Richard Valeriani

Who is Richard Valeriani?

Richard Valeriani was White House correspondent and diplomatic correspondent with NBC News in the 1960s and 1970s. He previously covered the Civil Rights Movement for the network and was seriously injured when hit in the head with an ax handle at a demonstration in Marion, Alabama in 1965 in which Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot and killed by Alabama State Trooper James Bonard Fowler.

In July 1962, he interviewed Marion King, the wife of Slater King, who had been beaten by policemen in Camilla, Georgia while trying to take clothes to jailed civil rights protesters from Albany, Georgia.

Valeriani portrayed himself as a reporter for CNN from the deck of the French aircraft carrier Foch in the 1995 film "Crimson Tide", providing the opening newscast which sets up the plot.