Prior to joining 60 Minutes, Stahl served as CBS News White House correspondent – the first woman to hold that job – during the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan presidencies and part of the term of George H. W. Bush.

[4] During much of that time, she also served as moderator of Face the Nation, CBS News' Sunday public affairs broadcast from September 1983 to May 1991.

As a moderator on Face the Nation, she interviewed world leaders, including Margaret Thatcher, Boris Yeltsin and Yasser Arafat.

From 1990 to 1991, she was co-host with Charles Kuralt of America Tonight, a daily CBS News late-night broadcast of interviews and essays.

In her TV news career, she has investigated the enhanced interrogation methods against Al Qaeda during the Iraq War, the cruelty Saddam Hussein inflicted on Iraqi children, in addition to examining practices within Guantánamo Bay and operatives.

Stahl began her television broadcasting career at Boston's original Channel 5, WHDH-TV, as a producer and on-air reporter.

A friend in New York had called to tell me about a memo floating around CBS News mandating that 'the next reporter we hire will be a woman.

"[13] Stahl reflected in an interview on her early days at CBS how, on the night of the '72 Nixon-McGovern election returns, she found her on-air studio chair marked with masking tape, not with her name as with her colleagues, but with "Female".

"I found an apartment in the Watergate complex, moved all my stuff from Boston, and didn't miss a day of work. ...

She went on to become White House correspondent during the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

At the Republican Convention of 1980, she broke the news on CBS that Reagan's negotiations with ex-President Gerald Ford had broken down and the answer to the question of who would be vice-presidential nominee was: "It's Bush!

Stahl has written two books, the first of which, Reporting Live, was published in 1999: I had decided by August 1989, in my 48th year, that I had already had the best day of my life. ...

We spent one hour in their world, watching them tumble and wrestle, nurse their babies, swing in the trees, forage for food—vines, leaves, berries— ... so close that a female reached out to touch me.

In 2002, Stahl made headlines when Al Gore appeared on 60 Minutes and revealed for the first time that he would not run for president again in 2004.

Lesley Stahl was a founding member in 2008, along with Liz Smith, Mary Wells Lawrence, and Joni Evans, of wowOwow.com, a website for "women over 40" to talk about culture, politics, and gossip.

During the 2020 United States presidential election campaign, Stahl interviewed President Trump on October 20, 2020, for a segment on 60 Minutes.