WASHINGTON — At 78, Bob Schieffer is entitled to reminisce about the “good old days” of reporting. He thinks young people coming into the business can also learn from them.
Schieffer will host CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday for the last time after 24 years. He’s retiring from a journalism career that began at 20 at a Fort Worth, Texas, radio station and landed him at CBS News in Washington when he walked in on someone else’s interview. He’s one of the last of a generation of reporters working at such a high level. He covered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a story that gave him one of the biggest scoops of his career.
“I suppose every generation thinks that the kids younger than them aren’t as good as they were and screwed it up in some way,” he said. “I try not to sound like an old goat, but the fact is there will always be a need for reporters, whether they are doing it on television or a website or for a newspaper that is not on paper anymore.”
Soon Schieffer will pack up an office stuffed with memorabilia. One picture shows him standing by a bar with Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather. After his last show, he’ll attend a restaurant where old friends and colleagues will toast his tenure.
