Biography
Bob Schieffer's distinguished career as a journalist began, for all intents and purposes, on Nov. 22, 1963 - the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. A reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegraph, Schieffer was answering phones in the paper's city room when a call came in from the mother of alleged shooter Lee Harvey Oswald, requesting a ride from Fort Worth to Dallas police headquarters. By offering that ride himself, Schieffer scooped other reporters, including future colleague Dan Rather. Following the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the arrival of the American military in Vietnam, Schieffer was the only reporter from Texas to travel to Southeast Asia, where he interviewed over 200 soldiers on combat duty. Work as an anchorman for an NBC affiliate station brought Schieffer to Washington, D.C., where persistence and dumb luck played a role in his hiring by CBS. Assigned to the Pentagon in 1972, Schieffer eventually covered every major news beat in the nation's capital, including the White House, the State Department and Capitol Hill. From 1973 on, he was the weekend face of "CBS Evening News" (1962- ) and in 1991 he succeeded Leslie Stahl as the host of the long-running political talk show "Face the Nation" (1954- ). A multiple Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist and a Library of Congress Living Legend, Schieffer earned the respect of colleagues and TV audiences with an emphasis on facts over sensationalism and by choosing to simply report and never become the news.
