Bernard Kalb, Celebrated Journalist, Dead at 100

CBS Photo Archive/Getty Bernard Kalb

Bernard Kalb — a celebrated journalist who reported for NBC, CBS, CNN and The New York Times — died Sunday at the age of 100.

Highlights of his six-decade career included serving as founding anchor of CNN's media industry watchdog show Reliable Sources program in 1992, and as assistant secretary of state for public affairs from 1984-1986. In the reporting world, he specialized in world affairs.

CNN reported that as State Department spokesperson, he was with the U.S. delegation when President Reagan held his first summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva in November 1985. As a television correspondent, the outlet also noted that he joined President Nixon on the opening trip to China in 1972 and traveled with presidents and secretaries of state beginning with Nixon and Kissinger.

According to younger brother and fellow journalist Marvin Kalb, he died at his North Bethesda, Md., home following complications from a fall, The Washington Post reported.

"We are all grateful for the many years we have been able to spend with a truly remarkable human being," Marvin told CNN. "A great journalist, and speaking as a kid brother, the greatest older brother any kid brother could ever have."

NBC News/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Bernard Kalb

The brothers were a team: Bernard and Marvin worked at CBS, where they were known as "The Kalbs," but Bernard was the lesser-known one.

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According to NBC News, the story goes that their mother called the CBS foreign desk in New York and said: "Hello, this is Marvin Kalb's mother. Can you tell me where my son Bernie is?"

Still, Bernard never seemed to mind, and would even introduce himself as Marvin's "kid brother."

They authored a 1974 biography of Henry Kissinger, Kissinger, and the 1981 novel The Last Ambassador, which was about the fall of Saigon, according to NBC News.

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Born in 1922 in Manhattan to immigrant parents Max and Bella, who were from Poland and the Ukraine respectively, he graduated from the City College of New York in 1942. He spent two years in the army before reporting for a newspaper in Alaska, according to The New York Times.

Next, he reported for The New York Times from 1946-1962, then joined his brother at CBS for the next 18 years (where he opened CBS News' Hong Kong bureau in 1972 and anchored CBS Morning News) before moving to NBC to serve as their State Department correspondent from 1980-1985, The New York Times reported.

During his heyday, the Washington Post described Bernard as "lanky, darkly handsome, bombastic, jocular, cigar-wielding and given to garish shirt-and-tie combinations heavy on stripes and burnt orange."

Then, he was the first journalist to become a State Department spokesperson, but that 1984-1986 stint ended in his resignation after a "reported disinformation program" conducted by the Reagan administration against the Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, The New York Times reported.

"I am concerned about the impact of any such program on the credibility of the United States," Kalb said at the time. "Anything that hurts America's credibility, hurts America."

He leaves behind his younger brother Marvin; wife of 64 years, Phyllis, and their four daughters Tanah, Marina, Claudia, and Sarinah; nine grandchildren; and four step-grandchildren, according to The New York Times.