The News Sorority Read online

  Weather, of course, was exactly where Diane didn’t want to be. She wanted the big stories—like the riots that occurred when SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael was rumored to be coming to Louisville. “She constantly badgered me: ‘Look, if you’ve got a news story and you don’t have anybody to cover it on the weekend, would you let me go and do it?’” Ken Rowland recounts. “And I said yes.” Rowland got a sense of her work ethic. After a day on weather, if he needed her to cover a fire, she was up for it. If there was a suspicious hospital death on a weekend, she could do that, too. She quit night law school.

  Finally, after eight months, in March 1968, there was an opening in news. Weather didn’t want to let Diane go and refused to trade her, but Rowland was tickled that he’d sneakily advised Diane not to sign a contract when she originally took the job. Sans contract, she could skip over to the news department. She did so in a heartbeat. Thus Diane Sawyer became the first full-time female TV news reporter in Louisville—just in time to help cover two country-shaking news stories: the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy.

  • • •

  AT JUST THIS MOMENT, women a generation older than Diane were finally opening the doors—a crack—as network anchors. Only four pioneers—Nancy Hanschman Dickerson, Marya McLaughlin, Lisa Howard, and Marlene Sanders—had put any real dents in the aircraft-metal ceiling of network news during the 1960s. That formidable ceiling had been pierced once—long before, in 1948—but since then had resisted much battering.

  The reason that TV news’s ceiling might be called “aircraft metal” is because service during World War II had been its hallowed and glamorous breeding ground. There were the dashing, risk-taking Murrow’s Boys, newsman Edward R. Murrow’s team that included Charles Collingwood, Eric Sevareid, and Howard K. Smith; and then there was feisty, independent Walter Cronkite filing copy for UPI. It was a guys’ club up and down, long excused from the male-chauvinism rap because of the drama, heroism—the sheer élan—of being a war correspondent.

  Even the way the first woman scored a moment on TV news has the romantic sheen of a swing dance. Frances Buss was a young would-be actress working as a substitute receptionist at CBS TV in Grand Central Terminal in early December 1941. Television was the brand-new novelty medium that had yet to gain the authority of radio, which itself had only recently leapt over newspapers and wire services by giving Americans World War II news in real time. When Frances heard, through a friend who had a radio, that the Japanese had attacked a big American naval base somewhere in the South Pacific, “I quickly took the train from the suburbs to the TV station,” Frances Buss Buch recounted shortly before her death, at ninety-two, in January 2010. Everyone there was panicked, not just because of the attack on Pearl Harbor, but because “we—our newscaster Bob Hubbell and the small crew—we didn’t have maps! We didn’t have atlases! Hawaii wasn’t a state yet, of course, and nobody at the station knew where this naval base, Pearl Harbor, was.” But Frances took the phone call that came in with the geographic information and, with her decent drawing skills, sketched a map and held it up to the CBS cameras to illustrate the world-shaking news. After honing her skills working on some navy training films, in 1945 Buch became the first female director of an American TV show, a quiz show.

  But the first serious pound on that metal ceiling came in 1948, by way of forty-year-old Pauline Frederick. Frederick was essentially the founding mother of the women-in-TV-news cause. By the late forties she’d become that rarest thing: a female news gatherer for ABC TV, having paid her dues as a print and then radio reporter. Pauline was the “exception—she was ‘above’ women! She was so serious!” says Beryl Pfizer, mocking her own midcentury self as the awed secretary for the Arthur Godfrey Show. (Pfizer went on to be a Today show girl—a “tea pourer”—just before pioneer Barbara Walters got and transformed that job.)

  Frederick was put on the air in desperation. She happened to be the only reporter available the day a particularly important story came through from the brand-new United Nations in 1947. The following year, Frederick became the first ever female TV news commentator in the United States.

  Frederick, at ABC, was like CBS’s Alice Weel, “who had gotten in the door during World War II only because there were no men around,” says Walter Cronkite’s longtime producer Sandy Socolow. “Any female who could write a sentence was hired” to scribble copy for anchor Douglas Edwards—“we just needed a body.” Weel was “a freak,” Socolow stresses, the only woman in the TV newsroom. “And God bless her, I loved her, but she was kind of sloppy. She wasn’t particularly well groomed. Everyone at CBS was a white male who had previous experience in hard news somewhere else, and I assume NBC was the same.” (ABC was a minor third network back then.) But Alice Weel—who the CBS men could reassuringly dismiss as ill-groomed, just as the ABC men reassuringly dismissed Pauline Frederick as dour—was merely a writer, behind the scenes. By contrast, Pauline Frederick got on the air as the first female anchor on a midday NBC New York affiliate—squeezed in between soap operas, but on the air nonetheless. Much of Frederick’s airtime longevity was owed to an accident of the larynx: She had a very low, male-like voice.

  Veteran network news producer Richard Wald remembers well what he calls the “Father Knows Best sexism” of early TV news, “when we didn’t let anybody else in our tree house.” Frederick never stopped fighting against this attitude. “Pauline pushed. Pauline was a feminist” well before the Second Wave feminism of Friedan and Steinem began. For over a decade Pauline Frederick had made the unpopular argument that women could be broadcasters.

  Frederick’s fortitude laid the groundwork for four younger “sisters”—born between 1926 and 1931, essentially a full generation older than Diane Sawyer—to make their own advances in the early to mid-sixties, when the Mad Men days were in full swing. This quartet was not just more feminine than the faux-masculine “sloppy” Alice and humorless Pauline; they were frankly sexy, and they rolled their eyes at their ghettoization. Nancy Hanschman Dickerson—who had dated John F. Kennedy when he was a senator from Massachusetts—had turned down a women’s-page editorship at a Washington, D.C., paper “because,” she’d scoffed, “it seemed outlandish to try to change the world by writing shopping and food columns.” She became CBS’s first female behind-the-scenes reporter in 1960, and went on to NBC, becoming, along the way, a well-married woman who threw A-list parties in twist-era Georgetown. Marya McLaughlin—who for thirty years had a romance with Senator Eugene McCarthy—became CBS’s first on-camera reporter in the spring of 1965. McLaughlin once fielded a request to “cover cooking” with: “Oh, now I understand. If a 707 crashed this afternoon, you want me to take my camera crew to the pilot’s house and . . . ask [his widow] what she would have cooked for dinner.”

  McLaughlin’s ascent to the air prompted a trend piece in the New York Times. The article was written by a freelancer named Gloria and commissioned by another Gloria, the Food-Fashion-Furnishings editor. It was headlined “Nylons in the Newsroom.” As the breezy title makes clear, 1965 was a hinge year—the exact middle of the decade—when one female paradigm was exaggerated in a last-gasp way as another was rumbling in its egg. The article’s editor was Gloria Emerson, who went on to become, after lobbying the paper furiously for the posting, an award-winning Vietnam War correspondent. The freelance writer was Gloria Steinem.

  ABC’s Lisa Howard, the third pathfinder, was too idiosyncratic to succumb to constraints. The actress-turned-broadcaster became so close to Fidel Castro that she helped open negotiations with Castro for the Kennedy administration. Beset by depression, Howard killed herself in 1965.

  Marlene Sanders, the only one of the four pioneers still alive, started as a secretary and became, in October 1964, the first woman to anchor a network news TV show that was more than five minutes long between soap operas. But, like Frederick’s breakthrough sixteen years earlier, that was by default: As an ABC press release took pains to explai
n, Sanders would be “a temporary female replacement . . . for an indispensable Ron Cochran,” who’d lost his voice one day. Sanders, a Midwestern-bred straight shooter who became friends with Betty Friedan early on and has retained a feminist’s gimlet eye on women in TV news (and who happens to be the mother of journalist and TV legal pundit Jeffrey Toobin), earned the spot through the same random attribute that had aided Frederick: “My voice was low.” Lest the novelty of her appointment be missed, Sanders’s eventual afternoon straight-news broadcast was called News with a Woman’s Touch.

  So this was the state of isolated gains—fleeting anchor slots grabbed by default, accidents of timing, or flukes of voice timbre, all undercut by network apologies—that Diane Sawyer, at a local station in a small city, was braving in 1968.

  Some parts of Diane’s early time in news could have been fodder for a period sitcom about a gal reporter at a provincial TV station: The time she’d borrowed Ken Rowland’s car, opened the trunk to store her big Bell & Howell camera . . . and found a cache of girly magazines that the city’s chief of police had confiscated during a magazine-stand public-decency raid—and had then mock-grilled Rowland: “What kind of literature have you been reading?” Or the mistake of going off to cover the Ringling Brothers Circus in a miniskirt—only to realize that a miniskirt was the last thing you want to be televised in while straddling an elephant. There were politicians’ wives to sip tea with and Lions Club meetings to cover. And, yes, WLKY was, even its own staff quipped, “the fourth of the city’s three TV stations.”

  But the lowliness had advantages. At the bare-bones station that was struggling to stay alive, Diane carried her own camera (or parts thereof)—in those days, shooting in sound required heavy equipment, “a huge tripod, and you had to put lights on two different ends of the room to shoot a subject,” says Rowland. One night Diane, Rowland, and assignment editor Jim Smith were hauling equipment to cover a public meeting, “and there must have been half a dozen men who saw her, this beautiful blond, carrying all this equipment, and they all said, ‘May I help you?’” She had to keep saying, “No, thank you, I can handle it,” over and over again. “And she did, and you would never know it from her face but I knew she was furious. Furious! I was biting my tongue to keep from laughing.” Kidding aside, “Diane wanted to be one of the boys. She didn’t want any special favors.” (“I know where Diane was coming from,” says Ginny Vicario. In 1974, a full six years after Diane was shooing off these chivalrous men, Vicario became the first female news camera operator ever hired by a network. “You could not accept help,” Vicario says of the late sixties and early seventies. “You could not accept ‘chivalry.’ If you did, the man would turn around and say he’d had to help you.”)

  Being at a small-staffed station also meant doing her own on-site reporting and in-studio editing and on-air reporting. On the night of a local election, “it was a quarter to ten and Democratic headquarters was mobbed.” In order to escape the room to get back to the station to edit her report for her narration on the eleven p.m. broadcast, “Diane took [a teenage intern] by the hand and said, ‘Follow me,’ and they got down on their hands and knees and they crawled out,” Ken Rowland recalls.

  WLKY’s reporters and producers were affected by community events on a personal level. News directors’ houses were egged when reporters, including Diane, covered the open housing marches and reported on the violence. “Communist! Communist!” callers yelled into Ken Rowland’s home phone. The worst violence in Louisville took place when a young black boy was killed by police who thought he’d robbed a store. It turned out he’d been unarmed and was running out of fear, not guilt. Protests and riots broke out all over the city and suburbs; though Rowland would not send Diane out into riots, she covered the daily press conferences, and when the dead boy’s mother begged for calm and forgiveness, Diane’s eyes were as misty as many members of the public’s. During one of the city’s civil rights battles, a handsome, extremely self-assured national and international reporter visited Louisville to see things close up. Rowland spent the day taking the young news VIP and his crew to relevant locations. “When we got back to the newsroom, he saw Diane at her desk and he poked me and said, ‘Introduce me.’” Rowland did, but “Diane was very cool about it; she didn’t seem to be impressed.” Whether she felt hit upon and didn’t like it or whether she got a whiff of this fellow’s eventually storied arrogance and was defending her small, scrappy station from the subtle condescension of a privileged interloper, he seemed to have gotten her coolness. “And,” Ken Rowland says, “I think that’s the first time that ever happened to Peter Jennings.”

  • • •

  SOON THE WORLD beyond Louisville beckoned. Washington, D.C., was the closest major market, and Diane had a connection there. The Washington, D.C., head of CBS News—Bill Small—had run a TV station in Louisville until 1962 and he knew of Diane’s family. “But I didn’t know she existed until I read her résumé and saw that she worked for the Louisville station,” Small says. She came to Washington in 1969 looking for work at the worst time possible—during a job freeze—which was a shame because “she was smart as hell,” he soon discovered.

  Small asked Diane to write a five-minute newscast, go into the studio, and tape it. “She did all of that with flying colors: She wrote fast, she wrote well, and her presentation was excellent. I said, ‘If you’ll be patient, these job freezes don’t last forever.’” He called the CBS local news director, Jim Snyder, and said, “‘This young woman strikes me as having terrific talent. I can’t hire her right now. Can I send her to you?’ But Snyder said, ‘We’re in the same boat.’” Diane returned to Louisville. However, Small never stopped following Diane, or regretting his initial inability to hire her. Later, he would be a key champion at a crucial juncture.

  Then came her father’s tragic death on the bridge that morning in late September. Perhaps to cleave to his memory as a distinguished Republican elected official, and to honor the contacts he had to bequeath to her, Diane sought a job with the Nixon White House. She called a senator who had been a close friend of her father’s, who called Lamar Alexander, then the chairman of the Republican Party. Soon, Diane was officially applying for a job with Ron Ziegler, President Nixon’s press secretary. Ziegler hailed from Kentucky (Alexander was from adjacent Tennessee) and knew Judge Sawyer’s reputation. As for taking a job in politics and government, “I felt that the journalist’s perspective was home for me,” Diane has said, referring to the satisfaction she’d felt during her year and a half as full-time news reporter, “but I really wanted to know something about making decisions, about taking responsibility.”

  Bearing a recommendation from one of Kentucky’s senators, who had known her father, Diane was granted an interview with Ziegler’s deputy, Gerry Warren. “None of us knew Diane. Before I could even talk to her, she sat on the podium while I was giving a briefing; it showed me an ease, a sense of self,” Warren remembers. “She was young and very wholesome and very fresh—fresh in the sense of eager to learn—but also quite refined. She was self-assured, but in a way that wasn’t arrogant.” Diane now cut a stylish, even glamorous figure. Long gone was the crimped beauty queen hairdo and the prim smile. Her blond hair was now several inches past shoulder length and lightly flipped up, slightly teased at the crown. She started wearing fashionable large sunglasses, big bracelets, and patterned miniskirts that showcased her long legs. Although Richard Nixon and his lieutenants (several sporting military buzz cuts) represented retrograde uptightness, this period of Diane’s life, oddly enough, presents her at her most sultry looking. Aside from her attractiveness, “she was eager to work—she was not afraid of work,” Gerry Warren says, immediately perceiving a quality that would last throughout her career. “We just happened to have an opening and she moved in. It was clear that she was not going to be a secretary. She was going to help us on substantive issues.”

  As excited as she was to take the White House job, “
Diane was concerned about leaving her mother home in Louisville,” says Jim Smith, her immediate boss at WLKY. “She mentioned, kidding around after a newscast, “‘Gee, I wish somebody could find someone for my mother to meet.’ So we did find someone, Dr. Ray Hayes,” an occasional guest on a WLKY afternoon show. An introduction was made. Dr. Hayes, the medical director of the state mental hospital in Louisville, was a recent widower, his wife having committed suicide. The dramatically sudden loss of spouses is something Ray Hayes and Jean Sawyer had in common. The two began seeing each other. They eventually married, and remained together until Dr. Hayes’s death in 2004. Diane would become close to her stepfather over the years—according to friends’ accounts, she liked him very much.

  Relieved that her mother was not alone, Diane left for Washington, D.C., in 1970.

  • • •

  WHAT A TIME to go to work at the Nixon White House! The counterculture was in ascent; so many of Diane’s peers were going left, yet she was heading right. The Republican Party in Kentucky was different back then, explains one of Diane’s Seneca classmates. “We didn’t have the right wing we have today, not the ones who are as fanatical about Jesus. There were no Pat Robertsons. Those people didn’t exist, or if they did, they were a small minority.” Besides, two other Seneca ’63 students—Greg Haynes and his wife, Sallie Schulten Haynes—were going to work for Nixon, too. So from a local standpoint, it wasn’t necessarily out of sync. Still, Diane’s time with Nixon would be the most controversial eight years on her résumé—and she has ruefully laughed that, over her long career, she’s been simultaneously criticized for being a flaming liberal and an unconscionable conservative.

  Nixon had won the 1968 election against Hubert Humphrey in a very divided America. Humphrey represented old-style liberal values. Nixon was representing law and order. And after a tumultuous two years of assassinations and riots, and the theatrics-for-the-sake-of-it at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, law and order, for older Americans, was an attractive position. Diane herself seemed to have a divided political and social philosophy. She had lived a personal, day-to-day version of the civil rights struggle, but she was a daughter of Republicans, and on the matter of protests against the Vietnam War—which were never popular even among the relatively liberal reporter class in Kentucky—she was likely agnostic, and, at least six years earlier, toward the end of her America’s Junior Miss reign, she had, according to Martin Snapp, virtually condemned the student protests.