Sander Vanocur, TV reporter who covered JFK, dies at 91
Sander Vanocur, the television newsman who became familiar to American viewers as a prominent White House correspondent during the Kennedy administration and as a tough questioner in presidential debates, died Monday night in a hospice facility in Santa Barbara, California. He was 91.
His son Christopher said the cause was complications of dementia. Vanocur lived nearby in Montecito.
Vanocur was the last surviving journalist of the four who, as a panel, questioned Sen. John F. Kennedy, D-Mass., and Vice President Richard M. Nixon in America’s first televised presidential debate, on Sept. 26, 1960. (The others were Robert H. Fleming of ABC, Stuart Novins of CBS and Charles Warren of Mutual Broadcasting.
In a memorable moment, Vanocur asked Nixon about a damaging remark that President Dwight D. Eisenhower had made about his vice president — that he could not remember a single idea of Nixon’s that was adopted.
Nixon replied that it was “probably a facetious remark.” But in his 1962 book, “Six Crises,” Nixon admitted that Vanocur’s question had hurt.
“I am sure,” he wrote, “that to millions of televiewers, this question had been effective in raising a doubt in their minds with regard to one of my strongest campaign themes and assets — my experience as vice president.”
Vanocur went on to cover the Kennedy White House, becoming a regular presence at the president’s frequent nationally televised news conferences. He was the first reporter to ask a chastened Kennedy about the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion by a CIA-sponsored Cuban paramilitary group in 1961.
Vanocur, along with John Chancellor, Frank McGee and Edwin Newman, was one of NBC’s “four horsemen” — correspondents who prowled the floor of national conventions in the 1960s in search of news developments and tantalizing tidbits to report. He reported on politics for NBC from 1957 to 1971, along the way conducting one of the last interviews with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy before he was assassinated in Los Angeles in 1968.
After a brief interlude at the Public Broadcasting Service in the early 1970s, he also was a TV columnist for The Washington Post.