ON A NEWS BROADCAST, the anchor is less a friend than a salesman, peddling content created by other people and trying to frame it in a way that piques interest, provides context and inspires trust. But of course, you’re framing and peddling a version of yourself, too, and likeability is still important, just as it is on softer shows. When I joined ABC, an extraordinarily likeable Canadian was anchoring its premier nightly newscast: Peter Jennings. I studied him closely, astonished by how well he connected with his audience and how calmly he could fashion a narrative on the fly. It was even more impressive because his brilliance was entirely self-made. His insecurity about not having finished high school drove him to out-work and out-research everyone around him. Luckily, he took an interest in me and my career (albeit, an interest that was often expressed in the form of pointed but constructive criticism).
In 1997, after a little more than two years anchoring WNN, I joined his show, World News Tonight, as a correspondent. At first, I was assigned New York–based stories: plane crashes, severe weather, that kind of thing. It was a fairly normal progression for overnight anchors with reporting skills. The network would try you out on weekends, sending you into the field to see if you could come back with stories good enough to air when viewers were actually awake.
I also began filling in for Elizabeth Vargas, the news anchor on Good Morning America, and became the regular co-host of Good Morning America Sunday, where I was paired with Willow Bay. At thirty-six, I was an up-and-comer again. At GMA Sunday we didn’t really cover breaking news, but the one-hour show was more feature-oriented than the longer weekday morning show and also leaned a little more towards news than entertainment. Willow and I were both new to the format and a little uncertain at times, but instead of making us competitive, our similarities helped us work together. It was a good partnership, or so I thought, until, seven months in, a senior executive at ABC News called me into his office and told me I was a drag on the ticket. With a Cheshire cat grin, he announced that my replacement had already been hired. I was stunned, but had the presence of mind to ask, “What does he have that I don’t?” The Cheshire cat grin widened. The guy was really enjoying this now. “Star power,” he purred. Clearly, I’d never be anchoring anything at ABC again.
Peter, who’d also done poorly on morning TV, took a longer view. He urged me to forget about the anchor thing for the time being and focus instead on developing my skills in the field and bringing back strong stories for the evening newscast. I did, and also tried to forget the executive’s verdict on my abilities (it got easier a few months later, when the new guy with star power was bumped from the show—he’d lasted even less time than I had).
After dinner on August 31, 1997, I was watching TV with Cathy and the kids when the phone rang: the network needed an anchor for a breaking news bulletin. Princess Diana had been injured in a car crash in Paris. Peter Jennings had been the first call, but he was at his summer home and didn’t think a “celebrity story” merited the long trek back to the city. I was the next call—not because I was in his league, but because I was so far out of it. On Labour Day weekend, when everyone who mattered at ABC seemed to be in the Hamptons, I was the on-call anchor, the junior guy who has to stay home on the off chance that something newsworthy happens. (The on-call system had been put in place the year before, after the bombing during the Summer Olympics in Atlanta; ABC was late on that story because they needed to scrounge up someone—me again, as it turned out—to anchor live coverage.)
Less than an hour later I was in the studio, where that breaking news bulletin morphed into an eight-hour live special report. Once it became clear that the princess had been seriously injured and others in the car had died, the powers-that-be decided to keep us on air. The fact that CBS and NBC got out of the gate even later than we did was likely a factor in the decision; continuous coverage could solidify ABC’s lead on the story. Today, first-hand accounts and photos from the crash scene would be trending on Twitter within minutes, but this was pre–social media. Pre–Wi-Fi on every street corner, too. Very few photos were coming across the wire and there wasn’t even an ABC correspondent in Paris at the time; all we had was a freelancer, relaying information to us by phone. At some point the producer decided to go ahead and broadcast some of those calls even though we didn’t have a video feed or any visuals to accompany them. It was a gutsy decision, and it had the added benefit of helping to fill airtime when there were few confirmed facts to report and we didn’t want to speculate.
The tone of the broadcast had to be even, subdued and respectful, or we’d quickly find ourselves in tabloid territory. This wasn’t hard news, exactly, but it wasn’t completely soft, either. One of the most famous people in the world had been gravely injured while being chased by the paparazzi. The increasingly fuzzy line between respectable and tabloid journalism was itself part of the story.
I hadn’t ever had any particular interest in Diana, but a producer once told me to look for the emotional core in every story, and the core of this one wasn’t hard for me to locate. It was uncomfortably close to home. Earlier that summer, my sister Kelly had died, completely unexpectedly, not long after giving birth. An undiagnosed brain tumour, we were told. She was thirty-four, vibrant, a proud police officer with everything to live for and then, in a day, gone. I’d raced from New York to be by her bedside after she was admitted to hospital in Toronto, but I didn’t get there in time to say goodbye. When I kissed her cheek, it was already cold.
For the first time in my life, I saw my father acting emotional; he was reeling from the shock. So was my mother, who never really got over the heartbreak. Many years later, she confessed to me that she’d come close to committing suicide, had thought about getting into her car and driving into Lake Ontario, but then Kelly’s husband, Don, had withdrawn into his grief and she’d needed to look after their daughter, Breanna. Her granddaughter saved her. She had a baby to raise.
In those first days and hours after Kelly’s death, there was a lot to do, as there always is when someone dies. My youngest sister, Debbie, who’d been very close to Kelly, possessed a strength I hadn’t realized she had, and between us we held our parents up and tried to support Don, who was devastated. I couldn’t stop moving, organizing, checking on everyone else … but I couldn’t seem to cry. If tears seemed imminent I’d rein in my feelings, afraid of losing control. I’d buttoned down my emotions so long and so well since Midday that if I started venting, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stop.
I hadn’t been a particularly good big brother to Kelly. We were only starting to grow close right before she died, connecting in a new way over her baby and the challenges of parenthood. Most of my memories of my sister dated back to early childhood. Before Debbie was born, Kelly and I had been one another’s only playmates during the two weeks we spent at our family’s cottage every summer. There were also occasional weekends at home when all the kids in our neighbourhood played as a group, regardless of age, but otherwise I didn’t seek her out. As a child, I’d envied the special relationship she had with our mother. When Kelly was three, she was diagnosed with Legg-Calve-Perthes, a disease that affects the hip; she had to wear a brace on her right leg for several years to make sure the bones developed properly. Mom often had to carry her places, and her worry about Kelly was all-consuming. Many years later, my mother told me some of her friends had taken her aside and pointed out that she was so focused on my sister that she was completely ignoring me. It wasn’t all in my imagination, apparently. Kelly was delicate, needed protection, and my mother defended her when I did the things big brothers usually do to little sisters: argue, instigate physical tussles and give it back when she started it. I grew up believing that although my mother loved me and Debbie, Kelly was her favourite.
As we moved into our teenage years, Kelly’s hip now completely healed, she made friends easily and was naturally athletic, outgoing, good-looking and popular—everything I wished to be, and believed my father wanted me to be, but was not. I mostly ignored her, and have to admit she was nicer to me than I was to her. When I ran for student council president, some friends of another candidate cornered Kelly after school and pushed her down, warning her that if I didn’t withdraw from the race, they’d do worse to her. She didn’t tell me until the election was almost over because she didn’t want me to quit. As I soon as I found out what had happened, I told the other candidate, who dealt with his friends and apologized to her personally. I felt much closer to Kelly after that episode, touched that she’d put her own safety on the line for me.
It was not a surprise when she became a police officer, and she must have been a good one because she was given the honour of a police funeral. One officer stood out at the service. Kelly had said that he had sexually harassed her. That day, he exuded self-righteous piety, strutting around with his dress uniform weighed down by pins and medals. I didn’t say anything to him because I knew Kelly wouldn’t have wanted me to, but I couldn’t believe a guy like that was still alive and my sister was not. The injustice of her death shook me to my core.
Barely a month after my sister’s funeral, waiting for news on the Princess of Wales’s condition, it wasn’t hard for me to summon the appropriately sombre on-air demeanour. Or to maintain an emotional distance from events. It was how I had been coping for weeks.
A live, breaking news report is the highest tightrope walk in television. There’s no script in the teleprompter, the story is developing in real time and initial reports are often unreliable. One mistake, or one fact misreported, can ruin your own reputation as well as the credibility of your news organization. You are often alone on centre stage, speaking without a pause, repeating what you know for sure over and over again, weaving in new facts as they’re fed to you by producers who are frantically working the phones and scouring the internet—all the while hoping that a brief lull is coming so you get a moment to cough, drink water or maybe even run to the bathroom. It’s improv, minus the comedy, and you need to be able to think quickly and craft a storyline on the fly.
Fortunately I had something to say about Diana. I had covered two of her visits to Canada, so I had personal anecdotes few American anchors had. I recalled watching her return to the Royal Yacht Britannia after a long day of appearances: her sons ran toward her outstretched arms, and the spontaneous look of joy on their faces and hers told you everything you needed to know about their relationship. I’d also seen how estranged she and Charles were in their joint appearances, how strained and formal their interactions were. Like anyone who’d ever covered the royal family, I knew about the niceties of protocol, what various titles mean—which gave me plenty to riff on when I had no news to report. I’m sure I came across as a royal wonk, but my citizenship came in handy on that particular evening.
I was also fortunate to be in the hands of Jeff Gralnick, one of the most accomplished live-event producers in American television news. In the control room in New York he and a team of producers scrambled to nail down facts and dig up experts I could interview. I’d be speaking extemporaneously about, say, police procedures in Paris when I’d hear Jeff’s calm voice in my earpiece: “We’ve got an expert on high-speed chases”—my cue to steer the narrative in that direction and introduce the guest, whose face would then pop up on the television screen. I’d read his or her name off the screen, hoping I wasn’t mispronouncing it, then ad-lib through the interview. Whenever new facts emerged, Jeff e-mailed them to the computer on the anchor desk rather than telling me through the earpiece, so I didn’t lose my train of thought while I was speaking.
Interestingly, for someone who puts so much stock in careful preparation, I felt quite calm. I was in the zone and felt I was hitting the right tone, calm and mature. The style of broadcasting was much more intimate and less format-driven than anything I’d done before, and I was very much myself. As a newscaster I tend to show more emotion than most, and I think on that particular evening it gave people comfort. It felt good to be on the leading edge of a major story, even such a sad one, and I was surprised at how light the weight of authority felt on my shoulders.
At several points during the marathon broadcast, the senior VP of News, Bob Murphy, told me I was doing a solid and credible job. That gave me confidence, as did the fact that I understand French, which turned out to be a big advantage. The press conferences in Paris the evening of Diana’s death were conducted almost entirely in French, and we were running audio from them live, without a translator. At that hour, even in New York City, it was too hard to find one. At one point, our freelance producer in Paris was holding out a cellphone during a news conference so that I could hear what was being said, and though my French isn’t great, I was able to paraphrase, very carefully, what I was absolutely certain I’d understood. “Elle est morte” was one phrase I heard very clearly, and I’d learned in grade school what those words meant, which is why ABC was the first American network to announce the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
I knew it was a big story, but I underestimated just how big until Barbara Walters called in, long after midnight. One of the network’s most powerful stars and a tireless newshound, she wanted in on the story. Barbara had met Diana and interviewed Prince Charles in the past, so we broadcast a phone call with her at an ungodly hour and she was terrific, full of anecdotes and observations. She’d instantly grasped the depth of people’s emotional connection to Diana and her story, and knew that many would take the loss personally. I hadn’t really understood just how personally until we’d wrapped up the Special Report and I was driving home at about four a.m., wondering why so many lights were still on in so many apartment buildings. Then I realized: people must have been watching TV through the night. Of course, by the time the sun came up, the princess’s death was the biggest story in the world, and Peter Jennings and the rest of the A-list at ABC were eager to own it.
But overnight, there had been a stunning turn of events: I was now within striking distance of the A-list myself. A few months before, when I’d been yanked off GMA Sunday, I’d been told I had no star power. Now, apparently, I had plenty of it, because the very next weekend, I co-hosted again with Willow. TV Guide anointed me the “breakout star of the coverage,” and for the first (and last) time, Roone Arledge, then president of ABC News, sent me a note praising my work.
The capriciousness of this reversal of fortune made it difficult to trust. I wasn’t being recognized for my portfolio of work. I was being anointed because I’d been in the right place at the right time on the night a princess died. The whole thing was so fluky that I felt I’d better make the most of any opportunities I was offered in case they evaporated as quickly as they’d materialized. There was something else, too. Kelly’s death had forced me to re-evaluate my own life. I’d always been cautious, delaying gratification, deferring pleasure. But now I’d been reminded that life was too fragile and the future too uncertain. I needed to live in the now. Cathy heartily agreed. We didn’t go crazy, but we relaxed our grip on the family purse strings—a holiday with the kids, a few home renovations—and I began training with weights in earnest, trying to build myself up physically, emotionally and mentally. I had a new mindset: seize the day. So I walked through every door that was now open to me, including the biggest one, at ABC’s flagship morning show, Good Morning America. I’d been filling in occasionally for news anchor Elizabeth Vargas, but in the fall of 1997, started doing so for weeks at a time. In November, when Elizabeth moved to 20/20, I formally replaced her on GMA.
I wasn’t really thinking strategically about where the job might take me or even where I wanted to go. Just trying to break out of the pack had been my focus, and the news anchor position was a big move up, one that gave me a higher profile and more money than I’d ever had. GMA didn’t have the prestige of an evening news broadcast or newsmagazine show, but it was very important to the network because of the advertising dollars it pulled in. I knew that if I did well there, it would be noticed, especially since ratings were declining and Roone Arledge viewed turning them around as his top priority.
After a long ride as the top morning show, GMA had started losing viewers the previous year.
Long-time co-hosts Joan Lunden and Charlie Gibson were blamed for this—conventional wisdom had it that the pairing had gone stale and the co-anchors were too old to attract the right demographic (conveniently forgotten several years later, when an even-older Gibson and Diane Sawyer took over the show). But there was more to it. GMA had started to falter when it was moved from ABC’s entertainment division over to the news division, where a new raft of producers had hardened up the show and made it more news-oriented. Fans sensed the fun, family feeling they’d come to expect was gone. In the meantime, Katie Couric and Matt Lauer had breathed new life into Today. They were a rare pairing, a teasing brother and sister who exuded completely different kinds of energy yet also clicked. Matt knew that Katie was the star, she was very generous to him, and they genuinely seemed to enjoy one another’s company—pure magic, on morning television.
By the time I started filling in on the GMA news desk in 1997, there was more than a hint of desperation in the air. In an increasingly panicked quest to halt the ratings slide, ABC executives were shuffling or rumoured to be on the verge of shuffling senior production staff as well as on-air talent. Nevertheless, the feeling on the set was collegial and welcoming. Charlie was particularly encouraging, and I quickly developed a good rapport with him and with Joan. They were under the microscope and knew their futures were uncertain, but somehow they performed for the cameras as though nothing at all was wrong. Just about everybody at that level is faking it to some degree, putting their own emotional reality to one side while the cameras are rolling, but Charlie and Joan were particularly good at that: masters of the game face.
In September, when Joan was eased off the show after seventeen years, she exited gracefully, as though it had been her idea. She was replaced by Lisa McRee, who’d co-hosted GMA Sunday prior to Willow, and had more recently been a local anchor in California. Thereafter, though Charlie Gibson still occupied the big chair he’d sat in for a decade, the network was essentially openly auditioning men to replace him. One male fill-in after another rotated in and out, which had to be awful for Charlie, not least because executives seemed to be looking for his polar opposite. They wanted a male host who wasn’t grounded in news, as he was, and they were casting the net very wide. Alec Baldwin and Greg Kinnear were approached, but they weren’t interested; ESPN sports anchor Dan Patrick was a serious contender, as was broadcaster Tom Bergeron, who went on to host America’s Funniest Home Videos and Dancing with the Stars.
With so many different men sitting on the couch beside Lisa it was challenging for me to develop an on-air rapport with them or her. It was pretty awkward most mornings when Charlie wasn’t there. I felt very loyal to him and thought his skills in driving GMA had been seriously underestimated by the management team. I also felt he was being humiliated, and I didn’t want to be part of that, so I didn’t try very hard to engage his potential replacements; mostly, the weathercaster Spencer Christian and I kept to our corner of the set and had a good time trying to make each other laugh on camera. That was something we could contribute to the show, and we worked at playing off one another. When Charlie returned for a week or longer, it felt like Dad had moved back into the house, and everyone relaxed a little. I was more playful, he was very supportive and generous, and my confidence was growing as the GMA newscaster. I wasn’t Peter Jennings and I didn’t aspire to his job. Delivering hard news in a more casual setting was helping me develop my own broadcast style, one that felt comfortable and unforced. The GMA news desk felt like my sweet spot, and I hoped that whoever replaced Charlie wouldn’t ask management to get rid of me (it happens).
Given the state of flux, I thought it would be wise to try to prove my value to the franchise. Going beyond the call of duty seemed like my best shot at longevity. So I pitched an idea: I could anchor our newscasts from Iraq. This was during the years-long cat-and-mouse game Saddam Hussein played with the United Nations after the Gulf War, when he frequently obstructed weapons inspectors who were looking for evidence of weapons of mass destruction. American and British members of the UN weapons inspection team had recently been kicked out of the country, and the government’s anti-West stance had hardened into official policy.
I got the idea to broadcast from Iraq while interviewing Tariq Aziz, then deputy prime minister, who told me and GMA viewers that Westerners were welcome there. “Anyone is invited to Baghdad!” he declared magnanimously. The next day I decided to call his bluff and apply for a visa, which he pretty much had to grant if he didn’t want to look like a liar.
Subsequently, Charlie interviewed Richard Butler, the UN’s chief weapons inspector. Afterwards, I cornered Butler, a telegenic Australian, who agreed to let me shadow him in Iraq. Later, in a private briefing at his Manhattan apartment, he gave me the lay of the land and promised to give me extraordinary access. He was a political guy in a highly political organization, and we both knew there was something in it for him: his bosses in New York would see him in action on television every day. It was important to Butler to display his agency’s ability to locate and dismantle weapons, as well as Saddam’s attempts to block him from doing so: Butler was certain Saddam had weapons of mass destruction hidden somewhere.
ABC agreed to let me broadcast from Iraq, but I had to get to Baghdad without a crew, and meet up with the ABC team already based there. Their schedules were already packed, so I’d have to fit my work in around theirs. And there would be a lot of work: along with anchoring the news on GMA, I’d have to provide an in-depth field report every day—without the help of a dedicated producer.
It was a major test of my ability to deliver in a hot zone. I’d never travelled in the Arab world before, never tried to report in a place where Westerners are considered the enemy. But I was hungry for adventure and wanted to burnish my credentials as a serious journalist, too. This was a big story, and an important one. If Iraq was concealing weapons of mass destruction, the military and geopolitical implications would be profound. (As it turned out, of course, the implications were profound even though no hidden WMD were found before the United States invaded in 2003—or after.)
I flew to Amman, Jordan, carrying a small duffle bag filled with a week’s supply of canned tuna and protein bars. I’d been warned that the hotel ABC used would sometimes refuse to serve Westerners, so I should bring my own food, just in case. This was the same establishment that, famously, had a welcome mat with an image of former president George H.W. Bush, so people could wipe their shoes on his face as they entered the hotel.
At the Amman airport I was met by the driver ABC News had hired to take me to Baghdad. After the Gulf War, Iraq had been divided into two no-fly zones patrolled by American and British aircraft, so the overland route was the only way in for civilians. The driver told me to get in the back seat of his Suburban, and be ready to hide on the floor under a blanket whenever we approached a checkpoint. The vehicle’s windows were tinted, but there was still a very real risk of discovery. I am not a small man who can be easily concealed.
The driver, however, ensured that no one would inspect the SUV too closely: at each military checkpoint, he quietly slipped what looked like a gram of cocaine into the lead soldier’s palm. I never saw the driver snort anything, but it was clear to me he was high on something for the entire trip—he was gunned and gunning it, and played the same Arabic song over and over. And over. For the entire sixteen-hour drive. Fortunately, the road through the desert was well-paved and incredibly straight; Saddam made sure his army had good highways. Also fortunate: I’d brought a Walkman, so I turned it up as loud as it would go to try to drown out the driver’s never-ending tape loop. My own cassette tapes had the most upbeat, poppy music I could get my hands on, because I’d suspected I might need something to take the edge off my fear. But though my heart raced at every checkpoint, I was determined to keep moving forward. I didn’t allow myself to think about what might happen if I was discovered. I just took it one stretch of dusty highway at a time, and between checkpoints, tried to catch some sleep.
We arrived in Baghdad the next morning, driving past the giant statue of Saddam that would be toppled after the American invasion in 2003. After checking into the hotel I met up with the ABC News crew and producer who were already there. They cautioned me not to discuss anything important in the hotel, including where we were going and when, because all the rooms were bugged; we communicated by passing notes. I got to work preparing a report for the next day’s broadcast and linked up with Richard Butler, who was already in the Iraqi capital. A colourful and divisive figure, he was eager to pressure Saddam’s regime to comply with weapons inspections and thought the presence of American television cameras might help. I expected the Iraqi authorities to protest, maybe even order me out of the country, once my reports started airing in the US. But either they weren’t as organized as I thought or Tariq Aziz wanted to be seen as a man of his word (or perhaps, like too many Americans, the Iraqis were no longer watching GMA). At any rate, I was able to report fairly freely for a week.
Butler showed me the UN lab where his team tested for evidence of chemical weapons and let us tag along for an actual inspection, so our cameras could capture how tense these visits to various factories and facilities around the country often became. But I also reported on everyday life in the capital, where the sweeping financial and trade embargo imposed by the UN created endless shortages. The military officers and soldiers we saw on the streets looked well-fed, and many were even overweight. Women and children, however, tended to be thin, and they, not men, were the ones openly begging for money. Wild currency fluctuations meant that the cost of a loaf of bread varied from one day to the next; re-pricing goods was a daily chore for merchants. Some had very little to sell. Very few fresh vegetables and fruits were available in the market where we filmed, yet books were everywhere.
The people in the market were warm, but no one wanted to talk on camera. I didn’t press too hard. I knew that openly criticizing Saddam and his government could lead to jail and torture, and I learned from a few murmured asides that informants were everywhere. One older man stared pointedly at an innocuous-looking guy hovering nearby to alert me to the local spy, who curried favour with the authorities by reporting on his neighbours. Saddam’s regime was clearly brutally efficient, but the whispered conversations I had at the market also confirmed what I had read: Iraq’s society was unusually literate and, at that time, women held about as many of the professional positions as men did, and everyone was taught some English. The GMA switchboard was probably busy after I reported that America’s sworn enemy had created one of the most-admired and egalitarian education systems in the Arab world.
One day, travelling around Baghdad with the film crew and a driver who had been assigned to us by ABC News, we stopped at a red light and a young soldier with an automatic weapon rushed up from behind our Toyota Land Cruiser, yelling. It was hot, so my window was open, and before I had time to react, the barrel of a gun was inside the car, aimed at me. Turning my head ever so slightly, I saw the guy’s agitated expression and glassy eyes. He was just a kid, and clearly high.
You never really know how you’re going to react in a crisis, and I surprised myself. The thought that went through my head was “no fear,” and I kept my eyes fixed on him. I felt strangely calm. Our driver was yelling at the guy in Arabic, and then I saw an older soldier move into position behind the kid and start questioning the driver. It didn’t sound like pleasantries were being exchanged. I wasn’t quite so calm anymore. I knew this could be the moment I died. But then the young soldier withdrew his weapon, on the order of the older one, I guess, and waved us on. After a high-adrenaline moment like that, I expected to have a delayed emotional reaction, but I didn’t. I just breathed a sigh of relief and we got back to work.
——
The news desk of a morning show is sometimes a way station where a journalist is groomed to become a co-host, so my name also surfaced on TV columnists’ lists of Charlie’s possible replacements. But I liked being news anchor. News has always been my comfort zone, and there was travel, recognition, the opportunity to report—and, for the first time in years, the certainty of knowing I was doing my job well. I was allowed to bring in a very talented producer I’d known in Canada, Fiona Conway, and I had a lot of confidence in the way we were covering news. For morning television, the hours weren’t even that bad: a four a.m. wake-up, two hours later than the hosts. I’d filled in for Charlie a couple of times when he was away, and thought his job wasn’t a good fit for me. My personality just isn’t big enough. I’m good at interjecting, but I’m not a great raconteur. I can help ground a conversation and I’ve got something to add to it, but I’m not a bon vivant.
So in December 1997, I went to David Westin, the president of ABC News, and said, “I don’t know if I’m even really in the running, but you should take my name off the list. I’m not host material, but I hope you’ll keep me around as news anchor.” Westin was new in his job, and seemed to be in my corner. After I’d anchored the breaking news coverage of Princess Diana’s death, he told a reporter, “I was not surprised, but Kevin’s performance opened the eyes of a great many people.”
He thanked me for being honest and I felt hugely relieved because he seemed inclined not to fire me. Shortly after that I pulled Tom Bergeron aside in our dressing rooms. He was always gracious and fun to work with, and we’d developed good on-air chemistry built on mutual respect. I wanted to keep it that way, and be sure he knew I’d withdrawn from whatever race was under way. He remembers the conversation, too, and telling me “whoever gets it inherits a poisoned chalice.” Though I didn’t find this out for years, Tom had actually already signed a contract to replace Charlie. It just hadn’t been announced yet because ABC wanted to give him a few months filling in first, so the audience gradually got used to him.
In January 1998, I went off to Cuba to cover Pope John Paul II’s visit, part of a team that included Peter Jennings, Roone Arledge and the network’s main political correspondent, Cokie Roberts. It was the first time a pope had ever been to Cuba, and the first time since Fidel Castro took power in 1959 that American networks had been given the green light from the US State Department to bypass the ban on American travel to Cuba.
The ban meant that most Americans had no idea how Cubans really lived, so I got there in advance of the Pope’s visit and stayed for a week, putting together features on everyday life. I like stories where you get to shine a light on people who wouldn’t normally be noticed or heard, and I got to do a bunch of them that week. I interviewed a farmer who owned land where cement remnants of the missile silos from the Cuban Missile Crisis still stood; he was pissed that the Russians hadn’t cleaned up after themselves properly. The old man immortalized by Hemingway in The Old Man and the Sea was, remarkably enough, sitting on his porch, smoking a huge cigar; he seemed a little stoned on the smoke when he spoke to me. I also followed an average family for a day, just showing what their lives were like and asking basic questions, one of which was, “What do you think my life is like in America?” The mother said something like, “I imagine a beautiful home, well-dressed children. And I also imagine you have no time for them and don’t understand what motivates them or why they do things. I imagine you don’t have a moment of calm.”
That stopped me dead in my tracks because she was right.
I never strived for mega-success, which may have something to do with why I didn’t achieve it. My biggest leap up, to co-hosting GMA, was mostly the result of a series of decisions made by others. I was just the last man standing. My path to becoming the third male host in the program’s history began the night before the Pope was to arrive in Cuba, when news executives learned the identity of the previously unnamed White House intern who’d been rumoured to have had an affair with President Bill Clinton. The senior executive team of ABC News was in Cuba, and they wanted to break the Monica Lewinsky story on GMA at seven a.m. the next day. It didn’t make sense for me to do it, because I was in Cuba, too. So suddenly Lisa McRee, who was still new to the job, and Tom Bergeron, who was sitting in for Charlie and months away from officially taking over, were in front of a major news bullet. Neither of them had network political reporting experience and they were breaking the biggest political story of the decade. I wasn’t in New York so I don’t know how it all went down, but I heard later in the afternoon that senior executives were unhappy with the broadcast. All I know for certain is that after that broadcast, things changed dramatically for me.
In a 2013 TV interview conducted for his induction into the Emmy Hall of Fame, Tom Bergeron explained that he was asked, after the Lewinsky scandal broke, whether he would allow me to co-host with Lisa the next time Charlie was off. Since he’d been promised Charlie’s job, he had the right to refuse. But he didn’t. In fact, he was all for it, for reasons I was completely unaware of for years. Apparently, Tom had signed his contract thinking that Elizabeth Vargas was going to replace Joan Lunden. He had good chemistry with Elizabeth but, he said, such a bad connection with Lisa McRee that viewers at home probably felt “wind chill” coming from their TV sets. Once Lisa was named Joan’s replacement, Tom wanted out of his contract because he believed the pairing would never work. If he could somehow get the network to cut him loose, he’d get a handsome farewell package; if he walked away of his own accord, he’d leave empty handed. So he actively wanted me to succeed where he had not. If I did and the network bumped him out of the job he’d already been promised, that would trigger the penalty clause in his contract and he’d exit with a whack of cash. The next time Charlie was off the show, then, Lisa and I wound up as co-hosts. I had no clue what was going on behind the scenes, either the machinations or the motives. I just viewed it as a pat on the head from the network, a gold star of sorts for my work in Cuba. Lisa and I had a good week together. It helped that I was feeling relaxed and confident because of the positive reviews I was getting. Plus, as far as I knew, I was happily out of the running for co-host.
Until one night about a week later, when David Westin called me at home out of the blue and offered me the co-host job. It was his first big decision as ABC News president, so you’d think he’d weigh it carefully. But there was an impromptu feeling to the call, and I remember thinking, “This is a big job to be offered over the phone.” What came out of my mouth was, “Are you sure you really want a Canadian saying, ‘Good morning, America’?” To me, it seemed potentially problematic. But his answer was quintessentially New York: he wanted the best person to say, “Good morning, America,” and he thought that was me.
I hung up the phone, turned to Cathy, and said, “Uh-oh. He just offered me the job.” She looked stricken and said, “Oh no.” It was the biggest job I’d ever been offered, but my gut instinct, and hers, was that I should just politely say no and hope they didn’t boot me off the show altogether. I was quite comfortable at GMA—on the news desk. But I didn’t think I had what it takes to carry the whole show. And between the way the show was being run and the strength of the competition at Today, the deck seemed to be stacked against GMA. I also didn’t really know Lisa. Chemistry is everything in morning television, and it takes time to develop. We didn’t know yet whether we had any.
My agent, Richard Leibner, heard me out but cautioned me not to turn down the job right away. “This is your chance to set your family up for the rest of their lives,” he pointed out. We were still living in our little house in New Jersey, all sharing the same bathroom, and I’d been worrying whether there would be enough money when the time came for the kids to go to university. I let myself start to think about the difference real money could make in their lives. And mine and Cathy’s, too. Carrying debt, even a small mortgage, wore on me. After Midday, I was perennially braced for financial disaster. How good it would feel to stop worrying about money, to live debt-free, to know I’d been a good provider. As soon as I began focusing more on the potential rewards than the risks, I became more sanguine about my prospects. Maybe I could do this. Maybe the show just needed a fresh face. Surely they were doing audience research the week Lisa and I co-hosted—presumably people liked us together, or they never would’ve offered me the job. Maybe viewers would like us even more once we’d had time to develop a rhythm. Maybe Westin saw something in me that I didn’t know was there.
The more money that was dangled in front of me, the more I second-guessed my gut reaction. Cathy, supportive as always, said she would back whatever decision I made. But I was deeply torn. Surely they wouldn’t pay me that much money unless they really believed I could do the job. I reached out to Charlie. I didn’t trust ABC News management to tell him I’d been offered his job, and I’m not sure they had. He was, as always, gracious and encouraging, telling me—and others—that he felt I was the right choice for the show, which gave me some confidence. So I told my agent that if he could get the network to guarantee the same salary for three years, regardless of how long I lasted as co-host, I’d sign a contract. He did, and I did, and on that day Richard gave me one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received. He urged me to pretend to myself that I wasn’t making the amount of money I was actually going to make, and to change nothing about our lifestyle. His message was, “Pay down debt, bank your savings and don’t start living large, because you never know what will happen.”
I’m glad I listened to him. And Tom Bergeron was very glad I signed: he used his windfall to buy a luxury New Hampshire vacation home, which, I learned years later, he named McRee Manor.