Cokie Roberts
Cokie Roberts was one of the 'Founding Mothers' of NPR who helped make that network one of the premier sources of news and information in this country. She served as a congressional correspondent at NPR for more than 10 years and later appeared as a commentator on Morning Edition. In addition to her work for NPR, Roberts was a political commentator for ABC News, providing analysis for all network news programming.
From 1996-2002, she and Sam Donaldson co-anchored the weekly ABC interview program This Week. In her more than forty years in broadcasting, she has won countless awards, including three Emmys. She was inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame, and was cited by the American Women in Radio and Television as one of the fifty greatest women in the history of broadcasting. In 2020, she was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in the Longstanding Network/Syndication (20 years or more) category.
In addition to her appearances on the airwaves, Roberts, along with her husband, Steven V. Roberts, wrote a weekly column syndicated in newspapers around the country by Universal Uclick. The Robertses also wrote From This Day Forward, an account of their more than 40-year marriage and other marriages in American history. The book immediately went onto The New York Times bestseller list, following Roberts' number one bestseller, We Are Our Mothers' Daughters, an account of women's roles and relationships throughout American history. Roberts's histories of women in America's founding era — Founding Mothers, published in 2004 and Ladies of Liberty in 2008 — also became instant bestsellers. Her most recent book, Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868, was published in 2015. In total, she wrote six national bestsellers that honored and elevated the role of women in American history.
Cokie Roberts held more than thirty honorary degrees. She served on the boards of several non-profit institutions and on the President's Commission on Service and Civic Participation. The Library of Congress named her a "Living Legend." Roberts was the mother of two and grandmother of six. She died on September 17, 2019, at age 75.
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President Obama, at a memorial service in Newtown, Ct., Sunday night, talked about using the power of his office to try to prevent more shooting tragedies. Do advocates of banning assault weapons have a chance of succeeding this time around?
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President Obama won re-election, not by going after independent voters, but by going after emerging groups in the U.S. population. By race, age and gender, voters made clear there are two — or more — Americas, and the Obama team captured more of them, and delivered more of them to the polls.
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President Obama and his GOP rival Mitt Romney are preparing for the first presidential debate Wednesday in Denver. Over the weekend, Republican operatives said the debates would change everything.
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The protests against an anti-Islam movie made in the U.S. are expected to continue for a while. How concerned is the Obama administration about political fallout at home? Plus, what's the impact of early and absentee votes on November's presidential election?
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With both conventions over, it's on to November. For a look at where the candidates stand, and what they think they need to accomplish in the next eight weeks, Steve Inskeep speaks to regular Morning Edition contributor Cokie Roberts.
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The Democrats convention comes right on the heels of the Republican meeting in Tampa last week. Democrats are taking full advantage of the traditional allocation of conventions where the party in power goes last.
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The Republican National Convention will come to order at 2 p.m. in Tampa, Fla., and then quickly go into recess. Because of Tropical Storm Isaac, the main events have been delayed until Tuesday. This is the second convention in a row where the GOP had to delay the opening because of bad weather.
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Next week, Mitt Romney's campaign will seek to introduce Rep. Paul Ryan again to the American people. Even before Ryan was selected as the GOP vice presidential choice, President Obama's campaign had been working to define Ryan as extreme on issues from Medicare to abortion.
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As the nation gets closer to Election Day, the addition of Rep. Paul Ryan to the GOP ticket will present the public with a dramatic choice about the role the government should play in health care.
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President Obama will be holding his first big town hall meeting of the 2012 campaign in Cincinnati Monday. And he will probably continue his campaign attack on Mitt Romney's record of what Democrats characterize as sending jobs abroad while he was the head of Bain Capital.