Ed Rabel, a television reporter for CBS and NBC News and an independent candidate for Congress from his home state of West Virginia, died at the age of 86 on December 2, 2025 in Little Washington, Virginia.
Rabel covered the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement in the United States and politics across the globe – interviewing political leaders from Jimmy Carter and Harry Truman to the Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Rabel interviewed Martin Luther King just hours before he was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Years later, he interviewed King’s assassin, James Earl Ray.
He won five Emmy awards, including one for the hour-long documentary titled Guatemala that recounted the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Guatemalan citizens by U.S. sponsored death squads. The documentary also earned him the George Polk Award.
Rabel moved to Berkeley Springs, West Virginia in 2013 and ran for Congress as an independent against Republican Alex Mooney, Democrat Nick Casey and Libertarian Davy Jones in the then second Congressional district. (Mooney won with 56 percent of the vote — Rabel came in last with 5 percent.)
In one video, Rabel is seen campaigning on horseback.
“I’m Ed Rabel campaigning here in the West Virginia countryside with my buddy Thor,” Rabel says in the video.
“We’ve got incredible problems in this country, and in the world. The Congress – the Democrats and the Republicans – do nothing,” Rabel says. “Their failure to govern this nation endangers all of us. I’d like to be your voice in Congress – the independent voice.”
“If you have ever been to West Virginia, you know how beautiful our mountains are,” Rabel says from high atop Thor overlooking Sleepy Creek Mountain in Morgan County, West Virginia. “They are being destroyed by big coal. And the water is being polluted as well. I want to save the mountains and the streams for not only ourselves, but our children and our grandchildren. In November vote independent. Vote Ed Rabel for Congress.”
In the twenty years with CBS and thirteen years with NBC, Rabel had more than 1,000 segments broadcast on the CBS Evening News, CBS Sunday Morning, CBS Reports, and NBC’s Nightly News and the Today Show.
Edward Lawrence Rabel, Jr. was born November 8, 1939, in Charleston. His father was a department store manager and his mother a homemaker. He lived with his parents while working, full time, for local radio stations and studying to obtain his Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and History at Morris Harvey College.
It was in West Virginia, where he was born and reared, that Rabel gained his reputation as a campaigner for poor people who could be counted in the thousands in his home state.
In 1963, as a reporter for Channel 8 in Charleston, WV (a CBS Affiliate), he covered President John Kennedy’s visit to the mountain state on its 100th birthday.
Rabel never forgot the president’s comment on that rainy day in Charleston, when he stirred the crowd of thousands, declaring, “The sun does not always shine in WV, but the people always do.”
Kennedy’s anti-poverty programs in the state were stressed by Rabel in his reports on WCHS-TV – reports that attracted the attention of CBS News executives.
Rabel had become the director of television news and anchorman at Channel 8 (WCHS-TV) in 1960.
At the time, his dream was to become a network foreign correspondent like his hero, Edward R. Murrow. On the strength of his job as a local news reporter, he was hired as a reporter at CBS in New York in 1966.
In 1967, after just seven months of work at its headquarters in New York, CBS assigned him to its Bureau in Atlanta at the height of the civil rights movement.
In 1968, while covering Martin Luther King’s campaign for sanitation workers in Memphis, Rabel interviewed the civil rights leader just hours before he was assassinated.
Two years later, Rabel was reassigned to the network’s Saigon bureau where he spent a year, in-country, covering the so-called Vietnamization of the war — the effort to transfer military responsibilities to the Army of South Vietnam.
Rabel traveled extensively in Southeast Asia to report on America’s fight against communism in Cambodia, Thailand and Laos.
While in Cambodia in 1970 with South Vietnamese troops, his unit barely escaped a North Vietnamese armored assault that killed and wounded hundreds of nearby troopers. In 1973, he volunteered to return to the region to cover the Easter offensive that presaged the fall of Saigon in 1975.
His reporting on the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Guatemalan peasants in the 1980s was broadcast in an hour-long documentary on CBS Reports and won for him an Emmy and a George Polk Award.
He covered Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign in 1975-76 and then, returned to his duties as a war correspondent to cover communist insurgencies in Central America.
During the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, he and his camera crew were pinned down for hours in a crossfire between the Sandinistas and a National Guard unit in Masaya, Nicaragua.
Rabel reported live from Panama during the U.S. military invasion to capture the dictator, Manuel Noriega.
Having begun his broadcast career as a disc jockey in St. Albans, West Virginia, Rabel was a passionate advocate for public service and higher education.
As a disk jockey in WV before he began his network career, he earned one of the many nicknames that followed him throughout his career. He was known as Ed Rabel on The Turntable.
He worked for his Alma Mater, The University of Charleston (formerly Morris Harvey College) and taught journalism at University School in Hunting Valley, Ohio.
His most recent university position was as adjunct professor of journalism at The Edward R. Murrow College of Communications in Pullman, Washington.
In 2013, 2014 and 2015 he led dozens of students from the college to Cuba for two weeks of study each year.
Rabel was believed to have traveled to Cuba more than any other North American journalist. Starting his sojourns to the island in 1975, he went there on assignment more than 150 times and achieved numerous scoops over the competition.
In 2018, Rabel realized his life-long desire to become a Peace Corps Volunteer. He was assigned to the Eastern Caribbean island nation of St. Lucia where he taught English literacy to third graders at the Soufriere Primary School.
In 2019, following his successful Peace Corps run, Rabel returned to West Virginia where he taught Spanish at the Riverside High School in Kanawha County.
In addition, he was a substitute teacher in West Virginia and Virginia. He was drawn to teach in Virginia in Rappahannock County. It was in the county seat of Washington, Virginia that he kept an apartment located in walking distance of America’s most favorite country inn, The Inn at Little Washington. (His favorite restaurant in West Virginia was the Lot 12 Public House in Berkeley Springs.)
Rabel is the author of two books, a memoir titled Ed Rabel Reports: Lies, Wars and Other Misadventures, and a historical novel about mining and miners in Appalachia that is titled Black Gold Black Death: In Coal Country, America’s President is Marked for Assassination.
Rabel, who had no children, is survived by his sister, Sharon Rabel Lewis and two nephews. Two marriages, to Mary Lu Stone and Theresa McCormick, ended in divorce.
