Field Notes of a Hotel Warrior, Part IV

Below is the last in a short series of posts about my experiences in Riyadh during the Gulf War. As I noted in previous entries, my assignments during the war took me to Baghdad, Amman, Damascus, Dharan, and Kuwait City, but I spent most of the war (about three months) in the Hyatt Hotel in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Today's post focuses on a talented young reporter named Katie Couric...

Part IV: Katie and Me

At the height of the Gulf War, the Today Show took several stories about the conflict for each of its major news blocks, and I often got the chance to do a live report on the information I’d gathered from Central Command’s daily briefing and from my sources in Riyadh for either the 7:00 a.m. or 8:00 a.m. news.

I hated it. Not the reporting – which I really enjoyed – but the live shots. There was something about talking to a round piece of glass that made me extremely uncomfortable.

This was not a problem for our Pentagon reporter, Katie Couric. Katie – actually, I think they were still calling her “Katherine” on the air at that point – was new to the network, and the news division had assigned her to back-up the regular Pentagon correspondent, Fred Francis, who was off covering the war in the field. And as we all soon discovered, Katie was a natural.

Most mornings the show would ask one of us to do a live shot for the 7:00 o’clock news block and the other to do one for the 8:00. But Katie and I would be on the phone to each other hours earlier, comparing notes. She would always quiz me about what I’d learned at the briefing, and I’d ask her what she was hearing at the Pentagon. It was all very collegial, but it didn’t take too long for me to realize that Katie had no compunction about using my material in her live-shot if she went on the air before me. And – equally sneaky – I would listen to her live shots and hear about important Pentagon developments that she’d somehow forgotten to brief me about on our morning call.

But you had to love her. She was a charmer, and she was just so damn good on the air.

One morning I said to her, “Katie, you’ve got to tell me. How do you communicate so naturally and confidently on your live shots?”

She said, “It’s easy. I just look at the camera and imagine I’m talking to my family back home.”

Right.

Well… I’m here to tell you: it’s not as easy as it looks.

Postscript:

I lost touch with Katie when I left NBC News, and she has, of course, moved on to great things at CBS. But I do remember answering a solicitation on the popular TV news gossip site, TVNewser, back in September of 2008 that said, “Katie Couric Wants to Know: ‘What Would You Ask Sarah Palin?’” Under the pen name “Letsgetreal,” I wrote, “If I were Katie, I'd say: ‘Governor, we live in a complicated world. And it's clear you lead a very busy life. So how do you get your information about what's going on? What do you read, and watch, and listen to? What have you read recently that has informed or influenced your views on the direction America is taking?’" I don’t know if my suggested question ever made it to Katie’s desk, but I was delighted when she used a similar question in her interview with Palin later that week. Katie's Palin interviews were a political game-changer, and she received numerous awards for them. All well-deserved.