If Katie Couric’s book, Going There, was a 500-plus-page marathon, then the press tour has been an ultra. Before the New York magazine profile, the prodigal daughter returned to Today, and later she sparred on The View. Podcasts, she’s known a few. This is all extracurricular work; for her book tour proper, she’s been to New York; Boston; Washington, D.C.; and Philadelphia. She’ll soon hit Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Nashville. Because such is the nature of a tell-all tour, she has continued to explain.
“I think I’m very hard on myself in general and question myself a lot, like off the written page,” she told me recently over Zoom after saying that the road has been long and tiring. “I didn’t feel as if I could be honest about other people and my external experiences, if I wasn’t honest about what was happening and what I was thinking and how I was reacting to certain situations. It’s just sort of who I am. I carry around a lot of guilt about everything.”
Couric started writing the book about three years ago, and in that time the country has gone through its very fair share of reckonings, from #MeToo to George Floyd. So judging the book can be, in part, an exercise in sifting through the process of personal excavation by a woman who, in the course of an approximately 40-year career had to learn how to maneuver through the corridors of power, but who also held plenty of her own and who is, it must be noted, making money off the process via book sales. In some ways she succeeds and in some ways you hope she continues to dig. She writes about how misguided it was to interview the “white victims of the L.A. riots,” lean into those ever-popular stories of white missing women, and “[ask] Anita Hill why she followed Clarence Thomas.” There is stuff on her family’s roots in the South, which brushed up with the Ku Klux Klan more than once, and her late husband’s enthusiasm with the Confederacy, a piece of her complicated puzzle that, though she wrings her hands over it in honest anxiety, she excuses too patly with a nod to “a different time,” noting that he wasn’t given an opportunity to see the odiousness in it because he tragically died from colon cancer more than two decades ago. And yes, as you’ve probably already read, she was competitive with her female colleagues in the man’s world of television media—but, she says, she didn’t sabotage anyone’s career as some outlets have suggested.
“I don’t know why I’ve always been so willing to put myself out there as Exhibit A of ‘this is what an ignorant person does,’ but I think that I’ve been willing to say, ‘This is what I learned, or this is what I screwed up,’” she said. “And maybe watching me will help you understand why this is wrong.”
The most illuminating passages often focus on workplace structures within which Couric rose and stumbled and rose and stumbled again. She describes early bosses, who could treat the women they hired like pretty chess pieces to move around. Many never faced consequences. Later, she describes colleagues who did lose their jobs after #MeToo brought consequences, including Matt Lauer, her cohost of many years on Today and Les Moonves, the CBS executive who courted her diligently to helm CBS Evening News.
Below is an excerpt on Moonves’s hard sell to get Couric to leave the institutional comfort at Today, and try something that appealed to her serious journalist side, CBS Evening News. The insurmountable issues at CBS would soon become obvious: a woman in the role that avuncular men once inhabited and an old format that was suffering low ratings before she got there. But at the heart of it is a workplace drama, one any employee trying to move through the ranks might find familiar. CBS Evening News was another place that refused to move.
“You have to remember, I came in at a time when network newscasts were starting to decline, so it’s really hard to reinvigorate a declining entity, but I think I would have had a lot more fun and it would have been a lot easier to deal with the incoming that was headed my way if I had had a better support system inside the network,” she said.
The following is an excerpt from Going There, published by Little, Brown and Company.
I ALWAYS LIKED LES Moonves, even though he was a close-talker with bad breath. I first met him in 1994 when he was head of Warner Bros. I’d been dispatched to L.A. to do a segment from the set of ER, the biggest show on TV at the time. That meant touring the County General set with sexy Dr. Doug Ross, aka an ascendant George Clooney. (It was a tough job, but somebody had to do it.) Then I visited the next soundstage over, where Les introduced me to the cast of a promising new show about six young, single Manhattanites. One of them, an actress with a fetching bob and a cute smile, said she was so excited to meet me—Jennifer Aniston before she became Jennifer Aniston.
Years later I ran into Les at a Knicks game. He came over, gave me a hug, and said, “If you walk down the aisle with that guy”—Tom Werner—“I’ll be the first one to say, ‘I object!’ ” Apparently, the bad blood stemmed from Les’s abrupt cancellation of Tom’s sitcom Cybill (years later, the show’s star, Cybill Shepherd, would allege that Les pulled the plug shortly after she’d rebuffed his sexual advances, but I digress).
My taste in boyfriends hadn’t prevented Les from pursuing me professionally over the years. Now, with my NBC contract set to expire in a matter of months, he was feeling out my agent, Alan Berger: Would Katie be interested in anchoring the CBS Evening News?
Wow. That was my first reaction. If this turned into something real, I’d be the first solo female anchor of an evening newscast. Ever. Barbara Walters with Harry Reasoner was a disaster. Connie Chung tried it with Dan Rather—another disaster. But me, out there alone . . . I suspended disbelief long enough to wonder, Could this actually work?
The courtship officially began at the Park Avenue apartment that Les and his wife, Julie Chen, were in the process of renovating. He greeted Alan and me at the door wearing his let’s-make-a-deal smile—shrewd blue eyes, perfect veneers, skin burnished by the California sun (he was fully bicoastal, with a $28 million estate in Malibu). Then he guided us to the sofa, one of the few pieces of furniture in the place, and offered us red wine in delicate Italian juice glasses—not stemware, but the kind from which you’d sip fresh apricot nectar on the balcony of a palazzo overlooking the Amalfi Coast.
“I want to reinvent the CBS Evening News,” Les said. “I want to energize it, give it new life.” He talked about getting rid of the portentous, pretentious voice-of-God format and making it warmer, more accessible. Something smart and new.
I sipped my wine and listened, desperately scanning the place for cheese and crackers. “And I think you’re just the person to do it,” Les said.
I was flattered. And a little buzzed, although I didn’t know if it was the pinot noir or the fact that he was massaging my e-spot (as in ego) so expertly.
Les went on: He thought I had the perfect personality and skill set to bring that kind of change, having mastered the tricky combo of being both approachable and able to hold people’s feet to the fire in tough interviews.
Les said he wanted to make one thing clear: He wasn’t interested in “blowing up” anything, as he’d been quoted as saying. He might as well have lobbed a grenade straight into the heart of the CBS newsroom, unleashing waves of fury and fear.
But he was looking to revamp a format that he believed had grown stale. Anachronistic. The evidence was hard to ignore: steadily declining ratings at each of the Big Three evening news broadcasts, with CBS stuck in last place for more than a decade.
It all felt a little surreal. While I could take a lot of credit for helping make the TODAY show a success, I was self-aware enough to know that I’d be a big departure from what people expected in an evening news anchor.
Of course, the gold standard was Walter Cronkite, whose authoritative, avuncular demeanor inspired worshipful reverence in millions of Americans. I couldn’t imagine filling his wingtips.
Dan Rather’s cowboy boots were another matter. He got the job in 1981 and held it for 24 years. Rather brought deep experience, authority, and a Texan folksiness, deploying election-night “Ratherisms” like “This race is as tight as the rusted lug nuts on a ’55 Ford,” “This race is hotter than a Times Square Rolex,” and my personal favorite, “This race is tight like a too-small bathing suit on a too-long ride home from the beach.” (Sometimes he just plumb ran out of gas, once saying, “This election swings like one of those pendulum things.”) But when he reported a story on 60 Minutes II about the supposed preferential treatment of George W. Bush in the National Guard, the whole thing blew up in his face when his sourcing came under scrutiny. Less than a year later, he was out.
The genial, much-loved Bob Schieffer, a fellow Texan who’d been with the network since 1969, filled in heroically and stabilized the broadcast while CBS figured out its next move. And that next move was apparently me.
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