R.I.P.

Bill Plante, Longtime White House Correspondent for CBS News, Dies at 84

Plante’s tenure at CBS spanned the administrations of Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama.

William “Bill” Plante, a longtime fixture of the CBS News roster whose tenure as White House correspondent spanned the administrations of every president from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, died Wednesday at his home in Washington, D.C. His family attributed the death to respiratory failure. He was 84. Plante retired from CBS in 2016, following a half-century spent with the network covering history as it unfolded, including the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Joining CBS in 1964 as a reporter and assignment editor, Plante began covering politics in Chicago before shifting to cover the White House in 1986, when Reagan was in his second term. “He was brilliant, as a reporter and as a human being,” said 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, with whom Plante covered the White House for a decade. “There wasn’t anything Bill didn’t excel at in our profession: He was a gifted writer, a first-class deadline maker, and a breaker of major stories. He’ll be remembered for his reports from the White House lawn, his booming voice that presidents always answered, and his kind heart.”