He made his mark as a Washington bureau chief and served as president of United Press International.

Bill Small, the former Washington bureau chief for CBS News and president of NBC News, died Sunday after a brief illness unrelated to the coronavirus, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences announced. He was 93.

Small led CBS’ news operations in the nation’s capital from 1962-74. He recruited Eric Sevareid, Marvin Kalb, Daniel Schorr, Harry Reasoner and Dan Rather from within the division and gave many producers and reporters their first commercial network news positions; those included Bob Schieffer, Ed Bradley, Bernard Shaw, Bill Moyers, Bernard Kalb and Tom Bettag.

“Bill Small was a hero to journalism,” CBS News president Susan Zirinsky said Monday in a statement. “He hired me as a 20-year-old college student to work the weekend desk in the Washington bureau two weeks after the Watergate break-in. He was tough as nails when it came to defending freedom of the press. He was strict, strong and full of conviction. But the man had a heart of gold — which he only revealed one-third of the time.”

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