Background and career
Samuel Andrew Donaldson Jr. (born March 11, 1934) is an American retired television reporter and news anchor. He broadcast with ABC News from 1967 to 2009. He was well known as the White House Correspondent (1977–1989 and 1998–99) with a booming loud voice, which could get the attention of President Reagan, amazingly cutting through the noise of whirling helicopter blades. He was a panelist and co-anchor of Sunday's This Week on the American Broadcasting Company (ABC).
Donaldson was born in El Paso, Texas, on March 11, 1934. He is the son of Chloe (née Hampson), a school teacher, and Samuel Donaldson, a farmer. He grew up on their family farm in Chamberino, New Mexico. This was in the New Mexico Territory when his father had bought it in 1910, two years before New Mexico was admitted to the Union. He attended New Mexico Military Institute and Texas Western College (now known as University of Texas at El Paso), where he served as station manager of KTEP, the campus radio station, and joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity. From 1956 to 1959, Donaldson served on active duty as an artillery officer in the United States Army, attaining the rank of Captain (USAR). While on active duty in 1958, Donaldson was one of the military observers of an atomic test in the Nevada testing grounds when an atomic device, with a yield roughly equivalent to the bombs dropped on Japan, was detonated three thousand yards away from the slit trench protecting the observers. Following military service, Donaldson was hired by KRLD-TV (now KDFW-TV), the then-CBS television affiliate in Dallas, Texas. After a year, he resigned and moved to New York City to look for a job in broadcast news. He failed to get one. He was hired by WTOP-TV (currently WUSA-TV) in Washington, D.C., in February 1961. He covered both local and national stories, including the Goldwater presidential campaign in 1964, the Senate debates on the civil rights bill in March 1964, and the Medicare bill the following year. He anchored the 6:00 pm Saturday and Sunday evening newscasts, with John Douglas doing the weather forecasts.
Donaldson was hired by ABC News as a Washington correspondent in October 1967. He covered the two major party political conventions in 1968 and in 1969 began anchoring the network's 11:00 pm Saturday and Sunday newscasts. In 1971, Donaldson covered the Vietnam War for ABC News. He was ABC's chief Watergate correspondent in 1973–74, covering the trial of the Watergate burglars, the Senate Watergate hearings and the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment investigation of President Nixon.
Donaldson covered Jimmy Carter's 1976 presidential campaign and became the network's White House Correspondent in January 1977, a post he held until January 1989. One of his most widely remembered questions during his tenure at the White House came during the Reagan administration: "Mr. President, in talking about the continuing recession tonight, you have blamed mistakes of the past, and you have blamed the congress. Does any of the blame belong to you?" To which Reagan retorted: "Yes, because for many years I was a Democrat!" In January 1998, Donaldson was once again assigned to the White House as the network's chief correspondent there and served until mid-1999. He covered the Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment of President Clinton.
Donaldson appeared as a panelist on the Sunday morning television program This Week with David Brinkley from its inception in 1981 and after Brinkley's retirement in 1996 co-anchored the This Week program with Cokie Roberts until the two were replaced in September 2002 by George Stephanopoulos. He still occasionally serves as a panelist on This Week.
In August 1989, Donaldson became co-anchor of the network's new magazine program Primetime Live with Diane Sawyer. He and Sawyer co-anchored Primetime Live from 1989 to 1998 and its successor, 20/20 Wednesday, from 1998 to 2000. One of his reports featured a Nazi Gestapo officer named Erich Priebke who had escaped to Argentina after World War II. Donaldson's team located Priebke in 1994, and Donaldson interviewed him on a street in Bariloche, Argentina, about his role in the execution of 335 Italian civilians on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler in the caves outside Rome. When the report aired, Italy demanded Priebke's extradition and Argentina eventually complied. Priebke was sentenced to life in prison in Italy for his crimes.
