Cokie Roberts

Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Roberts (nee Boggs), better known as Cokie Roberts, was an American Emmy Award-winning journalist and bestselling author. She was a contributing senior news analyst for National Public Radio as well as a regular roundtable analyst for the current This Week with Christiane Amanpour. Roberts also worked as a political commentator for ABC News, serving as an on-air analyst for the network.

Roberts, along with her husband, Steven V. Roberts, wrote a weekly column syndicated by United Media in newspapers around the United States. She served on the boards of several non-profit organizations such as the Kaiser Family Foundation and was appointed by President George W. Bush to his Council on Service and Civic Participation.

Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs was born on December 27, 1943 in New Orleans, Louisiana. She received the sobriquet "Cokie" from her brother Tommy, who could not pronounce "Corinne". Cokie Roberts was the third child and youngest daughter of former ambassador and long-time Democratic Congresswoman from Louisiana Lindy Boggs and of the late Hale Boggs, also a Democratic Congressman from Louisiana who was Majority Leader of the House of Representatives. Her sister, the late Barbara Boggs Sigmund, was mayor of Princeton, New Jersey and a candidate for U.S. Senate from New Jersey. Her brother Tommy Boggs is a prominent Washington, D.C. attorney and lobbyist.

Roberts attended the Academy of the Sacred Heart, an all-girls school in New Orleans, before graduating from the Stone Ridge School, an all-girls school outside Washington, D.C. in 1960 and then Wellesley College in 1964 where she received a BA in Political Science. She married Steven V. Roberts, a professor and fellow journalist, in 1966. They met in the summer of 1962, when she was 18 and he was 19. She and her husband had two children, and six grandchildren. Her daughter, Rebecca Roberts, is also a journalist and was one of the hosts of POTUS '08 on XM Radio, which offered live daily coverage of the 2008 presidential election.

Career

Cokie Roberts served as a senior news analyst for NPR, where she was the congressional correspondent for more than ten years. In addition to her work for NPR, Roberts was a political commentator for ABC News, serving as an on-air analyst for the network.

Roberts was the co-anchor of the ABC News' Sunday morning broadcast, This Week with Sam Donaldson & Cokie Roberts from 1996 to 2002, while also serving as the chief congressional analyst for ABC News. She covered politics, Congress and public policy, reporting for World News Tonight and other ABC News broadcasts.

Before joining ABC News in 1988, Roberts was a contributor to PBS in the evening television news program The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Her coverage of the Iran-Contra Affair for that program won her the Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting in 1988. Prior to joining NPR, Roberts was a reporter for CBS News in Athens, Greece. She also produced and hosted a public affairs program on WRC-TV in Washington, DC. From 1981 to 1984, in addition to her work at NPR, she also co-hosted The Lawmakers, a weekly public television program on Congress. Roberts is also a former president of the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association.

She also co-hosted This Week with Sam Donaldson & Cokie Roberts from 1996 to 2002 (and continues to appear on the "Round Table" segments from time to time). Roberts has won numerous awards, such as the Edward R. Murrow Award, the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for coverage of Congress[9] and a 1991 Emmy Award for her contribution to "Who is Ross Perot?" In 2002, Roberts was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died on September 17, 2019 from complications related to breast cancer.

Author

She was the author of the national bestseller We Are Our Mother's Daughters as well as Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation. The book, published in 2004, explores the lives of the women behind the men that wrote the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence. Her latest book, Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation, continues the story of early America's influential women that helped shape the United States during its early stages, and chronicling their various public roles and private responsibilities.

American Journalist and Author. Her career included decades as a political reporter and analyst for National Public Radio and ABC News, with prominent positions on Morning Edition, The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, World News Tonight, and This Week. Roberts, along with her husband, Steven V. Roberts, wrote a weekly column syndicated by United Media in newspapers around the United States. She served on the boards of several non-profit organizations such as the Kaiser Family Foundation and was appointed by President George W. Bush to his Council on Service and Civic Participation.

Bio courtesy of: Wikipedia

• Reference: Find-A-Grave