Smith, Howard K. (12 May 1914-15 Feb. 2002), radio and television journalist, news analyst, and network anchor, was born Howard Kingsbury Smith Jr. in Ferriday, Louisiana, the son of Howard Kingsbury Smith Sr. and Agnes "Minnie" Cates Smith, farmers. Precocious and athletic, Howard won a scholarship to Tulane University, where he majored in journalism and graduated with honors. "I intended all my life to work on newspapers," Smith said in an interview in 1997. "But I finished college in 1936, during the depths of the Depression, and could not get a job. My German teacher informed me he could arrange a scholarship for me at Heidelberg University, if I could pay my own way to Europe" (Marc). He used the prize money he won in a student writing contest to book passage.

A summer in Nazi-ruled Germany was a pivotal experience. Smith became fluent in German, which prepared him to become a war correspondent soon after, with responsibilities beyond his years. Moreover his firsthand observation of life under the Nazi dictatorship politicized his thinking in ways that profoundly affected his character and values.

Returning to Louisiana that fall, Smith was hired as a reporter for the New Orleans Item-Tribune. Within a year, however, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, and in the summer of 1937 he crossed the Atlantic again to begin graduate study at Oxford University. His anti-Nazi views were met with apathy or scorn by many of his aristocratic British classmates, leading Smith to participate in protests against the "appeasement" policies of Conservative prime minister Neville Chamberlain. Smith was the first American elected chair of the Oxford Labor Club.

When war broke out in 1939, Smith took a job as a reporter with United Press and, following rudimentary training in London, was sent to Berlin. He spent the next two years covering Germany and the war while enjoying the privileges of a journalist from a neutral country. In 1941 he was hired by Edward R. Murrow, who was assembling a news team in Europe for the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) radio network. "I was in Berlin during Hitler's most fruitful years, when he conquered everything and seemed unstoppable," said Smith. "I attended press meetings with Goebbels and met members of the Nazi elite, including Goerring and Hess. I saw Hitler close-up many times" (Marc).

In 1942 Smith married Benedicte Traberg, a Danish national. They had two children. Traberg also functioned as Smith's agent, negotiating his broadcasting and book contracts.

Smith angered German officials repeatedly by submitting reports of events as he saw them, even though he knew Nazi censors would not allow many items to be broadcast. Based on a tip that he would soon be interrogated by the Gestapo, Smith boarded a train to Switzerland on 6 December 1942 and crossed the border just hours before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, putting the United States and Germany in a state of war. Smith continued reporting for CBS News out of Berne until after D-Day, when he joined U.S. forces as a battleground reporter for the balance of the war. He was commissioned as a war correspondent with the Ninth Army at the rank of captain, serving in France, the Netherlands, and Germany.

In 1946 Smith succeeded Murrow as CBS News chief European correspondent in London. The Nuremberg war crimes tribunal was one of the many important stories he covered in postwar Europe. Asked how he was able to maintain an objective tone in reporting the story, he said, "I didn't begin my acquaintance with Nazism at Nuremberg. My rage occurred much earlier--when I could see it [a policy of genocide] coming" (Marc). During an eleven-year tenure as head of the London bureau, Smith established himself as a leading American journalist in foreign affairs, winning four Overseas Press Club Awards (1951-1954) and many other honors. He maintained a daily news analysis program on CBS radio and, as the network's director of European correspondents, helped to shape the reporting of international news on television. While in London, he wrote his second book, The State of Europe (1949), in which he described the emerging character of Cold War Europe.

Smith returned to the United States to join the CBS Washington, D.C., bureau in 1957, taking his first domestic assignment in sixteen years of broadcast journalism. While in Washington, he continued to offer his daily radio broadcast, in which he focused on foreign affairs, and he also became familiar to television viewers. In 1960 Smith secured a place for himself in media history as moderator of the initial debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, the first debate between major party presidential candidates ever televised. Despite the hoopla that surrounded the event, Smith felt it was more of "a series of promotional messages" delivered by the candidates than a debate (Marc). That same year he won three of the most prestigious honors in broadcast journalism, a George Polk Memorial Award, an Emmy Award, and a George Foster Peabody Award, for "The Population Explosion," an hour-long documentary. Smith was considered for the anchor position in a daily dinnertime half-hour television news program that the network was launching. When the job went to Walter Cronkite in 1961, Smith was named Washington bureau chief.

"I did a lot of television and I was reasonably good at it, but I never really cottoned to it," said Smith, who preferred to give the news on radio and get the news in print. "I never saw anybody who enjoyed being on TV as much as Cronkite. He would do any show [in the early days]. He did old history pieces on You Are There. He appeared with Jack Paar. He loved television and I think it showed. I always found it mechanical" (Marc).

Smith's career at CBS came to an abrupt end in 1961. While working on "Who Speaks for Birmingham?" a documentary for the CBS Reports television series, Smith and his film crew witnessed members of the Ku Klux Klan beating a group of Freedom Riders (black and white civil rights advocates who had ridden in a bus together to test segregation laws). Birmingham police officers were standing nearby but refused to intervene. That evening Smith reported the incident on his radio program, ending the broadcast with this quotation from the eighteenth-century British philosopher Edmund Burke: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." When Smith submitted the script for "Who Speaks for Birmingham?" he proposed to end the program with the Burke quotation, but Richard Salant, president of CBS News, deleted it, accusing Smith of "editorializing." Smith protested to the CBS board chair William S. Paley, who invited him to lunch and fired him.

In a matter of days Smith was hired by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), which had long been a poor third among the three major broadcasting networks in news reporting. For the next seventeen years Smith was a dominant figure at ABC News, anchoring, coanchoring, or offering analysis on the network's daily evening news broadcast, interviewing world leaders and celebrities on Issues and Answers, producing and hosting documentaries for the series ABC Scope, and offering his daily radio broadcast, Howard K. Smith--News and Comment, on the ABC radio network.

Smith's style--concise, fact-based, and logical--was greatly admired in the industry, even by those who disagreed with his views or disagreed with the idea that broadcast journalists should express their views. His politics were consistent as well. A liberal on domestic issues, he spoke straightforwardly in favor of civil rights and social-support programs. A hawk on foreign policy, he steadfastly supported continuing the Vietnam War long after public opinion had turned against it. Smith's son Jack Smith was wounded in Vietnam, but Smith always insisted his support for the war stemmed from his belief that abandoning the fight would be equivalent to the disastrous appeasement policies of the Western democracies in 1930s Europe. Nixon rewarded Smith for his support of the war in 1969 by granting him the first televised one-on-one interview conducted with a sitting president. Smith, as the grand old man of the underdeveloped news operation at ABC, enjoyed far more freedom in expressing his opinions during the 1960s and 1970s than any of his counterparts at CBS or NBC. Smith died of pneumonia aggravated by congestive heart failure in his home in Bethesda, Maryland, near Washington, D.C.

Smith's personal library, including papers, photographs, and mementos, were offered at auction by Benedicte Traberg Smith on 5 Mar. 2005 at Waverly Auctions, a subsidiary of Quinn's Auction Galleries. The audiotape and transcripts of an oral history interview that David Marc conducted with Smith on 8 Dec. 1997 are in the collections of Syracuse University Library. Smith wrote two books about World War II and its aftermath. Last Train from Berlin (1942; 2000) recounts his experiences as a journalist living in Nazi Germany during the years between the invasion of Poland and U.S. entry into the war; the 2000 edition includes a new introduction by the author. The State of Europe (1949) offers a cold warrior's view of the divided Europe that lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union. After a decade of living in the city, Smith wrote Washington, D.C.: The Story of Our Nation's Capital (1967). His autobiography is Events Leading up to My Death: The Life of a Twentieth-Century Reporter (1996). A finely detailed look at Smith's career in broadcasting is Albert Auster, "Smith, Howard K.," Museum of Broadcast Communications Web site, http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/S/htmlS/smithhoward/smithhoward.htm. Obituaries are in the New York Times, 19 Feb. 2002, and the London Independent, 20 Feb. 2002.