ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, July 13, 1996 TAG: 9607150072
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: Associated Press
John Chancellor, a pioneer of television journalism who brought Midwestern forthrightness and a reassuring manner to reporting, anchoring and wide-ranging commentary, died Friday. He was 68.
Chancellor, who underwent treatment for stomach cancer in 1994, died at his home, said NBC spokeswoman Beth Comstock. He would have been 69 Sunday.
He spent more than 40 years at NBC, reported from more than 50 foreign countries and lived in five, with a two-year hiatus as director of the Voice of America in the 1960s. He retired in 1993.
``When I started at NBC in 1950, I was one of its first television reporters,'' Chancellor said in a 1993 Associated Press interview. ``We only had three or four.''
``By 1952, we knew TV would be more powerful than radio, and this place [NBC News] really got going.''
Chancellor first came to the attention of a national TV audience in 1957 as NBC's senior correspondent covering the school integration crisis in Little Rock, Ark.
A panelist on the 1960 televised debates between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, Chancellor had interviewed every U.S. president since Harry Truman, every British prime minister since Clement Atlee and every Israeli prime minister since Golda Meier.
He was in Berlin when the Wall was built in 1961, and he was there when it was torn down in 1989.
Among his posts over the years: correspondent in Moscow, Vienna and Brussels, Belgium; ``Today'' show host (1961-62); and national affairs correspondent.
From 1970 to 1982, he was anchorman of the ``NBC Nightly News''; from then until his retirement in 1993, he delivered commentaries.
He described his commentary chores as ``a job that had nothing really to do with television. I just got to write whatever I wanted, and I got 12 to 15 million people to look at it every day. I didn't have to do TV. I just did me.'' He estimated he did 1,500 commentaries, ``and I've never been sued.''
``I've been yelled at a lot, but never sued. I'm proud of that.''
Covering his last political convention in 1992 - 40 years after his first - he groused that stage management and a dearth of old-fashioned politicking had made the gatherings ``about as interesting as the Miss America pageant. They've taken all the fun out of it, and then they complain that nobody watches it and we don't cover it.''
He had a solution in a 1990 book, ``Peril and Promise'': scrapping the primary system, holding state conventions to pick delegates to national conventions, and sending the national delegates to an arena somewhere to hash it all out.
Chancellor's most memorable convention appearance came with the Republicans who nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964. He was arrested for blocking an aisle while interviewing someone. Television viewers watched Chancellor led out of the hall, giving play by play into his microphone: ``Here we go down the middle aisle. ... I've been promised bail, ladies and gentlemen, by my office.''
``This is John Chancellor, somewhere in custody.''
``I've really enjoyed every day of the work at NBC,'' he said in the 1993 AP interview. ``Now, it's time to go.'' And lamenting the changes in TV news, he added, ``Besides, I really think I've outlived the culture here.'' NBC dropped regular commentary from its newscast after Chancellor retired but resumed it when it hired Bill Moyers in early 1995.
He said today's corporate owners of networks, including GE, which took over NBC in 1986, ``believe that television people are interchangeable parts.''
More recently, he was narrator of Ken Burns' nine-part Public Broadcasting Service documentary, ``Baseball.''
Chancellor and AP Special Correspondent Walter Mears were co-authors of a book, ``The News Business'' in 1983. An updated version, ``The New News Business'' was published in 1995.
In a 1995 People magazine interview, he said that his diagnosis of cancer ``made me mad and frightened - and that's a very toxic cocktail.'' But he underwent surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatments, and was feeling better and getting on with his life.
``As I read somewhere, `You want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans.'''
Chancellor was born July 14, 1927, in Chicago and began his journalism career at the Chicago Sun-Times. He moved on to broadcast news in local radio in Chicago, and moved to NBC television in 1950.
In 1965, he was appointed by President Johnson to head Voice of America, the radio arm of the U.S. Information Agency. The first professional journalist to hold the post, Chancellor insisted that VOA broadcasts be solid journalism, not government propaganda.
He also pressed his staff to put out broadcasts that ``sound American. They must reflect the current image of the United States as an interesting, dynamic and up-tempo place.''
LENGTH: Medium: 93 linesby CNB