When tonight's edition of "The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour" leaves the air, so will its executive editor and co-anchor Robert MacNeil.
Say it ain't so, Robin."Twenty years is enough," MacNeil said with amiable finality. "You have to know, in the rhythm of your own life, when it's appropriate to quit something."
A relaxed, genial man off-camera, MacNeil's persona belies the wintry Canadian who launched the half-hour "Robert MacNeil Report" from New York City on PBS in 1975, with Jim Lehrer as his Washington, D.C., correspondent.
Since then, "The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour" has become an award-winning exemplar of broadcast journalism's highest standards and Lehrer has become his co-anchor, associate editor and best friend.
"We've had an agreement for years that if either one of us wanted out, the other would understand," MacNeil said. In August 1994, the partners and their wives met to discuss his decision.
"One of the first things I said to him is, `I really want to do this next year - and you can, too,' " MacNeil said. "But he wants to stay. ... That program is in his blood, there in Washington, in a way it hasn't been in mine for a little while."
Mostly, though, MacNeil says he'll miss his day-to-day partnership with Lehrer. "That phone is a private line to him," he said, gesturing at his desktop's second telephone, "We talk on it 20-30 times a day as though we were in the same room, usually about a whole lot of other stuff - not the news."
On Monday, it will not ring for him. "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" goes it alone. Lehrer said he accepts and reluctantly endorses his best friend's decision.
"Professionally and personally, it's not going to be easy on me," Lehrer said. "On the first day, when I reach for that phone for the 20th time, it'll begin to sink in."
This isn't the first time MacNeil has wanted to call it quits. In January 1991, on the brink of the Gulf War, he said, "I was desperately trying to get my first novel out before I became 60 years old."
His "MacNeil-Lehrer" colleagues scotched his idea of leaving. "They ALL landed on me, starting with Jim," he recalled affectionately, "in the most unprintable terms."
The war came and went, and "MacNeil-Lehrer" performed superbly. He finished the novel, "Burden of Desire," by getting up earlier in the morning.
MacNeil, whose steamy second novel, "The Voyage," was published last month, wants to write more books.
"Writing is much more personal. It is not collaborative in the way that television must be," MacNeil said.
In addition to his fiction, MacNeil wants to work on TV series about Shakespeare and on the American language.
In a career that has covered the Berlin Wall's rise and fall, he has seen the big stories first-hand and witnessed the rise and fall of the Big Three network newscasts.
"It used to be, when the three network newscasts shared about 90 percent of the audience's attention at suppertime, there was an appetite for seriousness," MacNeil said. "And seriousness was served.
"Now half of that audience, half of that share, has been eroded in a population much bigger, by all these alternatives: The 911 and Most Missing Persons and rescue shows and police reconstruction shows. ...
"The network news departments are really scared, and hence two out of three networks made O.J. Simpson their major news story in 1994 - unlike ABC, which proved to be the ratings leader," he said.
"Can you imagine the NBC or CBS of 20-25 years ago leading their program night after night with a lurid trial like this one?" MacNeil said. "They're doing it because they're running scared, afraid the other people are going to steal more of their young viewers."