Growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, during World War II, MacNeil felt as though nothing of significance ever happened in Canada; Canada seemed too small, too parochial for his ambitions. Reared on his mother's obsession with all things English, when he moved to Britain in his mid-twenties he expected to find himself adopted by a new country that was at once familiar and foreign. But his career led him down a different path. Receiving a call from NBC to fill in as their London correspondent, he began reporting for an American audience. By the early sixties, NBC convinced him to come to the United States, where he continued his broadcasts and eventually founded the highly acclaimed MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour at PBS.
Looking for My Country, the biography of the former co-host of
The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, is one part snappy and readable memoir and one part examination of the meaning of nationality. We learn of MacNeil's childhood years growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, his three marriages, his early aspirations to be a stage actor and a writer, and of his lengthy and prestigious career in journalism. As a journalist, MacNeil worked for the CBC, Reuters, the BBC, NBC and finally PBS, covering many of the major events of the second half of the 20th century, including the Cuban missile crisis, the assassinations of John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, the 1976 election of Québec's openly separatist Parti Québécois, and the end of the cold war.
At the core of the book is the story of one man's search for his national identity. Early on MacNeil admits "For a long time, I was a man with a nationality but no inner country; or a man with a country but no psychic nationality". Of his years living and working in England he says "I knew immediately that I was not English and did not want to try to become English". As his career advanced, turning him into one of America's most recognised journalists, this struggle continued. He was, he says, "holding America in a kind of probation", recognising that "the emotional coolness Canadians of my background tended to exhibit" created his journalistic persona.
By the mid-90s, thoroughly immersed in the social and cultural life of his adopted home, New York City, MacNeil applied for US citizenship, receiving it in 1997. But, he adds, it was the events of September 11, 2001 that "removed any emotional reservations about becoming an American... Four years after I became an American citizen in law, I had become an American in my heart". Looking for My Country is both a candid story of one man's voyage through history and an equally compelling account of an emotional and psychological journey toward national identity. --Michael Ryan, Amazon.com
