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After all these years, Bob Schieffer wasn’t your average talking head

WASHINGTON – When Bob Schieffer bowed out last Sunday after 24 years as moderator of CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” he observed that from the start “I tried to remember that the news is not about the newscaster. It’s about the people who make it and those who are affected by it.”

In the current climate in which some other on-air deliverers of news and analysis have come a cropper for not always buying into that view, Schieffer’s comment might have come off as a reference to them.

But Schieffer, characteristically never one to criticize others, was describing his own deep and well-established commitment to the story, to the credibility of it and to always presenting it without personal bias.

In that way, he has emulated his idol, CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, called in his time America’s most trusted man on television.

Bob Schieffer in his appealing modesty sometimes passed off his wide and even worshipful viewer approval simply to longevity. “The interesting thing about my life,” he once told the New York Times, “is a lot of the recognition I got was after most people retired. I think people just became familiar with me because I had been there and others had come and gone.”

The truth is that for a long time at CBS, he had been a sort of utility infielder, filling in for other more glamorous television stars like Dan Rather and Katie Couric and self-promoters on the network weekend evening new shows.

But his easy-going delivery and old-shoe reporting style wore exceedingly well over time.

As an interviewer, Schieffer’s courteous and somehow inoffensive persistence inevitably was able to break through the most resistant of stone walls often constructed by those he gently probed.

On his final “Face the Nation” show last Sunday, he jovially chided undeclared 2016 presidential candidate Jeb Bush for refusing to say flat out that he is one.

Noting his intensive fund-raising, Schieffer observed, “It’s pretty obvious that you’re running for president.”

As Bush bobbed and weaved, his interrogator half-asked: “Now, you’re not telling me there’s a possibility you may not run?”

Jeb stuttered: “Look, I hope I run, to be honest with you. I would like to run. But I haven’t made the decision.”

Schieffer, smiling benignly, pressed on: “Well, what would have to happen between now and then to convince you not to run?”

Jeb, lamely: “Who knows, who knows? I’ve learned not to answer a lot of hypothetical questions.”

Schieffer, still grinning: “You’re probably going to run.”

Jeb. “I hope so. I hope I’m a candidate in the near future.” (Or as a lawyer might conclude, asked and answered.) It subsequently was disclosed that he would make his announcement on June 15.

The same low-key persistence brought the young Bob Schieffer from a reporter’s job on a local television station and the Fort Worth Telegram (where his big break came when he gave Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother a ride to Dallas shortly after the Kennedy assassination) eventually to the CBS anchor chair.

“I wanted to work for CBS because Walter Cronkite was my hero,” he told his viewers, “and I got a chance to do that. And after I was here awhile, I wanted to be the moderator of ‘Face the Nation.’ And I got to do that, and did it for 24 years.”

He made it sound as if he had little to do with it all, as if agreeing with Woody Allen that 80 percent of success in life is showing up.

Bob Schieffer certainly did that and much more, and now he reports he will be showing up at Harvard’s Institute of Politics on a three-semester fellowship this fall.

He already teaches at his alma mater, Texas Christian University’s Bob Schieffer College of Communication.

The fact is that this down-home, friendly Texan has been a teacher all his life in journalism.

Not only those who have learned about the news from him, but also others in the news business wise enough to adopt his even-handedness and good will in dealing with public figures, have been his fortunate beneficiaries.

Editor’s note: Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@comcast.net.

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