THE LAST WORD
MIRIAM R. KRAMER
e i t ka goes there.
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f you are not craving a stately overview of a serious rise to the pinnacle of helming television journalism, but instead want a dishy tellall from Katie Couric, America’s former “Girl Next Door,” her new memoir, Going There will satisfy your needs. You may find some of the former mixed in as well. Couric has written a bright, conversational overview of her career that will definitely pull in anyone who watched her for years as the co-anchor of the Today Show, first with Bryant Gumbel, and then with Matt Lauer, and her star turn as the first solo evening female news anchor at CBS. Couric starts off discussing her idyllic childhood in Arlington, VA in the 1950s through 1970s as the baby in a family of four. Her father, a reporter turned PR specialist, was a strong influence on her future career in communications. He would request that she learn a new word every day to present at the dinner table. As she notes, “It’s not an overstatement to say I pursued journalism for my father.” If you find early family dynamics one of your favorite parts of a memoir, you are in luck here. Couric’s steady family life, with parents who valued education and getting into a great college, put pressure on her family of achievers, including the oldest, her sister Emily, and her sister Kiki, who were both accepted to Smith when it was one of the Seven Sisters and the Ivy League was single sex. As she points out, she got into the venerable yet academic University of Virginia, whose social scene was a much better fit for someone whose likability, emotional intelligence, and tenacity allowed her to open so many doors in the future. Couric tackles her own struggles with institutionalized pressure for women to present a perfect image in discussing her bulimia, resulting mostly from her mother’s pressure for her to watch her weight. She and her sisters felt it strongly, and 12
| December 2021
GOING THERE By Katie Couric Publisher: Little, Brown Katie felt the need to “strive, cheat, binge, and purge” until her twenties. Interestingly, while she notes sexism throughout her career in TV journalism, she does not point this pressure out as a feminist issue. Later in her career, her image was photoshopped once to make her look thinner, although she never had weight issues. After serving as a journalist on the school paper at UVA, Couric took the initiative and talked her way into a meeting at ABC News, who passed her on to PR. Upon such meetings a future depends, and she passed that test to find her way first to ABC News and then a brand-new network called CNN, underwritten by a wild billionaire named Ted Turner. Carl Bernstein, who had just become bureau chief for ABC News, asked her, “Why are you going to the minor leagues?” She replied, “Because I need
to learn how to play baseball.” From her time at the CNN bureau in DC until her time at the mothership in Atlanta, Couric was making her reputation. She became friends with mentors who would help push her to the right place at the right time. She encountered inevitable sexism along the way, such as someone who commented on her breast size in the middle of a big meeting. Unusually for that time, however, she made a stink with her informal support team and got an apology. It is testimony to her sense of self that she was able to do that even as a woman in her early twenties during the early Eighties. Eventually Couric hopscotched to WTVJ in Miami. Covering the bright lights and alternatively glamorous and sordid stories of national interest in Miami gave her the experience to find her way back to the major market of Washington, DC, where she became a general assignment news reporter at NBC’s WRC TV. As she notes, it is unusual that WRC was fairly well integrated at that point in terms of race and gender, with strong local media personalities like Jim Vance, Susan Kidd, and Barbara Harrison. In meeting her future husband, Jay Monahan, Couric had decided that although her own first priority was her career, she wanted marriage and children too. When her sparkling on-air personality was noticed by higher ups at NBC, she was invited to discussions in New York regarding the Today Show, which was in flux. At that point there was a sense of tumult with the temperamental Bryant Gumbel going after Willard Scott, while news executives looked at Jane Pauley as yesterday’s news and today’s fish wrap. In pushing her out, they brought in Deborah Norville, who did not click with Gumbel as co-anchor. Couric had then been asked to be newsreader at the Today Show. As an intensely competitive and ambitious journalist, she scented blood and notes that at that point, the mostly female demographic THE LAST WORD > PAGE 13
Old Town Crier
