Marty Plissner, a longtime political director for CBS News who helped expand the role of television in covering elections, died on Thursday in Washington. He was 87.  The cause was cancer, his daughter Sarah said.  Mr. Plissner covered presidential politics for CBS from 1964, when Lyndon B. Johnson was elected, until 1997, the year after Bill Clinton was re-elected. Over the decades he became one of the most well-connected political journalists in television.  Mr. Plissner was known for being a behind-the-scenes force, cultivating relationships with county party chairmen, poll volunteers and candidates’ aides, whether or not it was an election year. If, say, the Iowa caucuses were drawing closer and a reporter or anchor needed contacts in a remote corner of the state, Mr. Plissner had them.  “He could put together a lunch or dinner for Dan Rather with people that the big feet didn’t know but who Marty had been working with for years and years,” Dotty Lynch, a former political editor for CBS News who now is a consultant with the network, said this week. Bob Schieffer, the host of the CBS News program “Face the Nation,” said on the program on Sunday that Mr. Plissner “knew more politicians, political operatives, insiders, outsiders and hangers-on than any one person I ever knew.”  “Better yet,” he added, “they knew him.”  As network political coverage became more prevalent and more competitive, it was sometimes criticized for being too focused on the horse-race aspect of campaigns. Mr. Plissner rejected those criticisms; the first thing voters wanted to know, he said, was who was ahead. He also defended television’s increasing use of exit polls — surveys taken after people vote but before polls in many parts of the country may have closed — to project winners.  Even with exit polls, viewers sometimes were told that races were “too close to call.” In 1996, William Safire explored the origins of that phrase in his “On Language” column in The New York Times. A source pointed him to Mr. Plissner.  “That phrase was invented at CBS between 1962 and 1964,” Mr. Plissner told Mr. Safire. “During that period, instead of using the exit polling we have today, we used a model we had devised for predicting or calling elections based on certain reported-precinct results. That gave us a sample to which we could apply mathematical formulae to determine a call. When we had a situation in which all the votes were reported but there was no clear winner, we called that election too close to call.”  Mr. Plissner was born on May 20, 1926, in Brooklyn. His father, Harry, was a businessman and community activist who, with Mr. Plissner’s mother, Charlotte, started a charity project in the 1950s to mail thousands of used English-language magazines and books to people overseas.  Mr. Plissner graduated from Yale in 1948, in the same class as the elder President George Bush. He wrote for The Yale Daily News while working full time as a reporter for The New Haven Journal-Courier.  He held several journalism jobs after college, writing for ABC News and NBC News and for radio stations in New York. At WMCA, he helped produce “John Fitzgerald Kennedy: A Memorial Album,” which included tributes to the slain president, recordings of coverage of his assassination in November 1963 and excerpts from some of his speeches.  The success of the recording helped him land a job at CBS in 1964.  In addition to his daughter Sarah, his survivors include his wife of 40 years, Susan Morrison; a brother, William; another daughter, Paige, who like Sarah is from his marriage to Ms. Morrison; and a son, Micah, from his first marriage, to Doris Ruth Kaplan, which ended in divorce.  Beginning in the 1970s, Mr. Plissner helped oversee the New York Times/CBS Poll. He also wrote opinion articles for The Times and other publications.  Mr. Plissner often criticized the roles of presidential primaries and the Electoral College. In his 1999 book, “The Control Room: How Television Calls the Shots in Presidential Elections,” he argued that the primary process had become distorted, in part by the relentless competition among the television networks that he had helped create. He cited New Hampshire, whose primary had drawn television coverage since it began in 1952.  In the 1964 primary, he wrote, network coverage went “overboard,” with more than 1,000 correspondents, producers, technicians and other workers sent to New Hampshire and converting “this once marginal political event, involving barely 1 percent of the country’s voters, into a unique proving ground for aspiring presidents.”
Mr. Plissner was a reporter and writer known for his ability to cultivate sources and for a dexterity in covering primaries that contributed to increased competition among television networks.