Richard Valeriani, a longtime NBC News correspondent who covered the civil rights movement and the Johnson and Nixon administrations from the network’s Washington D.C., bureau, died today. He was 85. He would spend 31 years as an on-air correspondent for NBC Nightly News and often appeared on Today. Colleagues would say Valeriani was “always the first” journalist to get to the scene to report a story, which is how they knew it was significant.

A native of Camden, NJ, who spoke five languages, Valeriani began his news career with the Associated Press in the late 1950s, when he was transplanted to Cuba to live and report on the Bay of Pigs. While in Cuba, he was hired by NBC and was the last American journalist ousted from the communist country.