Robert MacNeil

Robert Breckenridge Ware MacNeil

MacNeil was born in Montreal on January 19, 1931, the son of Margaret Virginia (née Oxner) and Robert A. S. MacNeil, a Royal Canadian Navy officer in World War II and later a Canadian foreign service officer.^[1][2][3] He grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, went to boarding school at Rothesay Collegiate School and Upper Canada College, then attended Dalhousie University and later graduated from Carleton University in Ottawa in 1955.^[4]

Career

MacNeil began working in the news field at ITV in London, then for Reuters, and then for NBC News^[1] as a correspondent in Washington, D.C.^[5] He also worked as a news anchor, for WNBC, in New York City.^[5]

Kennedy assassination

On November 22, 1963, MacNeil was covering President John F. Kennedy's visit to Dallas for NBC News. After shots rang out in Dealey Plaza, MacNeil, who was with the presidential motorcade, followed crowds running onto the grassy knoll; he appears in a photo taken just moments after the assassination. He then headed toward the nearest building and encountered a young man leaving the Texas School Book Depository at around 12:33 p.m. CST. He asked the man where the nearest telephone was and the man pointed and went on his way. MacNeil later learned the man he encountered might have been Lee Harvey Oswald.^[1] Historian William Manchester reached this conclusion in his book The Death of a President (1967). Recounting the day's events to the Dallas Police, Oswald may have mistaken MacNeil for a Secret Service agent because of his suit, blond crew cut, and press badge. MacNeil has said, "it was possible, but I had no way of confirming that either of the young men I had spoken to was Oswald."^[6]

MacNeil sprinted to the phone and dialed the NBC newsroom in New York before telephone lines became overloaded. To his horror, an NBC employee who answered his call immediately put down the phone and never returned to the call. NBC tracked down the employee the next day and fired him.^[7]

By a matter of mere seconds, the first news bulletins about the assassination were delivered by Merriman Smith of United Press International, as Smith had been riding in the front row of the White House pool car, which was equipped with an AT&T radiotelephone. Smith won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the assassination.^[8]

MacNeil relayed by phone his report of the shooting to Jim Holton of NBC Radio, who recorded MacNeil's account of what had happened. He then headed to Parkland Hospital, where he arranged a phone connection with Frank McGee, who was anchoring continuous coverage with Bill Ryan and Chet Huntley of NBC-TV in New York. At approximately 1:40 p.m. CST, MacNeil relayed to McGee that White House acting press secretary Malcolm Kilduff had announced that Kennedy had died at 1:00 CST. That evening, MacNeil went to Dallas police headquarters and saw Oswald twice at close range, including when Oswald said, "[T]hey've taken me in because of the fact that I lived in the Soviet Union. I'm just a patsy", but did not recognize Oswald.^[3] As he was reporting for NBC, MacNeil was at times in relatively close proximity^[9] to his future co-anchor and partner Jim Lehrer, also covering the Kennedy visit and assassination for the Dallas Times-Herald, but the two did not meet until several years later, covering the Senate Watergate hearings in Washington, D.C. for PBS.^{[citation needed]}

News anchor

In 1967, MacNeil began covering American and European politics for the

In director Michael Almereyda's 2000 modern-day adaptation of Hamlet, MacNeil portrayed the Player King, reimagined as a TV news reporter.^[15][16]

On September 11, 2001, after the terrorist attacks in New York City and Arlington County, Virginia, MacNeil called PBS and offered to help.^[3] He joined PBS's coverage of the attacks and their aftermath, interviewing reporters and giving his thoughts on the events.^[3]

In 2007, MacNeil hosted the PBS television miniseries