Lehrer, PBS news anchor, dies at 85
He moderated 12 presidential debates
Jim Lehrer, a low-key television newsman who co-founded what is now called The PBS NewsHour, which he anchored for 36 years and who was dubbed the “dean of moderators” for presiding over 12 presidential debates, died Thursday at his home in Washington. He was 85.
PBS announced his death but did not provide further details.
Lehrer began his career as a newspaper reporter in Texas before switching to broadcast journalism in the late 1960s, yet he always maintained the laconic, slightly rumpled manner of a city editor.
Besides questioning presidential candidates in debates from 1988 to 2012, Lehrer interviewed presidents and other world leaders directly, often asking pointed questions in a quiet, understated way.
Lehrer joined the small news operation of PBS in Washington in 1973 and soon began covering the Watergate hearings with fellow newscaster Robert MacNeil. In 1975 he became the co-anchor of The MacNeil/Lehrer Report.
The name was changed to The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour in 1983, then The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer after MacNeil left the program in 1995. Since 2009, the nightly report has been known as The PBS NewsHour. Lehrer stepped down as anchor in 2011.
He maintained a steady and calming presence during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and later reported on the long wars in their wake.
James Charles Lehrer was born in Wichita, Kan., on May 19, 1934, to a working-class but entrepreneurial family. His father worked for the Santa Fe Trailways bus company and, after Marine Corps service in World War II, created his own rival company, Kansas Central Lines, with three buses. The whole family, including Jim, worked for the business until it went bankrupt after a year.
The Lehrers moved to Texas, settling in San Antonio, where Lehrer said his ambitions turned to journalism after reading the war correspondence of Ernie Pyle and other columnists known for their intimate, grunt’s-eye-view of combat. He edited the newspaper at his high school and at a nearby junior college before graduating with a journalism degree from the University of Missouri in 1956.
After Marine Corps service in Okinawa, he ran the camp newspaper at the Parris Island Marine training camp in South Carolina and was hired, after his discharge in 1959, at the Dallas Morning News. Lehrer drew attention for his takedowns of the John Birch Society and other conspiracy-minded groups.
When his own publisher refused to print his series on a dubious civil defense organization, Lehrer quit and joined the rival Dallas Times Herald as a court reporter and later a political columnist. He also began writing fiction, including one poorly reviewed satiric novel, Viva Max!, about a Mexican general’s quixotic attempt to recapture the Alamo, that was turned into a movie in 1969 starring Peter Ustinov and Jonathan Winters.
It was also, perhaps, Lehrer’s entreaty regarding his own ambition. “Basically,” he wrote in the Library Journal, “I try to show through the Mexican general — Max — the need in all of us to be recognized for something — anything.”
After a brief stint as city editor, he quit the newspaper in 1969 and lived off his movie royalties before taking a part-time consulting job at KERA-TV, the public television station in Dallas. He was variously in charge of public affairs and host of an evening newscast and, in 1972, was hired as the first public affairs coordinator for the fledgling Public Broadcasting Service in Washington.