Robert Pierpoint, the CBS News correspondent who brought a human-interest touch to coverage of the Korean War and later reported on six presidents, from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Jimmy Carter, died Saturday in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 86.  Robert Pierpoint reported from the White House as a CBS correspondent in the early 1970s. Out of camera view, he wore tennis shorts and shoes with his jacket and tie.  The cause was complications of hip surgery, CBS News said.  In more than 40 years with CBS radio and television, Mr. Pierpoint covered the major news stories of his time, from Korea to the Kennedy assassination to Watergate, often reporting for “The CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite” and on the magazine-type program “Sunday Morning” with Charles Kuralt.  Mr. Pierpoint’s “special memory” of covering the Korean War involved not a particular battle but his visit to a Seoul orphanage.  “There are 500 arguments against the war; these kids,” Mr. Pierpoint told viewers in a report that was replayed on “Sunday Morning” on the 40th anniversary of the war’s outbreak. “They didn’t start it, they don’t want it, they don’t know what it’s all about. But they’re the real victims of this or any other war. And actually what they want most of all is just a little affection, something they’re never really going to get right here in this spot.”  Mr. Pierpoint’s reporting from Korea was featured on Edward R. Murrow’s first “See It Now” program, in November 1951, and his voice reporting the Korean cease-fire for CBS Radio was used on the final episode of “M*A*S*H” in 1983.  Covering the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Mr. Pierpont described Jacqueline Kennedy’s emergence from her husband’s operating room at Parkland Hospital. In an interview this month with The Santa Barbara News-Press, he expressed regret at having failed to mention that Mrs. Kennedy’s pink suit was soaked in blood. “I was in shock,” he recalled.  Mr. Pierpoint won Emmy Awards for his participation in CBS reports on Vice President Spiro Agnew’s resignation and on President Richard M. Nixon’s friend Charles G. Rebozo.  Robert Charles Pierpoint was born on May 16, 1925, in Redondo Beach, Calif. After naval service in World War II, he graduated from the University of Redlands in California, then did graduate work in Stockholm and was hired by CBS as a freelance reporter there.  He became a full-time foreign correspondent in 1951. After covering the Korean War he was the CBS Far Eastern bureau chief in Tokyo until 1957, when he became White House correspondent. He was named CBS’s State Department correspondent in 1980.  Mr. Pierpoint, who retired in 1990, is survived by his wife, Patricia; his sons Eric, a television and film actor, and Alan; his daughters Marta and Kim Pierpoint; a sister, Ruth Hogg, and five grandchildren.  Mr. Pierpoint was an avid tennis player, something that made for a mixed fashion statement one Saturday in the early 1970s when he reported from the White House lawn.  Mr. Pierpoint wore a suit jacket, dress shirt and tie but, as The New York Times later reported in an article on men’s fashions in Washington, “what the television camera did not reveal was that Mr. Pierpoint’s proper attire topped a pair of tennis shorts, tennis sneakers and bare legs.”  In his memoir “At the White House: Assignment to Six Presidents” (Putnam, 1981), Mr. Pierpoint wrote that he had hurriedly received a story assignment but was about to play tennis with Ron Ziegler, President Nixon’s communications aide. He changed into a tennis outfit he kept in his locker at the White House, in anticipation of the match, while keeping the suit jacket on.  He wrote that when a photo of his full frame later appeared in a book and newspapers, “my superiors were far from pleased, apparently feeling that tennis shorts, a jacket and tie did not provide a dignified image.”  Marta Pierpoint said her father had relished that episode and would be buried in a suit jacket and tennis shorts.
At CBS News, Robert Pierpoint brought a human touch to his coverage, which included the Korean War and six American presidencies.