He became an intelligence officer in the United States Army for two years with service in Austria and Berlin, and achieved the rank of first lieutenant.

[6] He was one of the questioners at the first of the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960, as well as one of NBC's "four horsemen," its floor reporters at the political conventions in the 1960s—the other three were John Chancellor, Frank McGee, and Edwin Newman.

Vanocur, who had interviewed Kennedy on June 4, 1968, shortly before the Democratic candidate was shot,[1] reported on the incident from The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California, for the entire night.

On the final night of the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, during a convention-wrapping Thursday night round-table discussion with his fellow NBC floor reporters in the vacated folding chairs on the convention hall floor, Vanocur suggested that the Republicans had "kissed off the black vote" in 1968, a comment which caused a media uproar in the ensuing week.

[10] Vanocur played fictional versions of himself as a broadcast journalist in theatrical films The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight (1971),[11] Raise the Titanic (1980), Dave (1993), and Street Fighter (1994).

[1] Vanocur was parodied by Bob Elliott as national newscaster Sandy Van Andy in another 1971 comedy film Cold Turkey.