R.I.P.: Former NBC Newser Richard Valeriani

Richard Valeriani

Richard Valeriani, an NBC News correspondent who was once clubbed by an ax-wielding assailant at a civil rights demonstration, earned the ire of the Johnson and Nixon White Houses for his television reporting and later worked on the other side of the camera, advising corporate executives and celebrities as a media consultant, died fro congestive heart failure June 18 at his home in Manhattan.

He was 85, according to The Washington Post.

As an NBC reporter from 1961 to 1988, Mr. Valeriani covered the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, rallies for voting rights in the South, the globe-trotting diplomat Henry Kissinger and the U.S. response to the Iran hostage crisis under President Jimmy Carter.

He also worked as a Washington-based correspondent for the “Today” show, the network’s flagship morning news program, although he expressed little pleasure in assignments that took him away from breaking news and scooping his competitors.

Valeriani was NBC’s senior White House correspondent when he reported on an upcoming, then-secret 1967 summit between President Lyndon B. Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, in a story that apparently led the president to unleash a fusillade of profanity.

“Johnson called him into his office at the White House and said, ‘There is no . . . way that you could know this if you are not [sleeping with] a Russian broad,” Berlin recalled. “And Dick said, ‘Mr. President, I’m a married person.’ And he said, ‘That doesn’t mean [anything] with you Italians.’ ” In a memoir, the former Soviet spymaster Oleg Kalugin — then working undercover as an embassy press attache — wrote that he was the one who told Mr. Valeriani about the meeting.

Valeriani later covered the Nixon administration during the Watergate investigation, and as a State Department correspondent traveled more than half a million miles with Kissinger, the national security adviser-turned-secretary of state.