Jim Lehrer Passed Away!

NewsHour co-founder Jim Lehrer passed away.

On Friday, PBS anchor Jim Lehrer passed away. The veteran newsman who hosted PBS NewsHour passed away in his sleep.

Lehrer died "peacefully in his sleep," according to PBS. He had suffered a heart attack in 1983 and more recently, had undergone heart valve surgery in April 2008.

For Lehrer, and for his friend and longtime partner Robert MacNeil, broadcast journalism was a service, with public understanding of events and issues its primary goal. Lehrer was also a frequent moderator of presidential debates.

News of his death shocked both politicians and fellow journalists. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) tweeted the nation lost a "champion for truth and transparency."

CNN chief Washington correspondent Jake Taper tweeted his condolences to Lehrer's wife Kate Staples and the staff at NewsHour.

For 36 years, Lehrer began the nightly newscast with a simple phrase, "Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer," PBS reports, in a news store about his passing.

The news program was once called The Robert MacNeil Report. It started in 1975 and it has Lehrer as a Washington correspondent.

The two had already made names for themselves at then the fledgling PBS seeing they both done work for the National Public Affairs Center for Television and its coverage of the Watergate hearings of 1973.

The broadcast was soon renamed the MacNeil-Lehrer Report and became the nation's first one-hour TV news broadcast in 1983 and was then known as MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour.

After MacNeil left the show in 1995, it became NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

Judy Woodruff hosts PBS NewsHour. Her former co-host Gwen Ifill passed away from cancer in 2016.

Lehrer was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1934, the son of parents who ran a bus line. In addition to titling his memoir, "A Bus of My Own," he collected bus memorabilia - from station signs to a feal 1946 Flexible Clipper Bus.

After graduation from college in 1956, he served three years in the Marines -- and later called the experience so valuable he thought all young people should take part in national service.
"I had no close calls, no rendezvous with danger, no skirted destinies with death," he wrote. "What I had was a chance to discover and test myself, physically and emotionally and spiritually, in important, lasting ways."

Lehrer leaves behind his wife Kate Staples, his three daughters Jamie, Lucy and Amanda. He also has six grandchildren.