Jim Lehrer Believed Serving His Country Made Him a Better Journalist

"My three years of service connected me to the rest of the world, the world outside myself, and the connection has been permanent."

These were the words of encouragement veteran journalist Jim Lehrer gave to Harvard's graduating class during his commencement speech in 2006.

Lehrer was professing his belief that the United States should adopt some kind of national service. He wasn't advocating for a new military draft, and he wasn't telling the new graduates to join the Marines. He wanted to impart the importance of his service in the Corps.

Lehrer, who died on Jan. 23, 2020, joined the Marines after graduating from the University of Missouri with a degree in journalism. It was in the Marine Corps that Lehrer says he looked past himself.

"I went with my parents from the commencement ceremony to a building on campus where I raised my right hand and was sworn in as a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps," Lehrer recalled of his service. He served between 1956 and 1959, between the Korean and Vietnam wars.

"I saw no combat, fired no rounds in anger, had none fired at me, had no roadside bombs kill fellow Marines," he continued. "My Marine service was a life-changing experience for me, a positive one that had I not had, I would likely not be standing here today because I would not be a person deemed worthy of such an honor."

When Lehrer joined the Marines, the U.S. military was still drafting service-age men. He decided to join as an officer, rather than be drafted. He chose the Marine Corps because his father and brother were also Marines.

Lehrer also wanted to get away from the trailways of Kansas.

His service took him across America to California, where he was eventually shipped to Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and to "essentially the world."

For much of his life, he recalled, he spent his time around people who "looked, talked and fought like me." Once in the Corps, he was "eating, drinking, sleeping, sweating and running up and down hills with and listening to people who had little in common with me."

They spoke, looked and acted differently, in almost every conceivable way.

"In that diverse company," he said, "I learned to be responsible for others. I learned to depend on others. And to understand what being depended on by others really meant. There was more to the world than me and my kind, more to life than me, me, me."

He credited his experience as a Marine for making him the person who became an award-winning journalist for the next 50-plus years.

"The experience left me convinced that connecting and connections are essential for our democratic society to work," he said.

Lehrer became a print journalist in 1959, working for newspapers in Dallas. In the 1970s, he turned to broadcast news on PBS, anchoring what began as the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour."

Even though co-anchor Robert MacNeil retired in 1995, the renamed "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" continued until Lehrer's retirement in 2011.

"I was a much better reporter then because of how I spent those intervening three years, and a much better person -- and commencement speaker -- now, 50 years later," he said.

Lehrer also listed his personal guidelines for reporting what The New York Times called "solid journalism, committed to fair, unbiased and far more detailed reporting than the CBS, NBC or ABC nightly news programs."

He said:

"These are my personal guidelines that we use at the NewsHour in our practice of journalism:

• Do nothing I cannot defend.
• Cover, write and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me.
• Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story.
• Assume the viewer is as smart, as caring and as good a person as I am.
• Assume the same about all people on whom I report.
• Assume personal lives are a private matter until a legitimate turn in the story absolutely mandates otherwise.
• Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories.
• Clearly label everything.
• Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes except on rare and monumental occasions -- no one should ever be able to attack another anonymously.
• And finally, I am not in the entertainment business."

"I am grateful my country forced me to serve my country," he said. "Not for my country's sake, but for my own."

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