There is plenty to say about Cokie Roberts’ professional accomplishments: breaking stories and breaking barriers, winning the Edward R. Murrow award and winning an Emmy, telling with skill and grace the stories of the people — particularly the women — who shaped our nation’s story.
But the impact Roberts, who died last week of complications from breast cancer at age 75, had goes far beyond her impressive lifetime of achievement in journalism. Colleagues, especially young women in the news business who were fortunate enough to have crossed paths with her, all sing the same refrain: Cokie’s professional and personal kindness were unmatched.
I often crossed paths with Roberts in the makeup room at ABC News. If the smoke-filled room is the image that brings to mind the “old boys’ club,” then perhaps the hairspray-filled makeup room is the networking power center for women in TV news. The makeup room is a mostly female space; while the men come for powder or a touch up and then go on their way, women often sit at length getting their hair curled and eyes lined before they go under the TV lights. The makeup room is often where advice is dispensed and gossip is shared — extremely valuable commodities if you are a young up-and-comer.
I began appearing on ABC News periodically in 2014 and was invited to participate in a package for the network’s year-end special. After idolizing Roberts for years, I found myself in a makeup chair next to her the morning of taping. She was just as elegant in person as I had imagined. She was finishing revisions on a book, Capital Dames, that was coming out soon, and I was exhausted from having just filed my own manuscript to the same publisher. She congratulated me on being the only person in the history of book publishing to have taken my editor’s deadline seriously. She was warm, friendly, and most of all, seemed genuinely excited for me.
When I joined ABC News some months later as a contributor and began spending more time with Cokie in that same makeup room, her warmth never dimmed, and my sense of begin starstruck by her never faded. She had unparalleled historical insight and context to offer an eager millennial pundit whose own personal memory of politics started somewhere around the George H.W. Bush administration.
Growing up in a Louisiana political family and building a legendary career spanning five decades in the news business, Roberts helmed news programs, wrote six books, raised two children, and was married to her loving husband Steven Roberts, also a journalist, for 53 years. Her father was a U.S. representative. When he died in office, Cokie’s mother succeeded him. Her nickname, she maintained, was bestowed on her from a young age by her brother, who struggled to pronounce her given name, Corinne.
As soon as I heard the news of Cokie’s passing, the first email I sent was to Jackie, the artist who had done the makeup for Cokie and me whenever we were on-air together. “She loved being a mentor and furthering women. There are literally thousands of stories of her helping someone with a reference, or job or school or matchmaking. She always asked about my family first every time I saw her and remembered where we had left off last.”
Thousands of stories is no exaggeration. In the days since Cokie’s passing, countless young women in journalism have poured out stories of her personal and professional kindness. Cokie bringing meals to a young ABC reporter whose newborn twins were in the NICU. Cokie advising a college student to pursue journalism even if it wasn’t her major and that young woman growing up to host a cable news show.
Cokie and I sat together on a rowdy political roundtable in the lead-up to the 2016 election. During a heated debate, Cokie actually jumped in to stop the moderator and then said, “Well, wait, Kristen has interesting information here,” and yielded the floor to me on national television. In the entire history of rowdy political TV news roundtables, I’m not sure anyone has ever yielded time willingly.
This may seem like a small courtesy, but it felt monumental to me then and feels even more so to me now. There was Cokie, as she so often was, giving a boost to a young woman who was still developing the courage to take the microphone herself.
Kristen Soltis Anderson is a political columnist for the Washington Examiner.
