Robert MacNeil, Longtime PBS Anchor, Dies at 93

Robert MacNeil, the trusted son of a Canadian naval officer who spent two decades alongside Jim Lehrer delivering the nightly news to PBS viewers, died Friday, PBS announced. He was 93.

MacNeil died of natural causes at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, his daughter, Alison MacNeil, told the Associated Press.

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MacNeil and Lehrer first teamed to cover the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973, and their live coverage earned them an Emmy. In 1975, they launched a half-hour program that would become The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; it covered a single story in depth and collected more than 30 awards, including a Peabody, a DuPont and several Emmys.

The program in 1983 became The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, the nation’s first 60-minute evening news program. Rather than concentrate on one topic, it provided comprehensive coverage and analysis of the day’s important stories.

On the eve of his retirement from the broadcast in October 1995 to concentrate on writing, he was asked why TheMacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour gave “very little coverage” to the O.J. Simpson story.

“We don’t normally cover big murder stories, for one thing … It is inconceivable to me that a generation ago, NBC News and CBS News would night after night have said to their audience, ‘This is the most important thing that happened in the world today,’ by leading with Simpson and coming back to it later in the program,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “What’s interesting to me is how frightened the mainstream media are of the tabloid shows and the new networks.”

On the morning of Nov. 22, 1963, MacNeil, then the No. 2 White House correspondent for NBC, was in President Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas, sitting in the front row of a press bus about six vehicles behind the limousine in which the president and first lady were riding.

“I had this daydream that somebody took a shot, fired a shot, and I got out of the bus and chased the person who fired the shot,” he recalled in a 2000 interview for the website The Interviews: The Oral History of Television. “And then I woke up and said, ‘C’mon, get real.'”

When he really did hear shots, MacNeil rushed out of the bus and followed policemen up a hill who were searching for the shooter. A few frantic minutes later, he asked a man outside the Texas School Book Depository building if he knew where he could grab a phone; that man quite possibly was assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

After Kennedy was taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital, MacNeil managed to commandeer one of two pay phones in an anteroom and fed NBC anchormen Chet Huntley and David Brinkley updates all day. “I said to a priest, ‘If you delivered the last rites, does that mean he’s dead?'” he remembered, “and he [responded], ‘I delivered the last rites.’ That’s all he would say.”

Robert Breckenridge Ware MacNeil — friends called him “Robin” — was born in Montreal on Jan. 19, 1931, the oldest of three sons. His father, Robert, served in the Royal Canadian Navy, and his mother, Margaret, was a housewife.

MacNeil was raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and wanted a career in the theater. For the CBC, he acted in radio productions like The Count of Monte Cristo, did some reporting and served as a national announcer before graduating from Carleton University in Ottawa in 1955.

He moved to London to write plays and made ends meet by working for three months as a reporter for fledgling network ITV, then joined the Reuters wire service, where he stayed for five years as an editor.

MacNeil moved to television in 1960 as an NBC News London-based correspondent and covered the civil war in Algeria, the construction of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1963, he was sent to NBC’s Washington bureau to report on the civil rights movement and to help cover the White House.

MacNeil and Ray Scherer anchored a half-hour weekend news broadcast on NBC starting in 1965, and he anchored local newscasts and NBC News documentaries including Whose Right to Bear Arms. In 1967, he returned to London, this time to report for the BBC’s Panorama program, then began at PBS in 1971 as a senior correspondent and then host of Washington Week in Review.

It wasn’t all serious for MacNeil; he appeared a few times on the PBS sister program Sesame Street, once posing probing questions to Cookie Monster (represented by his attorney, Kermit) about a “Cookiegate” scandal.

MacNeil wrote several books, including 1968’s The People Machine, which studied the relationship between television and politics, three memoirs and three novels. He also was the co-author of 1992’s The Story of English, a companion volume to a BBC-PBS series he hosted (he won a Primetime Emmy for that), and its 2005 sequel, Do You Speak American?

He became a U.S. citizen in 1997, the same year he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada for being “one of the most respected journalists of our time.” Two years later, he and Lehrer were inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame.

MacNeil was married three times and had four children, including Tony-winning scenic designer Ian MacNeil (An Inspector Calls, Billy Elliot: The Musical, Angels in America).

PBS NewsHour senior correspondent and former anchor and managing editor Judy Woodruff paid tribute to MacNeil. “I am devastated at the passing of a dear friend and someone who helped transform American television news,” she tweeted. “He and Jim Lehrer were partners in creating the iconic @NewsHour on @PBS and it was the honor of my life to work with and learn from them.”

PBS NewsHour co-anchors Geoff Bennett and Amna Nawaz added: “Robin was one of a kind. With his distinctive voice, he brought stories to life — unraveling complex issues with clarity and compassion. Whether it was through his incisive reporting or his intimate interviews, he possessed a singular ability to connect with people. As we reflect on his many contributions, we honor his memory by continuing to pursue the truth and by fostering connections that bridge divides — just as Robin did with such grace and vigor. We are deeply grateful for the enduring legacy he leaves behind.”

Asked by Charlie Rose in 1995 what he earned from Lehrer during their long association, MacNeil replied: “I came out of the school of television interviewing where one asked questions partly to demonstrate how much one knew,” he said. “I learned from Jim to ask much better questions, like ‘What does that mean?’ or ‘I don’t understand’ or ‘Have you answered the question?’ Or simply, ‘Why?’ People hate being asked why.”

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