vailsymposium

George Lewis was an NBC News correspondent for 42 years. He retired from the network in 2012 and is now working on book projects, blogging and lecturing. He co-authored the book “Line of Sight,” the biography of an early TV pioneer who brought commercial television to the West Coast.

The winner of three Emmys, the George Foster Peabody and Edward R. Murrow awards, he is no stranger to world crises.

Vietnam was his first assignment for NBC News starting in August 1970. Lewis remained there until May of 1972, returning to Vietnam in 1975 to cover the fall of Saigon. He was among the Americans evacuated by helicopter just before North Vietnamese tanks rumbled into the city.

In 1979, Lewis was in Iran to cover the hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy in Teheran and was one of only two American journalists to get inside the embassy for an interview with one of the hostages. He remained in Iran for 66 days until the government expelled foreign journalists.

In 1989, Lewis was present in China for the revolt in Tiananmen Square and the revolution in Romania. During his career with NBC News, he has also covered wars and revolutions in the Middle East, Latin America and Asia.

He was part of the NBC team that covered Operation Desert Storm, reporting from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq. Lewis was also present in Lebanon for the 1982 Israeli invasion. In the latter part of his NBC News career, Lewis reported on stories from his base in Los Angeles. His major domestic assignments included covering earthquakes in California, the O.J. Simpson criminal and civil trials and the Los Angeles Olympics.

The technology revolution was a recurring assignment for Lewis starting with the dawn of the Internet age in the 1990s. In a series of reports called “Almost 2001,” Lewis and his NBC News colleagues were among the first broadcasters to allow viewers to interact via email.