NEW YORK (AP) - Sanford Socolow, a longtime CBS News executive who was a right-hand man to anchor Walter Cronkite, has died. The Manhattan resident died at 86 at Lenox Hill Hospital because of complications from a long illness.
Socolow was an executive producer at the "CBS Evening News" when Cronkite was anchor. He was also a Washington bureau chief for CBS News and rose to vice president there, supervising all hard news programming. He produced coverage of moon landings anchored by Cronkite and much of the network's Vietnam War coverage, including Morley Safer's 1965 report that showed U.S. Marines burning a Vietnamese village.
Socolow, known as "Sandy," was a producer at "60 Minutes" when he retired in the mid-1980s.
He died on Saturday, and is survived by two sons and a daughter.