Tom Fenton, ‘Dean of American Foreign Correspondents,’ Has Died

Tom Fenton.

Tom Fenton, former CBS News correspondent, died July 16 in Novato, California. He was 94. 

CBS described him as “the dean of American foreign correspondents.”

Fenton spent close to a decade in the Navy after graduating from Dartmouth. After a stint at the Baltimore Sun, he joined CBS News in 1970, starting in Rome before moving to bureaus in Tel Aviv, Paris, London and Moscow. He covered the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, the first Gulf War in 1991 and the fall of communism in the Soviet Union, among other international crises. The wars he reported on included the India-Pakistan War in 1971 and the Arab-Israeli War in 1973. 

Fenton retired in 2004. 

“Tom is the embodiment of the wise and worldly CBS News correspondent,” then-CBS News president Andrew Heyward said when Fenton retired. “He is equally at home dodging bullets on a battlefield or prowling the corridors of power in London or Moscow or Jerusalem. In a world where civility is increasingly a casualty of competitive pressures, Tom holds steady to that most old-fashioned of virtues: He's a true gentleman.”