Jim Lehrer Translates Life Into His Fiction

It’s not enough that Jim Lehrer, a newsman’s newsman and half of PBS’ acclaimed “MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour” anchor team, helps to create an hourlong newscast for about 2 million viewers every night.

No, Lehrer has to go out and write books, too. And not your typical Commentator Views With Alarm books, either. He likes to write books that are funny.

His latest, “Lost and Found,” is his fourth on the One-Eyed Mack, an unnamed, fictional lieutenant governor in the mythical state of Oklahoma.

Lehrer, who names his characters out of an Ardmore, Okla., phone book, refuses to accept that he’s too busy to write books.

“You really can do whatever it is you decide is important enough to get done,” he said. “If somebody now tells me, ‘Oh, I don’t have time!’ I know they’re really saying that they don’t want to do it.”

His recent literary career derives from a trauma he suffered in 1983: “I was lucky in an unlucky way. I had a heart attack.”

“The doctors told me to make a list of all the things that I did that ate up time, that caused me anxiety and stress,” he said. “Then they said to go back through the list and cut out about half of them, because I’d put down things like my family, my job--stuff like that.”

Finally, he got the idea. “I’d always thought the secret was to decide what you wanted to do. Wrong. You have to also decide not to do the things you don’t want to do.”

The otherwise nameless One-Eyed Mack first appeared in 1988’s “Kick the Can.” It tells of how the Mack lost an eye while playing kick the can as a boy, and how that event shaped the course of his life.

He can’t be a highway patrolman like his Daddy. The bus depot won’t hire him, either. So he runs away from home, gets to Oklahoma for no particular reason, becomes a politician by accident and ends up lieutenant governor.

“I realized that for all these stories I’ve been wanting to tell--he’s there waiting for me to tell them,” he said. “He is a delightful vehicle for me to enjoy myself.”

In “Short List,” the next One-Eyed Mack tale due out next year, the Mack finds himself on the short list for the Democratic nomination ... for vice president.

“Hemingway said this, too: If you paid attention as a reporter, then when the time came to write fiction you’d have something to write about,” he said.

“And it turned out I did. And I’ve got all these stories stored up after 30 years in the news business. And they’re just flowing out of me.”

“MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” airs Monday-Friday at 6:30 p.m. on KCET and at 7 p.m. on KOCE and KPBS.