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This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bienkule. Today on Fresh Air, we're going to remember two notable people who died last week,

documentarian and author Eleanor Coppola, and veteran TV news reporter and anchor Robert

McNeil.

We'll start with Robert McNeil, who was 93 when he died last Friday.

Robert McNeil was born in Montreal in 1931, the son of a Royal Canadian Mountie.

Though his early ambitions were to be an actor and a playwright,

he changed gears while at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

and became a journalist.

During his long and distinguished career, McNeil was in Germany when the Berlin Wall went up in the 60s,

and was there again when it was torn down in the 90s.

He was in Dallas working for NBC, the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

In 1971, he joined PBS, covering the news in a way that offered more depth and less flash

than the other U.S. broadcast networks

were doing at the time. He was still a relatively unknown entity, but at the

time so was PBS with programs like Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, and imported

British dramas presented under the title Masterpiece Theatre.

Eventually, these shows became very popular on public television.

And so did McNeil, when he was paired with another journalist,

Jim Lehrer, to anchor the network's prime-time evening

reruns of each day's coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings.

...