Phil Jones Dies: Longtime CBS News Correspondent Who Reported On Vietnam, Watergate, Politics Was 87
Phil Jones, who as a CBS News correspondent covered some of Washington’s most momentous political battles including Watergate and President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, has died. He was 87.
The network said that Jones died over the weekend in Florida. Watch a CBS News tribute reel below.
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Jones began his career at an Indiana TV station before leaving to work at WCCO-TV in Minneapolis for seven years. He was one of the first local reporters to go to Vietnam, in 1965, and he later returned, according to the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame.
He joined CBS News in 1969. He was recognized with an Emmy for his work covering Vietnam and, according to the network, was among the correspondents known as “Cronkite’s kids,” the team of reporters who were proteges to then-anchor Walter Cronkite.
Jones was present on the White House lawn as Richard Nixon resigned and left on Marine One, and then covered the administration of his successor, Gerald Ford.
As Douglas Brinkley wrote in his biography of Cronkite, Jones was part of a “first rate” CBS Evening News lineup in the mid-1970s, “perhaps even hitting a high mark” with its team. “Some media critics credited the success of the CBS Evening News to the excellence of the roving correspondents rather than to the anchor,” Brinkley wrote.
Jones had been transferred to Washington in 1972, covering legal aspects of Watergate from the federal court building. The next year, he was working a Saturday shift when he was assigned to do a story on a day in the life of Ford, then just designated to be the next vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned.
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He recalled in an interview in 2009 for the Gerald Ford Foundation, “So I showed up like at five-thirty, six o’clock in Alexandria [at the Ford home], and stood out there and waited for something to happen with Jerry Ford. And that’s when I first met him. I traveled with him for the next ten months, spent more time with him than I did my own family, and then when he became president, I moved to the White House.”
Later, Jones covered Capitol Hill, including the Iran Contra scandal in 1987 and the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton in 1999. He also was a correspondent for 48 Hours. One of his most memorable assignments for the newsmagazine was interviewing Washington, D.C. mayor Marion Barry, then suspected of drug use.
CBS News’ Susan Zirinsky wrote on Threads that Jones “did it all.”
“So many stories from all over the globe” she wrote, adding that “he made us better journalists and he made us laugh.”
Jones retired from CBS News in 2001.
Jones grew up on a farm in Indiana, where he recalled in the 2009 interview that he “used to milk cows by hand and drove the tractor, and I was a farm-son. When I was on the farm I wanted to be a broadcaster, and I wanted to be a newsman.”
“I don’t know what inspired it. Suddenly I had this desire to do it,” Jones said in the interview with Richard Norton Smith.
Jones is survived by a son, Paul, and a daughter, Pam, the network said.
Here is CBS News’ video tribute to Jones:
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