Club President Michael Freedman remembers a longtime member, CBS News leader William J. Small: 'Setting standards and breaking barriers that we take for granted today'

Once a great while, a person comes along who changes lives. And then there are those who change the world. In the world of journalism such a man was Bill Small, who passed away Sunday, May 24, at the age of 93.

In short, Mr. Small, as he was known to all professionally, led the vaunted team that set the standard for television news coverage during the most formative years of the medium in the nation’s capital. From 1962 to 1974, an era that spanned the Kennedy administration, the war in Vietnam and Watergate—the Walter Cronkite era of television news—Bill Small served as Washington Bureau Chief for CBS, setting standards and breaking barriers that we take for granted today.

His team of correspondents is a who’s who of legendary reporters including Dan Rather, Bob Schieffer, Ed Bradley, Marvin and Bernard Kalb, Harry Reasoner, Daniel Schorr, Eric Sevareid, Roger Mudd, Bernard Shaw and Bill Moyers.

And unlike anyone before him, he carved a path for women in journalism with the hiring of Lesley Stahl, Diane Sawyer, Connie Chung, Martha Teichner, Rita Braver, Susan Spencer and a 20-year old college student named Susan Zirinsky who today is president of CBS News, the first woman to hold the title at a major network.

As a member of the National Press Club, Bill Small made a special train trip from New York to Washington in 1971 for the sole purpose of casting his vote when the Club was deciding whether to admit women. Among the highest-ranking members of the industry to vote “yes,” he said at the time and in later years that he wanted to ensure his daughters could join any organization they wished. Standing in a long line, he took on all comers with signs telling members to vote “no.”

I had the honor and pleasure of partnering with Bill Small during his tenure as chair of the Network News and Documentary Emmy Awards judging, which we hosted at George Washington University. I also had the privilege of working for more than two decades at the National Press Club with two of Bill Small’s disciples at CBS – Kalb Report moderator Marvin Kalb and director Robert Vitarelli. They spoke of Bill Small with a reverence reserved for those you most admire and your best protectors.

Bill Small empowered and protected. That was his management style and fortunately, it rubbed off on a few of us.

His team at CBS is considered second only in the annals of broadcast news history to Edward R. Murrow and the ‘Murrow Boys,’ who invented the profession in World War II. So, it seems wholly appropriate that it was a young Bill Small who introduced Murrow at the 1958 Radio-Television News Directors Association convention where the patron saint of the profession delivered his most enduring speech. That night, Murrow told his audience that television “can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire, but it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box.”

Bill Small was determined to use it to those ends. And he did. Like Murrow, he had the courage of his convictions and he achieved something that was quite extraordinary—he made a difference.