Cokie Roberts

Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Roberts (née Boggs; December 27, 1943 – September 17, 2019), known as Cokie Roberts, was an American journalist and bestselling author. Her career included decades as a political reporter and analyst for National Public Radio and ABC News, with prominent positions on Morning Edition, The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, World News Tonight, and This Week.

Roberts, along with her husband, Steven V. Roberts, wrote a weekly column syndicated by United Media in newspapers around the United States. She served on the boards of several non-profit organizations such as the Kaiser Family Foundation and was appointed by President George W. Bush to his Council on Service and Civic Participation.

Background

Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs was born on December 27, 1943, in New Orleans, Louisiana. She received the nickname "Cokie" from her brother Tommy, who, as a child, could not pronounce her given name, Corinne.

Her parents were Lindy Boggs and Hale Boggs, each of whom would serve for decades as Democratic members of the House of Representatives from Louisiana; Lindy succeeded Hale after his plane disappeared over Alaska in 1972. Cokie was the couple's third child. Her sister, Barbara Boggs Sigmund, would become mayor of Princeton, New Jersey, and a candidate for the Senate. Her brother Tommy Boggs would become a prominent Washington, D.C., attorney and lobbyist.

Roberts attended the Academy of the Sacred Heart, an all-girls school in New Orleans, before graduating from the Stone Ridge School, an all-girls school outside Washington, D.C., in 1960. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1964, where she received a BA in Political Science.

Career

Her first job in journalism was at WRC-TV in Washington, DC, where she was host of its weekly public affairs program Meeting of the Minds. After moving with her husband to New York City, she found work in 1967 as a reporter for Cowles Communications. She worked briefly as a producer for WNEW-TV before her husband's career relocated them to Los Angeles, where she worked for Altman Productions, then for KNBC-TV as producer of the children's program Seredipity. She moved with her husband to Greece, where she was a stringer for CBS News in Athens.

Roberts began working for NPR in 1978, where she was the congressional correspondent for more than ten years. Roberts was a contributor to PBS in the evening television news program The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Her coverage of the Iran-Contra Affair for that program won her the Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting in 1988. From 1981 to 1984, in addition to her work at NPR, she also co-hosted The Lawmakers, a weekly public television program on Congress.

She went to work for ABC News in 1988 as a political correspondent for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, continuing to serve part-time as a political commentator at NPR.

While working in Guatemala in 1989, Sister Dianna Ortiz, a Catholic nun from New Mexico, was abducted, raped, and tortured by members of a government-backed death squad, who believed she was a subversive. During a subsequent interview, Roberts contested Ortiz's claim that an American was among her captors. (The United States provided significant military aid to Guatemala at the time.) Roberts implied that Ortiz was lying about the entire episode, although Ortiz later won a lawsuit against a Guatemalan general she accused in the case.

Starting in 1992, Roberts served as a senior news analyst and commentator for NPR, primarily on the daily news program Morning Edition. Roberts was the co-anchor of the ABC News' Sunday morning broadcast, This Week with Sam Donaldson & Cokie Roberts from 1996 to 2002, while serving as the chief congressional analyst for ABC News. She covered politics, Congress, and public policy, reporting for World News Tonight and other ABC News broadcasts. Her final assignment with NPR was a series of segments on Morning Edition titled "Ask Cokie", in which she answered questions submitted by listeners about subjects usually related to U.S. politics.

Awards and honors

Roberts won the Edward R. Murrow Award, the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for coverage of Congress and a 1991 Emmy Award for her contribution to "Who is Ross Perot?" In 2000, Roberts won the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism.

She and her mother, Lindy Boggs, won the Foremother Award from the National Center for Health Research in 2013.

Roberts was inducted into the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame in 2000. She was also cited as one of the fifty greatest women in the history of broadcasting by the American Women in Radio and Television.

Roberts was a president of the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association.

Personal life

She was married to Steven V. Roberts, a professor and fellow journalist, from 1966 until her death. They met in the summer of 1962, when she was 18 and he was 19. They resided in Bethesda, Maryland. She and her husband had two children. Their daughter Rebecca Roberts is also a journalist and was one of the hosts of POTUS '08 on XM Radio.

In 2002, Roberts was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was successfully treated at the time, but died from complications of the disease in Washington, D.C. on September 17, 2019.

Books

• Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868. HarperCollins. April 14, 2015. ISBN 978-0-06-200276-1.. Stories about the formidable women of Washington, DC during the Civil War.
• We Are Our Mothers' Daughters: Revised and Expanded Edition. HarperCollins. 1998. ISBN 978-0-06-187235-8., essays
• Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation. HarperCollins. April 13, 2004. ISBN 978-0-06-009025-8. (2004). The book explores the lives of the women behind the men that wrote the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence.
• Ladies of Liberty. HarperCollins. October 13, 2009. ISBN 978-0-06-173721-3. continues the story of early America's influential women who shaped the US during its early stages, chronicling their public roles and private responsibilities.
• Cokie Roberts; Steven V. Roberts (April 7, 2009). From This Day Forward. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-186752-1.
• Cokie Roberts; Steven V. Roberts (March 8, 2011). Our Haggadah: Uniting Traditions for Interfaith Families. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-207465-2.
• Wymard, Ellie (1999). Conversations with uncommon women : insights from women who've risen above life's challenges to achieve extraordinary success. New York: AMACOM. pp. 254. ISBN 9780814405208.

External sources

• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Official biography – NPR
• Recent NPR stories by Cokie Roberts – NPR
• Video Interviews with Cokie Roberts – Charlie Rose
• Women of Influence – National Endowment for the Humanities
• 1994 Commencement Speech – Wellesley College
• Oral History of the U.S. House of Representatives – Cokie Roberts gives a first-hand account of growing up in the capital.
• Cokie Roberts at The Interviews: An Oral History of Television