[3] After beginning his career with the wire services and serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Newman worked in radio for CBS News.

After graduating from George Washington High School Newman attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison, serving on the staff of The Daily Cardinal and earning a bachelor's degree in political science in 1940.

He covered significant stories: the 1952 funeral of King George VI from the freezing battlements of Windsor Castle; Britain's emergence as a nuclear power; and the 1956 Suez Crisis.

In 1964 and 1968, he, John Chancellor, Frank McGee, and Sander Vanocur (dubbed "The Four Horsemen") were fitted with state-of-the-art backpacks enabling them to roam the convention floor and conduct live interviews with delegates.

He anchored the television coverage of the 1967 Six-Day Arab-Israeli War, the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and the 1973 Vietnam ceasefire.

In 1981, immediately after the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, he was chosen to anchor NBC's television coverage until full news teams were mustered.

The interview took place in September 1975 at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, shortly before Hirohito's diplomatically delicate visit to the United States.

Among interviewees were director Ingmar Bergman, zoologist Konrad Lorenz, classical guitarist Andrés Segovia, founder of Transcendental Meditation Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, boxer Muhammad Ali, and the first and fourth prime ministers of Israel, David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir.

(about kidney dialysis, 1965); Pensions: The Broken Promise (1972); Violence in America (1977); Land of Hype and Glory (1977); Spying for Uncle Sam (1978); Reading, Writing and Reefer (1978); Oil and American Power (1979); and The Billionaire Hunts (1981).

After leaving NBC in January 1984 Newman was in demand as an interviewer, narrator, and moderator, participating in many programs on PBS and cable networks.

Among his film credits were The Pelican Brief, Spies Like Us, and My Fellow Americans; television appearances included episodes of Newhart, Mr. Belvedere, The Golden Girls, Wings, and Murphy Brown.

In 1990, he was a narrator for an Audio Renaissance dramatization of Ernest Callenbach's utopian novel Ecotopia, reading the news reports of William Weston as he tours the breakaway republic.

Around the time Newman left NBC in 1984, he twice hosted Saturday Night Live; on one occasion, to the delight of the audience, he sang "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone" as part of the opening monologue.

[8] Newman also briefly anchored a faux newscast based on the tabloid newspaper Weekly World News for the USA Network in 1996.

The latter (a collection of his syndicated columns for King Features) ranged over U.S. politics and foreign policy, his journalistic assignments, and the state of the English language.