Me: Why didn’t you mention George Mitchell, Tom Foley, Bill Clinton, Geraldine Ferraro?
Duke looks a bit befuddled as I curtly wrap things up, giving him the morning-show equivalent of the bum’s rush.
Almost immediately, calls came flooding into NBC saying I had been “too angry” and “too harsh” with Duke. A viewer in Marion, Illinois, wrote:
Dear Fathead,
I watched David Duke make a fool of you today. Instead of being objective, you became antagonistic, almost strident! Your ignorance made him all the more reasonable. Shame on you.
My demeanor was about as far from perky as you could get. If Bryant had done that interview, it would have been seen as Bryant being Bryant—appropriately combative, holding someone’s feet to the fire. With me it was more like, Holy smokes, Martha, what happened to that nice Katie Couric?
So there I was, in the teeth of a dilemma: Do I run the risk of alienating viewers by doing what journalism often requires—going hard, calling BS? Here I am, face to face with a white supremacist attempting to become the leader of the free world. Would it be better to ask about his role models or how he keeps his energy up on the campaign trail?
Amid the bins of unhappy viewer mail, there was one letter that made it all worthwhile.
Dear Ms. Couric:
As an American, a journalist and a Jew, I watched in horror as the big guns of network television news let David Duke barrel through with his own, virtually unchallenged agenda in interview after interview. What you did this morning was not only right, but also smart and courageous—a true example of hard-hitting journalism, built on a solid command of the facts and a desire to uncover the truth.
This from Frank Rich, on New York Times letterhead. Rich was the theater critic; his unsparing reviews had earned him the epithet “the Butcher of Broadway,” so I knew compliments from him didn’t come easily. The framed letter still hangs in my office.
But the reaction I was waiting for was my father’s. After the show, we’d frequently do postmortems. Sometimes he’d have small corrections: They’re called Canada geese, not Canadian geese. And people feel nauseated, not nauseous. Sometimes the critique was more serious. Following a safe-sex demonstration with an AIDS counselor during which I put a condom on a life-size rubber penis, he called to say, “Katie, I’m afraid this time you’ve gone too far.”
When I called him after the Duke interview, I was worried he thought I’d gone too far this time as well.
Instead, he picked up and exclaimed, “Bravo, bravo,” clapping his hands as he cradled the phone between shoulder and ear. “Excellent work. An interview in the tradition of Edward R. Murrow. Well done.” I’d be hard-pressed to remember a time I felt more proud.
HE WAS MY journalistic North Star. I still go through his clippings, preserved in the plastic sleeves of the scrapbooks my mother had lovingly assembled. As I turn the fragile pages, I scrutinize the articles for evidence of my father’s perspective in stories about the South’s stubborn resistance to change. He despised the segregationist Georgia governor Lester Maddox and was both disgusted and amused by Strom Thurmond, the anti–civil rights crusader from South Carolina who served a mind-boggling 48 years in the Senate （humorist Dave Barry once satirized Thurmond in his syndicated column, saying he colored his hair with Tang）。 On one occasion, my father found himself in Thurmond’s office while reporting a story and witnessed an interaction between the senator and a female aide that Dad would reenact to my delight: Putting his arm around an imaginary woman, he’d drawl, “Purty guhl. Smaht too.”
Our father’s voice was rich and loamy, like the soil in Eufaula—a reminder of his heritage, and ours. He was one of the most fair-minded people I’ve ever known. Which is saying something, given that he grew up in the segregated South.
His willowy mother, Wilde, had an air of Southern formality. On birthdays and holidays she’d send Hallmark-y cards always signed Your devoted grandmother.
I remember going with my dad to see her in Dublin. We had lunch at a restaurant with a screened-in porch—it was hot, and there was a fly buzzing around her salmon croquettes. Wilde yammered on about who knows what; at the time I’d never heard the word dementia, but it was clear to me she was losing her marbles.
She was a teacher, a devout Presbyterian, and an adoring mother who handwrote multipage love letters to her two children. She was also that unusual thing at the time, an educated woman, an early graduate of the University of Alabama. And yet she was a racist. My grandmother bequeathed my father a first edition of the 1905 novel The Clansman （subtitled An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, the basis of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation）。 Her inscription: