Robert MacNeil (January 19, 1931–) was a reporter for
Reuters, the BBC and NBC, then co-anchor and executive
editor for twenty years with Jim Lehrer of PBS’ awardwinning The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour (previously The
Robert MacNeil Report). NewsHour was the first television
news program to devote large blocks of time to detailed
reporting on a few issues.
Robert Breckenridge Ware MacNeil was born in Montreal, Canada, January 19, 1931, to Robert and Peggy MacNeil, and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His two middle
names were drawn from American forbearers on both sides.
His father, a World War II naval commander decorated for
his heroics, was frequently absent from home. MacNeil
traces his love of language to his well-read parents. He is
known as Robin to friends, associates, and viewers of NewsHour, which he and co-host Lehrer ended each evening by
exchanging their signature salutes: “Goodnight Robin,”
“Good night Jim.”
In high school and Dalhousie University in Halifax,
MacNeil developed an interest in theater. Backstage following his performance as Cassio in Othello, a Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation producer offered him work in
live radio dramas. He was a regular on CBC radio, and later
secured a role in a daily radio series. He moved to Ottawa
where he wrote and broadcast a weekend review of news for
radio station CFRA, and attended Carelton College (now
University), earning a BA in English in 1955.
MacNeil moved to London in June 1955 to pursue
playwriting, then took a job with the newly founded Independent Television News (ITV) for three months before
moving to Reuters. Beginning as a subeditor, he worked
his way up to the Reuters Central Desk. MacNeil also
began writing and broadcasting stories from London for
the CBC in Toronto.
As London correspondent for NBC, MacNeil covered
the British government, then dozens of stories in Europe
and Africa—including the August 1961 German erection of
the Berlin Wall, during which he was briefly arrested and
held in East Berlin.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, NBC directed MacNeil to use his Canadian passport to fly to Havana, where
he and four other journalists were arrested and confined to
the Capri Hotel. Tapping into phone lines, the group called
Reuters. After his release, MacNeil bought a box of cigars
at the airport in Havana that subsequently were delivered
to John Kennedy via the president’s press secretary, Pierre
Salinger.
In March 1963 he moved to Washington to cover the
State Department and White House. When the shots that
killed Kennedy were fired in Dallas, MacNeil sprinted from
the press bus behind the president, up the Grassy Knoll in
search of a perpetrator, then into a building to look for a
phone, the Texas School Book Depository. MacNeil asked
a man descending the steps where he might find one. Historian William Manchester, who reconstructed a secondby-second account of the assassination in The Death of a
President, strongly believes it was Lee Harvey Oswald that
MacNeil encountered.
Later, with interns keeping a hallway pay phone open,
MacNeil regularly updated NBC on the president’s condition from in the emergency room of Parkland Hospital. He
would give a sentence of detail over the phone and Frank
McGee would repeat MacNeil’s updates live over the air to
Americans watching the unfolding tragedy. He also covered the assassinations and funerals of Martin Luther King
Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the 1968 Chicago Democratic
Convention. His 1982 book, The Right Place at the Right
Time, details his reporting during those cataclysmic years.
MacNeil covered Barry Goldwater and Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1964 election, then anchored and reported for
The Scherer-MacNeil Report, a Saturday news program
that garnered high ratings. He also anchored local newscasts and developed documentaries on topics such as electronic surveillance and gun control legislation. MacNeil
returned to London as a feature news reporter, doing longer
international pieces for the BBC’s Panorama, a show he
described as imminently superior to any news program on
U.S. television.
MacNeil’s critical exposé on the role of television in U.S.
politics, The People Machine, was published in 1968. He
returned to Washington to cover the 1972 elections for PBS
with Sander Vanocur. Jim Lehrer later replaced Vanocur
and the duo covered the ensuing Senate Watergate hearings, programming that attracted high ratings, large donations for public broadcasting, and an Emmy Award.
On New York’s WETA, The Robert MacNeil Report
with Jim Lehrer reporting from Washington premiered in
October 1975. PBS quickly began distributing the show
nationally and renamed it The MacNeil-Lehrer Report.
Consistent with MacNeil’s BBC sensibilities and Lehrer’s print reporter background, the co-hosts placed news values
over production, and strove for fairness. MacNeil-Lehrer
devoted a half hour of noncommercial airtime to one news
story with up to four guests explaining different views on
the topic. The conversations were shot in the round, with
guests seated at a horseshoe desk. The program’s audience
grew and attracted corporate underwriters.
MacNeil-Lehrer expanded to sixty minutes in 1983 and
became the NewsHour. It routinely included live interviews
from its studios in New York and Washington with highranking policy makers and internationally known experts.
Over the next two decades, the highly acclaimed program
appeared on over three hundred stations and earned more
than thirty awards for excellence in broadcast news. The cohosts formed MacNeil-Lehrer Productions, which produced
the program and features, such as MacNeil’s The Story of
English. With producer William Cran, MacNeil traced the
history of the language from its roots to its role as a global
language in the 1986 series that ran on the BBC, PBS, and
Australian Broadcasting, and earned Peabody and Emmy
awards. MacNeil and Cran’s Do You Speak American? was
adapted into a PBS documentary that premiered in January
2005. MacNeil retired in October, 1995.
MacNeil is author of novels Burden of Desire (1992),
Voyage (1995), Breaking News (1998), and memoir Wordstruck (1992). His 2003 Looking for My Country: Finding
Myself in America describes his search for a chosen nationality. MacNeil became an American citizen in 1997.
Further Reading
Lehrer, James. A Bus of My Own. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
1992.
MacNeil, Robert. Looking for My Country: Finding Myself in
America. New York: Nan A. Talese, 2003.
——. The People Machine: The Infl uence of Television on American Politics. New York: HarperCollins, 1968.
——. The Right Place at the Right Time. New York: Little Brown,
1982.
Kevin C. Lee