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| Jim Lehrer | |
Longtime PBS anchorman and author Jim Lehrer, "who for 36 years gave public television viewers a substantive alternative to network evening news programs with in-depth reporting, interviews and analysis of world and national affairs" on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and, later, NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, died January 23, the New York Times reported. He was 85.
Lehrer was the author of more than 20 novels, "which often drew on his reporting experiences," as well as four plays and three memoirs. The novels include White Widow (1996), No Certain Rest (2002), Eureka (2007) and Super (2010). His memoirs are We Were Dreamers (1975), A Bus of My Own (1992) and Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates (2011).
The Times noted that "writing nights and weekends, on trains, planes and sometimes in the office, Mr. Lehrer churned out a novel almost every year for more than two decades: spy thrillers, political satires, murder mysteries and series featuring One-Eyed Mack, a lieutenant governor of Oklahoma, and Charlie Henderson, a C.I.A. agent. Top Down (2013) revolved around the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which Mr. Lehrer had covered as a young reporter in Dallas."
"His apprenticeship came at a time when every reporter, it seemed, had an unfinished novel in his desk--but Lehrer actually finished his," Texas Monthly said in a 1995 profile.