By Helen V Hutchings
You hear his voice most weeknights calmly reporting events or describing issues in the day’s news. Perhaps you watched him moderate the presidential debates. Maybe you’re among those who have been listening to him from the very earliest days in 1975 when he joined PBS’s The Robert MacNeil Report as the Washington correspondent, or the following year as the program expanded, renamed The MacNeil-Lehrer Report and went national. In 1983 it became the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, eventually changing its name once more during 1995-96 season when Robert MacNeil retired. Since then that calm visage and voice are seen and heard on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer televised by PBS stations everywhere. Today Jim’s official title is Executive Editor and Anchor.
Behind that calm exterior, James Charles Lehrer is a man of passions. For certain he is passionate about and for his wife Kate with whom, along with their three daughters and six grandchildren, he celebrated their Golden Anniversary earlier this year. Lehrer also takes great pleasure in story-telling and he’s got lots of stories inside of him to share with us in addition to the twenty-two—yes 22—books he has written that have been published to date; two memoirs, 20 novels, plus three plays—and more books are, as they say, “in the pipeline and coming.” Plus he’s passionate about buses! Again, yes, you read right—buses…
