Jim Lehrer, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) news anchor, will deliver the commencement address at Hamilton College on Sunday, May 25, at 10:30 a.m. Hamilton's commencement ceremony will take place on the Main Quadrangle, or in the event of inclement weather, in the Margaret Bundy Scott Field House.
Lehrer was born in Wichita, Kan., in 1934. He is a graduate of Victoria College in Texas and the University of Missouri. After three years as an infantry officer in the Marine Corps, he worked for 10 years in Dallas as a newspaperman and then as the host of a local experimental news program on public television.
Lehrer came to Washington with PBS in 1972, teaming with Robert MacNeil in 1973 to cover the Senate Watergate hearings. They began, in 1975, what became the MacNeil/Lehrer Report, which won more than 30 awards for journalistic excellence. In 1983, they launched the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, the first 60-minute evening news program in television. When MacNeil retired in 1995, the program was renamed The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
Lehrer has been honored with numerous awards for journalism, including a presidential National Humanities Medal in 1999. In the last four presidential elections, he moderated nine of the nationally televised candidate debates. In 1999 Lehrer was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame with MacNeil, and into the Silver Circle of the Washington, DC, chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. He has won two Emmys, the Fred Friendly First Amendment Award, the George Foster Peabody Broadcast Award, the William Allen White Foundation Award for Journalistic Merit, and the University of Missouri School of Journalism's Medal of Honor. In 1991 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
No Certain Rest, published in 2002, is Lehrer's 13th novel; he has also written two memoirs and three plays. He and his novelist wife, Kate, have three daughters and six grandchildren.
Approximately 470 Hamilton students will receive bachelor's degrees during the commencement ceremony that marks the end of the college's 191st academic year.
