Suddenly, a last-ditch effort was on the table—“the surge,” which involved deploying an additional 30,000 troops to secure the population by having soldiers live among the Iraqi people and train their forces. General David Petraeus, who wrote the book on counterinsurgency （literally—his Princeton PhD dissertation）， was in charge. I was deployed to interview him and find out how it was going.
Which brings me to the bulletproof vest. I wore it in Fallujah as Petraeus and I walked the streets in triple-digit heat—my shirt was soaking wet beneath the Kevlar. It was September of 2007. We toured a place where, three years before, four contractors had been burned alive, dragged through the streets, and strung up, their tattered corpses dangling from a bridge. Now, looking at the footage, I fixate on my pearl earrings and half-pony. Like a lot of female journalists, I struggled with balancing the brutality of war with the pressure to be telegenic.
I remember fearing for my exposed body parts, especially my head. But Petraeus himself was so confident, intelligent, and smooth, it was hard to not be reassured. People hung out at open-air markets, excited children clustered around American soldiers who doled out candy, and Petraeus was greeted warmly by locals.
I still wasn’t convinced. “Some people might be watching this and saying, ‘Oh yeah, this is a nice dog-and-pony show; yeah, there are some areas of calm,’” I said. “But if you look at the country as a whole, it’s still a nightmare.”
Petraeus admitted there was still way too much violence but said that levels were dramatically down; I checked the army’s records, which bore that out. Still, it was all relative. The crew and I had to be escorted by beefy, heavily armed security, and we went to sleep to the rat-a-tat-tat of not-so-distant gunfire, the sky lighting up as bombs went off, even though we were staying in the Green Zone, a supposed oasis of safety where officials and journalists were housed. At the end of a grueling day, my shirt soaked with sweat, I’d remove my bulletproof vest and lay it on the floor, picturing the girls getting home from school and slipping off their backpacks. I hoped they were keeping up with their homework, practicing piano, and not giving Lori Beth a hard time.
I was proud of our coverage, although some critics called it a desperate attempt to reverse sinking ratings and reassert my hard-news credentials. Then MoveOn.org went after me, calling my reports “puff pieces scripted by the institutions [CBS] purports to be investigating,” and cherry-picked quotes, leaving out the tougher questions I’d asked. I suspect their real gripe was that I’d provided a platform for some positive news—the effectiveness of the surge—in a deeply unpopular war.
It felt strange being vilified by the Left; usually, I was accused of being in the tank for liberal causes. I thought back on Walter Cronkite’s wise words to me at the Four Seasons: “I know I’m being fair when everybody’s mad at me.”
The success of the surge was short-lived, and the war continued to unravel. Years later, I met a commercial helicopter pilot who told me he used to fly Chinooks in Iraq. I asked him what, in retrospect, he thought about the war. “So many of my buddies were killed,” he told me, shaking his head. “What a waste.”
AFTER TWO WEEKS in the Middle East, I was exhausted, emotionally and physically—completely wrung out—and I’d never been so happy to be home. I couldn’t wait to hug the girls and smell their hair. As I got out of the elevator, the first thing I saw was a big poster taped to the door. In bubbly letters filled in with stripes, polka dots, and hearts it read, WELCOME HOME MOM!
Underneath, in girlish print, How was Iraq?
68
The Twitter
BY 2007, WITH the world pushing into the digital space and social media emerging in a big way, I wanted to help move the news division in the right direction so we didn’t get left behind. I started ending live broadcasts of big events, like Super Tuesday, with “For our continuing coverage, please go to cbsnews.com.” I began carrying around a flip camera that I busted out if I saw something or someone newsworthy, like Michael Dukakis at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, whom I grabbed for an impromptu interview as we were going through the metal detector. And I launched a series of online interviews called @KatieCouric, which would let me do what I did best: talk to people—something I rarely did in our 22-minute broadcast.
My first guest was right-wing radio host Glenn Beck, who tried, without much success, to explain why he’d called President Obama a racist. I also sat down with Malcolm Gladwell, Hugh Jackman, Ellen DeGeneres, Shakira, Bill Gates, Drake, Al Gore, Justin Bieber…big names who knew that being interviewed online was no longer a dis. （I’d come a long way since 1994 when Bryant, Elizabeth Vargas, and I were on the sofa trying to figure out the “World Wide Web”; the worst part was when I plaintively asked our head writer, “Allison, can you explain what Internet is?” We were widely mocked 17 years later when some nice person leaked the video.）