CBS News correspondent Bill Plante is dead at 84 as confirmed by his family.
As a journalist for CBS News, Plante spent half a century documenting historical events on American television, including the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement.
His wife, Robin Smith, reported that respiratory failure was the cause of death.
In 1964, just two years after Walter Cronkite became the anchor position for the evening news, Plante began working for CBS as a reporter and assignment editor.
Between 1988 and 1995, Plante also anchored the CBS Evening News on Sunday evenings.
As the top White House correspondent for four US presidents—Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—Plante retired in 2016.
According to CBS, he has one of the longest TV careers among White House reporters.
He frequently disagreed with White House press secretaries and occasionally the president throughout his stint as the White House correspondent.
Tom Brokaw, a former anchor of NBC Nightly News, said of Bill, “Bill was a friendly rival, always prepared to share information.”
“A sharp, serious journalist with a sardonic, self-deprecating manner,” was how he described Plante.
Plante frequently disagreed with White House press secretaries and occasionally the president during his stint as the White House correspondent.
According to reports, President Clinton once apologised to Plante for answering one of his queries angrily.
“You want to pose a question that doesn’t easily allow a simple yes or no answer — especially if it’s an accusatory question that can be answered with a one-liner,” Plante told the Minneapolis Star Triune in 1997.
“I have no wasted sympathy on any occupant of the White House,” he added. “They are out to present themselves in the best possible light, and it’s our job to find out, if we can, what’s actually going on.”
On January 14, 1938, Plante was born in Chicago to a field engineer father and a school administrator mother.
Following his graduation from Loyola Academy in 1955, he enrolled at Loyola University Chicago, where he earned a humanities degree in 1959.
Around the age of 17 or 18, while working at a classical music radio station in Evanston, Illinois, Plante developed an interest in broadcasting.
Plante left Chicago-Kent Law School to take a position at a Milwaukee television station after being recommended for it, and he later graduated from Columbia University with a journalism fellowship.
