CBS News reporter Ike Pappas, who rose to national fame as the reporter who was interviewing Lee Harvey Oswald when he was killed by Jack Ruby, has passed away in Virginia at the age of 75 from heart failure.

Pappas, the consummate field reporter, covered wars, political events and the domestic strife of 1960s America during his 23-year career at CBS News, but his defining moment came as a radio reporter for WNEW New York covering the prisoner transfer of John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963.

As he asked Oswald a question, Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby, had to brush past Pappas to get his shot off. “Oswald has been shot…Mass confusion…,” Pappas reported live. As a result, he recorded Oswald’s last words and played a key role in the subsequent events, testifying at Ruby’s trial and in front of the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy assassination. “The man in the white raincoat,” as he was identified, also was an integral part of the best-selling record album about the tragedy, “Four Days That Shocked the World.”

Pappa is survived by his wife, Carolyn Hoffman, and three children, Theodore, Alexander and Sarah Thomason, and two grandchildren.