In 1960, after five years at the Reuters news agency in London, Mr. MacNeil joined NBC News, eventually replacing John Chancellor as a wide-ranging foreign correspondent, covering wars in Africa and the Cuban missile crisis. (For about a week after that October 1962 episode, he and five other journalists were held under house arrest in a Havana hotel by the Castro government.) He was present at the construction of the Berlin Wall and later covered its dismantling in 1989.
Mr. MacNeil was assigned to cover Washington in 1963 and was on his first presidential trip on Nov. 22 when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. While his work covering the killing was overshadowed by that of his NBC News colleagues, he may have had his own brush with the drama of that day.
After the shots were fired in Dealey Plaza, Mr. MacNeil made his way to the nearest building, the Texas School Book Depository — the building from which the fatal shots had been fired. There, he asked a man who was leaving and another in the lobby where the nearest telephone was. Kennedy’s accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, later told the Dallas police that he had encountered a Secret Service agent at the building. The historian William Manchester later concluded in his 1967 book, “The Death of a President,” that the man in the suit, crew cut and press badge was, in fact, Mr. MacNeil.
In his autobiography, “The Right Place at the Right Time” (1982), Mr. MacNeil wrote that “it was possible, but I had no way of confirming that either of the young men I had spoken to was Oswald.”
In 1965, Mr. MacNeil became the co-anchor, with Ray Scherer, of NBC’s half-hour weekend news broadcast, “The Scherer-MacNeil Report.” But two years later he returned to London, reporting for the BBC’s “Panorama” program, before joining PBS in 1971.
Kaynak: briturkish.com
