Ed Rabel, TV Correspondent, Dead at Age 86.
Ed Rabel, a fixture in American living rooms for more than a quarter century as a correspondent on CBS and NBC, died today at the age of 86.
Mr. Rabel died Tuesday, December 2, 2025, in Little Washington, VA.
To generations of television viewers, Mr. Rabel was a sober presence whose reporting for CBS and NBC across four decades ranged from the struggle for civil rights in the American south to the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf Wars to guerilla wars in Central America.
His most prominent interviews over the years included those with Martin Luther King, Jr., the Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro, U.S. presidents Jimmy Carter and Harry Truman and with the assassin, James Earl Ray.
He won 5 Emmy awards, according to CBS, including one for the iconic, hour-long documentary titled “Guatemala” that recounted the slaughter of hundreds-of thousands of Guatemalan citizens by U.S.-sponsored death squads. The documentary also earned him the George Polk Award.
In the 20 years with CBS and 13 years with NBC, Mr. Rabel had more than 1,000 segments broadcast on “The CBS Evening News,” CBS Sunday Morning,” CBS Reports,” and NBC’s “Nightly News” and “Today.” Many of those reports emanated from Israel where he was stationed for almost three years at the CBS bureau in Tel Aviv.
Edward Lawrence Rabel, Jr. was born November 8, 1939, in Charleston. His father, Edward Lawarence Rabel, Sr., was a department store manager and his mother, Gertrude Metz Rabel, a homemaker. He lived with his parents while working, full time, for local radio stations and studying to obtain his Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and History at Morris Harvey College.
It was in West Virginia, where he was born and reared, that Mr. Rabel gained his reputation as a campaigner for poor people who could be counted in the thousands in his home state.
In 1963, as a reporter for Channel 8 in Charleston, WV (a CBS Affiliate), he covered President John Kennedy’s visit to the mountain state on its 100th birthday.
Mr. Rabel never forgot the president’s comment on that rainy day in Charleston, when he stirred the crowd of thousands, declaring, “The sun does not always shine in WV, but the people always do.”
Mr. Kennedy’s anti-poverty programs in the state were stressed by Mr. Rabel in his reports on WCHS-TV – reports that attracted the attention of CBS News executives.
Mr. Rabel had become the director of television news and anchorman at Channel 8 (WCHS-TV) in 1960.
At the time, his dream was to become a network foreign correspondent like his hero, Edward R. Murrow. On the strength of his job as a local news reporter, he was hired as a reporter at CBS in New York in 1966.
In 1967, after just 7 months of work at its headquarters in New York, CBS assigned him to its Bureau in Atlanta at the height of the civil rights movement.
In 1968, while covering Martin Luther King’s campaign for sanitation workers in Memphis, Mr. Rabel interviewed the civil rights leader just hours before he was assassinated.
Two years later, Mr. Rabel was reassigned to the network’s Saigon bureau where he spent a year, in-country, covering the so-called Vietnamization of the war -the effort to transfer military responsibilities to the Army of South Vietnam. Mr. Rabel traveled extensively in Southeast Asia to report on America’s fight against communism in Cambodia, Thailand and Laos.
While in Cambodia in 1970 with South Vietnamese troops, his unit barley escaped a North Vietnamese armored assault that killed and wounded hundreds of nearby troopers. In 1973, he volunteered to return to the region to cover the Easter offensive that presaged the fall of Saigon in 1975.
His reporting on the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Guatemalan peasants in the 1980s was broadcast in an hour-long documentary on “CBS Reports” and won for him an Emmy and a George Polk Award.
He covered Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign in 1975-76 and then, returned to his duties as a war correspondent to cover communist insurgencies in Central America. During the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, he and his camera crew were pinned down for hours in a crossfire between the Sandinistas and a National Guard unit in Masaya, Nicaragua.
Mr. Rabel reported “live” from Panama during the U.S. military invasion to capture the dictator, Manuel Noriega.
Soon after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Mr. Rabel went to Baghdad to cover the Iraqi dictator’s failed effort to oppose coalition forces assembled against him in the first Gulf War. He moved from Baghdad to Iran to Israel and to Jordan where he reported on the advancing forces that finally ousted Saddam from Kuwait.
Some years later, Mr. Rabel returned to Baghdad after Saddam was toppled by the U.S.in the second Gulf War. He helped to set up an independent television network for the Department of Defense in Iraq and trained Iraqis to become reporters and producers.
Mr. Rabel’s life off camera was often as rich and compelling as his life in the studio. Having begun his broadcast career as a disc jockey in St. Albans, West Virginia, Mr. Rabel was a passionate advocate for public service and higher education.
As a disk jockey in WV before he began his network career, he earned one of the many nicknames that followed him throughout his career. He was known as Ed Rabel on The Turntable.
He worked for his Alma Mater, The University of Charleston (formerly Morris Harvey College) and taught journalism at University School in Hunting Valley, Ohio. His most recent university position was as adjunct professor of journalism at The Edward R. Murrow College of Communications in Pullman, Washington.
In 2013, ‘14 and ‘15 he led dozens of students from the college to Cuba for two weeks of study each year. Mr. Rabel was believed to have traveled to Cuba more than any other North American journalist. Starting his sojourns to the island in 1975, he went there on assignment more than 150 times and achieved numerous scoops over the competition.
In 2018, Mr. Rabel realized his life-long desire to become a Peace Corps Volunteer. He was assigned to the Eastern Caribbean island nation of St. Lucia where he taught English literacy to 3rd graders at the Soufriere Primary School.
In 2019, following his successful Peace Corps run, Rabel returned to West Virginia where he taught Spanish at the Riverside High School in Kanawha County. In addition, he was a substitute teacher in West Virginia and Virginia. He was drawn to teach in Virginia for the extraordinary bucolic landscape in Rappahannock County. It was in the county seat of Washington, Virginia that he kept an apartment located in walking distance of America’s most favorite country inn, The Inn at Little Washington. Mr. Rabel was often a guest at the inn where he, a self-acclaimed foodie, indulged himself in the haute cuisine of the restaurant.
Mr. Rabel is the author of two books, a memoir titled Ed Rabel Reports: Lies, Wars and Other Misadventures, and a historical novel about mining and miners in Appalachia that is titled Black Gold Black Death: In Coal Country, America’s President is Marked for Assassination.
Mr. Rabel, who had no children, is survived by his sister, Sharon Rabel Lewis and two nephews. Two marriages, to Mary Lu Stone and Theresa McCormick, ended in divorce.
Memorial Service will be 2:00pm Sunday, December 14, 2025, at Curry Funeral Home, Alum Creek. Friends and family will gather 1 hour prior to the service.
