Meanwhile, I feel stuck at KRON. The news director is clear I’ll never get a chance to anchor. I feel like I am one woman too many. I am frustrated because I am not growing my skill sets. It is 1996 and I am wrapping up my time as the KRON Oakland reporter, when a six-year-old black boy is charged with assaulting a Latino infant with a stick. He is taken to juvenile hall even though he is so little. I keep asking people why he’s there when he’s so young. The answer is always technical, something about the rules and no other place to send him.
The first time I see him, he is wearing big brown shorts that are down around his ankles because they are too large. The clothes are meant for a teenager. He clearly doesn’t belong there but he clearly has problems. He walks in the courtroom one day and waves at the sketch artist. “Who are you drawing?” he asks, whispering politely. “You,” the artist tells him. He is pleased and surprised. He wants to see the drawing. He is clueless. He doesn’t realize this is all about him.
The boy is charged with attempted murder and burglary because he entered the house with twin eight-year-old boys to rob a big wheel. The baby is four weeks old, Ignacio Bermudez Jr. He has skull fractures and bleeding in his brain. The prosecutors say the six-year-old knew what he was doing. I interview the father of the baby. He and his wife, Maria Carmen, had taken their other children to get groceries but left the baby behind because he had a cough and the night was chilly. The father is soft-spoken and deliberates before choosing his words. He feels for the parents of the children who have been accused. It won’t make things better for their lives to also be lost in all this. It amazes me that his calm tone never falters. I search this man’s eyes for anger, but I can’t find it.
I do live shots and a group of black people shout behind me. It’s stunning. They are not yelling at me—they are just yelling. They scream about the white media. They don’t mention either boy. There is nuttiness to these big crime stories. The sideshow has a rhythm to it. I am the morning reporter. They want me to use the elements I have—sound and pictures from the night before—to leave a story for the afternoon. The story changes so I have to report some more. Then everything changes for the next morning. I feel like I am always aiming for good enough because there is no time for being particularly thoughtful. We chase the newspaper reporters, who dig in a little deeper. Like all the reporters, I search for a reason. Even the kid’s own lawyer says it is impossible to get at what the boy had or had not done. He is just too young so his account keeps changing.
It is not shocking to me that a little boy ends up being defined by an assortment of social ills familiar to Oakland. He is a six-year-old redoing kindergarten. His neighbors and teachers say he is somewhat hyper, though mostly a regular kid. His mother is a twenty-six-year-old single child-care worker. His home is described as a crack den. His father was shot through the head and killed when the boy was four. The family is very poor. A granduncle trashes him to the media as a child demon. He says he obsessively played with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He remembers the boy standing outside late at night while screams erupted from inside. The family is disturbingly dysfunctional, almost beyond analysis. I can’t fully relate. I want to understand what happened and why, really why. But I can’t. The boy is sent to a group home for disturbed children after they find him incompetent to stand trial.
A year later, the baby can’t sit up and suffers from seizures. Ignacio, the father, still refuses to place blame. The saddest thing about this story is that none of the people involved have the emotional energy to scream out about the miserable situation that surrounds them. That is the awfulness of America’s poorest communities, that sometimes what’s most horrible just becomes the norm.
In 1996, NBC launches MSNBC, a twenty-four-hour cable competitor to CNN with a tie to Microsoft. The Internet is the presumptive news provider of the future. A year later, David Bohrman comes to California to set up an MSNBC studio. He is a gruff, hairy guy with a big smile, glasses, and the demeanor of the friendly bus driver who used to transport you to school. He has a very long list of female reporters he is interviewing to anchor a tech show. He figures he’ll pick the most energetic of the group and pair her with a serious guy who gets technology. For some reason my name is on his list. David figures he’ll meet me as long as he’s in town. It is not cool for him to be swiping employees from one of his network’s affiliates so we have a secret breakfast meeting at the Clift Hotel. He is enthusiastic from the get-go and discards the idea of me needing a male coanchor. He offers me a job anchoring The Site for MSNBC from Silicon Valley. I’m thrilled. Among other things, David is a sweet guy. He seems to think I’m terrific.
Two days before we’re on air, David is crawling around the floor assembling the control room. He is one of those people who believes you have to do things yourself for them to be done well. I move to an industrial section near Potrero Hill. I can watch the fog consume San Francisco in the distance. I can walk to work and I often do. Third and Cesar Chavez streets bound the neighborhood. It is tucked away from the highways. Waves of immigrants built this land. They were drawn by a gold rush. I feel as if I too am mining a piece of America. Brad is working at J.P. Morgan in downtown San Francisco. We have a sixth-floor penthouse apartment with a giant deck. How good is life?
Focusing on high tech, I am away from the tough stories of Oakland, but I am not done with them. I just have a few other things to learn about TV. I am anchoring. I do spots for the Discovery Channel, too. I have to interview guests. I don’t know much about technology, which turns out to be a good thing because I can ask questions like a viewer. The downside is I can sound like an idiot if I’m not careful. David creates this cyber guy to help me out. My coanchor is not even a person; he is a virtual geek played by Leo Laporte, who is a tech expert on the Web. There are so many new gadgets. I keep telling myself to boil it down, boil it down. Boil it down. I don’t know a thing about technology. David keeps celebrating my energy and enthusiasm like a proud parent. He is thrilled that I can carry a whole show on my own. It goes really well.
I keep hounding the people at NBC. I send tapes. I am interviewed several times, on the phone. Mostly I keep asking David what I’m doing wrong and right. I feel like NBC is where I should be, like I am on a trip away from home. TV is driven by events. You can never get used to the rhythm because then something happens and everything has to change. For me that something is the death of Princess Diana. I am anchoring a West Coast tech show. MSNBC launches into rolling news coverage and I’m dead, too, metaphorically. They realize this story and rapid-fire news coverage draws more viewers than my tech show, which just fades away. They keep paying me but I have no job. I sit in my apartment. I am told not to go to work. I can see a dire ending so I push for another job. They offer me the MSNBC weekend morning newscast, Morning Blend, back in New York. They tell me I can be a correspondent during the week for the NBC Nightly News. The three years at KRON have paid off. I’m on my way home—to do big things.
This time at NBC, I’m a grown-up. No one is cutting me any slack. I’m anchoring for MSNBC, but during the week I have been dumped on the NBC Nightly News, and part-time as well. The producer is David Doss. He is tall, smart, and handsome and not particularly friendly. I’ve been handed to him. But he doesn’t really need me so he seldom puts me on air. I anchor weekends but during the week there is not much for me to work on. There are plenty of stories. There is a whole slice of America that is not getting on anyone’s news shows. I can’t get their stories on air if I can’t get me on air.
The weekends are better. The executive producer, Rod Prince, is black. He gives me opportunities to do important stories. He hands me over to a senior producer, Kim Bondy, who is also black. There always seem to be plenty of people of color working on weekends trying to move up. She makes me laugh. I want to be her friend. She has these terrific shoes and always looks fantastic, not business dress fantastic but stylish and outgoing. She smiles and has a quick tongue, these piercing dark eyes, and a way of en
tering a room like she has completely thought through what she wants to say. She acts like she can own a conversation in a bar as easily as she can in a boardroom. I trust her instantly.
There we all are on the weekends when it seems that none of the network executives are watching what we are doing. Rod and Kim use me. They put me on TV and push me to grow. Kim has a great attitude. Tell me something I don’t know, she asks. Rod tells her to watch out for me. And she does and she will for the rest of my career. I have another Jeanne. The thing a woman most needs in the workplace is a good friend. Rod invests in Kim. Kim invests in me.
I fill in for weekend anchor Brian Williams. He is the heir apparent to Tom Brokow. It sounds like a big deal but a lot of people get to do it. Rod makes sure I’m one of them. I get noticed. After years of operating on my own, I finally have allies and mentors in positions of influence. But it’s not enough. I’m just not busy enough. The viewers are friendly and I have plenty of fans, but it feels a bit part-time.
MSNBC pulls me to cover the Pope’s visit to Cuba. Monica Lewinsky happens and we get derailed. It’s Princess Diana all over again. My big shot at international reporting has been shut down by an intern who had sex with the president. But I am in Cuba, the place my mother fled to find a better life. A lot of America’s immigrants get to go back and touch home plate every few years, remember why they left or savor what’s left behind. Not the Cubans. Politics has separated us from our past.
I realize on this trip how much of my mother’s past I’ve lost. My Spanish isn’t strong enough to chat fluidly, but people come up and try to talk with me anyway and I feel dumb. The food is wonderful, if you can find it. There is an ease to this place, a beauty to Havana that even its crumbling walls can’t obscure. I am an uptight American. I feel like this is a part of me I want to restore. I love the way the music pulses through the streets, interrupting the night frogs and crackle of the ocean. I love the warmth of the people, their good manners. They make an effort to work hard even when there is so little work to be had. I watch the old cars bounce by and walk the exact streets my mother saw as a restless preteen girl. The island has all these little places that smell of burnt tobacco and ocean mist and the occasional whiff of rum.
I’ve been in no other country where everything feels a bit like a lazy evening in my grandmother’s bedroom. I am suddenly surrounded by people who look like me. I am connected to the past by the red in my hair. My father’s mother used to call my mother “la Russa” when the colors lit up in the summer sun. I look around at them and see my toothy smile, tight nose, and freckly features. My cousin has a son named Orestes, who sits on her lap wearing a red and gray tracksuit. I can tell the death of my uncle Orestes has made a mark. My little brother, my favorite, is Orestes, too.
These are the children from the stories of my youth. My mother never talked much about Cuba beyond them. I can now see why. I am in Cuba during “la crisis,” when everything is in short supply. I feel incredibly uncomfortable meeting my cousins, who have nothing. They hug me and pinch my face but there is a tone to their voices that sounds something like resentment. Their house is buckling. They have crowded into too small a space. I have no way to help them and they need everything. I sit there as a symbol of what could have been if they could have left like my mother. My relatives aren’t allowed to visit me at my hotel, which stings of humiliation. I am not a product of the politics around Castro; my mother left before he arrived. I don’t even think about the swirl of controversy around what he has done. But in their smiles and laughter and feeling of home, I feel a connection and lament that I am not more a part of the Cuba that bore my mother.
America gives you the freedom to hold on to the past, even if it lives somewhere else. I can be Cuban in the United States because part of being American is bringing your culture to bear on the new land of your people. I suddenly understand something about my mother’s culture now, her race and ethnicity and roots that feel more visceral than intellectual. I know that this place feels familiar because it lives in me. I have the power to apply the forces of my immigrant roots to my American experience. Every time one of us chooses to do that we enrich the America around us. I go home and begin to study Spanish once again.
It’s 1999. I go to Weekend Today. I anchor with Jack Ford. This is the pipeline show to Today with Katie Couric and Matt Lauer. Jack is the first of three coanchors I’ll have. This is a big deal. We have millions of viewers. I’m suddenly a celebrity. I didn’t think I could be Katie Couric but I really admire her. I earn more money each year than my parents earned in a year combined. My weekends begin with one big serious interview. Then the show segues into cooking and fashion. My job is to continue the brand of Today, the most powerful morning show on American TV.
Elian Gonzalez floats ashore on a raft after his mother dies escaping Cuba by sea. A public battle ensues over whether he should be sent back or remain with his distant Miami relatives. Federal agents seize him in a predawn raid. I go on the air right away with my hair pulled back in a ponytail, still wet. I apply my makeup in the commercial breaks. Kerry Sanders is the reporter on the Elian story. He reports live, doing interviews on the fly. Passions flare on both sides—Elian should stay; Elian should go. I don’t relate to this story. This is not about the Cuba I know. Plus, the anchor job is a different job. You’re like the hub, the air traffic control, not the pilot. I manage the story; I don’t report it.
The space shuttle Challenger explodes. I go and stand at a location and hold on to it until Matt Lauer arrives on Monday for the big show. I interview guests and keep the story moving. Everything is top-notch, very controlled, where everything back at KRON was pure chaos. The reporters run around me and bring in facts. The anchors, well, we anchor. I miss reporting.
David Bloom becomes my coanchor. We have good chemistry, friendly and competitive. We are like brother and sister. We have dollar bets riding on everything. We race ice bikes on the Rockefeller Center rink. We have a dunking contest. He brings in a ringer who is a softball champion. We have a Mardi Gras parade and host concerts on the plaza outside. We invite Isaac Hayes to be Santa Claus at Christmas. We invite performers from Broadway shows, which I love.
Brad, meanwhile, is working for Morgan Stanley. He’s stressed, busy, and climbing the ladder. I’m having a lot of fun. I have a mental list. Get pregnant and have a baby are next, so I get pregnant. Complete strangers come up and grab my stomach as soon as I begin to show. I do a story about trapeze school. People tell me they love it. I like the praise but it feels a little hollow. I don’t want to be famous for doing a story on trapeze school. I do a show on Navy SEALs training and do the first underwater interview on Today. It’s a hit but no one is going to say that story changed anyone’s life.
In 2000, as I am pregnant with Sofia, it is bothering me that I have never graduated from college. It’s not like I need the degree, but something inside me feels like I should get it. I am just a semester away. It’s like low-hanging fruit and it’s annoying the heck out of me. Kim sets me up to speak at events and I’m introduced as someone who “attended” Harvard. With a baby on the way and a job as a network anchor it feels like this has to happen now or it never will. I sit down with Kim every so often and we list our goals. Mine go something like this: graduate from Harvard, get pregnant, have baby, and so on. I’m pregnant already and I have no degree. My life is out of order.
My big sister Maria comes to the rescue. I am doing a weekend show. I just need to be in Boston for a few days to go to class. She lives in the suburbs of Boston. So I hop on the train from New York to Boston Sunday nights and move in with Maria until Wednesday. Brad is working constantly so we barely miss each other. Maria is a full-time professor at BU with the first five of her seven kids at home. I arrive exhausted, spent from being pregnant more than anything. Her kids surround me with their youthful exuberance and we play around in Maria’s big house with its oversized everything. I brush their hair and let them play with my makeup. I am the fun aun
t who gives manicures and facials. I keenly watch how Maria parents in search of tips.
I have awful morning sickness. I call Kim on the phone and complain about throwing up, as if she can manage this for me. I call her from the plane once and ask if I should get off. She’s like, “I don’t know.” I am huge, really quite big. I have cravings like Lucille Ball expecting Little Ricky. I eat Kozy Shack Rice Pudding every day and search menus for fried oysters.
I face classrooms full of people much younger than me. I walk through Harvard Yard and fantasize about paying someone $20 to crash in their dorm room. I am back at school but this go-around I have money, so I can eat lunch in actual restaurants and pay for cabs. The money gives me this raging freedom. I see shoes I like and I buy them. I do things I never thought I could do. I can help people and fix problems. I feel good and proud and accomplished. I’m also in my second trimester so I’ve stopped throwing up. I feel like a normal person again, just a big one.
The funny thing is, when I get it, the Harvard degree feels uneventful. I have it framed and hang it on my wall but not anywhere anyone can see it. People in my family rarely go to graduations. At Harvard, the tickets are so limited we couldn’t have all gone anyway, and our lifelong philosophy is it’s all of us or none. When I get my set of tickets I talk about selling them on eBay until Kim talks some sense into me. “The anchor of Weekend Today does not sell tickets to her graduation on eBay,” she says. Brad is so busy he’s happy to not go, but I can tell he’s really proud of me by the way he makes no big deal out of it. That’s the way he is. But Kim is all excited so we plan a girls’ getaway to Italy. I am big as a house when I get on the plane and we spend a week traipsing through Venice.
The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities Page 7