The journalist who blazed a trail in Washington
Cokie Roberts was a fearless gate-crasher in the Washington media boys’ club. As a political correspondent for NPR and ABC News, Roberts became one of the nation’s most recognizable journalists. In a career spanning more than five decades, she won three Emmys and the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award. When Roberts began covering Congress in the 1970s, political reporting was an almost exclusively male domain and Capitol Hill was decades away from being shaken by the #MeToo movement. It wasn’t unusual for lawmakers to try to put a hand on her knee during interviews; Roberts would firmly brush it aside. South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond once forcibly kissed her live on air on the floor of a political convention. “Duck and file,” she advised aspiring female reporters. “Just do your work and get it on the air.”
Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne
Boggs was born in New Orleans to a powerful political family, said The Washington Post. She was nicknamed “Cokie” by her brother “because he couldn’t pronounce Corinne.” As a baby, Cokie was paraded through Congress by her father, Democratic Rep. Thomas Hale Boggs Sr. Following his death in a 1972 plane crash, Roberts’ mother, Lindy Claiborne Boggs, took over his Louisiana seat and served for 17 years. After graduating from Wellesley College in 1964, Cokie went to work at a Washington TV station, said the Associated Press. She married New York Times correspondent Steven V. Roberts two years later and for a time lived in Athens, filing freelance radio stories. Returning to Washington in 1977, she took a job covering Congress with the upstart public radio network NPR. She had never intended to cover politics, “but her background enabled her to understand how Congress worked in a way few outsiders could.”
Roberts became part of a core of trailblazing women broadcasters including Susan Stamberg, Nina Totenberg, and Linda Wertheimer—NPR’s “founding mothers,” said The New York Times. Roberts joined ABC News in 1988, going on to co-anchor the Sunday morning show This Week with Sam Donaldson. She also wrote six books, including several focused on the role of women in politics throughout American history. “Men come up to me on the street and say, ‘We like your common sense,’” she said. “But women say, ‘We love the way you don’t let them interrupt you, and that you hand it right back to them.’”