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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.
Jones began his career at an Indiana TV station, and then left 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.
Later, Jones covered Capitol Hill, including the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton in 1999. He also was. 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.
Jones retired from CBS News in 2001.
Jones grew up on a farm in Indiana, where he recalled in a 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.
