Former NBC News Anchor Garrick Utley Dies at 74

Garrick Utley, a former NBC News anchor and a longtime correspondent for the network, died Thursday night at his home in New York City, The New York Times reports. He was 74.

Utley died from prostate cancer, his wife, Gertje Utley, told the newspaper.

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Utley was a Chicago native, and both of his parents were correspondents for NBC radio. Utley was first hired as a researcher for the network in Brussels in 1963, but was promoted within a year to correspondent. He covered the Vietnam War and became one of the first network reporters based in Saigon in 1964. Utley went on to cover the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Yom Kippur war in 1973 and reported on the Cold War from Berlin and Moscow. Later, he reported on the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the start of the Persian Gulf war two years later.

Utley's notable interviews included Nazi leader Albert Speer and dissident physicist Andrei D. Sakharov.

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In addition his lengthy tenure as a correspondent, Utley also served as a weekend and substitute anchor on NBC Nightly News, an anchor of the Sunday Todayshow and also moderated the network's Sunday morning show, Meet the Press.

Utley then moved to ABC in 1993 and later to CNN, where he worked until 2002. He co-anchored the cable news network's coverage of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks the following morning. More recently, Utley worked as a professor of broadcasting and journalism at the State University of New York at Oswego and penned the book, You Should Have Been Here Yesterday, about the growth of television news in America.

Utley is survived by his wife and two brothers, Jonathan and David.