trade Center’s twin towers came down and when a Pennsylvania nuclear plant almost blew up, when the last Americans walked out of Hanoi’s war prisons and when Desert Storm drove the last Iraqis from Kuwait.

Pyle was even there at age 75, dashing to the shoreline when Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger’s jetliner made its lifesaving splash-landing in the Hudson River in 2009, the year Pyle retired after 49 years with the AP.

In the end, Pyle was proudest of his Vietnam War coverage over five critical years, the last half as chief of the news organization’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Saigon bureau.

A journalist in the 1960s “couldn’t let this story go by,” he said. “It was the greatest story I’ve ever had.”

AP’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, on Thursday praised Pyle for the depth of his journalism.