COKIE

An adoring look at the trailblazing journalist who relentlessly promoted the women around her in a male-dominated field.

Breast cancer claimed the life of Roberts, nee Boggs, on Sept. 17, 2019, a week after she and the author, her husband, celebrated their 53rd anniversary. Both of them were journalists—he had a long career at the New York Times and elsewhere—but Cokie’s life was often more public, especially since she was the daughter of two influential members of Congress, Lindy and Hale Boggs. A graduate of Wellesley College, from whose ranks many other journalists would emerge, Cokie was staunchly Catholic. In the cultural milieu of the mid-1960s, her romance with the young, Jewish journalist Roberts was seemingly doomed, yet they persevered in the face of conservative families. At the time, it was assumed Cokie would follow her husband’s career, which took them to New York and then Los Angeles. In LA, Cokie cut her teeth in a “one-man journalism school” run by her husband, who had to travel constantly while she took care of their children. Working as a stringer for CBS in Greece in the 1970s, she was on hand to cover the invasion of Cyprus, and TV executives began to show interest. She got her first full-time journalist job at NPR largely through the support of fellow Wellesley alumna Nina Totenberg and Linda Wertheimer. Eventually, Cokie turned her attention to politics on Capitol Hill, which was in her blood. She and her cohort changed the entire dynamic of the newsroom, insisting that it mattered how male politicians treated women. Her later career as an author of histories involved correcting the record about the Founding Mothers and Ladies of Liberty. The book is essentially a one-dimensional portrait, larded with quotes by friends and colleagues, very few of whom detract from the elegiac narrative, but it doesn’t cloud the luster of Cokie’s many accomplishments.

An upbeat portrait of a productive life that was so important to journalists and women everywhere.