TV newsman covered White House during Kennedy years
Sander Vanocur, the television newsman who became familiar to American viewers as a prominent White House correspondent during the Kennedy administration, died Monday night in a hospice facility in Santa Barbara, Calif. 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. Howard K. Smith, then of CBS, was the moderator.)
Vanocur went on to cover the Kennedy White House, becoming a regular presence at the president’s frequent nationally televised news conferences.
Vanocur 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. The question elicited one of the president’s more well-remembered quotations: The episode, he said, recalled “an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.”
Still in his mid-20s, Vanocur was hired by the New York Times in 1955. His stint at The Times, however, was relatively short, and he joined NBC News in 1957.
Vanocur reported on politics for NBC from 1957 to 1971. After a brief interlude at the Public Broadcasting Service in the early 1970s, he was a television columnist for the Washington Post in the mid-1970s. He then returned to political reporting, for ABC News, where he was also a vice president.
He was born Sander Vinocur in Cleveland on Jan. 8, 1928, to Louis and Rose (Millman) Vinocur. His father was a lawyer. After his parents divorced in 1941, his mother took Sander and his sister, Roberta, to Illinois to live and changed the spelling of their surname to Vanocur.
Vanocur’s first wife, Edith Pick Vanocur, a fashion designer who became a food columnist for The Washington Post, died in 1975. He married Virginia Backus that same year. She survives him, as do Christopher, his son from his first marriage; a stepdaughter, Daphne Wood Hicks; and two grandchildren. Another son, Nicholas, also from Vanocur’s first marriage, died in 2015.