Acclaimed foreign correspondent Bernard Redmont dies at 98

CANTON, Mass. – Bernard S. Redmont, an acclaimed former foreign correspondent for CBS News and other news organizations who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, has died. He was 98.

Redmont died Monday while in hospice care in Canton, Massachusetts, said his son, Dennis Redmont, a former longtime bureau chief in Rome for The Associated Press.

Born in New York City in 1918, Bernard Redmont enlisted in the U.S. Marines in 1943, serving as a combat correspondent in the Marshall Islands and receiving the Purple Heart.

He was Argentina bureau chief for World Report, the forerunner to U.S. News & World Report, during Juan Peron’s dictatorship in the late 1940s, and later was assigned to Paris.

Subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify in one of the trials of Commerce Department official William Remington, Redmont refused to name Remington as a communist. He subsequently lost his job at World Report and remained blacklisted for a decade.

“Bern Redmont, in addition to being a superb journalist, was a man of absolute and unflinching integrity, which cost him dearly in the McCarthy era. But he overcame and became one of American broadcasting’s premier foreign correspondents,” said Claude Erbsen, a retired AP vice-president and director of world services.

Redmont stayed in Paris, joining the English desk of Agence France-Presse. He later reported for the Canadian Broadcasting Co. and Westinghouse Broadcasting Corp., as well as CBS News in Moscow.

He won Overseas Press Club awards in 1968 for his coverage from Egypt of the Six-Day War and again in 1973 for his reporting on peace talks to end the Vietnam War. That same year, French President Georges Pompidou awarded him the Legion of Honor.

Later, Redmont became a professor of journalism at Boston University and rose to dean of BU’s College of Communication, working there through the 1980s. During his academic career, he lectured in the U.S., France, Britain, Italy, Morocco, Russia and China and was a vocal supporter of press freedom in Central America.

Redmont was preceded in death by his wife, Joan. He is survived by his son; a daughter, Jane Carol Redmont, of Boston; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

A memorial service is planned in the Boston area this spring.