Max Robinson, Troubled TV Anchorman, Dies at 49

Max Robinson, the nation’s controversial and troubled first black anchorman who was plagued in his final years by professional and personal demons, died Tuesday.

Before his death at age 49 at Howard University Hospital in Washington from the complications of AIDS, his family would not comment on reports that he had the fatal disease. But shortly after his death, United Press International quoted an old family friend, Roger Wilkins, as saying that Robinson’s posthumous wish was that his death be used to emphasize the need for AIDS treatment and education, especially among blacks.

‘Very Difficult Times’

In a Washington Post interview last May, five years after Robinson, Peter Jennings and the late Frank Reynolds formed a famous news troika for ABC, the failing anchorman reflected on the burdens he had long felt as a role model for black youth but refused comment on the alcohol and drug-abuse rumors that had plagued his career.

He had been thought near death in February when he was hospitalized in Chicago and the AIDS reports began to increase. “The curiousity has at times annoyed me,” he said shortly afterward. But he would not comment further, saying only, “I’ve had very difficult times.”

Once the darling of the airwaves, Robinson went from the summit of personal success at a $500,000 a year job to the depths of personal despair.

Married three times and the father of four children, Robinson had grown up in segregated Richmond, son of schoolteacher parents.

All his siblings became successful. A sister, Jewell, is an actress in Washington; his brother, Randall, is a Harvard-trained lawyer and head of the anti-apartheid group Transafrica, and a second sister, Jean, is director of public relations at a school of the arts in Chicago.

It was a snug, loving family, he said, and he was ill-prepared for the prejudice he encountered in his first TV job at a small station in Portsmouth, Va.

Robinson read the news but his face was never seen. One day he asked the cameraman to remove the sign “news” that covered the screen while he was reading and show the face behind the voice. The following day the station owner called and fired him.

“He’d gotten these calls from some irate whites who’d found out that one of ‘those’ people was working there.”

He moved to station WTOP in Washington, D.C., in 1965 as a reporter and, said Edward F. Ryan, a former news director, was “a guy who went after stories and got ‘em.”

“He had great presence on the air,” remembered James Snyder, vice president for news for Post Newsweek Stations, who worked with Robinson at WTOP. “He was a very meticulous dresser. He was a very proud man. He was very meticulous about his on-air performance. He rarely made a mistake. He was very conscious that he was a role model.”

But Snyder and others said Robinson was haunted by private demons. Friends said he labored under enormous pressure both because of his race and his fears of inadequacy.

Professionally he was at a peak he never again achieved, even when he reached the national level. In Washington, he even became part of the news when the Hanafi Muslims took over the B’nai B’rith headquarters in Washington and one of the sect leader’s first calls was to him.

Impressed with his seeming calm under fire, ABC beckoned.

In 1978, Robinson became the nation’s first black television network news star when he was made part of the three-anchor team of ABC’s “World News Tonight.” He was based in Chicago, working with Reynolds in Washington and Jennings in London.

Off camera, he proved himself feisty, complaining to network colleagues and superiors that news stories often did not reflect the black viewpoint.

“I remember someone once saying to me that I wasn’t a team player,” he told the Post in May. “And I said, ‘I’d be happy to play on the team if the rules were not structured against me and my people.’ ”

‘A Very Heavy Burden’

He grew stubborn and some said, arrogant, once showing up for an interview in a chauffeur-driven limousine.

And he sometimes showed up at the station late; sometimes not at all and sometimes drunk.

He made speeches about what he perceived as the racist nature of news coverage, which got him into trouble.

“Professionally, Max carried a very heavy burden for a while,” Jennings said on Tuesday. “He carried it with a lot of dignity. It wasn’t always easy for him.”

Finally, in 1983, the debonair, handsome and regally erect newsman who proffered the evening news as a royal gesture, departed the national scene.

What started the Emmy award winner’s downfall were speeches in which he criticized the media in general and his own network in particular for not assigning black reporters to the inauguration of President Reagan and the Iran hostage crisis. What apparently triggered his ouster was his not showing up for co-anchor Frank Reynolds’ televised funeral in which Robinson was to have been seated next to Nancy Reagan.

After leaving ABC, he became a co-anchor at WMAQ, the NBC-owned station in Chicago and then, in June, 1985, turned himself into a hospital in Cleveland for treatment of depression and alcoholism.

“I think one of my basic flaws,” he said in May, “has been a lack of esteem; not really feeling great about myself, always feeling like I had to do more. I never could do enough or be good enough. . . .

“In fact, it probably was the essential problem I had throughout my career, throughout my life.”