Edward Paddock Morgan was born in Walla Walla, Washington on June 23, 1910. In 1932, he graduated cum laude from Whitman College where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He had a year of graduate study at the University of Washington, 1932-1933.
From 1932 to 1934, Mr. Morgan was a reporter for the Seattle Star, after which he became a correspondent for United Press International until 1943. From 1943 to 1946 he was with the Chicago Daily News Foreign Service, and from 1946 to 1948 an associate editor of Collier's Weekly. After two years of free lance writing in Europe, he became a correspondent for CBS news and was appointed director of radio and television news for CBS in 1954.
From 1955 to 1967, Morgan broadcast an evening radio program of news and commentary, Edward P. Morgan and the News, that won him the George Foster Peabody Award, broadcasting's most venerable honor, in 1956.
In 1956, Morgan was based in New York City and working for the ABC Radio Network. He broadcast a professional news report of the collision of the ocean liners S.S. Andrea Doria and S.S. Stockholm off the Massachusetts coast, not telling listeners that his 14-year-old daughter had been aboard the Andrea Doria and was believed to have been killed. His daughter, Linda Morgan, was discovered alive the next day, having been catapulted to a deck of the Stockholm when its bow knifed into her cabin. Dubbed by media the “miracle girl,” she had received only a broken arm. Morgan then made another memorable broadcast emotionally describing the difference between reporting the news about strangers and how different it was with his own loved ones involved, describing also the extreme emotions he had experienced.
Morgan moved to ABC News in the early 1960s and become one of several rotating anchors of television's The ABC Evening News. He and Howard K. Smith were anchors for ABC's coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and for Presidential nominating conventions. He also served on the press panel at the second campaign debate between Kennedy and Vice President Nixon in 1960. For many years Mr. Morgan broadcast a nightly ABC radio report and commentary with a liberal viewpoint, sponsored by the AFL-CIO. A critic of commercial broadcasting as timid and bland, he left ABC in 1967 to become the chief correspondent for the Public Broadcast Laboratory of National Educational Television and did commentaries for public radio.
Morgan retired in 1975. He died January 27, 1993 at his home in McLean, Virginia, from complications of lung cancer.
