CBS News announced that Bill Plante, a longtime CBS White House correspondent who spent 52 years with the network in various capacities, died Wednesday. He was 88 years old.
According to CBS News, Plante’s family says he died of respiratory failure.
“He was brilliant as a reporter and as a human being. There was nothing Bill our profession didn’t excel in: He was a gifted writer, a first-class deadline-maker, and a breaker of major stories. He will be remembered for his reports from the lawn of the White House, his booming voice to which the president always responded and his kind heart,” said 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl. CBS said Stahl and Plant had worked with White for a decade. House covered together.
Born in Chicago in 1938, Plante joined CBS News in 1964; Prior to this, he began his career in Chicago-area radio at age 18 following a CBS fellowship at Columbia University, before graduating in 1959, before attending Loyola University. Covering the Civil Rights Movement – including interviewing Martin Luther King during the march from Selma. As soon as he woke up, he began covering politics as part of the network’s Chicago Bureau. He also won awards for his participation in CBS News’ coverage of the Vietnam War, including the fall of Saigon in 1975.
Plante moved to CBS News’ Washington, D.C. bureau in 1976, and a decade later was appointed senior White House correspondent, a role he held for 35 years – overseeing the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Covering – During a break in the George W. Bush administration, when he covered the US State Department.
Plante retired in 2016.