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Wednesday January 4, 11:41 AM
CBS News veteran Strawser dead at 78
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Former broadcast newsman Neil
Strawser, who anchored CBS radio coverage of President John
Kennedy's assassination, the Watergate hearings and NASA space
launches, has died at age 78, the network said on Tuesday.
The veteran Washington correspondent, who left CBS News in
1986 before taking a job as a press officer on Capitol Hill,
suffered a heart attack at his home in Washington and was
pronounced dead at George Washington University Hospital
December 31, according to CBS.
Born and raised in Ohio, Strawser was a familiar face on
CBS television during the late 1950s and early '60s, appearing
frequently on the nightly 15-minute broadcast of the "CBS News
with Douglas Edwards."
Strawser was the lone TV network "pool" reporter admitted
to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in 1962 during the Cuban missile
crisis and reported the departure of freighters carrying
nuclear missiles back to the Soviet Union.
But Strawser was perhaps better known for his radio work,
most memorably as anchor of CBS Radio's four straight days of
coverage of the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath in
November 1963.
He also moderated CBS Radio coverage of NASA missions
ranging from the Gemini program through the Apollo 11 moon
landing in 1969, as well as the Senate Watergate hearings in
1973 and the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment hearings
in 1974.
Strawser got his start at CBS in 1952 as an editorial
research assistant. He was promoted to correspondent four years
later and spent his entire CBS News tenure based at the
network's Washington bureau.
Starting in 1987, Strawser became a press officer for the
House Budget Committee, from which he retired in 1994.
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