The News Sorority Read online

  The meetings were kept secret even inside CBS. Although CBS famously never had an anchor succession plan—on principle, says a longtime CBS man (“We’ve never tried to ‘make stars’; if you became a star, whether it was Dan or Ed Bradley or Mike Wallace, it was because of what you did”)—it was thought, among the anchor-in-waiting senior correspondents, that “Scott Pelley and John Roberts desperately wanted it.” (Pelley eventually succeeded Katie.) It was even widely thought that Heyward was actively championing John Roberts—at least until Moonves made his crush on Katie clear.

  CBS News was known for being a proud, hard news, tight-budget, family-style network—a place that was difficult to get into but where, once you did, you spent your entire career; a news division that prided itself on using less money and fewer cameras than its rivals but always got a better story. It was housed in the least prepossessing, most unglamorous Manhattan physical studio and office space of the Big Three. (It’s a “dumpy old building,” says the CBS man—in the lonely, far west reaches of Midtown, hard by the car showrooms.) People spent their whole careers there and it had a very conservative turnover system. As of September 2004, CBS News had had only three six-thirty anchors in its entire history: Douglas Edwards from 1949 to 1962, Walter Cronkite from 1962 to 1981, and Dan Rather after that.

  During her courtship by Moonves and Heyward, Katie had the upper hand. She “very understandably had a lot of options,” Heyward says. He refers to the “tensions between opposing forces” involved in considering bringing her in as anchor. “On the one hand, you have a very noble tradition of the evening news. On the other, you have the need to continue evolving and innovating—and you have her unique skills.” Katie was concerned she’d lose something in the bargain. “It would be less a showcase for her versatility, her ad-lib ability, her sense of humor, her effervescence. I think she wanted to make sure that she could play a role in influencing the future of the Evening News,” to retain a little of her Katie essence. Yet the idea of becoming the first solo female six-thirty news anchor was overwhelmingly compelling. Not to mention the fact that, as a Today colleague says, “After fifteen years, maybe she thought, ‘If I have to do one more story on hormone replacement therapy, I’ll blow my brains out.’”

  Then, in September 2004, the unthinkable occurred, for a newsman of Dan Rather’s stature. On a midweek 60 Minutes report, a scant two months before the presidential election between George W. Bush and John Kerry, Rather revealed scathing memos about President Bush, supposedly written during his service in the Texas Air National Guard. The memos’ validity was suspect; upon rigorous technical analysis, they were determined to be counterfeit. CBS quickly offered a retraction. Rather hung on, defended the memos, and fought for the veracity of his story. “I like Dan, but he wouldn’t let go of it,” a female producer says of the effort to dislodge him from the chair. But as his error grew undeniable, Rather agreed to step down.

  In March 2005, after twenty-four years as CBS Evening News anchor, Rather signed off the air. Rather’s ouster was the capper to the “extremely traumatic” period of Memogate (as it came to be called), says a longtime CBS man, who adds, “They tried to historically erase Dan.” Images came off walls. “If you walk through the halls of CBS today, you can’t find a picture of Dan Rather. It’s very strange when somebody who’s been the heartbeat of the place for so long is shown the door, it’s slammed behind him, and they try to pretend like he was never there.”

  Bob Schieffer became interim anchor as “a desperation thing,” says the CBS man. The fellow late-middle-aged hard news Texan had been nicknamed “Deputy Dog” because he had for so long been second in command “and was shrewd enough not to get in Dan’s way, because Dan would have killed him.” Now Schieffer was thrilled to finally get his day in the sun. “He took everyone out to lunch and spent the whole time talking about himself. You’d walk down the street with him and people would walk up and shake his hand and he’d be beaming.” On top of that, “after a rocky few months, Bob hit his stride. The numbers went up. The mood in the place brightened.” Increasingly, people thought: Why don’t we keep Schieffer on as anchor?

  But Moonves and Heyward were strongly “in favor of the new.” And so here was CBS News—regarded as the most boys’ club–like of the three networks in terms of its internal behavior, and the one whose six-thirty newscast drew the oldest, most male, and most rural viewers—secretly planning to put Katie Couric in the anchor chair.

  Katie had done her share of interviews with political news makers at Today,* and had covered such major stories as the Rodney King riots, the Oklahoma City bombings, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Normandy invasion. But her Morning persona clung to her tightly.

  As a result of Rather’s Memogate, Andrew Heyward left CBS News in November 2005. The incoming news president was Sean McManus, the chairman of CBS Sports, who would now be president of CBS Sports and president of CBS News. A by then twenty-five-year CBS news veteran says, “I think most people in the news division weren’t familiar with who Sean McManus was.”

  Heyward says, “When I handed off to my successor, Sean McManus, in the fall of 2005 we actually went to Katie’s apartment together.” However that meeting at the apartment may have gone, senior CBS staffers think that, as one male correspondent puts it, “Sean was probably the worst possible executive” for Katie. “He’s a very uptight guy, and I don’t think he handles women well at all, and Katie’s very in-your-face.”

  • • •

  ON AUGUST 25, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck. Katie flew to New Orleans and broadcast in the street, the floodwater up to her knees. Then she repaired to the Superdome, where, among the teeming dispossessed, was a man named Glen Henry, who couldn’t find his family. He looked into the NBC camera and plaintively wailed, “Katie, help me!” She tracked down his family and reunited them.

  Diane rushed to New Orleans, too. Outdoing Katie in the reporter true grit department, Diane—and Phyllis McGrady and Anna Robertson—“slept in a car,” Phyllis says, “because there was no place to stay. We only slept for an hour or two” before heading to the worst-hit parts of the city and to the Superdome.

  Meanwhile, back in New York, machinations continued that would roil all three networks—not just NBC, Katie’s current berth, and CBS, her would-be home, but also Diane’s more comfortable habitat, ABC. As for Christiane, she would embark on the most emotional experience of her life and the most intense schedule of travel in her career.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Home from War, Still in Battle

  Christiane: 1997 to 2007

  LIKE MANY WOMEN who had found their calling in a particularly all-consuming, aggressive, “nonfeminine” career after being raised in a traditional happy family setting, Christiane had consciously chosen work over serious love during the years in Bosnia and just afterward. It was a pragmatic, not a wounded, decision. “I couldn’t have done my work if I’d been married or had a kid,” she later said. “All my energy, my emotion, my intellect went into my work. During the nineties, people would ask me, ‘When are you going to settle down?’ and I’d say, ‘I don’t think I’ll ever have a child.’” Those close to her knew this. Christiane “wasn’t a gushy baby kisser and would have been all right if she never married and had children,” says Lizzy Amanpour. “We thought we would never get married,” says Diana Bellew. “I remember chats with her—a wistfulness, a sense that ‘this’”—marriage—“‘isn’t going to be for us.’ But we weren’t crying over it. We weren’t really sad.” They were matter-of-fact. “I had made my life working and living in Rome, and Christiane had her big old career—and that was just how it was.”

  But then something changed. “I knew Christiane was looking for love at some point,” says Emma Daly. Christiane has put it this way: “There came a moment where I flipped the switch and said, ‘Okay, self. You can be proud of the work you’ve done. You wanted to be a foreign correspondent, you’re a foreign c
orrespondent. Maybe now it’s time to look for some personal happiness and fulfillment. It took me a couple of years, but I consciously changed myself.”

  Christiane turned thirty-seven in January 1995, when Bosnia was still ablaze. There was a small window of time for childbearing, as Christiane, Emma, and all the other female war reporters well knew. If you worked these dangerous international assignments too long, you risked never having children—if, indeed, you wanted them. But if you did want kids and you did want to continue your career, as Christiane was now beginning to feel—well, there was no easy answer. One major consideration was how much risk you’d then be willing to take: “There’s a lot more eyebrow raising if you’re a mother” covering wars, says Emma, who now, as a parent, has a desk job. “Whereas if you’re a father, everyone assumes you’ll carry on. Why would you stop just because you have a family?”

  Another risk was the culture itself, in which men had infinitely more time to be attractive as potential mates than women. On January 12, 1997, when Christiane turned thirty-nine, she called her old friend Liza McGuirk from her hotel room in Bulgaria, as Liza, who now had a husband and child, remembers it. “She was talking about how the power had been turned off in the entire city and it was freezing cold. I remember saying, ‘Boy, that really sucks. It’s your birthday and you have no power.’

  “And I thought to myself, ‘Has she made too many sacrifices?’ It was the first time I ever thought: ‘Sometimes you don’t get it all—and she might not.’ I hung up the phone feeling really sad. Feeling like: Had it been worth it for her? If you’re [almost] forty in pitch-black, freezing cold Bulgaria—and I am the first call you make?” Liza remembered how, a dozen years earlier, the Newsweek cover headline warning that a single forty-year-old woman had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married had sent her and her friends “into a black depression.”* She and Christiane had talked at the time about how the article had been “a disservice to womankind.” Now, on her friend’s birthday, she wondered if their umbrage had been too idealistic.

  That birthday and phone call provided a wake-up call to Christiane, too. She made the decision to start consciously looking for love. Then, about six months after what she has called “that turning point,” she met Jamie Rubin. Jamie (James Philip) Rubin was the brother of Elizabeth Rubin, who was freelancing for Harper’s magazine when Christiane met her in Sarajevo. The Rubin siblings had grown up in Larchmont, a comfortable town in Westchester County, their father the prosperous owner of a small publishing company, their mother a medical school instructor who helped students interview psychiatric patients. A graduate of Columbia, where he also earned a master’s degree in international affairs, Jamie Rubin, at thirty-seven, was chief spokesman for Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

  Jamie had never been married—like Christiane, he had been so absorbed in his work that “he never had time to date,” according to one friend, British writer Peter Pringle. At least not date steadily, by apparent choice. Jordan Tamagni, a college friend who became a speechwriter for Bill Clinton, remembered being struck by the sight of the “tall, handsome, brash” Columbia student driving around “in a beautiful green Mercedes convertible.” Jamie seemed to have always been confident; he has said that he realized he could “talk to anyone about anything. I didn’t hang out only with the nerdy, smart kids, but also with the sports jocks.” He developed a passion for politics while at Columbia. Reagan had just been elected, and—mirroring Christiane’s concerns about Reagan, voiced at the Benefit Street dinner table—Jamie became obsessed with nuclear weapons, which he thought would be recklessly used by the new president. His postcollege job was at an arms control think tank; by the end of the 1980s he was then senator Joe Biden’s foreign policy adviser. Albright was quick to hire him when she was appointed secretary of state.

  “Women in D.C. thought Jamie was hot—a very attractive guy who could have had a lot of beautiful women,” says a female NPR producer, who adds that people were surprised by his romance with Christiane. In fact, when Christiane’s family met Jamie, “my mom and sisters were shocked at how good looking he was—we were quite astounded,” says Lizzy Amanpour.

  Jamie had a forceful personality. “Jamie’s highly intelligent, extraordinarily articulate, but he’s a difficult character, like all interesting men are difficult,” is how Christiane’s new friend Bella Pollen would come to view him. Such men “have their fair share of neuroses and baggage; they have a lot of stuff going on in their heads; they’re opinionated and contrary, fun to be with but not easy.” The words “arrogant” and “ego” had been bandied about in descriptions of him in Washington, D.C.’s media and gossip circles. He liked to dress well. He was socially well connected. He was a highly effective spokesman for Albright, and he did his job with appropriate aggressiveness. He had an evident degree of self-importance: Years later, when he was hired for an executive position at Bloomberg, the media empire of New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, Rubin, unlike other equally credentialed executives there, couldn’t abide the egalitarian open-space setting. “Jamie is not a cubicle guy,” a friend of his says, citing this as a reason that he left.

  Christiane and Jamie first briefly met through his sister, but it was four years later, in July 1997—six months after her concerted attempt to look for love—that they both found themselves on board a State Department plane bound for Bosnia. Jamie and his boss had been, as diplomats, as passionate about justice for Bosnia as Christiane was in her role as that embattled country’s premier reporter. On the plane, Christiane was in the press section, and Jamie was sitting with Secretary Albright. Lizzy Amanpour says, “He passed a note down to her to say, ‘Will you go out for a drink with me?’” Emma Daly recalls, “Christiane was a little freaked out about this. I remember her saying, ‘What should I say? ’Cause he’s the spokesman for Madeleine Albright.’ I said, ‘Go for it. See what it’s like. See if you have a good time.’”

  When they disembarked in Bosnia, Christiane and Jamie went to a bar and ordered margaritas. From there, says Emma Daly: “It all happened very quickly. They were pretty besotted and it took off like wildfire.” Liza McGuirk: “From the minute she met him it was very clear: This was very different. It wasn’t as if Christiane didn’t have her share of suitors, but Jamie was definitely right for her from the first second.”

  As for Jamie, when he got back to the United States, he told a friend, “I’ve never felt this way.” He was smitten by a woman whom he didn’t name but then said, “Turn on CNN now and have a look at her.”

  Christiane’s family saw that “Jamie really made her laugh. And they were intellectually compatible,” says her sister Lizzy. “They had passionate conversations about what was going on in the world.” The Amanpours were “very, very happy” for Christiane.

  Each was traveling on separate work schedules. “They spent as much time as they could meeting in places where they could be together,” Lizzy says. One rendezvous was in Italy, where they attended Diana Bellew’s fortieth birthday party, at a historic castle on a lake just outside of Rome. Another was in D.C., where they attended a book party for Sally Quinn, long the social doyenne of the nation’s capital, who would soon become a close friend.

  Less than three months after that party, in January 1998—four months after her harrowing encounter with the angry Afghan Arab in Kabul—Jamie and Christiane took a vacation to the island of Tobago. As they walked on the beach one night, he rustled in his pocket for the box that contained a gold-and-sapphire ring he’d recently bought in Paris. Then he dropped on one knee in the sand.

  Days later, Christiane was in London, about to fly to Iran for the interview she and Parisa Khosravi had worked so hard to obtain with President Khatami. Mark Phillips would be her cameraman. “We’d heard a rumor that Christiane was getting engaged to James Rubin,” Mark says. Since “Rubin was the spokesman for the secretary of state, the word was, ‘Don’t say anything to Iran because w
e don’t want to blow that interview.’” The interviewer’s intense relationship with a member of the secretary of state’s team could look suspicious. “So at Heathrow we’re loading all the stuff, and we could see Christiane coming across the tarmac—and she’s holding her finger up in the air and pointing to her finger! And we’re going, ‘Shut up! Shut up! You’re not supposed to tell anybody!’” For the tough, mature, worldly Christiane Amanpour, the image of her flaunting her engagement ring is incongruous, if endearing.

  The wedding was scheduled for August. Lizzy says, “At that age you realize if you meet somebody you really love, you get married quickly.” Christiane and Jamie considered marrying in London but decided Rome would be more central for their far-flung friends and family. They chose the lakeside town Bracciano, where Diana Bellew had had her birthday party. The castle, Castello Orsini-Odescalchi, was just right for the Jewish ceremony that would be held after the Catholic ceremony was held at the nearby Church of Santo Stefano.

  Habitué that she may have been of shelled-out Sarajevo hotels and African flophouses, Christiane now paid fussy attention to detail. She spent so much time comparing tablecloths with the wedding planner that, Diana recalls, “Jamie got really bored and wandered off and came back a few minutes later and said, ‘Is the great linen debate over yet?’”

  The wedding was very nearly derailed at the last moment by world events, perhaps fitting for this particular power couple. On August 7, 1998, the day before the ceremony, al-Qaeda forces drove truck bombs through the gates of the U.S. embassies in two African capitals—Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya—leading to 223 deaths and 4,000 people injured. But even in the face of this major terrorist attack, Christiane and Jamie decided not to call off the wedding. “We were truly distraught,” Christiane has said. “We thought we had to do something, but you only get to get married once. It was almost inevitable that such a thing happened at our wedding. When people like us take vacation, our worst nightmare is that something should happen,” she said. “It was a credit to them to go on with it,” says Parisa, who attended. “Christiane and Jamie knew that the world could go on without them.”