Richard Valeriani

Richard Valeriani was an American journalist.

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.

He was a 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 the mid-1990s, Valeriani began a new career as one of the first and leading media trainers, working with such high-profile clients as Kathryn Bigelow, Sumner Redstone, Jimmy Fallon and Ted Danson, as well as senior officials in the U.S. and foreign governments and top executives from Ford Motor CO., IBM and Merck.

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

Valeriani died June 18, 2018, in New York City, New York. He was 85.