“You!” he bellowed. “What is your name?”
I felt the whole newsroom look my way. “Katie,” I squeaked.
“Katie! Katie!” At which point, Donaldson literally jumped on the desk and started crooning, “K-K-K-Katy, beautiful Katy You’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore When the m-m-m-moon shines, over the cowshed / I’ll be waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door.”
My cheeks started burning while everyone else just rolled their eyes and went back to their work—Sam being Sam, apparently. Then he jumped down and said, “Come with me!”
We hoofed it to the White House, about a half mile away, for the daily briefing. I was huffing and puffing in my summer shift and heels, desperately trying to keep up with Sam’s long strides, as we approached the West Wing entrance. He grabbed my hand and whisked me past security, barking, “She’s with me.”
The press room was packed with pros holding reporter’s notebooks and tape recorders. Sam plunged into the crowd while I stood stiffly against the wall, hoping no one questioned what the hell this 22-year-old nobody was doing there. I spotted legendary Helen Thomas in the front row looking like a harried housewife in a sea of men. Then they started lobbing questions at Jimmy Carter’s press secretary, Jody Powell, fighting for information the nation needed to know. Afterward, Sam went off to his White House cubicle and sent me on my way. Returning to the bureau, I felt a bit dazed. Did that actually just happen?
Back in the newsroom, Mike pointed out Kevin Delaney’s secretary, the person who’d be giving me my weekly schedule. Blond and so thin she was practically concave, Wendy Walker looked like she had just stepped out of Town & Country. I introduced myself and whispered conspiratorially, “Today is my first day.”
“It’s my first day too,” she whispered back. I felt like grabbing onto her like a life raft. “Want to get lunch?” I asked.
Over salads, Wendy told me about her recent breakup with a curator at the National Gallery, about working for Ethel Kennedy and seeing Walter Cronkite do the limbo at Jackie Kennedy’s 50th-birthday party in Hyannis Port. It all sounded so upper-crusty and out of my league. But later she’d tell me how her father had lost his job. After graduating from Hollins, a women’s college in Virginia, she headed to Washington with $40 in her bank account and instructions to marry well. Coming from a frugal family, I realized we had more in common than I’d thought.
We shared something else too—the desire to succeed not by finding a husband but by having a career. It was the ’70s—the decade of Roe v. Wade, Title IX, fiery debate over the Equal Rights Amendment, Barbara Walters becoming the first woman to co-anchor a Big Three evening newscast. I’d spent many a Saturday night for seven years watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show, transfixed by the ambitious, independent heroine setting out for a career in TV news.
Gee, I thought, I want to turn the world on with my smile too!
FRANK REYNOLDS, THE anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight, gave off an air of old-school manliness. After the broadcast, he and his posse would sip scotch in his office and compare notes about what the competition had led their newscasts with. I’m pretty sure he spoke to me only once—in front of a Washington Post reporter who was writing a profile of him. I’d been asked to fetch him a ham sandwich from the deli next door, and when I returned, Reynolds looked up from the interview and said, “Thank you, dear.” Largely, I guess, for the benefit of the reporter.
The backdrop of World News Tonight was the newsroom. To make sure viewers saw that it was a real, live, working newsroom, we were asked to be seat-fillers behind the anchor desk. I would always volunteer and pretend I was engaged in serious business—holding the phone to my ear, earnestly nodding and taking notes—when in reality, I was talking to my parents, urgently telling them to turn on the TV. “Can you see me? Look! I’m behind Frank Reynolds’s right shoulder!”
Wendy and I did everything we could to get ahead. We memorized the office floor plan, learned everyone’s names and what they did. We came in on Sundays to do extra work （we called it “Sunday school”）。
One of those Sundays when no one was around, I slipped into the anchor chair. Wendy handed me a script she’d found in a trash can by the teleprompter operator’s perch. I proceeded to deliver a mock newscast in full-on Ted Baxter mode, before collapsing in laughter at how ridiculous we were.
3
Let ’Em Know You’re There