Robert MacNeil

ABOUT ROBERT MACNEIL

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.

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

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.

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

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.