AWARD DATE: 1968
AWARD NAME: Best TV Interpretation of Foreign Affairs
AWARD RECIPIENT: Charles Collingswood
AWARD RECIPIENT AFFILIATION: CBS News
AWARD HONORED WORK: Reports from Hanoi
He long since qualified as one of those foreign correspondents you has been everywhere and seen everything, but Charles Collingswood of CBS News retains every which of his zest for the fresh, big story. He was in Mexico, only six weeks into a planned sabbatical year 1968, one word came that he had been cleared for admittance to North Vietnam–the first American network newsman to cover the country in recent years. He leaped back into action.
During the week after his arrival there in late March, he produced the two television features–”Charles Collingswood’s Report from Hanoi”, and “Hanoi: A Report by Charles Collingswood” – which radio audiences saw during April and for which the judging panel handed him the palm in the current OPC awards.
From Hanoi he went to Paris for the preliminary peace talks that opened last May, resuming the post he has held since 1964, as chief European correspondent for CBS News. He’s currently based in London.
The peripatetic Mr. Collingswood has been shuttling around the world since 1939, when he was graduated cum laude from Princeton and picked up a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. He also won a
scholarship for study of international affairs in Geneva, and was in that capital when the second world war erupted. Abandoning his studies, he joined the United Press as a reporter in London, and two years later transferred there to CBS News bureau under Edward R Murrow.
In 1942 he won a Peabody Award for his coverage of the Allied invasion of North Africa, and a year later was cited by the National Headlines Club for consistently accurate and interesting reports of
the fighting in North Africa.
With the exception of the two-year leave in the 1950s as special assistant to a Averell Harriman then Director of Mutual Security in Washington, Collingswood has been on scene and on microphone for CBS News for three decades, in the places and at the times when history was being made.
He was one of 16 correspondents to cover the Germans capitulation at Rheims, ending the second world war, and in 1965 in the same city, he reported on “Victory in Europe–20 Years After”. He was his
networks first United Nations correspondent; has broadcasted on the White House and the President at home and abroad; and on United States involvement in South Vietnam affairs, over the past 10 years.
His competence has been attested by many awards and honors, including decoration as a Chevalier the French Legion of Honor.
Citation of Excellence: Howard K. Smith, ABC News, for regular commentaries on the ABC Evening News with Frank Reynolds.