Murray Fromson was an Associated Press and CBS News Correspondent and Producer who covered both the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the former Soviet Union, two U.S. presidential campaigns, the civil rights movement in the southern United States as well as major stories in the midwest.
During a 35 year career in journalism, he also reported from Tokyo, Jakarta, Phnom Penh, New Delhi, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Moscow, Bangkok, Saigon and Hong Kong. He and his CBS colleagues were awarded two Overseas Press Club awards for their reporting on the fall of Saigon in 1975.
Among the other major stories he covered were the armistice talks in Korea, the end of the U.S. occupation in Japan, the Quemoy-Matsu crises in the Taiwan Straits, the 1965 war between India and Pakistan, the Tet Offensive in Saigon, the defeat of the U.S.-backed government in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge, three summit meetings between Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev, the anti-war movement in the United States, the Conspiracy 7 Trial in Chicago and the Apollo program that put the first men on the moon.
In 1969, he proposed the formation of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press for which he served as a founding member. For more than 30 years, it has represented individual journalists involved in court challenges testing their First Amendment rights.
In 1978, he was deputy campaign manager for Governor Edmund G. Brown of California and the following year, consultant to the President of the University of California's Systemwide Administration. From 1980-83, he was moderator of a statewide television program on PBS stations called California Week in Review. He also was the producer of a nationally syndicated program, Eric Sevareid's Chronicle.
Fromson joined the USC faculty in 1982, was founder and director of the Center for International Journalism for seven years that recruited 115 working journalists to earn Master's Degrees, specializing in reporting on Mexico and Cuba. He was appointed Director of the School of Journalism from 1994-99. He now writes opinion pieces periodically for U.S. newspapers and is at work on a memoir about the Cold War.
In the year 2000, he was named a fellow in the Joan Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.
In 2003 and 2004, he was a judge of the Pulitzer Prizes in journalism as well as a judge in the History category for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes.
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