Chancellor, John William

▪ 1997

      U.S. television journalist (b. July 14, 1927, Chicago, Ill.—d. July 12, 1996, Princeton, N.J.), spent more than 40 years as a broadcaster for NBC, where he established a reputation for professionalism, thoughtfulness, and intelligence. He reported from over 50 countries and interviewed every U.S. president since Harry Truman, British prime minister since Clement Attlee, and Israeli prime minister since Golda Meir. Chancellor's appetite for the news business was whetted by an after-school job as a copy boy at the Chicago Daily News when he was 14. After dropping out of Chicago's Navy Pier campus of the University of Illinois, he became (1947) a copy boy at the Chicago Sun-Times and worked his way up to feature writer before leaving to join Chicago's NBC affiliate, first on radio and then on television. Chancellor gained national attention for his coverage of the 1957 school integration crisis in Little Rock, Ark. He then was posted to Vienna (1958), London (1959-60), and Moscow (1960-61); served (1961-62) as host of the Today show; and covered (1962-63) the Common Market meetings in Brussels. One of Chancellor's most memorable broadcasts was aired in 1964 when he was covering the Republican Party's national convention. Arrested for blocking an aisle while conducting an interview, he signed off by saying, "This is John Chancellor, somewhere in custody." Chancellor spent two years (1965-67) as director of the Voice of America but then returned to NBC as a national correspondent. From 1970 to 1982 he served as anchorman of the "NBC Nightly News," a post that made him a celebrity but left him unsatisfied, and in 1982 he became a senior commentator. After having delivered an estimated 1,500 commentaries, he retired from NBC in 1993. In 1994 Chancellor was narrator of Ken Burns's "Baseball," a nine-part Public Broadcasting Service documentary.

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