Lesley Rene Stahl (born December 16, 1941) is an American television journalist. She has spent most of her career with CBS News, where she began as a producer in 1971. Since 1991, she has reported for CBS's 60 Minutes. She is known for her news and television investigations and award-winning foreign reporting. For her body of work she has earned various journalism awards including a Lifetime Achievement News and Documentary Emmy Award in 2003 for overall excellence in reporting.
Prior to joining 60 Minutes, Stahl served as CBS News White House correspondent – the first woman to hold that job – during the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan presidencies and part of the term of George H. W. Bush. Her reports appeared frequently on the CBS Evening News, first with Walter Cronkite then with Dan Rather and on other CBS News broadcasts. During much of that time, she also served as moderator of Face the Nation, CBS News' Sunday public affairs broadcast from September 1983 to May 1991. As moderator, she interviewed such various world leaders as Margaret Thatcher, Boris Yeltsin and Yasser Arafat, among others. From 1990 to 1991, she was co-host with Charles Kuralt of America Tonight, a daily CBS News late-night broadcast of interviews and essays.
Throughout her 50-year career in journalism, Stahl has covered such iconic moments in United States history as the Watergate scandal in 1972, the impeachment hearings of President Nixon in 1974, the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan and the 1991 Gulf War. She reported on the U.S./Russian summit meetings and the economic summits of the industrialized countries, as well as the national political conventions and election nights throughout her career. In her TV news career, she has investigated the enhanced interrogation methods against Al Qaeda during the Iraq War, the cruelty Saddam Hussein inflicted on Iraqi children, in addition to examining practices within Guantánamo Bay and operatives. She has also reported on tensions within the Middle East and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
In 2020, she gained much media attention for her interview with President Donald Trump in which he stopped the interview short and walked out due to his objections to her warning him about "tough questions" which he believed were "inappropriate."
Early life and education
Stahl was born in 1941 to a Jewish family in the Boston suburb of Lynn, Massachusetts, and was raised in Swampscott, Massachusetts. She is the daughter of Dorothy J. (née Tishler) and Louis E. Stahl, a food company executive. She attended Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where she was an honors graduate, majoring in history.
