Gordon Manning, who died Tuesday at 89, was an executive at CBS News and then NBC News who was famed for grabbing tough-to-get interviews of newsmakers, including the first by an American news organization with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and another with Chinese diplomat Huang Hua, whom he plied with champagne on an Air France flight in 1974.

The humorist Art Buchwald called him “the man in the middle nobody knows,” but within the news business, Manning was a major force. He headed not just two of the three networks news divisions but also previously served as executive editor of Newsweek.

Manning was at CBS for a decade beginning in 1964 and directed the network’s coverage of Vietnam and Watergate, including a two-part special narrated by the anchorman Walter Cronkite that helped bring the story to national prominence.

He also led the CBS crew that covered President Nixon’s 1972 trip to China, which ended two decades of official silence between the two nations. He returned to China in 1989 to direct NBC’s coverage of the Tiananmen Square student uprising.

Manning grew up in Lancaster, Pa., where his parents worked in a watch factory. He attended Boston University and edited the student newspaper, and then took a job as a reporter at the United Press wire service. He served in the Navy in World War II and afterward worked as a magazine editor and freelance writer.

An early profile he wrote in 1949 for Colliers of Yogi Berra, citing the Yankees catcher’s awakening pride, earned him a full-time job at the publication. He quickly ascended to managing editor of Colliers, but the magazine folded in 1956 and Manning became an editor at Newsweek. He was promoted to executive editor in 1961. He and two other top Newsweek editors, Osborn Elliott and Kermit Lansner, became known as the “Flying Wallendas” for their acrobatic skills at walking the news high wire.

At CBS, Manning formed a close alliance with Mr. Cronkite, whose evening news program became the top-rated network news show in the country. He arranged for the first Western interview with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn shortly after the dissident novelist began his exile from the Soviet Union, in 1974. Mr. Solzhenitsyn called Manning “the greatest traveling companion since Boswell.”

In 1975, he joined NBC, where he oversaw political coverage. The giant blue Plexiglas map of America the network used to provide a visual display of red and blue states starting in 1976 was Manning’s idea, but the original map used red for Democrats and blue for Republicans, the opposite of today’s usage.

Manning’s special coverage marking the 10th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War garnered a Peabody Award in 1985. The 1987 Gorbachev interview, which he procured after bombarding diplomats with telex messages and cozying up to ambassadors, was cited in a George Polk Award that he won in 1988.

John Gordon Manning Jr.

Born May 28, 1917, in New Haven, Conn.; died September 6 at Norwalk Hospital, near his home in Westport, Conn.; survived by four sons, John Manning III, David Manning, Glenn Manning, and Douglas Manning; a brother, Frank E. Manning; eight grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. His wife of 47 years, Edna Currier Manning, died in 1989.