Longtime CBS White House correspondent and broadcast journalist William “Bill” Plante died Wednesday at age 84, according to the network.
His family told CBS that the cause of death was of respiratory failure.
Plante worked with CBS for more than half a century, covering the civil rights movement and reporting on the Vietnam War in four separate tours. He anchored the network’s Sunday evening broadcast “CBS Sunday Night News” for nearly a decade in the ’80s and ’90s and also appeared on “CBS This Morning.”
The storied reporter was perhaps best known for covering the White House under four U.S. presidents — Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — with a brief assignment to the State Department during George H.W. Bush’s time in office.
He retired from his senior White House correspondent role in 2016 as one of the longest-serving White House TV journalists in history.