Fred Friendly Dies at 82

Fred Friendly, the former president of CBS News, and a legend in broadcast journalism, died Tuesday night after a series of strokes. He was 82.

Part showman, part salesman, but always standing for accuracy and integrity, Friendly was a major influence in the development of television news and documentaries. First in partnership with Edward R. Murrow, then as President of CBS News, and finally as the producer of a series of documentaries on the fundamental freedoms of the Constitution, he consistently informed the American public and helped frame a generation of broadcast journalists. Over the years, he won 10 Peabody awards.

From 1959 to 1964, Friendly was executive producer of CBS Reports, helping to write and produce landmark programs like Harvest of Shame, Biography of a Bookie Joint and The Population Explosion.

He became president of CBS News in March 1964. He resigned in protest on Feb. 15, 1966, when the network broadcast an I Love Lucy rerun while rival NBC went live with a Senate hearing on Vietnam.

In honoring Friendly last year, the Committee to Protect Journalism called him "an inspiring and courageous leader. A principal exponent of the importance of a free press in a democracy, he challenged a fledgling industry to realize its potential to inform and enlighten public opinion." The committee also said of Friendly: "[He]set a standard for investigative reporting that endures to this day."

Whether producing landmark programs like See It Now with Edward R. Murrow or seminars for public television, Friendly was forever pushing himself and those around him to aim higher.

After leaving CBS, he became a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was the Ford Foundation's adviser on communications for 14 years, and created the Columbia University Seminars on Media and Society, a public television series that tackled a wide variety of issues.

In addition to his television endeavors, Friendly published numerous articles and five books, including The Good Guys, The Bad Guys and The First Amendment and Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control, an account of his 16 years at CBS.

He was quick to speak when anyone violated what he considered the principles of his profession.

Television news, he once said, was in danger of being "twisted into an electronic carnival, in which show-biz wizardry and values obscure the line between entertainment and news."

He was born Ferdinand Friendly Wachenheimer on Oct. 30, 1915, in New York City.

A childhood fascination with history and radio led him to apply for work at a Providence, R.I., radio station, WEAN, after graduation from business college there. He proposed doing a series of five-minute biographies called Footprints in the Sands of Time.

The station bought the idea, hired him to write and narrate them at $8 a script but lso decided to shorten his name for broadcast purposes to Fred Friendly. He later adopted the name change legally.

During WW II, he served with the information and education section in the U.S. Army.

In 1948, he met Murrow and they began to collaborate, first on the best-selling I Can Hear It Now album for Columbia Records an oral history of the years 1932 to 1945, then on a CBS radio network series, Hear It Now.

They took the format to television with See It Now. Its initial prime-time broadcast Nov. 18, 1951, was the first coast-to-coast TV hookup. The award-winning series, which ran seven years, included Murrow's classic examination of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's communist witch hunt.

When Friendly quit CBS, he said it was a matter of principle. Others said he had worn out his welcome with his tough, driven style. In The Powers That Be, author David Halberstam described Friendly as "a man who always came equipped with his own precipice from which to jump."

The resignation opened the door for his later work in academia and in public television.

The televised Columbia University Seminars on Media and Society brought jurists, journalists, government officials and others together to discuss on everything from libel to health care, terrorism to the Constitution.

Walter Cronkite declared them "an absolutely splendid use of television to inform and educate in a format that is at the same time delightfully entertaining and intellectually challenging."

Friendly said their purpose was "to open minds and to make the agony of decision-making so intense that you can escape only by thinking." But he cited the minority training program as his proudest achievement.

"We trained hundreds of minority journalists," he said. "One was a postman from Denver, another was Geraldo Rivera. Well, I'm not happy about him, but you take them as you find them."

Friendly married Dorothy Greene in 1947; they had three children. Their marriage ended in divorce. In 1968, he married Ruth W. Mark.

Friendly's funeral will be held Friday at 11 a.m. (EST) at Riverdale Temple in New York.

In a written statement late Wednesday, President Clinton called Friendly ''one of the giants of American journalism.''

He said that ''to this day, the programs Fred produced four decades ago rank among the finest journalism of the century, exposing the demagoguery of Joe McCarthy, the poverty of migrant farmers, and so many other social ills.''

The president says Friendly Â"was always willing to challenge the powerful.''

''He led CBS News at a time when television was just beginning to demonstrate its power to the world,'' said the president.

And ''through his many writings and television productions,'' said the president of Friendly, ''he succeeded in his goal: to force the American public to think.''

Here's hat broadcast leaders are saying about Fred Friendly:

• Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News: "Fred Friendly was one of the inventors of broadcast journalism and will remain one of its guiding lights. What we think of with pride as the CBS News tradition is a reflection of the courage, passion, and integrity that Fred Friendly embodied as a producer and later as news president. After he left CBS News, he taught a new generation of journalists who are making their mark - his mark - on our craft and our country today. He also served as a critic and a friend to those who followed him at CBS News - a tireless crusader for the highest ideals of journalism. The only road he knew was the high road, and the clear view from there helped the rest of us find our way."
• 60 Minutes correspondent Andy Rooney: "Almost obsessed with the important of the Constitution, Friendly carried a tattered copy of it in his coat pocket. On the slightest provocation, he would take it out and read it to anyone he might be talking to Â… The American people have lost a best friend they hardly knew."
• CBS News anchor Dan Rather: "Fred set the highest of standards, then lived up to them, taught them and demanded them of others. A great lovable bear of a demanding man whose passion and drive made American journalism better and made better at least two generations of American journalists."
• Mike Wallace, co-editor, 60 Minutes: "We hear the word 'giant' cast about from time to time, and sometimes deserved, sometimes not. This man is a giant ... A man of giant appetites for giving the American public, the American citizenry the best that he could do in the way of information and enlightenment, illumination. He was a newsman's newsman, and he was a hell of a fellow to work with."
• Charles "Casey" Murrow, son of Edward R. Murrow and co-director of a corporation training teachers in math, science and technology: "Fred's determination, and my dad's too, was what got [See It Now] on the air and what kept it there for so many years ... It also deserves credit for its technological innovations, and a lot of those were pushed by Fred. Once he found it was possible, he wanted to try it."
• NBC News correspondent Geraldo Rivera, a former student of Friendly's at Columbia University: "He was my No. 1 cheerleader back to legitimacy. When I went into the show-bizzy aspects of the early days of my talk show, he would kind of roll his eyes and say, 'Oh, you were my smartest student. I know you've got to make money but this is not my favorite thing'."
• ABC News Chairman Roone Arledge: "All of us in television news were saddened today to learn of Fred Friendly's passing. His remarkable career embodied the history of television news. Fred's influence will live on in the work of the many journalists he taught and guided."
• PBS journalist Bill Moyers said in 992: "Fred is an original. Everything Fred has done has been unique ... He never thinks that because something is serious it has to be dull."

  ©1998 CBS Worldwide Corp. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report