TV news executive William Small dies at 93
William Small, a television news executive who presided over the storied Washington bureau of CBS News in the 1960s and 1970s, directing news coverage and hiring stars of broadcast journalism such as Dan Rather, Lesley Stahl, Bill Moyers and Connie Chung, died Sunday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 93.
His daughter Tamar Small said that there was no specific cause of death but that it was unrelated to the coronavirus pandemic.
Small became chief of the CBS Washington bureau in 1962 and built it into one of the most formidable newsrooms, in any medium, in the capital. In the years that followed, he mentored dozens of journalists who went on to major careers as reporters and anchors.
He helped direct the network’s coverage of the major news stories of the era, including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the passage of civil rights laws and the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s, which led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
Small did not appear on camera, but he had an intense, no-nonsense approach to the news that inspired legions of reporters, producers and directors on his staff.
It was a fiercely competitive environment, in which reporters sometimes competed against one another for stories and airtime.
“They said the stains on the carpets at NBC were coffee,” Chung said in a 2015 interview with the Archive of American Television. “The stains on the carpeting at CBS were blood.”
Small drove himself as hard as his staff. During the coverage of the Kennedy assassination in 1963, he did not leave the office for four days. He helped drive the network to cover the Watergate breakin, which was revealed by The Washington Post and gained additional national coverage when CBS devoted increasing attention to the scandal late in 1972.
“Bill Small was the most demanding boss I’ve ever worked for, but he brought out the best in me,” former CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer, who was hired by Small in 1969, said in an interview. “He said, ‘Get the story, and get more of it than anyone else.’ He was the backbone of that bureau.”
Team of stars
The team Small recruited or promoted to the Washington bureau reads like a who’s who of broadcast news: Rather covered the White House and Watergate, Roger Mudd was on Capitol Hill, Marvin Kalb was the diplomatic correspondent, Fred Graham covered the Supreme Court, Daniel Schorr did investigative reports and Eric Sevareid — a veteran of Edward R. Murrow’s radio news team from World War II — did commentary.
“His team at CBS is considered second only in the annals of broadcast news history to Edward R. Murrow and the ‘Murrow Boys,’ who invented the profession in World War II,” Michael Freedman, a former general manager of CBS Radio Network News and the current president of the National Press Club, said in a statement.
Others who passed through the Washington bureau included Moyers, Harry Reasoner, Ed Bradley, Bruce Morton and Bernard Shaw. Small also helped launch the careers of numerous women in TV news, including Stahl, Chung and Rita Braver. Susan Zirinsky, the current president of CBS News, was hired by Small when she was 20. In a statement, Zirinsky called her former boss a “hero to journalism.”
No fewer than six staffers at the Washington bureau — Mudd, Reasoner, Chung, Shaw, Schieffer and Rather — became news anchors at CBS or other networks. Others, including Bradley, Reasoner and Stahl, became correspondents for “60 Minutes.”
Mudd devoted a chapter to his onetime bureau chief in his 2009 book “The Place to Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News.” He called Small “a sophisticated judge of journalistic horseflesh” who ran the bureau like “an independent duchy,” insulating it from interference from the corporate headquarters in New York.
Small’s wife of 56 years, the former Gish Rubin, died in 2005. Survivors include two daughters, Tamar Small of Annandale, N.J., and Willa Kuh of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.; a sister; and six grandchildren.
During Small’s 12-year tenure in the Washington bureau, he battled CBS honchos in New York but, according to Douglas Brinkley’s biography of Cronkite, he got along well with the network’s star anchor. Soon after he joined CBS, Small learned that one way to stay on good terms with Cronkite was to placate the anchor’s mother.
“When the press does profiles on Walter, they often mention my age — they make me feel undateable,” she told him. “You make sure they leave my age out of it. OK?”