R.I.P.: CBS News Correspondent Eric Enberg

Eric Enberg

Eric Engberg, a former political and investigative reporter for CBS News who also covered overseas conflicts and won electronic journalism’s top honor for a report identifying a Vietnam veteran buried in the Tomb of the Unknowns, has died.

He was 74, according to Deadline 

Engberg died Sunday in his sleep at his home in Palmetto, FL, where he retired.

“One of the best television correspondents of his generation,” former longtime CBS newsman Dan Rather said today. He called Engberg “tough but fair, and that rarity: a hard-nosed reporter with a sense of humor.”

Engberg made news last year from retirement. In February 2015, questions arose about Bill O’Reilly’s claim of reporting from a dangerous war zone during the Falklands War in 1982. Engberg had been with O’Reilly, then a CBS News correspondent, and other reporters who were prevented from reaching the front and were contained in Buenos Aires, where there was street violence.

Born on September 18, 1941, in Highland Park, IL, Engberg appeared on CBS Evening News for nearly three decades. He joined the division’s New York bureau in 1975 as a correspondent and was sent to the Dallas bureau the next year. He joined the Washington bureau in 1981, where he remained until his retirement in 2002. Before joining CBS News, Engberg got one of the biggest scoops of his career when he reported the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew in a Baltimore courtroom in 1973.

He might be best remembered for Reality Check, a series of original segments on the federal government that ran on the broadcast network in the 1990s. It launched as a regular segment on the accuracy of charges and countercharges flung about in the 1992 presidential campaign and grew from there.