Robert MacNeil’s spy footnote

Robert MacNeil (1931-2024)

Robert MacNeil, a long-time television journalist, died this week at the age of 93. During his day job, he covered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and hosted the MacNeil/Lehrer Report (later the PBS News Hour) for years.

MacNeil also had a spy entertainment footnote: He hosted PBS’s presentation of the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy miniseries in 1980. The miniseries debuted in 1979 in the U.K.

MacNeil made clear in his introductions that he was a big fan of David Cornwell/John Le Carre. In one of his Tinker Tailor introductions, he took a dig at Ian Fleming and James Bond. Bond was a cardboard figure, as MacNeil told it. Le Carre wrote well-developed, complicated characters.

Essentially, MacNeil mirrored a decades-long debate. In 2017, there was a debate in London about whether Le Carre or Fleming was the better spy novelist.

Personal note: That Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy miniseries is when I discovered Le Carre. I then bought some of the author’s novels. They’re all quite good. But I never liked how some Le Carre fans (such as MacNeil) felt the need to slam Fleming and Bond.

For more about MacNeil’s career, you can view obituaries by The Washington Post and The New York Times. These are gift links meaning there should be no paywall issues.

John le Carre dies at 89

David Cornell, aka John Le Carre, circa 1964

John le Carre, a prolific author of spy novels with characters coping with ambiguously moral situations, has died at 89, The Guardian reported, citing a family statement.

Le Carre, real name David Cornwell, reached fame in 1963 with the novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Other popular novels followed, including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley’s People, The Russia House and The Night Manager.

Cornwell had worked in intelligence, which is why he adopted the le Carre pen name. In a 1989 interview with PBS, he said espionage involved doing “dishonorable things for honorable purposes.”

The author discussed the many types of spies.

“The field man is the figure who interests me because I feel he’s a metaphor for other walks of life,” Cornwell told PBS. “He’s a person I can explore, some kind of alienated character perhaps who rather like a writer is dependent on the society he’s deceiving, or penetrating, and who rather like a writer makes his perceptions secretly and reports them in due course to the consumer.”

Le Carre works were made into films and television miniseries. By 2016, a group called Intelligence Squared, held a debate which spy author — le Carre or Ian Fleming — was better.

David Farr, who adapted The Night Manager for the BBC, advocated for le Carre. Anthony Horwitz, a popular novelist whose works include two James Bond continuation novels, spoke on Fleming’s behalf.

 Below is a video from 1964 as le Carre’s career was taking off. He appeared on the U.S. television show To Tell The Truth. By this point, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was going to be made into a movie and le Carre was a hot property. The le Carre segment begins at the 8:22 mark.