Then Jay himself went to college in the Blue Ridge Mountains and fell in love—with the land, the history, the people. Carrie wrote:
I am not sure if twenty years of collective reckoning and revision would have changed him, but I am hoping, urgently, that it would have. I cannot ask him questions about why he wrote what he wrote or played bugles on horseback in reproduced battle scenes. I’d like to give him a chance to explain things to me.
Here is what I know about Jay: He was openhearted and generous, always rooting for the underdog. He was drawn to people with integrity and character, and his friends, who came from all backgrounds, reflected that. But the romanticism that surrounded the Civil War for so long—the regalia, the accoutrements, the pastoral settings—kept him from acknowledging the brutal realities that undergird the Lost Cause narrative.
I wonder how Jay would feel about nearly 80 percent of the faculty at his alma mater voting to strip Lee’s name from the school. And how would the conversations with his grown-up daughters go? Would he listen and learn from what this keenly sensitized, incredibly well-informed generation had to say? I hope he’d be moved by racial justice pioneers like Bryan Stevenson, author and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, who told me, “My interest in talking about our history is not to punish America for this history…I want to liberate us. And there is a way to be a white Southerner”—even by marriage—“and proud of who you are and acknowledge the pain of this past.”
I know it sounds like an excuse to say, “It was a different time.” But—it was a different time. And Jay never got the chance to live in this one.
99
It’s C-o-u-r-i-c
I’D DONE TIME at just about every major network. I’d joined forces with a digital behemoth. I’d worked for pretty much every middle-aged white guy at the top of the TV food chain. Now I wondered—with some urgency—what I would do next.
For the first time in my career, I didn’t have a game plan.
I started to question everything. Shortly after the 2016 election, Andy Lack reached out about a nighttime show on MSNBC. The idea of going back to the network—which still was in my blood, which still saw me as family—was appealing. But it would have meant getting home after 10:00 p.m., hopped up on Diet Coke and adrenaline, and never having dinner with my new husband. It would have left my Yahoo colleagues in the lurch, and besides, I wasn’t completely comfortable entering the cable fray, which seemed to rely more on opinion than reporting. Maybe I should have just done it anyway.
Maybe I shouldn’t have done the syndicated show, with red flags flapping from day one. Did my fear of being perceived as washed up after CBS blind me to how wrong the genre was for me?
While we’re at it, maybe I shouldn’t have gone to CBS. At the very least, I should have been more mindful of the culture and the politics of the place and done my due diligence. At the time, I was riding about as high as a human can （by TV standards）。 Maybe I thought I was failure-proof and didn’t consider how much it would hurt if I fell on my face.
But…where would saying no to CBS have left me—staying at the TODAY show the rest of my life? That didn’t sound like such a great idea either. If there is one thing I’ve always been dead set against, it’s staying too long at the party.
I started thinking about what I love to do: Talk to people. Tell their stories. Use those stories to help others better understand the world.
I started thinking about what I hadn’t done. The obvious answer—I’d never been entrepreneurial. Never done my own thing, never not worked at some monster company with a big bronze logo affixed to the wall.
I started thinking about how to create the content I loved but in a new, more nimble, modern way, taking what I’d learned at Yahoo and combining it with my decades of news-gathering and storytelling experience.
I could picture it. But that would require a workspace, staff, production, marketing, promotion, a budget, a regular influx of cash…how could I make it a viable business and not just a vanity project? Who could help me do this?
Luckily, I had an excellent finance guy—a wiz at raising capital, managing people, bringing good ideas to fruition. And he was right there in the kitchen in his boxers, serving up the scrambled eggs.
John and I launched Katie Couric Media in 2018. I am so grateful for his business acumen—something he’s apparently had his whole life. In fourth grade, he made a killing selling Burpee seeds door to door. When he was 14, he drained his savings to buy a snowblower at Sears, then signed up neighbors for his fledgling snow-removal service during a historic Chicago winter; late adopters were subject to surge pricing.