Ex-anchor, foreign correspondent
Nov. 19, 1939 - Feb. 20, 2014
Garrick Utley, a former anchor for NBC News who for many years was one of a rare breed in television news reporting, a fulltime foreign correspondent, died Thursday night at his home in New York City. He was 74.
He died of prostate cancer, his wife, Gertje Utley, said.
From the battlefields of Vietnam and Iraq to the Soviet-led invasion of Prague, Mr. Utley was a forthright interviewer of troops and commanders in the field and of presidents and diplomats in the halls of power.
Fluent in Russian, German and French, he reported from some 75 countries in a multifaceted career that included 30 years at NBC. He was a bureau chief in London and Paris for the network, chief foreign correspondent, weekend news anchor and substitute for John Chancellor and Tom Brokaw on “NBC Nightly News.” He also hosted magazine programs and moderated the Sunday morning program “Meet the Press.” He later worked for ABC News and CNN.
Mr. Utley began his career auspiciously, rising from office clerk to Vietnam War correspondent in one year. In 1964 he became one of the first network reporters based in Saigon, joining newspaper and wire-service correspondents. Like some of his colleagues, he strived for meaningful reporting, offering longer perspectives on political issues and battlefield developments and bringing a little-known war home vividly to Americans.
In 1968, Mr. Utley covered the invasion of Czechoslovakia as Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces crushed the so-called Prague Spring political reforms. He covered the 1973 Yom Kippur war, interviewed the Nazi leader Albert Speer in 1976, reported on the Cold War from Berlin and Moscow and, in 1987, interviewed the dissident physicist Andrei D. Sakharov as he emerged from years of internal exile. He covered a summit of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1989, the Persian Gulf war in 1990 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991.
Mr. Utley was no swashbuckler in a trench coat: He was a 6-foot-6 scarecrow with gentle eyes and a wry smile who slouched beside his small German-born wife. He loved opera and for years was the host of the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on PBS. He was also a workhorse on assignment, an aggressive voice in the studio and a critic of the networks when they cut back international news coverage and in-depth reporting.
Serious television reporting has largely been replaced by “interminable talking heads,” he told The New York Times in 2004, when he joined a State University of New York graduate program in international relations in Manhattan.
Clifton Garrick Utley was born in Chicago on Nov. 19, 1939, to Clifton Utley, an NBC radio and television commentator, and Frayn Garrick Utley, a broadcast reporter for CBS and NBC and a Chicago civic leader. He graduated from Westtown School in West Chester, Pa., in 1957, and from Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., in 1961.
He moderated “Meet the Press” from 1989 to 1991 and anchored weekend news programs from 1988 to 1993. He left NBC in 1993 and until 1996 was ABC’s London-based chief foreign correspondent. From 1997 to 2002 he reported for CNN; he coanchored the network’s coverage of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Mr. Utley won a Peabody Award and the Overseas Press Club’s Edward R. Murrow Award. He was president of SUNY’s Neil D. Levin Graduate Institute of International Relations and Commerce in Manhattan from 2004 to 2011, studying New York’s role in the global economy. He later taught journalism and broadcasting at the State University of New York at Oswego.