Sitting in her office, which curls like a cat’s tail around a corner of the CBS newsroom, Katie Couric is doing her best to appear blasé, even though it’s a mere five days before Diane Sawyer is scheduled to ascend to the anchor chair at rival network ABC.
Couric and Sawyer have been trying to get together for lunch, she says. “I think we like each other a lot,” Couric says. True, she gamely participated in Sawyer’s Good Morning America going-away video, in which ABC’s chief investigative correspondent, Brian Ross, pretends to burst in on Couric — in this very office — making out with Sawyer’s husband, director Mike Nichols. Couric insists she isn’t taking their impending face-off too seriously. “I don’t know whether it’s that I’ve gotten older or more mature, but some of the brouhaha just seems so silly to me.”
Couric will always have the distinction of being the first female solo anchor in the history of network news. Of course, network news is by definition stories relayed via visuals, and the portraits on the walls of Couric’s office of trailblazing American women — Sally Ride, first in space; Wilma Rudolph, first to collect three Olympic golds in a single Games; Amelia Earhart, first to fly solo across the Atlantic — tell a story, too, elevating her own famous profile to a select pantheon.
Read More: – By Phoebe Eaton, HarpersBazaar