Dartmouth College

Bob Hager’s life as a correspondent for NBC News is what most people remember when they hear his name. But Bob’s affinity for the news started at a very young age. "I fell in love with the news while bed-ridden with an ear infection the summer after fifth grade," Bob recalls. Bob listened to the radio then, especially the baseball games that were being announced on the air.

Bob started his career as a sports announcer for a local Vermont radio station while in high school. Upon entering Dartmouth, Bob worked as the play-by-play announcer of Dartmouth athletics for the college radio station, WDCR. "I loved doing the play-by-play for the Ivy’s," Bob comments. "But I also served as the News and Sports Director during my college days and wrote the news script as well." Bob’s first love, however, was reporting and in order to become an announcer for minor league baseball he graduate from Dartmouth early so that he could land a radio announcer job for the summer.

After being a radio sports announcer and news reporter for two years in the south, Bob transitioned over to local television news serving as a reporter, sports announcer, and weatherman. After 7 years, Bob was hired by NBC News where his first assignment was as a foreign correspondent covering the Vietnam War. "Vietnam was difficult to watch due to all of the tragedy. Watching young children with burns and missing limbs was very hard to see. Yet you learn to insulate yourself from your emotions and focus on covering the news."

After covering Vietnam, Bob served in the Berlin and Moscow News Bureaus covering the "cold war" before being moved stateside where he was a correspondent in New York and Washington, D.C. "I was in the nation’s capital for 25 years. All of the high profile news beats were taken and I thought there was too much political coverage. So I wanted to focus on things that touched people’s lives; I wanted to do consumer-oriented news, but not advocacy. I wanted to report in an impartial way the issues that really impacted people’s lives," Bob offers. Thus, Bob’s decision to focus on aviation and weather issues. "The folks at NBC liked the idea and let me focus on those areas. It was also a time of a great deal of public interest in aviation due to a federal investigation of a major airline crash."

Since then, Bob’s career has focused on numerous airline crashes, more than 30 hurricanes, the loss of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, and the terrorist attacks at the Munich Olympic Games and Oklahoma City, as well as 9/11.

When asked about news stories he reported on that stand out in his mind Bob responds, "Certainly 9/11 and its impact on the country, the Challenger and Columbia crashes and its human impact, the Mining disaster in western Pennsylvania that turned out to have a happy ending, but the one I remember fondly was that of Senator John Glenn returning to space. I found that to be fascinating because of the importance to viewers that Senator Glenn succeed. Here was this elder statesman who had served as one of the original "fly boys" for NASA but stood for good things."

In these times when television journalism is attacked for being biased and reporting based on ratings rather than accuracy, Bob offers a unique perspective, "While there is no lamenting that the 24/7 news cycle focuses on info-tainment. The public is hungry for the right news and there are still enough "straight reporters" who report the hard news. Being a news reporter is an honorable profession; we provide an important service to our democracy. There certainly are enough opinionated news programs on during prime-time that cater to the conservative and liberal views, but the public is smart enough to know the difference between these programs and real news."

In 2004 Bob retired from NBC News. Since then he has done some public speaking and commentary for NBC News. But he enjoys traveling, skiing, snowshoeing, gardening, hiking, and swimming. Bob lives with his wife, Honore, in his hometown of Woodstock, Vermont. They have three daughters and eight grandchildren.

As we concluded the interview, Bob offers "My advice to students is to get a broad education, take advantage of electives to learn about a variety of subjects and postpone ‘vocational’ education (i.e. journalism, medicine, law, etc.) until the graduate years." And his views on the Fraternity. . . "I think life at the Fraternity mostly taught me the importance of making and keeping good friends. Of the relationships that I consider the most important and meaningful to me in retirement, my buddies from the Fraternity are among those I value the most."