Safer began his
journalism career as a reporter for various newspapers in Ontario (
Woodstock Sentinel-Review, London Free Press, and
Toronto Telegram) and England (
Reuters and
Oxford Mail), in 1955. He later joined the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) as a correspondent and producer.
International news and war correspondent One of his first jobs with CBC was to produce
CBC News Magazine in 1956, where his first on-screen appearance as a journalist was covering the
Suez Crisis in Egypt. the
Arab-Israeli war of 1967, and the
Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. United States President
Lyndon Johnson reacted to this report angrily, calling CBS's president and accusing Safer and his colleagues of having undermined America's role there. Safer's report received the
George Polk Award in 1965. Some ex-Marines who saw Safer's story on television during the war shared President Johnson's opinion. They claim that Safer never had time to be properly briefed on the operation, and was therefore not aware that four Marines had already been killed there and 27 wounded. Ex-Marine Larry Engelmann, author of a story on the Vietnam War, claimed Safer's story was "highly sensational". Justifying collective punishment, he alleged: "The fact is that this village had been a pretty tough village and these people had been warned repeatedly that the village would be torched if they continued to shoot at Marines … But there was none of that in Morley Safer's story." In the
PBS series
Reporting America At War, Safer himself said, " … the denials themselves were absurd. [Officials claimed] I had gone on a practice operation in a model village—a village the Marines had built to train guys how to move into a village. Or the whole thing was a kind of '
Potemkin' story that I had concocted. There are still people who believe that." After the incident was broadcast, Marines were forbidden from burning any more villages. Brig. Gen. Joe Stringham, who commanded a Green Beret unit, commented that Safer "was all business and he reported what he saw… We looked at eternity right in the face a couple of times … and he was as cool as a hog on ice." His trip was the basis of a
60 Minutes show in 1989, which Safer said got a reaction of annoyance from some veterans, and a positive reaction from others.
60 Minutes reporter in the
White House Solarium in August 1975 before filming
an interview with her for 60 Minutes In 1970, CBS producer
Don Hewitt asked Safer to replace
Harry Reasoner on
60 Minutes, as Reasoner had just left to anchor the
ABC Evening News. Hewitt had created
60 Minutes, and he was, according to
Diane Sawyer, the program's "guiding, self-renewing, revitalizing genius." Safer, who had been covering the funeral of
Charles de Gaulle in Paris, accepted the new position and joined
60 Minutes. The show had by then aired for only two seasons, and Safer, who had until that time reported and traveled alone, recalled that he accepted the new position on condition that if the show failed, he would be given his old job back: "I was the new kid, with a lot of pressure, because we were trying something new. We were utterly unheard of. I was utterly a stranger to working in a head office." The story garnered numerous awards for Safer. In 1994, he hosted a CBS News Special,
One for the Road: A Conversation with Charles Kuralt and Morley Safer, which marked Kuralt's retirement from CBS. He retired after 46 years and 919 stories for CBS, a week before his death; by then, Safer had set the record for the show's longest-serving correspondent. A few days after he retired, CBS broadcast an hour-long special, ''Morley Safer: A Reporter's Life''. During his 60-year career as a broadcast journalist, Safer received numerous awards, including 12
Emmys, and a Lifetime Achievement Emmy from the
National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 1966 when he was only 35; this was remarkable because the award is usually given after a lifetime of work. Including his three
Overseas Press Awards, three
Peabody Awards, two
Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, and the
Paul White Award from the
Radio-Television News Directors Association, Safer won every major award given in broadcast journalism. Safer narrated several documentaries, including Exodus 1947 (1997), American Experience (1997), American Masters (1996), Bicentennial Minutes (1975), and Saigon (1957). ==The Morley Safer Award for Outstanding Reporting==