The Washington Post - 18.09.2019

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A

it’s historic, and if it is true that I

have a bias, it’s a bias in favor of

the institution.”

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through as a child and run

through as a reporter. “This is a

friendly place,” she once told the

Los Angeles Times. “It’s beautiful,

Ms. Roberts remained a pres-

ence in the Capitol well after her

cancer diagnosis, traipsing down

halls that she had shuffled

Rebecca Roberts of Washington;

and six grandchildren. Her moth-

er died in 2013, her brother in

2014.

three decades until his plane dis-

appeared in Alaska en route to a

campaign stop on behalf of a

fellow Democrat. Ms. Roberts and

her family were briefed daily on a

search mission that never found

the body, leaving her with a nag-

ging sense of uncertainty.

“I know my father is not alive.

... But still, I catch myself hesitat-
ing before changing the kitchen
wallpaper, fearing that he will
come home and think strangers
are in the house,” she wrote in a
1991 New York Times op-ed. Her
mother, the former Lindy Clai-
borne, took Hale Boggs’s seat in a
special election and was later ap-
pointed by President Bill Clinton
as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.
Ms. Roberts graduated from
Stone Ridge School of the Sacred
Heart, a Catholic girls’ school in
Bethesda, Md., and received a
bachelor’s degree in political sci-
ence from Wellesley College in
1964. Her early journalism jobs
included hosting a public affairs
program at Washington televi-
sion station WRC-TV and produc-
ing stints in New York and Los
Angeles.
She covered Capitol Hill for
NPR beginning in 1978, when the
media organization was still an
upstart and, by some accounts,
could only afford to hire inexperi-
enced staffers, network castaways
and women (who were paid less
than men). Within NPR’s news-
room, Ms. Roberts and female
broadcasters including Susan
Stamberg, Nina To tenberg and
Linda Wertheimer became
known as the organization’s
“founding mothers.”
“We had people tell us all along
the way that we weren’t qualified
to deliver the news, that we
weren’t authoritative enough,”
she told the Los Angeles Times in
1992. “We would have meetings
with men in high positions and
find their hands on our knees. We
would have invitations from
those people to hotel rooms. All
kinds of propositions. Insults they
didn’t consider insults.”
“Those assaults make a differ-
ence in terms of how you think
about yourself,” she added. “May-
be they’re right, you begin to
think. Maybe I’m not authorita-
tive. Maybe I’m not smart enough.
And then you say to yourself, God,
I went to the same schools as
those guys. I have the same educa-
tion as they do. What’s the prob-
lem? Why am I asked how many
words a minute I can type when
the guy next to me can’t type at
all?”
Ms. Roberts served as a con-
gressional correspondent for
more than a decade at N PR, which
eventually installed a special line
into her home so that she could
call in to “Morning Edition” early
in the day, i n pajamas if necessary.
At least one such broadcast was
reportedly interrupted by the
howling of her basset hound.
She married Roberts in a 1966
ceremony attended by President
Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife,
Lady Bird. They lived in Bethesda
for many years and chronicled
their marriage in a 2000 book,
“From This Day Forward,” which
also explored the history of mar-
riage in America.
In addition to her husband,
survivors include two children,
Lee Roberts of Raleigh, N.C., and

shifting media landscape and
changing world.”
Her seasoned understanding of
Washington politics was in-
formed by an upbringing in Con-
gress itself, where she bounced on
the knee of House Speaker Sam
Rayburn (D-Tex.), whom she
called “Mr. Sam,” and was parad-
ed through the halls by her father,
Rep. Thomas Hale Boggs Sr.
(D-La.). Hitting the campaign
trail w ith a young Cokie in tow, he
rose to become House majority
leader before dying in a 1972
plane crash. His seat was filled by
Ms. Roberts’s mother, Lindy
Boggs, who launched her own
nine-term congressional career.
Ms. Roberts inherited much of
her parents’ unflappability and
charisma, entering journalism in
an era when the profession was
dominated by men, especially in
the political ranks. Her husband,
Steven V. R oberts, was a New York
Times correspondent in Greece,
where Ms. Roberts began filing
radio dispatches for CBS News as
she watched the country’s mili-
tary junta collapse in 1974.
She later worked at NPR and
PBS before joining ABC News in
1988, where she served as a politi-
cal correspondent for “World
News To night,” filled in for Te d
Koppel on “Nightline” and ap-
peared as a panelist on David
Brinkley’s Sunday political pro-
gram “This Week.” She anchored
the show with Sam Donaldson
from 1996 to 2002, when she was
diagnosed with breast cancer.
“Men come up to men on the
street and say, ‘We like your com-
mon sense,’ ” s he once said, recall-
ing her early “This Week” years.
“But women say, ‘We love the way
you don’t let them interrupt you,
and that you hand it right back to
them.’ I get the feeling that the
country is full of women who’ve
never gotten a word in edgewise
when men talk about politics.”
As h er influence grew at A BC —
and at NPR, where she continued
working as a political commenta-
tor until her death — Ms. Roberts
sought to fill the journalistic
ranks with women. “Duck and
file,” she advised aspiring female
reporters: “Just do your work and
get it on the air.”
Ms. Roberts was the author of
best-selling books, including sev-
eral that focused on powerful
women in American history, and
wrote a syndicated political col-
umn with her husband, notably
urging “the rational wing” of the
Republican Party to stop the 2016
presidential nomination of Don-
ald Trump.
At times, she said, she yearned
to step into politics like her par-
ents and two siblings: Thomas H.
Boggs Jr., a high-profile lobbyist
and power broker, and Barbara
Boggs Sigmund, who served as
mayor of Princeton, N.J., before
dying of cancer in 1990.
“I’m the only person in my
original nuclear family who
didn’t run for Congress.... I have
always felt semi-guilty about it,”
she told The Washington Post
earlier this year. “But I’ve sort of
assuaged my guilt by writing
about it and feeling like I’m edu-
cating people about the govern-
ment and how to be good voters
and good citizens.”
Ms. Roberts’s political connec-
tions led some media critics to
question whether she was able to
report dispassionately on friends
and, in some cases, financial
backers. Speeches that she and
her husband delivered to corpora-
tions and special interest groups
reportedly earned the couple as
much as $45,000 in fees, and
fueled criticism that Ms. Roberts
— like other marquee names in
Washington journalism — was
merely echoing narratives of the
political establishment.
“Roberts doesn’t just voice the
conventional wisdom; she is the
conventional wisdom,” Slate me-
dia critic Jack Shafer wrote in

2009. Her four-minute NPR com-
      mentary segments, he added, “do
      little but speed-graze the head-
      lines and add a few grace notes.”
      For millions of viewers and
      listeners, however, Ms. Roberts
      was an indispensable guide to
      official Washington, able to ex-
      plain knockout legislative fights
      and White House intrigue in
      snappy s egments on David Letter-
      man or Jay Leno’s late-night talk
      shows. She said she avoided sto-
      ries in which there might be a
      conflict of interest, and saw little
      conflict in working for two media
      organizations at o nce, even if they
      were competitors.
      “I think it’s a woman’s talent,”
      she told The Post in 1993. “Being
      able to do two things at once.”
      Mary Martha Corinne Morri-
      son Claiborne Boggs was born in
      New Orleans on Dec. 27, 1943, and
      said her brother nicknamed her
      Cokie because he couldn’t pro-
      nounce Corinne.
      Her father, known as Hale,
      served in Congress for nearly

ROBERTS FROM A

COKIE ROBERTS 1943-

From journalist’s earliest years, halls of Congress were home

REBECCA ROTH/CQ ROLL CALL/ ASSOCIATED PRESS

Cokie Roberts claps while talking to Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) in August 1996 at the United Center in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention.

PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) greets Ms. Roberts at the Great Hall of the Library of Congress in 201 6.

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