Terence Smith is an award-winning journalist who has been a political reporter, foreign correspondent, editor and television analyst over the course of a four-decade career. He has written on everything from a Bedouin wedding in the Sinai to firefights in the jungles of Vietnam to presidential news conferences in the White House.
Born into a newspapering family — his father was Red Smith, the sports columnist — Smith began his career covering local politics at the Stamford (CT) Advocate. Moving on to The New York Herald Tribune, his coverage of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign for the United States Senate in New York attracted attention and propelled him to a job at The New York Times. He spent 20 years with The Times, including eight years abroad in the Middle East and Far East, covering four wars, peace negotiations and the day-to-day lives of people in more than 40 countries. Smith’s coverage earned two Pulitzer Prize nominations and numerous other awards. He won the Times’ Publisher’s Prize for outstanding writing 22 times. Smith also served as Assistant Foreign Editor and Deputy Metropolitan Editor in New York. In the paper’s Washington bureau, he served as diplomatic correspondent and chief White House correspondent before founding and editing the popular Washington Talk page.
In 1985, Smith joined CBS News in Washington, covering the Reagan White House and for nine years, reporting the cover stories for CBS Sunday Morning. He earned two Emmys for his work on the broadcast “48 Hours,” and shared in the George Foster Peabody Award for general excellence given to the staff of CBS Sunday Morning.
In 1998, Smith turned to public television, founding and leading the media unit at The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. As senior producer and media correspondent, Smith broadcast 110 in-depth tape reports and anchored some 250 studio discussions on media, national and international issues. In the course of seven years, Smith and his unit won 18 national awards and honors for media criticism and analysis. He is now a special correspondent for The NewsHour.
Smith is a 2013 inductee to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Hall of Fame. In 2021, he published a memoir, “Four Wars, Five Presidents: A Reporter’s Journey from Jerusalem to Saigon to the White House.”
Smith is an occasional guest host on National Public Radio. He speaks, writes and broadcasts on national politics, international affairs and environmental issues involving the Chesapeake Bay and ocean policies. He formerly served as chairman of the board of trustees of the Chesapeake Bay Trust. Previously, he was a member of the advisory board of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and the Board of Visitors of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. Married with two grown children and three grandchildren, he lives with his wife, Susy, in Annapolis. Smith is a World Affairs speaker aboard cruise ships around the world. In between, he squeezes in as much sailing and golf as possible.
Terence, our paths overlapped 30 summers ago in Mississippi during a reunion of Freedom Summer volunteers. At the time, I was a Chicago-based correspondent for NPR. You were reporting for Sunday Morning with Izzy Bleckman and Jim Houtrides. In the years that followed, I was fortunate to become close friends with Jim and his wife Maureen, who encouraged me in ways my non-journalist parents (who loved and were proud of me) could not.
This weekend I traveled to their Brooklyn neighborhood for a wonderfully informal, heartfelt, anecdote-filled gathering to honor Jim’s and Maureen’s memory. My present home is in Lafayette, Louisiana, where I (try to) manage KRVS, the local NPR affiliate and where, it turns out, Jim reported for the Daily Advertiser in the late 1950s. Among my saved YouTube videos is the feature you reported on Zydeco and Beau Jocque — the music exerted a gravitational pull that led me to the state from which my parents eloped at about the time Jim was honing his journalism chops there.
You’ve been in my thoughts these last few days; I wish you well and offer my condolences on the passing of your colleague.