AWARD DATE: 1966
AWARD NAME: Best Television Interpretation of Foreign Affairs
AWARD RECIPIENT: Howard K. Smith
AWARD RECIPIENT AFFILIATION: ABC News
AWARD HONORED WORK: Analytical reports from Vietnam
This is Howard K. Smith’s third OPC award for interpreting the news; he has also won four OPC awards for his top reporting from abroad. The judges selected the ABC news commentator for his “analytical reports from Vietnam.”
Smith, 52, commentator on ABC’s Peter Jennings television newscast and anchorman on the weekly “ABC Scope: The Vietnam War” series, has been in radio and television for more than a quarter of a century. Before joining ABC in 1961, he was with CBS for 20 years.
A Rhodes Scholar, Smith began his news career with United Press in London in 1939, moved to Copenhagen and Berlin, where he joined CBS in 1941. He was expelled from Germany, covered occupied Europe from Switzerland until 1944, when he moved to Paris. He then covered the Allied sweep through Belgium, Holland and Germany. He was in Marshall Zhoukov’s headquarters the day the
Germans surrendered. In 1946, he covered the Nuremberg war crimes trials.
His major CBS projects included “CBS Reports,” “Face the Nation,” “Eyewitness to History,” and “The Greatest Challenge.” He won an Emmy for “CBS Reports: The Population Explosion.”
He was born in Ferriday, LA.