“Cokie” Roberts, a female television and
radio journalist, covered Congress for National Public Radio and for the ABC
Television Network for decades. Her
parents were important members of the House of Representatives, and she herself
gave deep interviews often full of understanding and respect. She died on September 17th.
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Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne "Cokie"
Roberts (née Boggs;
December 27, 1943 – September 17, 2019) 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, Steve,
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.
Childhood and Education
Roberts 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 served 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 their third child. Her
sister, Barbara, became mayor of Princeton, New Jersey and a candidate for the
United States Senate. Her brother, Tommy, became a prominent attorney and
lobbyist in Washington, D.C..
She attended the Academy of the Sacred
Heart, an all-girls Roman Catholic high school in New Orleans, Louisiana, and
then graduated 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
Roberts' first job in journalism was at WRC-TV
in Washington, D.C., where she was host of its weekly public affairs program Meeting
of the Minds. After moving with Steve 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 Steve's journalism career relocated them to Los Angeles,
where she worked for Altman Productions, then for KNBC-TV as producer of the
children's program Serendipity, which won a 1971 Los Angeles Area Emmy
Award. She also moved with her husband to Greece, where she was a stringer for CBS
News in Athens.
Roberts began working for National
Public Radio (NPR) in 1978, where she was the congressional correspondent for
more than ten years. Because of her early involvement in the network as a
female journalist at a time when women were not often involved in journalism at
the highest levels, she has been called one of the "founding mothers of
NPR". Roberts was a contributor to
the Public Broadcasting Service (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 cohosted The
Lawmakers, a weekly public television program on Congress. In 1994, The
New York Times credited her, along with NPR's Linda Wertheimer and Nina
Totenberg with transforming male-dominated Washington D.C. political
journalism.
Roberts 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. It was later revealed that the law
firm of Roberts' brother, Tommy, called Patton Boggs, was paid by the
Guatemalan government to promote a more positive image of the regime, which was
widely criticized internationally for human rights abuses.
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.
Her Personal Life
Roberts was married to Steve, a
professor and fellow journalist, from 1966 until her death. They met in summer
1962, when she was 18 and he was 19. They resided in Bethesda, Maryland. They
had two children. Their daughter, Rebecca, is 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.
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Nina Totenberg, also a veteran of
National Public Radio, gave a eulogy of Roberts that is available at:
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