Richard C. Hottelet, the last of the original “Murrow’s Boys,” a group of wartime journalists hired by CBS’s legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow, has died at the age of 97.
A CBS News spokesperson said Hottelet passed away early Wednesday morning at his home in Wilton, Connecticut.
Hottelet was a foreign correspondent for the United Press in Berlin during World War II before joining CBS in 1944.
He went on to become CBS’s correspondent for the United Nations in 1960, but resigned in 1985 to join the U.S. Mission to the U.N. as its public affairs counselor.
During his time as a war correspondent, Hottelet spent four months in a Nazi prison in 1941, after the Gestapo falsely accused him of espionage. He was also in an Air Force bomber that attacked Utah Beach just minutes before the start of the Allied D-day invasion. In December 1944, Hottelet was the first to report the German counteroffensive that became the Battle of the Bulge.
The legendary “Murrow’s Boys” were all found by Murrow, starting in 1937. They included some of journalism’s most prominent figures, such as Eric Sevareid, William Shirer, Charles Collingwood, Larry LeSueur, Winston Burdette and Howard K. Smith.
“It was not our job to inspire people, to educate, to move them,” Hottelet told The Hartford Courant in 2003. “It was our job to tell them what was going on.”
Hottelet is survived by four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. His wife, Ann Delafield Hottelet, died in 2013.
Watch Hottelet’s reporting on D-day here.