Susan Stamberg hosted NPR’s evening news broadcast, “All Things Considered,” for 14 years, starting in 1972. When she died recently at age 87, a female friend recalled what a difference it made to hear a woman’s voice on the radio. Susan was the host, she recalled, she was authoritative, and it was inspiring.
That memory might seem woefully outdated, but Stamberg, as the first woman ever to host a national news broadcast, made an enormous impact. Katherine Maher, NPR’s president, put it this way: “Susan’s voice was not only a cornerstone of NPR — it was a cornerstone of American life. … She inspired countless journalists to believe they could explore life and truth, and lead with both authority and warmth.”
Her assignment almost didn’t happen. “There were no role models for me,” she told The Seattle Times in 1999. “There were objections from station managers that women’s voices were not as authoritative.”
But the network’s programming chief, Bill Siemering, put her on the air anyway. “He said two magical words to me very early on,” Stamberg recalled years later. “He said, ‘Be yourself.’ And what he meant was, we want to hear from — we want to hear voices on our air that we’d hear across our dinner tables at night or at the local grocery store. And we want our announcers and our anchor people to sound that way, too.”
Those voices, to be real and reliable, had to include women, and Susan was a key member of what came to be called NPR’s Founding Mothers, a sorority that included Nina Totenberg, Linda Wertheimer and my late wife, Cokie Roberts.
Their impact was felt inside NPR as well as outside. They were role models and rule breakers, advocates and allies, sisters and friends. They formed an Old Girls’ Network, doing for other women what men had always done for their own.
I witnessed their power firsthand in 1977, when Cokie and I returned to Washington after four years in Europe, and she started job hunting. A colleague at The New York Times suggested I contact Nina, then and now NPR’s chief legal affairs correspondent, and when I called her, Nina immediately said, “Get me Cokie’s resume tomorrow.”
The men at NPR raised all sorts of objections: Cokie’s voice was too harsh, her name too cutesy, her family too political. “What finally made the difference were her female allies,” I wrote in my book about Cokie.
Robert Krulwich, one of the editors who finally hired her, recalled: “It was very definitely pressure. They were for her and wanted to recruit her and were not going to back down.” When I asked Nina if she was acting out of sisterly loyalty, she replied: “Oh, absolutely, I wouldn’t have done that for a man. No way.”
The Founding Mothers didn’t just shape the culture of NPR; they changed the whole way Americans viewed women as sources of information and figures of trust. Even after Cokie’s TV career blossomed on ABC, she continued to appear on NPR every week, and she once described her interaction with the public this way:
“Men come up to men on the street and say, ‘We like your common sense.’ But women say, ‘We love the way you don’t let them interrupt you, and that you hand it right back to them.’ I get the feeling that the country is full of women who’ve never gotten a word in edgewise when men talk about politics.”
Jean Becker, a journalism student when the Founding Mothers were in their prime and who later became White House chief of staff under President George Bush 41, described their legacy this way: “Women like Cokie made me feel I could do anything I wanted to do. She gave us confidence.”
Amna Nawaz, now the co-host of the “PBS News Hour,” remembers her parents giving her a copy of Cokie’s first book, “We Are Our Mothers’ Daughter”: “She was an example for us,” recalled Amna, whose parents were immigrants from Pakistan. “It was, look at this incredible woman, look at everything she has accomplished, and look at the person she is and the work that she does and the difference she makes. This is a path you should take.”
Just the other day, a former student of mine, a rising star at CNN whose family also emigrated from South Asia, asked if I could introduce her to Amna, her hero. The legacy continues. The Old Girls’ Network endures. The Founding Mothers would be delighted.
Steven Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University. He can be contacted by email at stevecokie@gmail.com.
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