The News Sorority Page 39

  It had been, after all, during the filming of the piece on the AIDS orphans that Christiane had most acutely confronted the conflict of work versus mothering. Darius was taking piano lessons, something that delighted her and made her proud, and he was preparing for a children’s recital back home in London at the very time that she and Pierre Bairin had secured unprecedented CNN access to a charity hospice in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, that had been founded by Mother Teresa’s religious order. The nuns took in eight hundred people who were dying in the gutters from AIDS and tuberculosis, and they housed, fed, and cared for them. “It was a big coup for us,” Pierre says. “They had never allowed a camera inside,” not even when Bono and Angelina Jolie had visited. When Pierre returned from his “recking”—reconnaissance—trip and showed Christiane the footage of the life-giving services in the home, “she cried, it was so dramatic.”

  But there was a problem: They could only shoot on one day—a Sunday. The very next day was Darius’s piano recital. “It was a big dilemma for her, but she solved it,” Pierre says. “She paid for a chartered plane to take her from Addis Ababa to Nairobi so she could make the British Airways flight from Nairobi back to London that same night. It cost her a lot of money, but she refused to compromise on either the story or her motherhood.”

  Christiane’s change came in careful measures, though. “There are situations now where I’ve heard her say, ‘No! I’m not gonna go there! I’m going to stay with Darius and watch his school play!’” says Bella Pollen. “But at the same time, she has to square that with her desire to be in the thick of the action.”

  Saddam Hussein’s first court appearance—in Baghdad, in October 2005, on charges of killing and torturing 140 of his own people in 1982—was one such irresistible occasion. “It was a huge story,” says Tony Maddox, CNN’s chief of international reporting. “All the media outlets in the world were clamoring” for the sight of the arrested dictator brought in in chains and prison jumpsuit. “Almost no reporters got in. But Christiane showed up that day, and I knew it would be her” who was allowed inside to see Saddam screaming in rage at his accusers. “All the other news organizations were furious. She was thrilled! She was filing every few minutes. She was so pumped up. It was like someone just out of college, that kind of excitement.”

  • • •

  IN LATE 2007, Christiane and Jamie arranged to move back to New York, with the general expectation that an anchoring job awaited. Darius was now seven, and in those seven years of her motherhood alone, she had—aside from her justice and crisis stories—conducted interviews, many of them exclusive, with figures such as Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Pervez Musharraf, Jordan’s King Abdullah, Mahmoud Abbas, Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad, and Yasir Arafat. Her documentary about Islam in the UK, The War Within, had been aired to praise.

  She had also reported God’s Warriors, her other documentary, an ambitious six-hour series about how “the three monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—were related, but also how the forces within those traditions were using religion as a political weapon,” Andrew Tkach explains. Christiane had traveled to six countries to film the three separate installments of the series, which aired one after another in late August 2007. While some appreciated how uniquely suited she was to the project—“Nobody could have done that multipart documentary better than her: her father is Muslim, her mother is Christian, her husband is Jewish. How many people have that kind of perspective?” says Parisa—others would not feel that way. She would attract criticism for the series, and it would dog her.

  “God’s Jewish Warriors” aired first. In it Christiane covered the radical Jewish group that intended to blow up Islam’s sacred Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem in order to derail the peace talks between Israel and Egypt; she looked at evangelical Christian supporters of Israel; and, most controversially, she conducted interviews with people who believed that America’s Israel lobby was supportive of Jewish settlements on the West Bank. In “God’s Muslim Warriors,” which aired the following night, she profiled the late Sayyid Qutb, the self-martyred Egyptian “father” of today’s Islamic fundamentalism; she delved into the Iranian Revolution; and she discussed women’s rights, and the lack thereof, in Islamic societies. “God’s Christian Warriors” was the concluding segment. She interviewed American conservative evangelicals and conducted the last interview with Jerry Falwell shortly before his death.

  The series rated tremendously high for CNN, attracting more than six million viewers over the three nights. But that fact—on the face of it a great boon to Christiane—was undermined by one particular problem that would linger: Christiane was criticized by Fox News and some pro-Israel groups for, as the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America put it, “equating the extremely rare cases of religiously inspired violence on the part of Christians and Jews with radical Islam’s global, often state-supported, campaigns of mass killing” and for “presenting highly controversial critics of Israel and the so-called Israel lobby and doing so without challenge.” Even MSNBC’s Dan Abrams, that network’s general manager, felt enough entitled umbrage to call the series “the worst kind of moral relativism” and “shameful advocacy.” Abrams publicly carried on at length about Christiane’s report, saying, “I felt the journalism behind it was shoddy” and “I felt very strongly that in its totality it was unfair.” He did, however, he concede that “it was a very successful, well-rated documentary for CNN,” which of course was Abrams’s network’s competitor.

  Christiane had been confrontational with Walter Isaacson about day-to-day Mideast coverage, but that had been an internal CNN matter. These specials, timed as they were as a kind of calling card for Christiane’s return to New York—where CNN was now headquartered, in a gleaming new building in Columbus Circle, a clear power statement—had the potential to make her seem too left wing and too insensitive to American political and religious sympathies. There are few more abiding taints for an American journalist or public servant to bear than that of having a bias against Israel, yet, after all the fine and arduous work that Christiane had done for a decade and a half, this charge was now the chief one surrounding her. With God’s Warriors, she had taken an impolitic risk—but then, taking impolitic risks was what Christiane often did.

  She had won numerous awards.* Queen Elizabeth named her a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Time magazine named her the most influential foreign correspondent since Murrow himself.

  That Christiane Amanpour should be able to trade constant war zone hopping for a high-status anchor/analyst chair seemed self-evident to many. Others had done it before—Murrow, Cronkite, Peter Jennings—following years of war zone reporting on a par with hers. If ever a reporter had earned her right to a post at an anchor/analyst desk, it was Christiane Amanpour, many thought. Such advantage was rightly hers. No other international correspondent of her generation had done this as long and as well and as passionately as she had.

  She arrived in New York with an appropriately entitled feeling.

  CHAPTER NINE

  First Female Anchor

  Katie and Diane: 2006 to 2009

  IT WAS DIANE, not Katie, who was supposed to have been the first solo female six-thirty anchor. And she almost was.

  In the earliest days of February 2006—while Les Moonves was tendering his secret preemptive CBS offer to Katie—Diane made a secret move of her own.

  The World News Tonight anchorship had been in play, amid tragedy, for ten months, ever since April 2005, when Peter Jennings announced he would resign to undergo aggressive chemotherapy for lung cancer. Charlie Gibson had pitched in as interim anchor, as had Elizabeth Vargas. After Peter’s death on August 7, Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff had rotated duties, and in December Woodruff was named Jennings’s replacement. But a month later, on January 29, 2006, Woodruff was seriously injured by an IED in Iraq.

  Says someone who knows: “Diane
went to Westin as soon as Bob Woodruff was injured and said, ‘It has to be me.’” But the airtight secrecy of Diane’s request for the job was compromised by a leak to a minor trade bulletin, “and so Diane said, ‘It can’t be me. It’s ruined. It has to be Charlie.’ She didn’t want it to look like she was big-footing Charlie. She didn’t want to look like she’d killed Charlie’s dream.” This would seem to be classic Diane: the chess game and the decorum. The “no fingerprints” code had been violated. Someone else—a person less concerned with image than Diane, someone who wouldn’t care about a possible media storm of “She pushed for the job and then got it” stories—would not have pulled back from so delicious and well earned a possibility as the anchorship. But Diane wasn’t like that; how a thing was done was just as important as that it was done. The Southern woman in her would not abide looking as if she had elbowed Charlie out, and the chess player in her would not abide so clumsy and risky a move. So she undid the move. (Remarkably, the small, off-line trade bulletin leak got no attention. Such accidental secrecy “never would have happened today,” says the source, when media industry gossip runs in a twenty-four-hour-a-day Twitterverse.)

  Besides, “Diane liked Charlie. She’s not a bad person—she’s just incredibly ambitious,” this witness continues. Still, despite her own hand in the goings-on, “she was very angry” that it hadn’t worked out. Furthermore, “she was completely bat-shit that Katie was the first female anchor. It will always eat away at Diane that Katie was the first.”

  Apparently not knowing the details of Diane’s approach and retreat, the media was puzzled by the situation. In his New York magazine article, “Charlie the Conqueror,” Joe Hagan wrote: “When Diane Sawyer did not get tapped to anchor ABC’s World News Tonight, it could have been reasonably assumed that she must not have wanted the job. Otherwise, what could explain the decision? She’s the network’s most bankable news star, and she has made no secret of her desire to handle weightier fare than what she can get away with on Good Morning America.” When Hagan asked Diane herself if she’d wanted the anchor job, for which he felt she’d earned “first dibs,” she waxed elusive. “‘Yes and no,’ she told me, as we sat in her office. ‘No and yes.’ . . . Faced with [the] choice . . . she slipped into Hamlet mode, unsure of how to balance her loyalties and self-interest. Which . . . is what gave her GMA co-host Charlie Gibson the chance to land the job himself. . . . Gibson had none of Sawyer’s ambivalence.” Hagan went on to say he’d probed Westin and Sawyer “over many conversations,” and in these talks, “Westin says that he gave Sawyer the chance to take the job, but she wouldn’t. This is his official position and it squares with Sawyer’s official position . . . [e]xcept of course that she did want it.” Hagan provocatively observed that, when he interviewed her, “instead of being content with this state of affairs, Sawyer seemed very much at loose ends.”

  Three and a half years later, Diane would get her due. Diane was ever strategic, waiting for the right time to strike—the opposite of Katie, who dove into, or pushed herself into, opportunities. Diane revealed too little, and indirectly; Katie revealed too much.

  Thus, for now, Charlie assumed the anchorship. (The show’s name was changed to ABC World News, the “Tonight” shorn.) Diane was mysterious about her feelings and her strategy. “The Golden Sphinx . . . has been more inscrutable than ever,” reported Rebecca Dana in the New York Observer, adding that a source told her, “Diane is keeping her cards extremely close to her chest” and “None of us has any idea what she plans to do.” That was certainly the view at the time. But a staffer who has spoken to Charlie Gibson over the years describes the 2006 to 2009 events more dramatically—and unflatteringly to Diane: “In Gladiator, one of the senators advising the mad emperor says that certain sea snakes lie very still at the bottom of the water. They let their predators get very close—and then they strike. When Charlie got the anchor job, Diane went quiet like a sea snake.”

  When Charlie ascended to World News anchor, Robin Roberts became Diane’s GMA coanchor, an appointment that would not have been possible without Diane’s approval. “What other woman would have invited another woman to that desk? I can’t think of another. That’s pretty generous, in that world,” says her friend, producer Mark Robertson. The pairing was immediately successful. The two tack-sharp, elegant Southern women—both raised by powerful, proper, controlling mothers to whom they were complexly obeisant (Lucimarian Roberts criticized Robin’s shade of lipstick just as Jean Sawyer criticized Diane’s hair)—had a rapport that was genuine, and dated back several years: When Robin’s father, a former Tuskegee Airman, died in October 2004, Diane took a day off GMA to arrive at Robin’s mother’s Biloxi, Mississippi, doorstep at nine a.m. on the day before the funeral, “in big sunglasses, hair pulled back,” so no one would notice her, Robin has recalled, bearing pots of gumbo from the Robertses’ favorite restaurant “so when we came back from making arrangements we’d have food at home.”

  The white woman/black woman symmetry had a comfortable genius to it—for Diane, it might have even been a forty-five-years-later Seneca High come full circle. During a joint interview with Ladies’ Home Journal editor Diane Salvatore, when asked if they talk about how race affected their friendship, Diane instantly straight-manned: “You mean . . . I’m white?” Then, through Robin’s and Salvatore’s uproarious laughter, she protested: “But . . . did you see me dance?” Diane and Robin’s friendship would deepen over the years. When Robin stayed up all night after the shock of her breast cancer diagnosis in 2007, “Diane called and said, ‘Go to bed—I’m on watch now,’” Roberts says. “She was relentless in finding me medical information.”

  In fact, Diane’s generosity has been quietly known within her circle of colleagues for years. She is such a good friend that “if you get sick, forget about it—she’s calling a van to the rescue,” says someone who is otherwise critical. Ira Rosen concurs: “She is simply the best foul-weather friend in the business. If, God forbid, something bad is happening in your life, she will go through every doctor she knows. When Anthony Radziwill was dying of cancer, she spent days on the phone [calling doctors and] trying to save his life.” She did the same for a colleague who had pancreatic cancer. Private school tuitions for kids of single moms she barely knows, beach camps for children who never saw an ocean, surgeries for family members of a studio tech and an elevator operator, all done anonymously, with the recipients not knowing the source: “You could fill a stadium with the people she’s helped,” says Mark Robertson. On long international flights, she’d often force her first-class seats on her young producers while taking their coach seats. Eventually, when she took over the anchorship of ABC World News, she bought the whole staff gym memberships, each one including a trainer.

  Still, “the problem with Diane,” says a person who worked with her around this time, “is she causes so much pain” through her relentless pushing of senior staffers. “There are people at work who believe the people who got sick got sick because of her. Whatever it is that drives her breaks as many people as it helps.” “She gets every executive producer she’s worked with fired when she gets tired of them, and she never wants it known she’s had anything to do with it,” claims a man who suffered this fate, probably exaggerating for effect or from wounded feelings. “Diane presides over a kind of imperial court like in I, Claudius,” contends one particularly arch ex-staffer, adding that Charlie Gibson cautioned this person, in 2003, about the flip side of her seductive charm: “When the mighty light of Diane shines on you—so brightly, so briefly—I am giving you the strongest possible warning: Don’t fall for it.”

  • • •

  IN FEBRUARY 2006, while Diane was making her secret and then self-withdrawn bid to be anchor at ABC, Les Moonves was making Katie a secret preemptive offer of about $15 million a year to be anchor at CBS. This was twice the salary that Dan Rather had made—and, says a foreign bureau worker, Rather’s salary had itself just recently, before Mem
ogate, “been doubled—and at a time when the TV news business model had already been incredibly stressed, not to mention with the recession coming.” Fifteen million dollars a year for an anchor—and an anchor who was considered more a “celebrity,” not a longtime hard news dues payer? And coming from outside to a network that, as Marcy McGinnis puts it, was so familylike, “people at other companies marvel to me in conversation that people stayed at our news division for so long.” All this would be a lot for the CBS News staff to stomach. Besides, “some Evening News staffers were making ten dollars an hour and working sixteen-hour days, doing major research,” says one who was there at the time. Moonves apparently didn’t think of the staff morale, not that it might have mattered to him.

  As the offer from Les to Katie was going forward, Jeff Zucker, who was now president of NBC’s entertainment, news, and cable group and was thus back in control over the news division that subsumed Today, tried to hold on to his friend. “Obviously, I was leading those conversations to try to get Katie to stay. I offered her a lot of money and a lot of opportunity for her to stay at NBC,” Jeff says, declining to explain “opportunity.” Newsweek reported that he offered her $20 million and Fridays and summers off. “Well, that didn’t happen,” he rebuts, then seems to take it back: “But yeah, I think that’s a pretty accurate reflection of what we had on the table for her—and there was other stuff. I was sad for NBC. And I had to protect NBC.”