Lesley Rene Stahl was born on December 16, 1941, in Lynn, Massachusetts, into a Jewish family that valued education deeply. She attended Wheaton College in Massachusetts before beginning her journalism career in 1970 as a producer at Boston’s WHDH-TV. She joined the CBS News Washington bureau in 1972 as a reporter and became a full-on-air correspondent in 1974, quickly establishing herself through her Watergate coverage.

Stahl served as CBS News White House correspondent from 1978 to 1991, becoming the first woman to hold that role at CBS. From 1983 to 1991, she moderated Face the Nation, again as the first woman to hold that position, conducting landmark interviews with Margaret Thatcher, Boris Yeltsin, and Yasser Arafat. She also co-anchored America Tonight with Charles Kuralt and hosted 48 Hours Investigates from 2002 to 2004.

Lesley Stahl joined 60 Minutes in 1991, and she has been with the show since then. She has interviewed every major U.S. president of her era and was one of the few Western journalists to enter China under Xi Jinping’s media restrictions. In 2026, she publicly called the wave of 60 Minutes firings the hardest chapter of her career but confirmed she is staying with the program.