Frank McGee was a reporter for NBC News starting with the mid-1950s
when he worked at the Montgomery, Alabama bureau. He, along with Chet
Huntley and WNBC-TV reporter Bill Ryan broke the news to the American
public of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Friday,
November 22, 1963 - mostly repeating the words of field reporter Robert
McNeil via telephone from Dallas, due to an audio fault in the New York
studio. From 1971 until his death due to bone marrow cancer in 1974
(age 58) he served as co-host with Barbara Walters of the NBC Today
show. A traditional, strait-laced, old-fashioned reporter and
newscaster, McGee, like his contemporaries, had a great talent for
descriptive language, painting visual pictures of events in the news,
in the tradition of Edward R. Murrow. He also served as newscaster for
the landmark NBC Radio program "Monitor" in the early 1960s.
