On my third day there, I was on the steps overlooking the parking lot, feeling turned around, when I spotted a couple of civilian women around my age—such a rarity—who worked at the Department of Defense. They pointed me in the right direction.
When I ran into one of them the next day, she shared a tip: Classified documents had been discovered in the West Berlin home of air force captain John Vladimir Hirsch, now under investigation for espionage. This was new territory for me, so I consulted Fred, who made a flurry of calls and said we should go with it.
A week later I was on the air with my first exclusive. I quoted a source, saying the case had “all the familiar earmarks of an American selling secrets to the Eastern bloc.” David Martin was quietly irritated.
Then we learned the investigation was the result of a glitch in a routine lie-detector test. Hirsch was cleared and would eventually receive an honorary discharge.
Whoops. I was terrified I had screwed up royally. That I’d let down Tim Russert, who took a big chance on me, and Fred, who allowed me—the neophyte—to run with the story. Not to mention the entire news division of NBC, many of whom might have been skeptical about me to begin with. Maybe Naomi Spinrad was right.
Then Hirsch slapped the network with a $10,000,000 defamation lawsuit. That meant I would have to be deposed. The only depositions I had ever witnessed were on L.A. Law, and I was beside myself. Kevin Baine, a colleague of Jay’s at Williams & Connolly, spent many hours coaching me on how to handle whatever Hirsch’s lawyers threw at me. I kept Jay up all night practicing.
On D-day （deposition day）， I sat behind a massive mahogany table and tried not to incriminate myself or reveal my sources. For so many years, I’d wanted a seat at the table, but Jesus—not this one. Mercifully, Hirsch and his lawyers dropped the lawsuit.
That night, I thanked God profusely, but also Jay, who’d held my hand through it all. It was an early lesson in the high stakes of the profession I’d chosen and the enormous responsibility of getting it right.
I SPENT MY DAYS in press briefings and taking endless laps around the E-ring, the outer corridor of offices, chatting up officers and flacks, earning their trust and trawling for leads. But airtime was hard to come by, especially for the new kid who still looked like a kid; I’d heard about a Nightly News producer, a bespectacled veteran, who flat-out refused to put me on the air.
Then Noriega happened. In December 1989, the U.S. invaded Panama （code name Operation Just Cause, in case anyone had any doubts）， and Fred was assigned to the Pentagon’s press pool. That left me to mind the store. Nightly had no choice but to use me, which meant regular stand-ups. But I was so green. I did everything I could to project substance, clinging to my serious-sounding sign-off: “Katherine Couric, NBC News, the Pentagon.”
Across the Potomac, Jay was working crazy hours, coming home at midnight, heading to the office on weekends. I remember going to church one Sunday with my dad, singing the familiar “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow,” and out of nowhere starting to cry, missing Jay, missing the fun of playing house with my new husband—and feeling overwhelmed at work. My dad grabbed my hand. By the time we reached the parking lot, my tears had dried.
16
Velveeta
JAY AND I were living in my small apartment at 4707 Connecticut Avenue, and hankered for a place where we could stretch out. Convinced we would never be able to afford anything in DC or even the nearby suburbs, we decided to keep the apartment and buy a weekend house in Maurertown, a cozy hamlet in the Shenandoah Valley. It was an easy drive from Washington and much more affordable than places like Middleburg and Upperville, the tony, horsey getaways of social fixtures like the Mellons and Senator John Warner （who was married to Elizabeth Taylor at the time）。
Despite the fact that he typically dressed like a pheasant-hunting Anglophile, Jay hated pretense. His strong preference was for grounded middle-and working-class people—like our new neighbors. In Woodstock, the next town over, the big attractions were a Ben Franklin five-and-ten, a Food Lion, and an 18th-century courthouse supposedly designed by Thomas Jefferson.
Our Federal-style farmhouse was built in 1803 from bricks made of local clay with actual horsehair visible in the mortar （used back then to strengthen it）。 The house was situated on 10 peaceful acres on a sloping hillside between our neighbor Betty Carey’s barn and a small tributary where the Shenandoah River gurgled beneath a concrete bridge, our favorite place to take walks and pictures.
The home came with a name: Valhalla, the word from Norse mythology meaning “a place of great glory” or “heaven,” which is what it was for Jay. We built fires in the winter （there were four fireplaces, including one in the kitchen the size of an SUV where we kept a big vase of dried flowers） and swatted away gnats in the summer as we dipped our young, toned bodies in the less-than-high-end pool, our toes sinking into the vinyl bottom.