Three fallen pioneers
Cokie Roberts, Sander Vanocur and Paul Ingrassia all trailblazed their respective fields
One was a pioneering female journalist with a deep understanding of the totems and taboos of Washington. Another was a pioneering television broadcaster with a sharp eye for history. The third was a pioneering business reporter with an obsession with detail. All were enriched by a figure they lived with: parents and a spouse in one case, a college roommate in another, a brother in yet a third.
Cokie Roberts. Sander Vanocur. Paul Ingrassia. The three died within hours of each other, an unusual moment of mortality that reminds us not only of how fragile and ephemeral is life but also of the passing of an era of probity and civility in public affairs that seems almost antiquarian in our amped-up world.
Together they left the legacy that all journalists crave — figures of integrity and intelligence who changed the way we look at the world even as they changed the way their craft was conducted. We in our business are all their legatees, and you as consumers of news are their beneficiaries.
Cokie Roberts was the daughter of two House members, one a Capitol Hill baron en route to the speakership when he perished in an Alaska air crash, the other a quiet but imposing lawmaker who also was a diplomat. She grew up in, and as an adult moved back into, a courtly house at the bend of Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda, Md.
She married Steven V. Roberts, a force of nature at The New York Times and for many years a Cokie colleague on the marble floors and, often, in the cloistered back rooms and hideaway offices of Capitol Hill. She and the formidable Linda Wertheimer, her NPR colleague on the Hill, knew more of the inside workings of Congress than most backbenchers and half the leadership. She and Steve drove me home from work in the Capitol press galleries every night. It was a graduate education in American politics, and they paid for the tuition, which was the gasoline.
But Cokie’s impact was only part in her work, which was not simply professional but peerless. It was also in the role she grew into with remarkable grace, as the grande dame of Washington journalists. She, along with fellow New York Times wife Judith Weinraub, recoiled and rebelled in their identity as Wives of The New York Times and blazed a trail of independence and accomplishment that was an inspiration to a generation of female journalists.
In a different but equally potent way, Mr. Vanocur was a figure of elegance and refinement in the raucous environs of the pressroom. Working for the Manchester Guardian and The New York Times before assuming his principal role as inquisitor and intellectual at NBC News, he was the final surviving participant of the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates. He was a towering figure, but not looming so large that my 8year-old daughter, at lunch with him in his Santa Barbara retirement, couldn’t share an inadvertent off-color comment with him and prompt an embarrassing laugh around the table.
At work, Sandy was a figure to reckon with; he broadcast all night and into the morning the day Robert F. Kennedy was shot. In retirement he was a gentle critic and genuine booster of those he chose to follow, and when Sandy followed you he read every word. He was possessed of humankind’s greatest attribute, the gift of friendship, and perhaps his oldest friendship was with his Northwestern roommate, Newton N. Minow, who gained fame of his own when, as chair of the Federal Communications Commission, he described television as a “vast wasteland.” (It was no surprise that the shipwrecked boat on television’s moronic “Gilligan’s Island,’’ which ran from 1964 to 1967, was named the S.S. Minnow.)
“Sandy was equipped with deep intellectual and political curiosity, which gave him exceptional insight into how government succeeds or fails,” Mr. Minow, now 93 years old, told me. The two men were neighbors in Washington’s Cleveland Park section during the Kennedy years. “Always ahead of the curve, Sandy’s reporting enlightened our nation with his mind, heart, courage and wisdom.”
The final figure to leave the pressroom in this sad passage was Paul Ingrassia, a former Reuters managing editor who shared a Pulitzer for his Wall Street Journal investigation of the management of General Motors. The day after he died, the columnist E.J. Dionne described Paul as a “reporter’s reporter,” a description that would have pleased Paul no end.
In a way, Paul’s heart wasn’t in the right place. It migrated after his right lung was removed 22 years ago. But in the most important way, it was in just the right place, sometimes on his sleeve, always at the center of his work.
Paul’s brother Larry, who held top positions at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, provides the best testimony to his skill. “Paul could be a very demanding boss, an editor who held reporters and subjects — and himself — to the highest standards,” Larry said in a sad email exchange the day after his brother died. (Paul once told Paul Gigot that if he couldn’t cease making errors he should find another line of work. Mr. Gigot won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2000 and a year later became the editorial page editor of The Journal, a position he still holds.)
“Paul was innately, scrupulously fair,” his brother went on. “He didn’t care who you were or where you came from. What mattered was what you did. If you worked hard and did well, you were heaped with praise and encouragement or got a story written about your company that you liked. If you fell short, well, that would be another matter.”
That was a quality — a point of view — a hard truth — shared by all three. That is why we mourn and miss them already, even as we thank, and celebrate, them for their work, their lives and above all their sacred honor.