Tom Pettit

Who was Tom Pettit?

William Thomas "Tom" Pettit was an American journalist who was a television news correspondent for NBC from the 1960s through 1995. During most of that period, he filed reports for NBC Nightly News and served numerous times on the panel of Meet the Press. He served as one of NBC's floor reporters at the political conventions in 1972, 1976, and 1980.

Pettit began his broadcasting career in the state of his upbringing, Iowa, in the 1950s before moving on to positions in Minneapolis and Philadelphia. His first position with the NBC network was in the network's Los Angeles bureau, where he worked for 13 years, except for a brief tenure with National Educational Television. By 1975, Pettit moved to the Washington, D.C. bureau, where he would cover national affairs until 1982, when he became executive vice president of NBC News under president Reuven Frank. In 1985, he returned to reporting, serving as national affairs correspondent until 1989, when he began a three-year stint in NBC's London office. He continued working as a correspondent until 1995, the year of his death.