Morley Safer, a CBS television correspondent who brought the horrors of the Vietnam War into the living rooms of America in the 1960s and was a mainstay of the network’s newsmagazine “60 Minutes” for almost five decades, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 84.

His wife, Jane Safer, said he died of pneumonia.

Mr. Safer was one of television’s most celebrated journalists, a durable reporter familiar to millions on “60 Minutes,” the Sunday night staple whose signature is a relentlessly ticking stopwatch. By the time CBS announced his retirement on May 11, Mr. Safer had broadcast 919 “60 Minutes” reports, profiling international heroes and villains, exposing frauds and corruption, giving voice to whistle-blowers and chronicling the trends of an ever-changing America.

Mr. Safer joined the program, created by Don Hewitt, in 1970, two years after its inception. His tenure eventually outlasted those of his colleagues Mike Wallace, Dan Rather, Harry Reasoner, Ed Bradley and Andy Rooney, as he became the senior star of a new repertory group of reporters on what has endured for decades as the most popular and profitable news program on television.

But to an earlier generation of Americans, and to many colleagues and competitors, he was regarded as the best television journalist of the Vietnam era, an adventurer whose vivid reports exposed the nation to the hard realities of what the writer Michael J. Arlen, in the title of his 1969 book, called the “Living-Room War.”