Fred Graham (correspondent)

Fred Patterson Graham (October 6, 1931 – December 28, 2019) was an American legal affairs journalist, television news anchor, and attorney.^[1][2] He was the chief anchor and managing editor of the former Court TV.^[3] He also won a Peabody award for his work as a CBS law correspondent.

Early life

Graham was born in

He went to a two-room school in Texarkana, Arkansas where his classmate was Ross Perot.^[2][4] Then, the family moved to Nashville, Tennessee for his father's work.^[1] He graduated from West End High School in Nashville in 1949.^[2] He attended Yale University on an academic scholarship, receiving a B.A. in 1953.^[1][2] There, he was a member of the fraternity St. Anthony Hall.

Graham was in the infantry and was an intelligence officer of the United States Marine Corps from 1953 to 1956.^[1][2] He served in both Korea and Japan.^[2]

He then attended Vanderbilt University Law School, receiving an LL.B. in 1959.^[2] There, he became a member of the Order of the Coif and was the managing editor of the Vanderbilt Law Review.^[2]

As a

From 1960 to 1963, Graham went into private practice with the firm of Trabue, Sturdivant and Harbison in Nashville, Tennessee.^[2] In January 1963, he moved to Washington D.C. to serve as the chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments.^[2] In October 1963, he then worked as a special assistant to Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz.^[2]

In February 1965, he was the first attorney hired to be a Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times, working there until 1972.^[1][2] In addition to the Supreme Court, he covered the Justice Department in an era of racial tensions and violence.^[1]

He was a legal correspondent for

However, as television news became film focused, his airtime was reduced because cameras were not allowed in the courtroom.[1] In 1987, he was laid off from CBS during a period of staff reduction.^[1] Graham found a new position as a local news anchor of WKRN-TV, the ABC affiliate in Nashville, for two years.^[1] During this time he wrote Happy Talk: Confessions of a TV Newsman which was published in 1990.^[1] In this memoir of his twenty years as a broadcast journalist, he stated that network news had become “infotainment, the equivalent of a well-produced video version of a tabloid.”^[1]

In 1991, cameras were allowed in the courtroom for criminal trials. Graham was hired as the managing editor, chief anchor, and one of the first four anchors of

Graham was a founding member of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.[2] He wrote articles for magazines Esquire, Harper’s, and The New Republic, as well as the newspapers Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.^[1]

Awards

• 1974: Peabody Award^[5]
• 1974: Silver Gavel Award – Television, for his series of four reports on the U.S. Supreme court as broadcast on the CBS Evening News^[6]
• 1980: Silver Gavel Award – Radio, for the CBS Radio Network's special report, "The Supreme Court on the Air: The Pentagon Papers Case Revisited"^[7]
• 3 Emmy Awards^[1]

Publications

Books

• Happy Talk: Confessions of a TV Newsman. Norton & Company, 1990.
  ISBN 9780393027761^[1]
• The Alias Program. Little, Brown & Co., 1976.
  ISBN 978-0316322980^[4]
• Press Freedom Under Pressure. The Twentieth Century Fund, 1972
  ISBN 9780527027827^[4]
• The Self-Inflicted Wound. MacMillan Publishing Company. 1970.
  ISBN 978-0025450202^[4]
• The Due Process Revolution: The Warren Court's Impact on Criminal Law. Hayden Book Company, 1970.

• "Politics, the Constitution, and the Warren Court." with Arthur Selwyn Miller, Philip B. Kurland, and Stephen L. Wasby. Columbia Law Review. 2006; 71: 502.[8]

Personal life

He married Sheila Lucile McCrea in 1961.^[1] They had three children before divorcing in 1982.^[1] He married Skila Harris in 1982.^[1][4]

In 2019, he died at 88 in Washington, D.C., from complications of Parkinson’s Disease.^[1][2]

References