Longtime ABC News, NPR reporter, political analyst
Cokie Roberts, the pioneering broadcast journalist known to millions for her work with ABC News and National Public Radio, died Tuesday. She was 75.
ABC News, in a posting on its website Tuesday, said the cause was breast cancer, which was first diagnosed in 2002.
Roberts started her radio career at CBS, then in 1978 began working for NPR covering Capitol Hill. She joined ABC in 1988. Her three decades at the network included anchoring, with Sam Donaldson, the news program “This Week” from 1996 to 2002.
“Cokie’s kindness, generosity, sharp intellect and thoughtful take on the big issues of the day made ABC a better place and all of us better journalists,” James Goldston, president of ABC News, said in a statement.
Roberts was both reporter and commentator during her career and was widely respected both by her fellow journalists and by those she covered.
Danielle Kurtzleben, an NPR reporter, praised Roberts as an example for younger generations of journalists.
“I’m proud as hell — proud as hell — to work at a news organization that has ‘Founding Mothers’ whom we all look up to,” she said on Twitter. “God bless Cokie Roberts.”
If Roberts brought deep knowledge and keen insight to her work, that was in part because she was a child of politicians and first walked the halls of Congress as a young girl.
Her father was Hale Boggs, a longtime Democratic representative from Louisiana who in the early 1970s was House majority leader. After he died in a plane crash in 1972, his wife and Roberts’ mother, Lindy Boggs, was elected to fill his seat. She served until 1991 and later became U.S. ambassador to the Holy See.
It was a background that gave Roberts a deep respect for the institutions of government that she covered.
Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs was born Dec. 27, 1943, in New Orleans. She said that her brother, Tommy, invented her nickname because he couldn’t say “Corinne.”
Although her father had considerable influence on her, so did her mother, who was active in furthering her father’s career, and other women she came to know, like Lady Bird Johnson.
Many of her eight books explored the role of women in shaping the country, including “We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters” (1998) and “Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation” (2008).
In 1966 she married Steven Roberts, then a correspondent for The New York Times.
She became a radio correspondent for CBS, then in 1978 joined NPR. With Nina Totenberg and Linda Wertheimer, she began to change the journalistic landscape.