Robert MacNeil
Paradigm of Public Broadcasting Credibility

Robert MacNeil heard three shots. He stopped the press bus, jumped out, and raced towards the nearest building looking for a telephone. A man leaving the Texas Book Depository pointed to another man inside the building and said, “Better ask him.” Later it was confirmed that MacNeil had spoken to Lee Harvey Oswald, who was leaving the building minutes after shooting President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963.

This is one of the incidents that illustrates why Montreal-born, Halifax-raised, MacNeil titled a book on his 40-year journalistic career The Right Place at the Right Time. It was written while he was serving as executive editor of The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, the TV show seen on some 300 PBS stations that has won more than 30 awards for journalistic excellence. After 20 years of sharing the program with Jim Lehrer, Robert – better known to friends and associates as Robin – retired from NewsHour in October 1995 to spend more time writing fiction instead of fact. His first novel, also written while MacNeil was still with the program was a Canadian best-seller, and a second, The Voyage, came out at the time of his retirement. He is now writing a third novel and possibly another non-fiction book to go with the five he has already written.

MacNeil has worked in radio and TV newsrooms in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States and, as an international correspondent, has covered events such as the Belgian Congo uprising, the civil war in Algeria, the building of the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban missile crisis. There were also stints as NBC’s Washington correspondent reporting on civil rights and the White House, and later, for PBS, the Senate Watergate hearings.

MacNeil had no burning desire to be a newsman. “I stumbled into it,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I was not pushed. I did not choose it.” His first choice was to be a naval officer. He enrolled in the Navel Training Division at Dalhousie University in Halifax but gave that up in 1950 to become an actor. While with a New York summer stock company, he realized he “wasn’t meant to be an actor.” This experience, however, led to his acting on a local radio station and this, in turn, led to a summer job in 1951 as well as a stint as an overnight disc jockey before he moved to Ottawa to study at Carleton University.

In Ottawa he got other radio jobs and, in 1954, moved from CBC radio to its TV station where he hosted 26 episodes of a children’s program, Let’s Go To a Museum, before graduating in 1955. Determined to go to England, he quit the CBC and got a job as a writer with London’s independent television network, ITV, on the basis of his experience in Ottawa, “embroidered,” he admits, “with a little delicate exaggeration.”

A year later he joined Reuters, a newswire agency that taught him “to write fast, simple, yet graceful English leaving no ambiguities.” After five years there, NBC hired him as its roving correspondent and sent him to the Congo, Algeria, Berlin, and Cuba before bringing him back to Washington as its White House correspondent in 1963.

Most of 1964 was spent covering the U.S. presidential campaign and, in 1965, he was named anchor of a nightly newscast in New York. Later he teamed up with Ray Scherer for a Saturday evening network news roundup and developed a number of TV documentaries on such subjects as electronic surveillance and gun control legislation. By 1966, however, he grew tired of being “a commodity” on commercial TV and returned to London to be a reporter for Panorama, the prestigious BBC show that, he claimed, “makes CBS’s 60 Minutes look like a pale grandchild.”

For the next four years he flew from story to story, covering such events as the resignation of President Charles de Gaulle, the student riots in Paris, the police violence at the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 (later developed into a 90-minute documentary “The Whole World is Watching”) and the assassinations and funerals of Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy.

Despite his life of jet lag and the anxiety of covering headline events, he wrote his first book, The People Machine: The Flame of Television on American Politics, which Current Biography called “a blistering indictment of commercial television’s preoccupation with entertainment.” In 1971, he left the BBC to return to the USA to become with Sandy Vanocur a senior correspondent for the National Public Affairs Center (NPAC), later adding the role of host on the PBS program Washington Week in Review. In 1973, while at the NPAC, he met and co-anchored with Jim Lehrer the Senate Watergate hearings, coverage that won an Emmy award.

MacNeil rejoined the BBC Panorama program in 1973 but spent much of his time in the U.S. covering the impeachment hearings of President Nixon. Later he interviewed President Gerald Ford, a television interview shown in 19 countries.

In 1975 he was “lured by the promise of his own news analysis program” to join WNET-TV in New York City with Jim Lehrer in Washington. Within a year a number of PBS and educational stations signed on and a Saturday Review critic wrote, “I have been watching with mounting admiration the Robert MacNeil Report, for my money this year’s most exhilarating innovation on public TV.”

On Labour Day, 1976, the title of the half-hour show was changed to the MacNeil/Lehrer Report and, after 1,000 shows, MacNeil conceded in a 1979 magazine article that, while the show didn’t give anyone sleepless nights, it was proving that “in-depth journalism has a place on TV.” That was reinforced in 1983 when it became the hour-long program, NewsHour.

Besides his five days a week editing and co-hosting NewsHour, MacNeil has written or co-authored and hosted numerous other documentaries including the nine-part TV mini-series, The Story of English, first shown on the BBC and then PBS in 1986. In 1987 it won TV’s Peabody and Emmy Award for excellence in writing and was published later in book form by Viking Press. In 1989 his on-going love of the English language resulted in another successful book, Wordstruck, and in 1992 he produced his first novel, Burden of Desire, set in Halifax at the time of the explosion in 1917.

When Robert Breckenridge Ware MacNeil announced his intention to retire from NewsHour, Lehrer, his partner of 20 years, told The Toronto Star’s Robert Crew, “It’s a bit like a death in the family for me. He is responsible for what’s left of serious news reporting on television. He led the way; I follow in his wake.”

Mel James