The News Sorority Read online

  Hearing of Diane Sawyer’s pending audition at CBS, Bill Small’s team was horrified. Dan Rather told Small, “Don’t hire her!” So did Eric Sevareid—and Sevareid, one of Murrow’s Boys and a regular commentator on Cronkite’s nightly broadcast, “had a lot of clout.” But that was just the beginning. Small and Don Richardson, his trusted assistant news director, had thought that the flak about hiring “a Nixon person” would come from outside CBS. Surprisingly, Small says, “that almost never happened. Most of the criticism came from our own people.”

  It was fierce. “Diane Sawyer was back from San Clemente, and all of a sudden CBS News is hiring her?—I remember the uproar,” says producer Jennifer Siebens, who held many positions in CBS News over the ensuing decades. “CBS was right behind the Washington Post with the most in-your-face anti-Watergate attitude.” “There was almost a revolt in the ranks at CBS News! Lesley Stahl was gonna quit!” recalls Sandy Socolow, Cronkite’s producer, who reported to Small and who in fact signed Diane’s hiring papers. “Diane came with this baggage. She was close to Nixon. And she wasn’t a journalist. Here you had an organization”—CBS News—“that demanded five years of experience and all this journalism. And suddenly Small is picking a political person who had no experience. The Junior Miss of the United States, or whatever she was,” is how Socolow and the CBS people derisively viewed this politically encumbered beauty queen and so-called reporter.

  “It was that she worked for Nixon even after his resignation that caused the animosity,” says Roger Mudd. “It’s one thing to work in a political operation in the White House. But to continue with him even afterward meant she had some loyalty to this blemished, crooked president.” So contagious was the protest that even Bob Pierpoint, who’d been essentially operating as Small’s recruitment emissary all four preceding years, joined in.

  “There was enmity. I caught a lot of flak,” Small admits. “But I hired her.” To those who raised questions, “My answer always was, ‘She’s intelligent, a good journalist, and a good addition to the staff,’” adding now that “it had nothing to do with her being a woman.” (Av Westin, who’d defused the toxic pairing of Barbara Walters and Harry Reasoner, begs to differ on the latter: “I happen to be a cynic about a lot of this stuff. I believe that management was going to make it work for Diane because they needed a woman at CBS.”)

  And so, in mid-1978, Diane Sawyer flew back to D.C. and into the lion’s den. This happened to be just when women her age were identifying with well-bred, smart, idiosyncratic, vulnerable, WASP urbanites—Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman. The era of the sarcastic if polished feminist rebel, often with long, straight, center-parted hair and long legs in bell-bottoms (Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, Ali MacGraw in Love Story) was giving way to an updated version of discerning, distracted ladylikeness: a girl in a skirt. This shift of zeitgeist did not hurt Diane.

  Arriving at CBS, Diane launched a preemptive three-pronged strike on her critics. She was an egoless team player, she worked immensely hard—tirelessly—and she purveyed her copious charm.

  Some people say that she was made to do penance—even that she was hazed, as if she were a hapless fraternity pledge. “I know they humiliated her. They made her do all the crap duties they could think of. They really slapped her around,” recalls a CBS veteran. “They made her do stakeouts, stand in front of Supreme Court justices’ houses in the rain. But the buzz was, she was taking it and taking it and taking it.” In other words, she knew she had to pay—and she did. (Bill Small denies that Diane was hazed. “Anyone who came in at the bottom was given the worst assignments, like sitting with a crew outside a house all day,” he explains.)

  She was not only uncomplaining but humble, the faceless leg-woman for colleagues. “She was selfless,” says Roger Mudd, “and that quality in her, more than anything else, eradicated this feeling that this Nixon sympathizer was coming to work for us. I remember she was backing up at the State Department, and Marvin Kalb was the main diplomatic correspondent, and day after day she’d come in at four or four fifteen, and her notebook was filled with stuff she’d gather during the day, and she dumps it on the producer and says, ‘This is what I’ve got’”—that is, giving it to the reporter with no strings attached—“never saying, ‘I’ve got a story. This is my exclusive.’”

  Her tireless work ethic kicked into high gear when two huge, dramatic, and confounding news stories broke just months after she joined the bureau. She threw herself into both.

  The first, emerging on November 18, 1978, was so startling and tragic and out of the blue that the public had, literally, no template for it. A wild-eyed, dark-haired white “preacher,” Jim Jones, had assembled a cultlike community called the Peoples Temple, largely populated by black Americans desperately loyal to him, on the island of Guyana. When a U.S. representative flew there with an investigative team to examine conditions, gunfire from Jones’s henchmen greeted the delegation, killing five, before the inconceivable transpired: 914 members of the temple stood calmly in line to commit suicide, along with Jones, at Jones’s orders, by way of cyanide dissolved in Kool-Aid. Many were adults who first subjected their children and babies to the potion (more than two hundred children were murdered) and then drank it themselves. The tragedy—which led to the now common expression “drink the Kool-Aid,” to indicate blind obedience—ranks among the largest mass suicides in history, and was then the greatest loss of American civilian life in a nonnatural catastrophe, and would remain thus until September 11, 2001.

  “When the story happened in Guyana, with Jim Jones, it was Thanksgiving weekend,” Susan Zirinsky remembers. “Diane and I were at Dover Air Force Base, where all the caskets and the bodies were coming home. She was amazing. We were up for seventy-two hours. Nobody slept. It was, ‘What is this?’” During the hectic production of the Peoples Temple suicide broadcasts, Zirinsky and Sawyer worked together intensely. “She was simply the hardest-working woman I had ever met.”

  Then, four months later, on March 28, 1979, alarms blared throughout the U.S. energy community: A partial meltdown had taken place at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. It was a fast-moving crisis—the most severe accident in American nuclear power history—confusing to the plant technicians and operators, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the press alike. Diane—who had by then matriculated from leg-woman to on-air correspondent for CBS Evening News—threw herself into the complex story, punctiliously and determinedly reporting. Even the skeptical Sandy Socolow, who’d dismissed her as a beauty queen, was amazed. “She was great at ferreting out information. Everything about her was very professional. She worked night and day, and she was ready to go on the air morning, noon, and night. Everybody was just knocked out,” he says. The Encyclopedia of Television would later report that Diane’s “coverage of the Three Mile Island crisis assisted her in garnering heavy journalistic assignments which at the time were considered a challenge to male colleagues.”

  Diane further burnished her workhorse reputation at the outset of the Iranian hostage crisis in November 1979. She camped out for an entire week at the State Department. “I would sleep all night on two secretarial chairs, so I could get up at four a.m., stalk the halls, and see what I could get,” she has recalled. This was actually reporter fanaticism doubling as a very smart move: Charles Kuralt, the deep-voiced, avuncular anchor of CBS This Morning, would cut to her live reports. And there was something about this elegant young female correspondent, in the State Department so early in the morning, that caused the executives in New York to sit up straight.

  She was also assigned to the Republican presidential primaries, covering George H. W. Bush in his campaign against the ultimately successful Ronald Reagan. She was paired with correspondent Richard Roth, with Jennifer Siebens as their producer. Siebens, who’d been stunned when Sawyer was hired at CBS, was by now impressed. “She was very smart and unbelievably well-read,” Si
ebens says. “She and Roth tag-teamed: One day one would do TV and the other radio. She did not pull attitude. She would carry the tripod, and they had a collegial relationship. After every campaign stop we’d get back on the bus or plane and they’d sit together and share notes. I remember being surprised she was such a good team player, because if you’re assigned to the Washington bureau you can become a prima donna.”

  Within two-thirds of a year “everyone forgot the Nixon connection—she’d endeared herself” to the bureau, Bill Small says, with the satisfaction of one who’d made an unpopular bet that turned out to be a winner. “In fact there were several people who denied that they had ever objected to her. She won them over.” Bob Pierpoint had not only stopped protesting Diane’s hiring but was starting to claim that he’d “discovered” her. But, Small adds, “Dan Rather was the only one who came to me and said, ‘Remember what I said to you before, Don’t hire her? I was wrong.’” No one else said that.

  The third prong of Diane’s campaign—unleashing her charisma—helped silence naysayers. “She was a marvelous people person,” Small says. “Well, let me put it another way: She had more charm than most men. A lot of male beginning reporters could find it difficult to become a member of the team quickly, but she did not. Part of it may have been her charm, part of it may have been beauty. She worked the 1980 conventions and was very good at getting people. I can’t remember a time when we said ‘Diane, get Senator Russell’ or ‘Get Senator Humphrey’ and she failed.”

  Small was, in an innocent way, quite smitten by her. He frequently took her out to lunch—and when, on the one-year anniversary of his hiring her, she insisted that she treat him, she employed all her Southern charm. “You said your father always told you, ‘Never let a woman pick up the check’”—Small denies his father ever said this but was tickled nonetheless—“but today I want to pick up the check.” Small replied, “Only if I can pick the restaurant.” She agreed. He promptly led her to Hot Diggity Dog, where, perched on stools, they elegantly dined on the best one-dollar frankfurters in the nation’s capital.

  Bill Small knew what he had. Diane was exceptionally attractive for a news reporter—and exceptionally smart. Told that so many people have called Diane “the smartest person I have ever met,” a high-ranking female news producer frowns a bit at what she views as hyperbole and says, “People in television are not necessarily brilliant—we’re not talking about people who went to Harvard Law or anything like that. There are some very, very smart people in television, but, in serious news, there are not very many beautiful blonds, and that is why Diane is talked about like that.” But another television professional has a different take: “I’m not sure I’ve ever worked with a smarter person in my entire life. And not just intellectually smart. But smart about how to do a better job, or what questions to ask, or . . . how to maneuver.”

  In 1981 Diane got an offer. Her early-morning State Department dispatches with Charles Kuralt had dovetailed with the network’s reevaluation of its morning news program. The executives decided to restructure Kuralt’s CBS This Morning as CBS Morning News. While NBC had Today and ABC had Good Morning America, the Tiffany Network had eschewed the morning news-and-features format in favor of a straight-news morning broadcast. Now they wanted to compete with the others, but with a still slightly more serious focus. They asked Diane to be the female coanchor, which would involve a move to New York.

  Roger Mudd—originally skeptical about Diane—had become one of her big brothers at the D.C. bureau. By now he had left CBS, but while Diane was considering the offer, the two ran into each other at a Washington dinner party. “She said, ‘They want me to come to New York, to do the morning news,’” Mudd recalls. “And I said, ‘Don’t go,’ and she said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Diane you haven’t lived enough. You don’t have enough experience. You haven’t been through enough. If you’re on the air and it’s live and you’ve got to fill airtime, you need stuff that you’ve experienced to draw on. You should stay in the field another year.’” Spoken like a true old-timer, slowly and earnestly building a career.

  But this was the beginning of a new age of TV reporters—younger, glossier, more oriented toward human interest stories—and while Roger Mudd may not have sensed this, Diane did. “She said, ‘Interesting, interesting . . .’”—respectfully mulling the advice. “But she went to New York anyway. So the hell with Father Mudd.”

  • • •

  NEW YORK LOVED DIANE. During her early years there, CBS chairman William Paley, a widower since 1978, showered attention on her—romantic attention, some believed. She befriended Henry Kissinger. At one point, she briefly dated Warren Beatty, the premier pursuer of any Girl of the Hour. (“If you win an Academy Award, he’s right behind you,” notes Arlyne Rothberg, manager of two of Beatty’s most famous short- and long-term girlfriends: Carly Simon and Diane Keaton, respectively.) She settled into an apartment, but barely furnished it.

  Even before she officially began at CBS Morning News, Diane used the imminent tenth anniversary of the 1972 Watergate break-in to score the interview she was destined to be granted—the interview she had earned: a face-to-face with her former boss Richard Nixon. Now she was the journalist—not the defender, not the employee. Perhaps Nixon hadn’t fully grasped the difference when he agreed to the sit-down, and his oddly cheery prattling on about how “I want women to be like women,” rather than like “witch”-like reporters, gave her a fitting, ironic opening. “She really pressed him about Watergate; she asked him about it in great detail. It was a very tough interview, and he was really pissed, but the interview certainly helped her with CBS,” says someone who covered the event. She and Nixon had made advance plans to go out to dinner afterward; Nixon abruptly, angrily canceled.

  It is fascinating that she—whose usual means were subtle and indirect—risked so explicitly signaling to her former boss that she was no longer an ally. Was she killing the past, cutting herself off from her loyal-employee and good-Southern-girl self? Or had she simply been as pragmatically opportunistic as any journalist with extraordinary access to a public figure would be?

  Diane began dating Richard Holbrooke, who was just completing a term as assistant secretary of state for Asia and was now an investment banker with Lehman Brothers. Brilliant, handsome, self-assured—in fact, widely disliked for his arrogance—Holbrooke, two years older than Diane, had had a very impressive Foreign Service career, starting with his six years as a civilian attaché in Vietnam immediately after he graduated from Brown in 1962. By the time Diane met him, he was a superbly connected high achiever. He also had a somewhat unusual personal background: He had grown up in Scarsdale, the son of parents who avidly took him to Quaker meetings on Sundays, but both of them were Jews who had fled the Nazis, his mother from Germany, his father from Poland.

  By several accounts, Holbrooke fell deeply in love with Diane. “He was head over heels about her,” says a normally cynical journalist, adding that, as for her feelings for him, “it was hard to read Diane emotionally.” (Even after they broke up, their closeness endured, according to one former network executive.) She kept her own apartment, but spent much of her time in his, an elegantly furnished suite of rooms in the Beresford on Central Park West. They also had a historic country house in the little-known town of Sandisfield, in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Far worldlier than Diane when she arrived in New York, Holbrooke became “a pivotal part of her growth and her formation,” says a woman who worked with her. “He wasn’t just her boyfriend. He was for years her primary guidance counselor.”

  In October 1982 Diane began cohosting CBS Morning News, first, briefly, alongside Kuralt, then, and enduringly, partnering with Bill Kurtis, who had been a Chicago anchorman for sixteen years. Diane proved an arresting alternative to her competition, the two very popular female morning anchors—both, like Diane, blonds—Good Morning America’s Joan Lunden and Today’s Jane Pauley. Lunden, an approachable young married wom
an with a two-year-old daughter, somewhat suburban in style, with fluffy short hair, was a native of Sacramento. Jane Pauley was the cheerleader-pretty debate team whiz with the girlish long tresses, the aura of Midwestern decency, and the earnest, crisp voice that directed viewers to take her seriously. She was married now to Garry Trudeau, and viewers had empathized with her about her miscarriage; soon they would watch her growing daily more pregnant with her twins—a girl and a boy. Lunden would bear two more daughters during her time on GMA; Pauley would bear a third child, a son. Over the whole second half of the 1980s, Pauley and Lunden were unintentionally embroiled in, as Pauley puts it, a game of “dueling pregnancies,” their swelling bellies and their unavoidable forthrightness about their conditions finally erasing the last vestiges of puritanical TV. Pauley and Lunden would turn Morning into a format virtually synonymous with moms of young children—a template very welcoming to Katie Couric, who would ascend to the Today chair when she was five months’ pregnant. Diane Sawyer was not only unmarried and not a mother but was also slightly more remote than the other two when she took her seat at CBS Morning News.