Photography by Nathaniel Welch
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Gritty Woman
By Mark Matousek, September & October 2004
CNN’s Judy Woodruff balances hard news and hard knocks
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My love affair with Judy Woodruff, star anchor of CNN and host of Inside
Politics, began, like many secret obsessions, long before we ever met. She
was moderating the 1988 vice-presidential debate, preventing a cadre of
contenders from sound-biting each other's head off. I'd seen Woodruff
onscreen for years (she's been reporting since 1970) but never in such a
daunting capacity. She was—there's no other word for it—fierce.
(Think of Glinda the Good Witch taming the winged monkeys.) By the end of the
show, I was a secret Judy groupie.
How could she be so unflappable, I wondered. Was her steel-magnolia thing a
telegenic invention? Behind the awards and professional coups, rumors have long
swirled around her of personal tragedy, gritty one-upsmanship, even love
goddess worship (though judywoodruffisafox.com has shut down). Who is the real
Judy Woodruff? I'm about to find out and, honestly, it makes me
nervous.
The first thing Judy says when I enter her small office after her show is
"Aren't those flowers beautiful?" She's waving toward an
arrangement of 24 yellow roses. "They're from my husband. Yesterday
was our anniversary." Up close, she is very slender, porcelain-skinned,
eyes the color of lapis lazuli. A pair of Emmy awards are stashed high on a
shelf, nearly out of sight. Judy unwraps a turkey sandwich and smiles.
"She's just not princessy," one of her friends has already told
me.
As we talk, my nervousness fades. I sense a fragility and a humanness that
puts me at ease. "She's always a little insecure," I'm told
later by her boss, Washington bureau chief David Bohrman. "Even on camera.
She's the smartest kid in the class, knows more about politics than
anybody, but still…."
When it comes to shooting the Beltway breeze, though, she couldn't be on
firmer ground. She has covered every presidential election since Jimmy
Carter—as White House correspondent for NBC, chief Washington
correspondent for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, and finally at CNN since
1993. By Judy's own admission, she positively adores politics.
"It's corny," she tells me, "but I'm one of those
people who get goose bumps on election night when they count the votes. It
never ceases to amaze me that we decide whose hands will be on the levers of
power in the richest, most powerful country without spilling a drop of blood.
Sure, nasty things are done in the process, but we don't shoot each other
to decide who's going to be in charge."
A self-described wonk and news junkie even as a student in the late '60s
at Duke, Woodruff had her eye on Washington, a town then not generally viewed
as the most charitable for women. Aside from Nancy Dickerson and Barbara
Walters (the first woman to anchor a national news program), men had a
stranglehold on national political journalism. More than once she was told,
with a straight face, "We're not looking for a woman, we're
looking for a reporter," she wrote in her 1982 memoir, This Is Judy
Woodruff at the White House. So Woodruff paid her dues. After graduation,
she worked in Atlanta for the CBS and NBC affiliates, as a news secretary and
later as a reporter, before being assigned to Washington in 1977.
Woodruff was trained to succeed. Born 57 years ago in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she
was the elder daughter in an Army household. Her childhood was spent in Germany
and Taiwan before the family settled in Georgia when she was 13. This transient
childhood (seven schools before seventh grade) left its mark—having to
re-impress peers so often made her "an overachiever with a
vengeance."
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Woodruff met her husband, Al Hunt, in Steubenville, Ohio, in 1976, while
both were covering the Carter campaign—they were in adjacent phone
booths. ("I noticed this person with great legs," he tells me later.)
Best known as the left-wing foil to Robert Novak's conservative rants on
CNN's The Capital Gang, Hunt has a day job as a columnist at The Wall
Street Journal. They married in 1980 and have two biological
children—Jeffrey and Ben—and an adopted Korean daughter,
Lauren.
"Family really is the most important thing to her," says NBC News
correspondent Andrea Mitchell (who is married to Alan Greenspan), a friend for
25 years and godmother to Judy's daughter. This maternal devotion was
sorely tested after their eldest son, Jeff, was diagnosed with spina bifida, a
defect of the spinal cord. Six years ago, an injury during surgery left Jeff,
who was then 16, paralyzed on one side, with limited sight and speech and loss
of short-term memory. This, I'm told more than once, is the most defining
event of Judy's personal life.
I'm escorted upstairs to the newsroom. Judy is on the Inside
Politics set. The Capitol rotunda is framed behind her through a
wall-to-wall window. As Judy kibitzes with her first guest, Nebraska senator
Chuck Hagel ("So, the kids like the new school?"), seven producers do
a last-minute check before the live broadcast. Jacket buttoned, eyebrows
furrowed, hair realigned in her trademark coif—bangs and a blond flip
behind her ears—she is now her public self. The transition is eerily
seamless. Halfway into the show, she's hit stone cold with a breaking story
on Iraq. She reports the piece as it's read to her through an earpiece, not
missing a beat.
Indeed, Judy's powers of concentration are legendary in Washington.
"She brings new definition to multi-tasking," says Andrea Mitchell.
Her crony, Mark Shields, moderator of The Capital Gang, agrees.
"She extracts more from the moment and from herself than anyone I've
ever known," he says. "If I had a six-pack of that energy, we could
both retire and I could dominate the Western world."
How is it possible for someone covering politics not to be cynical in this
town? "You do get cynical," Judy says. "I wrestle with that
today more than ever. The stakes of winning have gotten so high. So much money
sloshes around these guys that work for the presidency. It absolutely taints
the process. You can't ignore somebody who's written a big fat check.
Those people get access." Bad as the glad-handing is, her real pet peeve
is spin. "These days, people will say things didn't happen when you
know they did," she says. "How can you not be depressed?"
Some days you feel you've had the greatest ego
massage, then the next day you've been trampled on.
Still, for the most part she respects the politicians she covers. "Some
of them may be a little full of themselves, or downright arrogant
SOBs—but they don't like us, either," she says with a laugh.
"Most people do come to public service with the right motives."
Woodruff believes partisan politics to be at an unprecedented high and the
current campaign especially dispiriting. "There is an emotional hangover
since the 2000 recount and 9/11. We have a president who did not win the
popular vote—a lot of Democrats were very angry about that and carried
their anger beyond the inauguration. It divided the country even before the
war."
Her prophecy: "You tell me what's going to happen in Iraq between
now and November, and I'll tell you how the election's going to turn
out."
An assistant knocks on the door to say our time is up. "Later,"
she promises me. "At my house."
We drive together to her large stone house—which I must confess to
having scoped out on previous trips to Washington. Jeff is sitting outside in
his wheelchair, shooting the breeze with a couple of friends. His head lolls
slightly as he laughs at his buddy's joke.
"This is Jeffrey Hunt," Judy tells me, tenderly stroking his hair.
As Judy tends to a few things, I wait in the den, its walls covered with family
photographs of a past life—Jeff, Ben, and Lauren standing between their
parents on ski slopes and beaches, Jeff handsome and smiling, not unlike his
younger brother, Ben, who is now a senior in high school. Judy returns,
apologetic, and settles herself on the well-worn blue sofa.
"Jeff really is my hero," she says, relaxing into the cushions.
"Having him changed my life completely. At first, his condition didn't
really affect our lives that much. Then, after the operation, everything
changed," she says, with tears in her eyes. "I've seen this young
man go from having hopes of being a doctor, and doing great things in life, to
having his dreams…."
Guys like Cronkite and Brokaw seem to gain wisdom with
every gray hair. For women, it's the opposite.
She stops, then starts again. "He knows he's limited, but he wants
to participate, wants to achieve. He has this amazing spirit. He really is my
inspiration."
Lauren appears in the den, a pretty 15-year-old with a bold streak of blond
in her dark hair. We're introduced—she's shy and leaves as soon
as she can. Watching her bound up the stairs reminds me that while Judy may
look 45, she's actually staring down 60. With stars such as Paula Zahn and
Katie Couric in the picture, I wonder if she's feeling the pressure.
"Guys like Cronkite and Brokaw seem to gain wisdom with every gray
hair," she tells me. "For women, it's the opposite. It's
getting better, but it's still an uphill fight." I recall a line in
her memoir: "You don't see a lot of balding fat women on
television."
"I hear that you're tenacious," I say.
"I think I was born competitive," she says. "There's an
awful lot riding on your shoulders, especially in presidential politics. I want
things to be the best they can be. You know, perfect."
Indeed, perfection's a glaring motif in how this woman approaches life.
"She doesn't stop till she gets it right," Jim Lehrer, her
ex-boss, tells me. "She's not somebody who's all hung up on
performance, smiling—things like that. She understands that's the
least important part of the job. And she's funny.
"To tell you the truth…" He stops and thinks for a moment.
I can hear hyperbole coming. "She's about as complete a human being as
I have ever known."
Although I tried, not a single person I spoke to would knock her at
all—least of all her husband, who calls me from his desk at The Wall
Street Journal. "A lot of people talk about how nice, how kind, how
generous she is," Hunt says, mocking his wife's sainted reputation.
"And that's true. But she's also one tough, determined, persistent
woman."
As for having a two-byline bedroom, both agree it's a blessing. "It
takes another journalist to understand the peculiar highs and lows of this
field. Some days you feel like you've had the greatest ego massage, then
the next day you've been trampled on," Woodruff says.
"Trust me," she promises, "I have my bad days."
Maybe, I think to myself. But who in the world would ever know it?
Mark Matousek wrote The Boy He Left Behind (Riverhead Books,
2000) and The Art of Survival (Simon & Schuster, 2005).
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