Mr. Threlkeld’s car collided with a propane tanker on a highway in Amagansett, N.Y., the police in East Hampton, where he lived, said. Mr. Threlkeld was alone in his car, the police said, and the driver of the truck was not injured. “Richard Threlkeld had the kind of name and kind of looks that could have made him a reporter in the movies, but unlike a reporter in the movies, he could write his own scripts,” Lesley Stahl, with whom he was co-anchor of “CBS Morning News” from 1977 to 1979, said in a statement. “In fact, he was one of our best writers and reporters.”
Mr. Threlkeld did two stints at CBS — from 1965 to 1982, and again from 1989 to 1998 — and the intervening seven years at ABC. Over those three decades, he covered seven presidential campaigns, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the American invasions of Panama and Grenada, the Patricia Hearst kidnapping and trial, the war in Lebanon and the Middle East peace process.
On April 29, 1975, after covering the Vietnam War, Mr. Threlkeld was aboard one of the last helicopters to lift off from the American embassy as Saigon fell to the Communists. He was in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989 and in Moscow as the Soviet Union crumbled in the 1990s. From that experience, he wrote a book, “Dispatches from the Former Evil Empire” (2001).
Mr. Threlkeld was among the first correspondents doing features for CBS’s “Sunday Morning,” which first went on the air in 1979. Three years later, Roone Arledge, then the chairman of ABC News, hired him as a correspondent for “World News Tonight.” There he began doing a regular feature, “Status Reports,” offering analysis of the week’s most important story. For seven of those reports, in 1982 and ’83, he received the prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton. In 1984, he won an Overseas Press Club award for his reporting on Lebanon and Grenada.
Born on Nov. 30, 1937, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and reared in Barrington, Ill., Mr. Threlkeld graduated from Ripon College in Wisconsin in 1960 with a degree in political science and history. A year later he received a master’s degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Before joining CBS, he worked at WMT-TV in Cedar Rapids, and WHAS-TV in Louisville, Ky.
He is survived by his wife of 28 years, Betsy Aaron, a former CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN correspondent; a brother, Robert; two children, Susan Paulukonis and Julia Threlkeld; and two grandchildren.
When Mr. Threlkeld left CBS to join ABC, Charles Kuralt, the anchor of “Sunday Morning,” told The New York Times: “We didn’t want Richard Threlkeld to leave without saying that we think he has given us something more than 108 good stories. He has given us a demonstration that the news on television does not have to be cramped and constricted. It can be expansive and exalting if you make a little time on the air and then ask a good man to fill it.”
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