Jim Lehrer, Longtime PBS News
Anchor, Is Dead at 85
For 36 years, mostly teaming with Robert
MacNeil, he offered an alternative to network evening news programs with
in-depth reporting, interviews and news analysis.
New York Times
By Robert D. McFadden
January 23, 2020
Jim Lehrer, the retired PBS anchorman who for 36 years gave
public television viewers a substantive alternative to network evening news
programs with in-depth reporting,
interviews and analysis of world and national affairs, died on Thursday at his
home in Washington. He was 85.
PBS announced his death.
While best known for his anchor work, which he shared for
two decades with his colleague Robert MacNeil, Mr. Lehrer moderated a dozen
presidential debates and was the author of more than a score of novels, which
often drew on his reporting experiences. He also wrote four plays and three
memoirs.
A low-key, courtly Texan who worked on Dallas newspapers in the 1960s and began his
PBS career in the 1970s, Mr. Lehrer saw himself as “a print/word person at
heart” and his program as a kind of newspaper for television, with high regard
for balanced and objective reporting. He was an oasis of civility in a news
media that thrived on excited headlines, gotcha questions and noisy
confrontations.
“I have an old-fashioned view that news is not a commodity,”
Mr. Lehrer told The American Journalism Review in 2001. “News is information
that’s required in a democratic society, and Thomas Jefferson said a democracy
is dependent on an informed citizenry. That sounds corny, but I don’t care
whether it sounds corny or not. It’s the truth.”
Critics called Mr. Lehrer’s reporting, and his
collaborations with Mr. MacNeil, solid journalism, committed to fair, unbiased
and far more detailed reporting than the CBS, NBC or ABC nightly news programs.
To put news in perspective, the two anchors interviewed world and national
leaders, and experts on politics, law, business, arts and sciences, and other
fields.
It was not unusual to see presidents, prime ministers,
congressional and corporate leaders and other luminaries interviewed on
“MacNeil/Lehrer.” Early subjects included the Shah of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Presidents
Anwar Sadat of Egypt and
Fidel Castro of Cuba.
Mr. Lehrer also interviewed nearly all of America’s presidential and
vice-presidential candidates from 1976 on.
With Mr. Lehrer reporting from Washington and Mr. MacNeil
from New York,
the program sought to represent all sides of a controversy by eliciting
comments from rivals for public attention. But the anchors deliberately drew no
sweeping conclusions of their own about disputed matters, allowing viewers to
decide for themselves what to believe.
The approach had its drawbacks. An extended presentation of
authoritative voices offering conflicting viewpoints left some viewers
dissatisfied, if not confused. Many found the technique elitist and dull, and
even some critics called it boring — or, worse, a willful refusal by Mr. Lehrer
and Mr. MacNeil to make hard judgments about adversarial issues affecting the
public interest.
In The Columbia Journalism Review in 1979, Andrew Kopkind
wrote: “The structure of any MacNeil/Lehrer Report is composed of talking heads
rather than explosive images, of conversation covering several points of view
rather than a homogeneous statement of the world’s condition, of panels of
experts, proposals for policy, and the sense of incompleteness — and therefore
of possibility — rather than a feeling of finality.”
Edwin Diamond, writing in The New York Times that year, said
the hosts had “gradually created one of the best half-hours of news on
television without ‘visuals’ at all; the major elements of the program are the interviewers
themselves, always prepared with good questions, and the quality of their
guests, always specialists on the night’s single topic and almost always
capable of speaking fresh, intelligent thoughts.”
“MacNeil/Lehrer” audiences were small compared to the
network news shows, which drew far more viewers with videotaped coverage and
news summaries that critics called headlines for people who did not read daily
newspapers. But surveys found that PBS viewers were better educated, and that
they were newspaper readers who tuned in to amplify what they knew.
Mr. Lehrer and Mr. MacNeil each declined lucrative job
offers from television networks. Unlike commercial networks, “MacNeil/Lehrer”
relied on donations by corporations, foundations and wealthy individuals; by
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a nonprofit creation of Congress; and
by MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, created in 1981 to support their franchise,
specials and documentaries.
In 1986, Mr. Lehrer hosted the documentary “My Heart, Your
Heart,” which was based on his experience of double-bypass surgery and recovery
in 1983. The program, on PBS, won an Emmy and an award from the American Heart
Association. He also hosted “The Heart of the Dragon,” a 12-part series on
modern China,
also shown in 1986.
Known mainly to PBS viewers, Mr. Lehrer became one of
television’s most familiar faces by moderating presidential debates, starting
in 1988 with the first between Vice President George H.W. Bush and Gov. Michael
S. Dukakis of Massachusetts,
and continuing in every presidential campaign through 2012, sometimes including
two or three debates in a year.
Complaints by candidates and pundits about moderators’
performances became a tradition of election seasons, and Mr. Lehrer, often
called the “Dean of Moderators” for his many appearances, was singled out
repeatedly, accused of being too easygoing or too strict in enforcing the
rules, of being too soft or too hard on the debaters.
In 1988, when critics said he was not aggressive enough with
the candidates, Mr. Lehrer snapped, “If somebody wants to be entertained, they
ought to go to the circus.” In 2008, he was said to be too aggressive in trying
to get Senator John McCain of Arizona and
Senator Barack Obama of Illinois
to engage with each other.
In the 2012 debate, it was Mr. Lehrer’s light touch that
came under fire. President Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts at times
ignored Mr. Lehrer, who strained to interrupt when they exceeded their allotted
speaking times, and rules were violated repeatedly. Both campaigns accused Mr.
Lehrer of losing control of the debate.
The Commission on Presidential Debates defended Mr. Lehrer,
saying it was his job to get the candidates talking, not to insert himself into
their dialogue. For his part, Mr. Lehrer said his task had been “to facilitate
direct, extended exchanges between the candidates about issues of substance”
and “to stay out of the way of the flow,” adding, “I had no problems with doing
so.”
James Charles Lehrer was born in Wichita, Kan.,
on May 19, 1934, to Harry Lehrer, who ran a small bus line and was a bus
station manager, and Lois (Chapman) Lehrer, a teacher. Jim attended schools in Wichita and Beaumont, Tex., and graduated from Thomas
Jefferson High
School in San Antonio,
where he edited a student newspaper.
He earned an associate degree from Victoria
College in Texas
in 1954 and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri
in 1956. Like his father and his older brother Fred, he joined the Marine
Corps. He was an infantry officer on Okinawa, edited a camp newspaper at the
Parris Island Marine training center in South
Carolina and was discharged as a captain in 1959.
In 1960, he married Kate Staples, a novelist. She survives
him, along with three daughters, Jamie, Lucy and Amanda, and six grandchildren.
From 1959 to 1961, Mr. Lehrer was a reporter for The Dallas
Morning News, but he quit after the paper declined to publish his articles on
right-wing activities in a civil defense organization. He joined the rival
Dallas Times Herald, where over nine years he was a reporter, columnist and
city editor.
He also began writing fiction. His first novel, “Viva Max!”
(1966), about a Mexican general who triggers an international incident by
trying to recapture the Alamo, was made into a film comedy starring Peter
Ustinov and Jonathan Winters.
In 1970, Mr. Lehrer joined KERA-TV, the Dallas public broadcasting station, where he
delivered a nightly newscast. In 1972, he became PBS’s coordinator of public
affairs programming in Washington.
He quit over funding cuts, but in 1973 he joined WETA-TV in Washington, became a PBS correspondent and
met Mr. MacNeil, a Canadian who had reported for NBC-TV and the BBC.
They co-anchored PBS telecasts of the Senate Watergate
hearings, investigating the break-in by Republican operatives at the Democratic
National Committee headquarters, an episode that set off a political
dirty-tricks scandal that led to the downfall of Richard M. Nixon’s presidency.
The telecasts began the partnership that would carry the two broadcasters to
television fame.
Mr. Lehrer won numerous Emmys, a George Foster Peabody Award
and a National Humanities Medal. He and Mr. MacNeil were inducted into the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of
Fame in 1999.
He lived in Washington and
had a farm in West Virginia,
where he kept a 1946 Flxible Clipper bus, the centerpiece of his collection of
bus memorabilia.
Mr. Lehrer’s memoirs were “We Were Dreamers” (1975), “A Bus
of My Own” (1992) and “Tension
City: Inside the
Presidential Debates” (2011). His plays were “Chili Queen” (1986), a farce
about a media circus at a hostage situation; “Church Key Charlie Blue” (1988),
a dark comedy on a bar flare-up over a televised football game; “The Will and
Bart Show” (1992), about two cabinet officials who loathe each other; and “Bell”
(2013), a one-man show about Alexander Graham Bell.
Writing nights and weekends, on trains, planes and sometimes
in the office, Mr. Lehrer churned out a novel almost every year for more than
two decades: spy thrillers, political satires, murder mysteries and series
featuring One-Eyed Mack, a lieutenant governor of Oklahoma, and Charlie Henderson, a C.I.A.
agent. “Top Down” (2013) revolved around the 1963 assassination of President
John F. Kennedy, which Mr. Lehrer had covered as a young reporter in Dallas. Critics called
his fiction workmanlike, relying more on twisty plots than characters and
dialogue.
“His apprenticeship came at a time when every reporter, it
seemed, had an unfinished novel in his desk — but Lehrer actually finished
his,” Texas Monthly said in a 1995 profile.
But it was as a newsman that Mr. Lehrer was best remembered.
“Jim Lehrer is no showboat,” Walter Goodman wrote in The
Times in 1996. “That is a considerable distinction for television, where the
interrogators are often bigger than their guests or victims. This man of modest
mien keeps the spotlight on the person being questioned. His somewhat halting
conversational manner invites rather than commands. And his professional
principles dispel any fears that he is out to get not just his guests’ point of
view but also the guests themselves.”
LEHRER, Jim (James
Charles Lehrer)
Born: 5/19/1934, Wichita, Kansas,
U.S.A.
Died: 1/23/1920, Washington, D.C.,
U.S.A.
Jim Lehrer’s
western – writer:
Viva Max -1969
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