Bill McLaughlin, an award-winning diplomatic and foreign correspondent who headed bureaus in Germany and Lebanon for CBS News in the late 1960s and ‘70s died Friday morning. He was 76 and lived in France. McLaughlin died from cardiac arrest in a Connecticut hospital. He was visiting friends in the U.S.
McLaughlin’s television news career spanned 27 years, nearly all of it with CBS News; he left for two years in 1979 to report for NBC News at the United Nations.
McLaughlin joined CBS News as a reporter in 1966 in Paris. He was named bureau chief in Bonn, West Germany in 1968. He served there until being sent to cover the Vietnam War in 1969. In 1971, he was named bureau chief in Beirut, from which he covered conflicts in the Middle East, including the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. His coverage of the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics won an Overseas Press Club award.
From 1983 to 1993, when he left CBS news, he was a State Department correspondent, and general assignment reporter in the Washington Bureau.
Besides his wife, the former Huguette Cord’homme, whom he met while on assignment in Paris, he also leaves behind a son, Liam, and daughter-in-law Joslyn, of New York City; a granddaughter and a stepson in Paris, Julien Bodard.