Ray Scherer

1976

Biography from the RCA Corporation

Ray Scherer was elected a vice president of the RCA Corporation by the RCA Board of Directors at their meeting on September 3, 1975.

In his post of Vice President, Washington, Mr. Scherer has responsibility for all aspects of the Corporation’s Public Affairs activities in Washington.

Prior to joining RCA, Mr. Scherer had been NBC News Correspondent, Washington, since August 1973. This appointment was reassignment to a post he covered for many years earlier in his career. In the interim, Mr. Scherer had been based in the London bureau of NBC News for four years.

With the exception of the years in the London Bureau of NBC NEWS, Mr. Scherer has spent more than two decades covering the White House, Congress and other news sources in the nation’s capital for NBC, a period spanning the administration of six presidents.

He rode back to Missouri with outgoing President Truman in January 1953; was in Denver the day President Eisenhower suffered a heart attack, and maintained a running report on the air for 12 hours; was in Hyannis Port the night President Kennedy was elected; and accompanied President Johnson on a one-hour television tour of the LBJ ranch. Critics acclaimed “The Hill Country, Lyndon Johnson’s Texas,” as a rare insight into the private life of a president. He was the first newsman to do a daily radio newscast from the White House.

Mr. Scherer has logged 250,000 miles on globe-girdling assignments for NBC News, including Vice President Nixon’s visit to Russia in 1959, President Kennedy’s European Mission in 1963, President Johnson’s five-day worldwide tour in December, 1968, and Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States.

Born June 7, 1919, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Mr. Scherer attended the public school systems there and was graduated from Valparaiso (Ind.) University in 1942. He earned a master’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago in 1947. His first reporting job was with his hometown newspaper, the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette. He joined NBC News in Washington in 1947.

Mr. Scherer and his wife, the former Barbara Hetzner, are the parents of two children, David and Nancy.