Mr. Plante joined CBS News as a reporter and assignment editor in 1964 — two years after Walter Cronkite assumed the anchor’s chair on the network’s nightly news — and retired as senior White House correspondent in 2016, having become in his own right one of the most visible newsmen on television.
Like many journalists, Mr. Plante had the proverbial front-row seat to history. Unlike many colleagues, he also had, more than occasionally over the years, a front-row seat in the White House briefing room.
Having covered the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — a run interrupted by an assignment covering the State Department during George H.W. Bush’s administration — Mr. Plante was one of the longest-tenured White House TV journalists in history, according to CBS.
“Bill was a friendly rival, always willing to share insights,” Tom Brokaw, the longtime former anchor of the “NBC Nightly News” wrote in an email, describing Mr. Plante as “a smart, serious journalist with a droll, self deprecating style.”
Many TV viewers remembered Mr. Plante for his distinctive baritone, a voice that bespoke the gravitas of the “Tiffany Network,” as CBS long was known. Fellow reporters, meanwhile, knew him for his lungs — a pair of organs “often in service” to the entire White House press corps, recalled journalist Lesley Stahl, who covered the White House for CBS with Mr. Plante before becoming a “60 Minutes” correspondent.
“Bill could boom out questions to a President over impossibly vast distances,” Stahl commented, such as across the White House lawn or over the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base. The president would “invariably answer … giving us all the lede,” she continued, using the journalistic term for the most important news of the day.
Mr. Plante appeared on “CBS This Morning” and the “CBS Evening News,” anchoring the Sunday evening news broadcast from 1988 to 1995. But he was perhaps best known as a White House correspondent, covering events from the Iran-contra scandal during the Reagan administration to the 2008 election of Obama, the nation’s first African American president.
The job frequently placed Mr. Plante in conflict with White House press secretaries and other officials — sometimes the president himself — who resented his digging and needling.
In 2007, when President George W. Bush announced the resignation of political strategist Karl Rove, Mr. Plante yelled out what some attendees regarded as an impertinent question: “If he’s so smart, why did you lose Congress?” (The question referred to the 2006 midterm elections, which Bush had characterized as a “thumpin’ ” of Republicans.)
“The President, as usual, didn’t answer,” Mr. Plante later wrote. “That’s OK — he doesn’t have to if he doesn’t want to. But judging by some of the reaction, you’d think I had been shouting obscenities in church!”
“There was no time to frame that question because the event … was a statement, not a news conference. So I asked a more direct one. I thought it unlikely that they would answer, but it’s always worth a try,” he continued. “Reporters are not here as guests. We’re here to ask questions. Why? Because if we were ever to agree to ‘behave,’ we’d be walking away from our First Amendment role — and then we really would be the shills we’re so often accused of being.”
It was neither the first nor the last time that Mr. Plante irritated a commander in chief; on one occasion, Clinton reportedly apologized for his angry reaction to an unflattering…
Read More: Bill Plante, CBS News correspondent for a half-century, dies at 84
