Tuesday, August 27, 2013

R.I.P.: CBS News Correspondent Bruce Dunning

Bruce Dunning
Bruce Dunning, the CBS News correspondent whose 1975 television report on the last flight from Da Nang vividly captured the frantic end of the Vietnam War, died Monday in New York.

He was 73.

The retired CBS newsman died at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan from injuries suffered in a fall. He lived in Union, City, N.J., where he had resided since his retirement from CBS in 2005.

As a young correspondent reporting on the Vietnam War, Dunning developed an affinity for the region and spent most of his 35-year career at CBS News in the Far East, where he rose to become Asia bureau chief in 1989 based in Tokyo. In that position, he supervised all of the news division's operations in Asia until he retired. During that time, he served as president of the Tokyo Foreign Correspondents Club.

Dunning was the first CBS News reporter to be based in China when he opened the Beijing bureau in 1981; in 1979, he was one of the first American broadcast journalists to report from North Korea.

He is best remembered for his award-winning and dramatic report on March 29, 1975 aboard a 727 World Airways jet attempting to rescue refugees from the airport in Da Nang, South Vietnam. The five-and-a-half-minute report -- long even then for a television evening news segment -- was broadcast on the "CBS Evening News" Saturday edition anchored by Dan Rather, who introduced Dunning's segment with the words "Da Nang has become a Dunkirk."

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