Robert MacNeil

TV Show Host

Birthday January 19, 1931

Birth Sign Capricorn

Birthplace Montreal, Canada

DEATH DATE Apr 12, 2024 (93)

#11330 Most Popular

About

Canadian novelist, journalist, and TV news anchor best known for co-creating The MacNeil/Lehrer Report on PBS. The show later became the PBS NewsHour. 

Before Fame

He was raised in Nova Scotia and attended Dalhousie University and Carleton University.

Trivia

He received an Emmy Award for his PBS coverage of the Senate's Watergate hearings. In 2007, he hosted the miniseries America at a Crossroads.

Family Life

He was born in Montreal, Canada to Margaret Virginia Oxner and Robert A. S. MacNeil. He became a U.S. citizen in 1997.

Associated With

He was covering President John F. Kennedy's fateful 1963 visit to Dallas when he encountered a man who may have been Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. MacNeil, not knowing the identity of a man he saw leaving the Texas School Book Depository, asked for directions to the nearest telephone.