Veteran broadcaster David Frost — ’fearsome interviewer’ — dead at 74

British broadcaster David Frost has died, the BBC reports this morning.

Frost was aboard the Queen Elizabeth cruise ship when he suffered a heart attack on Saturday evening, his family told the Independent.[tweet id="374118058157441024" url="https://twitter.com/David_Cameron/statuses/374118058157441024"]

The legendary journalist may be best known for a series of interviews he conducted in 1977 with former U.S. president Richard Nixon. "Why didn’t you burn the tapes?" he asked the disgraced leader.

Frost had been with Al Jazeera English since 2006. He most recently had been at work on a series of hour-long interviews featuring such subjects as Buzz Aldrin, Isabel Allende, Garry Kasparov and Marc Andreessen (promo for that discussion below).

Al Jazeera notes that Frost was the only journalist to have interviewed the last seven U.S. presidents and Britian’s last six prime ministers.

More later.