Cokie Roberts

Cokie Roberts, born Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs on December 27, 1943, in New Orleans, was an American journalist and author. Her brother Tommy, unable to pronounce "Corinne" as a child, gave her the nickname "Cokie." Her parents, Lindy and Hale Boggs, were both longtime Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives from Louisiana; Lindy took over Hale’s seat after his plane vanished over Alaska in 1972. Cokie was their third child. Her sister Barbara became mayor of Princeton, New Jersey, and ran for the U.S. Senate, while her brother Tommy became a prominent Washington, D.C., attorney and lobbyist.

Roberts attended the Academy of the Sacred Heart, an all-girls Catholic high school in New Orleans, and graduated from the Stone Ridge School, another all-girls school near Washington, D.C., in 1960. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in political science from Wellesley College in 1964.

Career

Her journalism career began at WRC-TV in Washington, D.C., hosting the public affairs program Meeting of the Minds. After moving to New York City with her husband Steve, also a journalist, she worked as a reporter for Cowles Communications in 1967 and briefly as a producer for WNEW-TV. The couple then relocated to Los Angeles, where she worked for Altman Productions and produced the children’s program Serendipity at KNBC-TV, which won a 1971 Los Angeles Area Emmy Award. She also lived in Greece, serving as a stringer for CBS News in Athens.

Roberts joined National Public Radio in 1978, serving as its congressional correspondent for over a decade. Because she entered the network at a time when few women held top journalism roles, she became known as one of NPR’s “founding mothers,” alongside Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer, and Nina Totenberg. She also contributed to PBS’s The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, and her coverage of the Iran-Contra Affair for that program earned her the Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting in 1988.

From 1981 to 1984, she co-hosted The Lawmakers, a weekly public television show about Congress. Starting in 1992, she worked as a senior news analyst and commentator for NPR, primarily on Morning Edition. In 1994, The New York Times credited her, along with Wertheimer and Totenberg, with transforming male-dominated political journalism in Washington.

In 1988, Roberts joined ABC News as a political correspondent for World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, while continuing part-time work at NPR. She appeared as a panelist on ABC’s This Week with David Brinkley for many years. After Brinkley retired, she co-anchored the program—renamed This Week with Sam Donaldson & Cokie Roberts—from 1996 to 2002, also serving as ABC News’ chief congressional analyst.

She and Donaldson were replaced as anchors by George Stephanopoulos in September 2002. She continued reporting on politics, Congress, and public policy for World News Tonight and other ABC broadcasts, and occasionally appeared as a panelist on This Week. Her final NPR assignment was a Morning Edition segment called “Ask Cokie,” where she answered listener questions about U.S. politics.

Roberts also wrote a weekly syndicated column with her husband Steve, distributed by United Media to newspapers nationwide. She served on the boards of several nonprofits, including the Kaiser Family Foundation, and was appointed by President George W. Bush to his Council on Service and Civic Participation.

Reporting on Dianna Ortiz case

In 1989, Sister Dianna Ortiz, a Catholic nun from New Mexico, was abducted, raped, and tortured in Guatemala by members of a government-backed death squad. During an interview, Roberts challenged Ortiz’s claim that an American was among her captors—the U.S. had provided significant military aid to Guatemala at the time—and implied Ortiz was lying about the entire episode. Ortiz later won a lawsuit against a Guatemalan general she accused in the case. It was later revealed that Patton Boggs, the law firm of Roberts’s brother Tommy, was paid by the Guatemalan government to promote a more positive image of the regime, which faced widespread international criticism for human rights abuses.

Awards and honors

Roberts won the Edward R. Murrow Award, the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for coverage of Congress, and a 1991 Emmy Award for her contribution to Who Is Ross Perot? In 1997, she received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement, presented by Sam Donaldson. She won the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism in 2000. She and her mother, Lindy Boggs, received the Foremother Award from the National Center for Health Research in 2013.

She was made an honoris causa initiate of Omicron Delta Kappa in 1995 from the University of Akron and later received the organization’s highest honor, the Laurel Crowned Circle. Roberts was inducted into the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame in 2000. She died on September 17, 2019.