Former CBS News correspondent Tom Fenton, a Navy veteran and an award-winning reporter who was known as the dean of American foreign correspondents, died Tuesday morning, his son confirmed to CBS News. He was 94.
Tom Fenton Jr. said in a statement that his father died in Novato, California.
“He spent 34 cherished years at CBS, a time he truly loved,” the younger Fenton said.
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Tom Fenton joined CBS News in 1970, starting his decades-long career for the network in Rome before moving to bureaus in Tel Aviv, Israel; Paris; London; and Moscow, covering major developments in Europe, the Middle East and the countries of the former Soviet Union.
Fenton covered the downfall of communism in the USSR and the rise of the ayatollah in Iran. He reported on the India-Pakistan War in 1971, the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 and other conflicts. In 1997, he was part of the award-winning CBS News team that covered the death of Princess Diana.
“Tom is the embodiment of the wise and worldly CBS News correspondent,” then-CBS News President Andrew Heyward said when Fenton retired in 2004. “He is equally at home dodging bullets on a battlefield or prowling the corridors of power in London or Moscow or Jerusalem. In a world where civility is increasingly a casualty of competitive pressures, Tom holds steady to that most old-fashioned of virtues: He’s a true gentleman.”
Before his time at CBS News, Fenton worked for the Baltimore Sun in the 1960s. He served in the Navy for nearly a decade after graduating from Dartmouth College in 1952.