After 40 some years in the business, “ABC World News” anchor Diane Sawyer admits she still doesn’t have everything down.
“First of all, I don’t have one of those voices,” Sawyer told Marvin Kalb at Tuesday night’s taping of “The Kalb Report” at the National Press Club. She then went into her best broadcast voice, with an impression of Charlie Gibson. “Tonight on World News,” she said lowering her vocal cords. “I can’t do that, I can only just go, ‘Tonight on World News,'” she said in a much more conversational tone.
Sawyer chatted about her intrepid career for more than an hour, gushing at times over other correspondents like Christiane Amanpour and Jake Tapper. She recalled being hazed at “60 Minutes” by Mike Wallace and others when she became the program’s first female correspondent. “Oh, I had not idea what I was walking into, let me tell you,” she said laughing. “I said once I knew I was in trouble when the entire group of ’60 Minutes’ correspondents walked down the hall…said ‘here’s what we’re going to do,’ and ended up in the men’s room,” she recalled.
She also discussed the more serious topic of why she decided to stick by President Nixon‘s side. She had worked at the White House as an aide and then helped Nixon with his memoirs after his resignation. “It was, in a funny way, how I lived up to what my father had always taught me, which is if you walk away from someone at the worst time of their life, that is also a choice that has implications for who you are and who you want to be,” she said.
She also had no clue how she got that White House job in the first place, coming to the executive branch from a gig as a “bad” weather girl. “I have no idea what they thought I was going to do,” she said. “I didn’t either.”
