RIP Robert MacNeil

[dixiehack]

Gift link to WaPo obit.

He began writing for Reuters in 1955 and, five years later, joined NBC News as a foreign correspondent, covering fighting in the Belgian Congo, the Algerian war of independence and the construction of the Berlin Wall.

After moving to the network’s Washington bureau, he was assigned to cover President John F. Kennedy’s November 1963 visit to Dallas, where he was sitting at the front of a press bus when shots rang out.
Mr. MacNeil ran off the bus, followed police officers up a grassy knoll and searched for a phone to call his editor. Sprinting toward the Texas School Book Depository, the building from which Lee Harvey Oswald was later found to have shot Kennedy, he came face to face with a “young guy in shirtsleeves” who suggested that Mr. MacNeil “ask inside” for a phone.
“I didn’t register his face because I was obsessed with finding a phone,” Mr. MacNeil told the Canadian Press in 2013. “Much later,” he added, “it occurred to me that I was going in just about the time Oswald had been going out.”

https://wapo.st/4aVJ2e9

 

[Liut]

Never really became a viewer of The NewsHour until after he left, but certainly respected his career. Figured he'd already died. RIP

 

[Mr._Graybeard]

My dad was a TV news junkie. He'd start with the 4:30 p.m newscast on Chicago's WMAQ and wrap up the jag with the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour. So MacNeil probably influenced my direction in life.