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In Katie Couric’s ‘Going There,’ There Includes Family Skeletons, Busting Into the Boys’ Club and More

By Alexandra Jacobs

• Oct. 14, 2021
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Early in her broadcasting career, Katie Couric tried using her given name, Katherine, onscreen: “to counteract my Campbell’s Soup Kid looks,” she writes in a new book that has been leaking like unburped Tupperware throughout the media ecosystem. To “lend an air of authority my face and voice lacked.”

During the chirpy morning hours of “Today,” the show that made Couric famous, relatability trumped authority, and so “Katie” prevailed. But the inner “Katherine” continued to stomp her foot, quite rightly wanting recognition and respect for trips to war zones and interviews with world leaders — even as her fun-loving alter ego did things like fly across Rockefeller Center in a Peter Pan costume, sprinkling fistfuls of confetti .

Unmentioned is yet another name- specter: the so-called “Karen,” archetype of entitled white woman — sometimes portrayed, as it happens, with a Peter Pan pixie haircut.

Richer than Croesus, surrounded by trophies and commanding an eponymous media company with her second husband, John Molner, Couric no longer has to worry about a contract or a program getting canceled. But her public self — tsked at on Twitter last year for saying Denzel Washington “jumped all over me” in an old interview; loving the problematic movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” so much that she made it the theme of her 50th birthday party; casually citing Longfellow’s exoticizing epic poem “The Song of Hiawatha” — is still vulnerable.

“Going There,” as she calls the Epic of Couric, might as well be subtitled “Owning This,” starting with rattlesome family skeletons: subdued Judaism on one side, “blighted with racists” on the other. Her paternal grandmother, Wilde, gave Couric’s father a first edition of “The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan” inscribed: “This is such a valuable and beautiful book. Never destroy it.” (It was discovered in his study by a horrified great-granddaughter.) Then there is Couric’s first husband, Jay Monahan, whose bugle-blowing passion for Confederacy re-enactments Couric once saw as “a benign hobby” — throwing him an Old South-themed 40th birthday bash complete with a Scarlett O’Hara Barbie doll atop the cake — but now finds queasy-making, even as she continues to mourn his death from colon cancer at 42.

Failing to visit Black schoolmates’ houses in her “de facto segregated” childhood suburb? Attending, however uncomfortably, a University of Virginia fraternity party with waiters in blackface as an undergrad? Devoting hours of “Today” to white victims rather than acknowledging institutional racism? Ms. Couric regrets. She squirms, cringes and is mortified about her “cluelessness, born of intractable white privilege.” She agonizes over having withheld part of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s rambly scold of the football star Colin Kaepernick’s protests. (“Clearly, this was a blind spot for Ginsburg, and I wanted to protect her.”) Maybe journalistic objectivity isn’t all it was cracked up to be?

The patriarchy proves harder to denounce. Soon after our heroine, modeling herself after the fictional Mary Richards , burst into the business as a 22-year-old assistant, a midlife Sam Donaldson leapt atop a desk to serenade her with a World War I song (“K-K-K-Katy, beautiful Katy”). Larry King made advances after poached veal (“The lunge. The tongue. The hands.”). Years later, Les Moonves, “a close-talker with bad breath,” lured her into being the first woman to anchor the “CBS Evening News” solo, “massaging my e-spot (as in ego ) so expertly” on the sofa of his Park Avenue apartment. Like Richards, Couric turned the world on with her smile and clearly benefited from the not-always-appropriate attentions of powerful men. In such an environment, she confesses, when “someone younger and cuter was always around the corner,” mentoring female correspondents “sometimes felt like self-sabotage.”

Katie’s story is one of busting through the doors of a boys’ club whose members greet each other “heyyyyy, budddddddy” — not burning that club down. (The bluestocking Katherine might have dared.) Of sex and the newsroom, her attitude is basically that was the way it was, to paraphrase her avuncular idol Walter Cronkite. Being characterized as “perky” perturbed her, but having dollops of “moxie” was just fine.

While she was a young associate producer for “Take Two,” a daytime program at CNN — then nicknamed Chicken Noodle News — Couric unblinkingly dated a director and swiped on Frosty Cola lipstick to flirt with the playwright Neil Simon at a news conference. (“I knew he knew that I knew that he noticed me.”) When an executive commented on her breasts in a meeting, she banged out a crisp rebuke on an IBM Selectric and personally marched it over to his office. Problem solved! A kind of borscht-belt ribald humor (“speaking of horny toads,” she once ad-libbed on air, segueing from mention of an amphibian convention, “Gene Shalit just walked into the studio”) becomes as much a part of her armor as shoulder-padded designer jackets. Even at the expense of a beleaguered “Today” successor, her contemporary Ann Curry, during a Friars Club roast of Matt Lauer that now seems like a smoking gun.

Hearing salacious rumors about Lauer and a production assistant, Couric wrinkled her nose at the affront to Lauer’s then-wife rather than the big “duh” of workplace harassment. Curry said she internally reported Lauer’s behavior in 2012. He was ousted five years later and eventually became, Couric writes “the Leon Trotsky of 30 Rock,” their awkward texts trailing off: “It was as if Matt never existed.”

Honestly, with all the enablers above her, it’s hard to fault Couric for being oblivious to a colleague’s compartmentalized exploits. If there’s one thing “Going There” conclusively proves, it’s that she always had a lot going on. The youngest of four children born to a P.R. man with his own dashed dreams of the fourth estate and a homemaker who had done layouts for Coronet magazine, Couric grew up into one of the original and most determined exemplars of that ’80s shibboleth, “having it all.” After Monahan’s death, she raised piles of money to fight the disease that killed him. Her on-air colonoscopy destigmatized the procedure and surely saved many lives — though possibly also left her inured to oversharing, like the pointless anecdote in this book about her young daughter’s diarrhea accident on the highway.

But I don’t believe for a second that she, so refreshingly candid about her competitiveness, wants the first line of her obituary to be “Katie Couric was a tireless advocate for cancer awareness and research.” In this generally sporting tam toss of a memoir, such an assertion lands with the soft plunk of sanctimony. And that’s never good for ratings.

Alexandra Jacobs is a book critic for The Times and the author of “Still Here: The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch.”

Going There By Katie Couric Illustrated. 514 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $30.

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Going There

By Katie Couric Little, Brown: 528 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.

In Katie Couric’s new memoir “Going There,” the TV news star recalls a question asked by her therapist. “Have you ever considered that maybe not everyone is going to like you?”

Couric admits that she hadn’t. She was a “pleaser” since childhood, “a master of recruiting people to Team Katie.”

The breakthrough moment clearly stuck with her. There is no relentless people-pleasing in her fearlessly frank memoir, a wildly entertaining and often emotional ride through the volatile media landscape of the last 40 years in which no subject is off limits.

Couric, 64, puts herself among the generation of career-oriented women inspired by “ The Mary Tyler Moore Show ,” but she was in a class of her own. Hard-working and extroverted, she over-delivered at every turn, keeping NBC’s “Today” show No. 1 in the ratings for 16 years. She also stood up for herself, demanding an apology from CNN executive Ed Turner , who said she was hired for her breast size, and telling Bob Wright , then vice chairman of NBC parent General Electric, to back off when he said she was too aggressive in questioning his Bush White House pals.

Couric arrived at NBC News as a serious journalist, having quickly learned her craft in local TV and on CNN during its rollicking startup years. But she was almost too good at the entertainment elements of morning TV — crooning along with pop stars, dressing up for Halloween and diving head-first into any ratings-driven stunt.

Being described as “perky” and “ America’s Sweetheart ” overshadowed her real accomplishments as a journalist capable of hard-hitting interviews. It also made her a favorite target for the tabloids and the long lenses of paparazzi.

This much hasn’t changed: Couric has been pilloried in the press over early leaks of “Going There,” in which she admits she was not the mentoring kind at “Today.” It’s understandable she would want to protect her turf; every woman who made a strong impression at NBC News was touted by the press as a replacement. (Of course, the three network news anchors of that era, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw, had no part in grooming their successors).

But Couric knew she could be taken out the same way she came in. Her remarkable rise occurred after NBC News famously botched the transition of Jane Pauley from the program in 1989. When ratings dropped among younger women, Pauley — then just 39 — was the first one thrown overboard. When her younger replacement Deborah Norville couldn’t right the ship, management turned to Couric in 1991.

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Couric’s starry run at “Today” elevated the stature of morning TV while the influence of the evening news was waning. But as a baby boomer raised on “The Huntley-Brinkley Report,” she couldn’t resist the chance to join CBS in 2006 as the first solo woman to serve as an evening news anchor.

She was warned not to do it; Warren Beatty, of all people, said mornings were more important. But she could not pass up the opportunity to make history.

Couric was not welcomed by the traditionalists at CBS News, especially as she was pulling in $15 million in a season of cost-cutting. She admits her spiffed-up office in the dreary CBS Broadcast Center “stuck out like a Givenchy gown at a hoedown.”

Her attempt to reinvent the evening news didn’t click with audiences, but Couric’s 2008 interview with Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was one of the all-time game-changing moments in politics. It silenced her critics long enough for her to work through her contract at the network.

Despite early reports, Couric doesn’t really go over the top in her critiques of former colleagues at NBC. The brunt of her barbs are aimed at CBS. If you’re a producer or executive who worked with her there and don’t see your name in the index of “Going There,” consider yourself extremely fortunate.

Couric is particularly rough on former “60 Minutes” executive producer Jeff Fager, who was not a fan of her work. She takes credit for directing journalists on the #MeToo beat to investigate Fager’s alleged inappropriate behavior toward women at the company, which ultimately led to his demise. She uses two vulgar terms for male genitalia to describe him.

Couric provides a historical perspective on workplace relationships, noting that “no one batted an eye” in the 1980s when ABC News correspondent Sam Donaldson showed up at her apartment door for a date with one of her young roommates, who also worked at the network’s Washington bureau. Couric herself dated an older separated director while at CNN. She describes a secret office at NBC known as “The Bunker,” to which the only one with a key was “a male anchor who used it for one-on-ones and I don’t mean interviews.” Let the speculation begin.

NBC fires ‘Today’ host Matt Lauer for ‘inappropriate sexual behavior’

NBC News said today that longtime “Today” show host Matt Lauer has been fired for “inappropriate sexual behavior.”

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Couric also provides a deftly written tick-tock on her reaction to the downfall of her longtime co-anchor Matt Lauer. It’s compassionate without excusing his behavior, to which she was admittedly oblivious when she worked with him.

But civilians who read “Going There” will be most transfixed by Couric’s raw and unvarnished account of losing her first husband , attorney Jay Monahan, to colon cancer at the age of 42.

After attempting to be the have-it-all career mom, Couric questions whether the self-involvement required to succeed at “Today” kept her from noticing Monahan’s weight loss and jaundiced complexion, signs he was seriously ill. She shares the resentment she began to feel over Monahan embarking on a TV career as a legal analyst. Their truncated union is a subject on which the ever-confident anchor expresses the most self-doubt.

Couric used her clout as a celebrity to find doctors and treatments to save Monahan. She was too late, but she did succeed at turning her platform at “Today” into a megaphone, shifting public attitudes by having a colonoscopy on “Today” in 2000. It remains a remarkable milestone of persuasion when you consider how difficult it’s been to convince many Americans to get vaccinated against a deadly pandemic.

Couric balanced the desire to preserve her husband’s memory for their two daughters while trying to find a new companion. In 2014 she married financier John Molner, but only after his own harrowing cancer surgery.

In a jaw-dropping coda, Couric and her younger daughter Carrie reexamine Monahan’s obsession with the Confederacy. A native Virginian, Monahan participated in Civil War reenactments and collected memorabilia from the era. “I know it sounds like an excuse to say it was a different time,” Couric writes. “But — it was a different time. And Jay never got the chance to live in this one.”

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Many of Couric’s former colleagues — especially those who knew her as an extremely demanding on-air talent — are likely to take issue with their depictions in “Going There.” They are already wondering why she chose to torch the infrastructure that might lead her back to TV.

The guess here is that she knows she is among the last generation of TV stars recognized by their first names. Multiplying sources of video streaming continue to slice and dice the mass audience. The kind of media fame she experienced simply won’t be replicated (sorry, podcasters).

Couric, who says she passed on a chance to host a show on MSNBC in 2016, was a polarizing figure before polarization was the norm in TV news. One need only witness the overheated reaction to her decision to shorten up the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s off-brand rant about Colin Kaepernick to surmise that Couric has likely had enough.

When taking on projects for her own media company, Couric now sticks to covering topics she cares about. She misses the pulsating energy of a big news organization but seems at peace with herself and the sometimes messy, always interesting life she has lived. “My success may have come with a side of BS,” she writes. “But I like to think it did some good.”

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Stephen Battaglio writes about television and the media business for the Los Angeles Times out of New York. His coverage of the television industry has appeared in TV Guide, the New York Daily News, the New York Times, Fortune, the Hollywood Reporter, Inside.com and Adweek. He is also the author of three books about television, including a biography of pioneer talk show host and producer David Susskind.

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‘Hilarious and very honest’: Katie Couric casts off her perky persona in her new memoir

Her blistering book dishes out insults and reveals the harshly competitive environment for women in broadcast news

S he was the golden girl of TV whose questions burst the bubble of Sarah Palin, the highest-paid morning news anchor who switched to hard evening news, and the broadcaster who once noted that an interviewer needs to “know when you’re going to be loaded for bear” – get tough.

But now, after excerpts from an autobiography were leaked to news outlets, Katie Couric has lifted a lid on the background politics, personalities and infighting that accompanied the former NBC Today Show and CBS evening news anchor’s rise to the top.

Couric takes aim at former colleagues, lovers, friends and professional frenemies in harsh terms, throwing off the sexist persona of the perky girl-next-door forced on her for decades.

Couric’s list of grievances is as long as it explicit. According to the New York Post, which obtained a copy of her tell-all memoir Going There , which is scheduled for release later this month. Little, Brown and Company, Couric’s publisher, told the outlet that the book is “heartfelt, hilarious and very honest”.

Across 500 pages, Couric, 64, is reported to have a put-down for almost everyone, from Martha Stewart – “some healthy humbling (prison will do that …) to develop a sense of humor”; Prince Harry – cigarettes and alcohol seem to “ooze from every pore”; industry colleagues like Deborah Norville – “relentless perfection”. But she also reveals some of the appalling behavior of her peers, including the late CNN interviewer Larry King, who, she writes, made a “lunge” for her across a sofa.

She holds her most scathing criticism for the ABC Good Morning America anchor Diane Sawyer. Couric says that Sawyer was so desperate to beat her in the morning TV ratings wars that she declared: “That woman must be stopped.”

“I loved that I was getting under Diane’s skin,” she writes. She says Sawyer was everything she wasn’t – tall, blonde, with a voice “full of money”. Among her most damaging criticisms was that Sawyer took advantage of a clearly troubled Whitney Houston in an interview in which the singer was put in the position of defending her use of crack cocaine.

“There was a very fine line between a revealing interview and the exploitation of troubled, often traumatized people in service of tawdry tidbits and sensational sound bites,” Couric writes.

In blunt language that might shock some readers, Couric jokingly wonders who Sawyer “had to blow” to score a big interview with a woman who’d given birth to twins at 57. She adds: “I’m pretty sure I speak for Diane when I say neither of us ever resorted to actual fellatio to land an interview. But we both engaged in the metaphoric kind – flattering gatekeepers, family members, and whoever else stood in the way of a big get.”

But in many ways Couric’s blistering book is summoning a world that has to a large extent ceased to exist: where top TV anchors were the “voice of God” to Americans stuck in front of their televisions and consuming news from a handful of networks. First cable TV and then the internet have long put paid to all of that, shifting the consumption of news firmly online and dealing a huge blow to nightly news broadcasts.

Robert Thompson, a director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, says he’s struck by how the names in the book seem so long-ago – from a time when network news anchors held greater sway over the culture.

“As vicious as it might be, it seems like it’s from a more innocent time. Hearing this nasty, behind-the-scenes kind of thing almost sounds quaint, and beckons back to a time when television journalism was a much different thing,” Thompson says.

While cautioning that reports of the book’s contents are by definition second-hand, Thompson points out that the stories Couric recounts are already in the universe of retrospective fiction – “a memoir after the made-for-TV version of it”.

To some, the most revealing aspect of the leaks is a passage involving Ashleigh Banfield, a younger MSNBC correspondent whom Couric felt professionally threatened by. It reveals how the sexist attitudes of the television industry in which women were struggling to thrive could reward competition – not cooperation – between rising female stars.

“For a minute there, Ashleigh Banfield was the next big thing,” Couric wrote. “I’d heard her father was telling anyone who’d listen that she was going to replace me. In that environment mentorship sometimes feels like self sabotage.”

On Friday, Banfield went on her show to set the record straight on whether Couric really did give her “the cold shoulder”. She later told the New York Post: “Her words have really hit me hard. She was my North Star. I always looked at her as one of the most brave presenters … at a time when we were all called bimbos. She was the best morning show host ever. I’m just gobsmacked.”

Norville also reacted to Couric’s description: “I’m really too stunned and, frankly, hurt to comment,” she said. Sawyer has yet to comment.

The passage, says Thompson, communicates “a sense of the pathological nature of TV news at the time, and maybe more so now that there’s only so much room at the top for women”. The same, he says, can be said for the anecdote about Diane Sawyer.

“Katie Couric, it seems, is coming out about how it was and how it felt to be a woman in television news at the time. The situation that she found herself in was such that a lot of the insecurities and behaviors she engaged in are exactly what we might expect in such unequal situations.”

What should not be forgotten, he adds, is that she rose from the top-rated morning news show to sit in what had once been Walter Cronkite’s evening news seat.

“Even when she was at the top of her game, there was a sense that the ways she was being described and therefore judged in gender-specific terms typical of a sexist TV news industry. The perky, friendly image of a person you could talk to across the backyard fence is something she has long tried to dispel,” Thompson said.

Couric’s candid memoir might just nail that.

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Katie Couric’s Memoir Is Juicy, Frank, and Irresistible

Going there is a master class in likability..

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As someone who never watched a full episode of the Today show or really any network newscast after leaving home for college, I can say with confidence that Katie Couric meant absolutely nothing to me when I picked up her new memoir . As such, you might think I’d be the last person in America to be won over by it. But resistance to this book, appropriately titled Going There , appears futile. By the time I hit page 50, she’d already finagled me into her corner. Reading it was a two-day crash course in the American infatuation with Couric’s wholesome smile and cap of tousled brunette hair, spiced by her late-life regrets over how she once handled everything from race and gender to homelessness. The book satisfies the appetite for two types of voyeurism: the desire to peek into the lives of the rich and famous, and the wish to see them do penance for the sins they committed along the way.

Going There arrives accompanied by a long, tortuous profile in New York magazine by Rebecca Traister , a piece that wrestles with both the insane privilege Couric enjoyed at the summit of her success—she accepted a salary of $15 million to anchor the CBS evening news in 2006—and the floridly misogynistic media industry in which she won it. What a difference a decade or two makes. Couric’s partner at Today was Matt Lauer, with whom she enjoyed a particular on-screen chemistry, “the perception that we were like brother and sister.” She maintains that while she heard “whispers” of Lauer’s affairs and found them “gross,” she had no idea of the allegations of sexual harassment that would cost Lauer his job in 2017. But all this happened, she clarifies, in a workplace that sounds like the ad agency in Mad Men, rife with rumored liaisons between male higher ups and young female staffers, and with no policy in place to prevent them. “At one point,” she writes, “even the head of HR was screwing a low-level producer.”

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Publicly, gossip tabloids drummed up the rivalry among top female broadcasters like Couric and Diane Sawyer into headline-grabbing “catfights.” The competition was real, partly because the slots available to women were so few, and partly because it always is for such jobs. But “I find it puzzling that turf wars involving ruthlessly competitive men barely register,” Couric deadpans. She confesses that once she’d made it, she happily mentored younger women in jobs that posed no threat to her own but was “way less welcoming” to up-and-coming female correspondents like Ashleigh Banfield. This fall, one of the tabloids that used to revel in pitting these women against each other, the New York Post, rather hilariously used excerpts from Going There to accuse Couric of having “ never been an ally to other women .” (The real reason conservative tabloids have it in for Couric is twofold: She wrested an admission of support for Roe v. Wade out of Laura Bush on the eve of her pro-life husband’s inauguration in 2001, and, above all, she conducted an infamous give-her-enough-rope interview with Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential campaign.)

Going There is full of reckonings of the type widely demanded these days, although Couric’s are exceptionally candid. She has two daughters, aged 25 and 30, the younger of whom dug up evidence that Couric’s beloved late husband’s enthusiasm for Civil War reenactments extended to a disturbing fondness for the iconography of the Lost Cause. He once boasted to the United Daughters of the Confederacy that Couric was descended from a “member of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Cavalry,” Forrest being the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Couric’s daughters surely spurred her to confront such unsavory facts, and she writes that she wants to believe that their father (who died of colon cancer in 1998, at the age of 42), had he lived, would have been open to “listen and learn from what this keenly sensitized, incredibly well-informed generation had to say.”

The tales of glory, the mea culpas, and even the dish proved less fascinating to me, however, than Couric’s command of the art of being likable. (In fact, the tales, the confessions, and the astutely deployed gossip are all part of that art.) This is a skill often derided but disastrously beyond the reach of figures ranging from politicians to fictional characters. Going There is a master class in likability, the careful balance of self-deprecation, identifiable yearnings, and chipper indomitability. When Couric describes having a C-section under local anesthetic and hearing “the squishing sound of the surgeon pushing my bladder and intestines aside so he could get to the baby,” the effect is one of startling intimacy, as if the reader were in the operating room with her. She really seems to be fulfilling the promise in her prologue of delivering, in this book, “the whole me.”

Going There

By Katie Couric. Little, Brown and Company.

In fact, Couric’s body, especially her GI tract, has supplied her with an impressive amount of content over the years. In one of her most famous Today segments, she had a colonoscopy on national television to encourage more people to get the screenings that might have saved her husband’s life. And many of the funny stories she relates in Going There involve her vomiting, whether from morning sickness or taking a spin in a F-16 fighter jet. (She emerged from the plane and announced, “Look, everyone! A two-bagger!”) She admits to suffering from an eating disorder in her youth and rock-hard fibrocystic breasts in later life. Under the influence of such frankness, it becomes easier to forget that $15 million paycheck, especially when your audience is other women, for whom the female body tends to feel like a universal leveler.

For 500-plus pages, Going There dishes out anecdotes, funny or chilling, that resemble scenes from Lifetime movies. The seemingly perfect nanny who became obsessed with Couric. The co-op board that refused to renew her sublease when her husband was dying. The time the head of NBC told her to buy a Chanel suit in Paris on the network’s dime. The day her daughter ate too many churros at Disneyland and got diarrhea in the car. The dashing boyfriend who came on strong then turned cold. Even when the underlying circumstances set these stories well out of the sphere of the ordinary (as a Today host, Couric could afford her own Chanel suit and that boyfriend owned the San Diego Padres), Couric expertly casts them as the delights and travails of an average middle-class woman. She made a point, she explains, of buying her on-air clothes from Ann Taylor and similar retailers patronized by such women. That last item may be the most telling revelation in Going There . The book absolutely convinced me that it was delivering the real Katie Couric, unvarnished and unpretentious, someone I could well imagine befriending. Whether that’s just another outfit that Couric can shed at will is something I’ll never know.

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Author Interviews

After years of trying to be likable, katie couric is letting that go.

Terry Gross

Katie Couric, shown here in 2016, reflects on the successes and setbacks she's experienced as a journalist in her new memoir, Going There . Mike Windle/Getty Images hide caption

Katie Couric, shown here in 2016, reflects on the successes and setbacks she's experienced as a journalist in her new memoir, Going There .

As co-host of NBC's Today show from 1991 until 2006, Katie Couric was known for her relatability and mass appeal. But recently Couric's been working with a therapist on relinquishing the notion that she has to be likeable. She even bought a T-shirt that says, "I'm not for everyone."

In her new memoir, Going There , Couric reflects on her evolution as a journalist and the successes and setbacks she experienced during her 40 years in a male-dominated media industry. She recalls one instance, early in her career, when Ed Turner, CNN's second in command, told her that her breast size had contributed to her success.

"I was all of 26 years old and I was humiliated," Couric says. With her boss's support, Couric wrote Turner a letter, demanding an apology — which she later received.

Book Reviews

In 'going there,' katie couric lays out her life in intimate detail.

But Couric also acknowledges times when she failed to speak up. She suspected that her long-time Today co-host Matt Lauer was having affairs with co-workers, but she says she didn't know the extent of his behavior. NBC fired Lauer in 2017, citing "inappropriate sexual behavior."

Looking back now, Couric says, "I don't know whether I was naïve or I just didn't want to believe it, but I think it was evident to me after hearing information come in that [Lauer] abused his power mightily and deserved to be fired."

Couric acknowledges that the revelations in her memoir might contradict the "likable" reputation she spent so many years cultivating — and she's OK with that.

"My goal in life isn't to please people anymore," she says. "I think if you're likable, sometimes you are like milquetoast. You don't necessarily stand for anything. You don't rub people the wrong way because you [don't] have strong opinions, and honestly, I think if you're just likable, you're not very interesting."

Interview highlights

On her reaction to allegations about Matt Lauer

I was really surprised, and I know people have a hard time understanding that. They think, "Oh yes, everything's out in the open," but it really wasn't like that. I had a really wonderful, close working relationship with Matt. I would say we were friends. But ... after the show was over, we went our separate ways. We had very separate lives and I made a very conscious decision ... that I did not want to socialize with Matt. I just thought that was not a good idea. Not necessarily a recipe for disaster, but I just thought, you know what? I want to have a professional relationship with him. ...

Going There by Katie Couric Little, Brown and Co. hide caption

Going There by Katie Couric

There was one incident ... where there was a [memo] that was sent to the wrong person, and it was creepy. It was like, "Come to my office and I hope you're wearing that skirt that came off so easily." And I was like, "What the heck is going on?" And I remember saying to the person who, unfortunately, got that wrong message, "That's disgusting." ... At the time I thought, Oh, I'm so disappointed that he's cheating on his wife and I think I know who this was intended for, I'm not sure. And I just said, "That's gross."

The Two-Way

Fired 'today' host matt lauer responds, promises 'soul-searching'.

Now, in hindsight, should I have approached him? Should I have approached the young woman, the intended recipient for that [memo]? Maybe.

On why she texted Lauer upon hearing the news

I was really confused. I had very little information at the time. I didn't know what the transgression had been. I didn't know how serious it was. ... It was so abrupt and so swift and intense. I wanted to make sure he was OK. And I think my human side just wanted to reach out to him. I had just seen him a couple of weeks prior, ironically. We would maybe have dinner once a year or something like that. And I had actually had dinner with him, and I don't know, I was clearly not very perceptive. I take real pride in my emotional intelligence, but I didn't have much EQ when it came to this.

Katie Couric goes behind the scenes in the cutthroat world of morning TV news

On the lasting damage created by Lauer and NBC's culture of abuse

I think people can present themselves and show a side that they want to show at certain times, and I think what it made me wonder is why someone would be, first of all, so abusive, because some of the women I spoke with ... [have] been really traumatized by this and the damage is lasting. And I think what I've always wondered about is the callousness of these kinds of encounters and the recklessness and the dehumanizing aspect of this. And I think that is what really troubled me.

On regretting her decision not to level with her first husband, Jay Monahan, about his terminal colon cancer diagnosis

I wouldn't say [I sugarcoated] the situation, but I tried to make it seem that it wasn't as bad as it was and that we were going to fight this and we were going to figure this out. The doctors were going to come up with great therapeutic solutions. And we can make this work and, or we can we can beat this. ... I wish that we had talked about what might happen if all of that didn't work. I think I was so determined to keep him fighting and feeling hopeful and living a life that was as full and joyful as it could be in the time he had left that I wasn't completely honest with him, and I regret that to this day. ...

Arts & Life

Katie couric, cbs and the future of network news.

I think maybe there were a lot of things that would not have been left unsaid. I think maybe he would have done a video for [our daughters] Ellie and Carrie. ... I think he might have written them a letter.

On why she opted to undergo a colonoscopy on Today

I wanted to save some lives, and I had the potential to do that. I wanted to explain to people, demystify and destigmatize a procedure that can actually save your life. Colon cancer has a greater than 90 percent cure rate if it's detected early. ... For people in the viewing public or in the audience, I wanted to do for them what I couldn't do for Jay. I wanted to arm them with the information they needed, and that was really my only goal. I didn't think people were jonesing to see my colon, but I thought if they saw me go through it, they would say, "Oh, that wasn't that bad. I'm going to call my doctor because I'm 50 years old and I need to get one."

On being hired to the evening newscast at CBS in 2006, and getting criticized for everything from her appearance to the stories she covered

Katie Couric Makes It Official: She's Leaving 'CBS Evening News'

Even though they brought me there to really kind of rethink the evening news, and to retool it, and to get rid of sort of the anachronistic voice of God, they wanted something different. So I went there and tried to do that, but I don't think America was ready. ... And then, I think, internally, CBS was a very traditional network, and I think, internally, there were forces that weren't ready for what I had been hired to do.

Sam Briger and Seth Kelley produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.

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10 Brutally Honest Anecdotes in Katie Couric’s Memoir Going There 

Katie Couric was America’s sweetheart for 15 years starring as the co-host of NBC’s Today show, so you know she has the dirt. In her memoir Going There, which arrived on stands October 26, Couric reveals what it was actually like behind the wholesome TV-family façade. Beyond her work, she details the trials and tribulations in her personal life, including her struggle with an eating disorder and postpartum depression, as well as her loved ones’ battles with cancer. But there are hilarious moments, too, as she recounts memories of romantic pursuits from the likes of Neil Simon , Larry King , and Michael Jackson . She also candidly shares stories about the celebrities and politicians she’s interviewed, including Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Here are ten brutally honest anecdotes from Going There, most of which would not be allowed on daytime television.

Louis C.K. scripted his inappropriate sexual behavior for Couric. Two years before Louis C.K. was “nailed for jerking off in front of up-and-coming female comics,” he had pitched Couric a cameo on his FX show Louie . In the show, Couric would be reading the news on TV while he watches, then she’d stop abruptly to tell him, “So, just take off your pants and get started … Just watch my mouth and do your disgusting thing,” and he would proceed to unbutton his pants. “And … scene. I guess life does imitate art,” wrote Couric, who passed on the appearance.

Couric struggled to accept that Matt Lauer  is a sexual predator. Couric first learned of Matt Lauer’s impropriety from a producer on Today . The producer told Couric that Lauer messaged her, inviting her to his studio office “and asked her to wear that skirt that came off so easily (or something to that effect).” He had mistaken the producer for a production assistant, whom Couric and the producer realized was his “fling at the Olympics.” Ultimately, Lauer would be fired from NBC for allegedly sexually assaulting a colleague at the Sochi Olympics . “Wow, gross, he’s cheating on his wife,” was Couric’s initial reaction, rather than “that’s not okay, he’s taking advantage of a young woman on the show.” After Me Too, Couric experienced “cognitive dissonance” reconciling the friend version of Lauer she knew and his identity as a sexual predator. But months after Lauer was fired from Today , she passed by him on a summer day in the Hamptons: “I knew in that moment we’d never speak again.”

A network higher-up harassed Couric about her breast size. While she was at CNN’s broadcast Take Two in 1983, the “number-two man” Ed Turner said Couric was successful because of her “determination, hard work, intelligence, and breast size.” In response she hand-delivered a (fuck you) memo: “If you were intending to be humorous, you failed … I request that you apologize to me and that you somehow indicate to the other who heard the remark that you have so apologized.”

She lived with an eating disorder for years until her childhood idol died.  “Starve, cheat, binge, purge — the cycle would take years to break,” said Couric, who struggled with bulimia for years. She had a wake-up call after her childhood idol Karen Carpenter’s heart gave out due to anorexia in 1983. The death of Carpenter “flipped a switch” for Couric, and the dangerous precedent helped her “escape the grip of an illness that, for far too long, had controlled [her] life.”

Couric thanks prison time for Martha Stewart ’s sense of humor. When Martha Stewart won a Matrix Award in 1996, Couric presented Stewart with her award. Couric also wrote a personalized poem poking fun at Stewart for being a “doyenne of domestic perfection,” which featured lines such as “Marzipan, tarte tatin, coq au vin too, / Bruschetta, pancetta’s not all you can do.” Couric says that in response to the poem “Martha, however, seemed a little miffed,” and “it took a few years and some prison time for Martha to develop a sense of humor.”

Some pretty famous men have tried to pursue Couric. After a press conference for The Slugger’s Wife in 1985, Couric recalls how Neil Simon invited her back to his hotel. “He started kissing me and — well, that’s as far as it got,” she writes. He had a three-word explanation for her: “Blood pressure medication.” She also remembered Larry King also trying to put the moves on her, but after “the tongue … the hands,” she told him, “I’m really interested in meeting someone a little closer to my age,” a moment which Couric claims the two laughed about after the fact. Even Michael Jackson wanted to take Couric out to dinner, she writes, but since talking to him was like “talking to a wilting flower,” her answer was “easy as ABC: No thanks.”

Salacious tales were rampant in TV news pre-Me Too . During Couric’s time at NBC, she recounts that “salacious tales about who was shagging whom were practically part of the news cycle.” They involved the men in positions of authority, “a high-ranking, married executive and junior publicist,” “a powerful producer and his assistant.” There was also “the Bunker,” the secret office of a male anchor she does not name. She says he “used it for one on ones and I don’t mean interviews.” A former NBC colleague also told Couric that “the head of HR was screwing a low-level producer.”

She attended a sleazy Jeffrey Epstein dinner party.  Couric attended a dinner party at Jeffery Epstein’s home, which was billed as an evening honoring Prince Andrew. Couric’s date at the time remarked, “That was pretty bizarre. Did you see how young the women were who took our coats?” Another less-than-memorable moment at the dinner was when Chelsea Handler had “momentary amnesia” and “asked Woody and Soon-Yi how they met.”

There were full-on covert ops to steal interviews.  Couric says GMA staff would pretend to be Today staff and call guests telling them that their interview at Today was canceled, or sometimes they’d send a car to pick up Today show guests and take them to their own studio. She also claimed if a guest was booked for both shows but had their GMA interview first, staff there would chat with the guest so they would be late for their rival’s program.

Couric had amusing brushes with presidents. Seated next to Vladimir Putin at a dinner hosted by NBC, Couric says she asked Putin why he didn’t cut his seaside holiday short when a Russian submarine sank, killing 118 sailors in 2000 . After adding that it would make him appear more compassionate, she says, “Putin just stared at me with those beady little eyes.” A few years before the 2008 presidential election, then–Illinois senator Barack Obama approached Couric and said he was a big fan. As he pulled away, she asked her cameraman, “Who was that again?”, with equal puzzlement the cameraman responded, “Don’t ask me.”

This post previously referred to a memo as an email. It has been updated.

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GOING THERE

by Katie Couric ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 26, 2021

A sharp, entertaining view of the news media from one of its star players.

The veteran newscaster reflects on her triumphs and hardships, both professional and private.

In this eagerly anticipated memoir, Couric (b. 1957) transforms the events of her long, illustrious career into an immensely readable story—a legacy-preserving exercise, for sure, yet judiciously polished and insightful, several notches above the fray of typical celebrity memoirs. The narrative unfolds through a series of lean chapters as she recounts the many career ascendency steps that led to her massively successful run on the Today Show and comparably disappointing stints as CBS Evening News anchor, talk show host, and Yahoo’s Global News Anchor. On the personal front, the author is candid in her recollections about her midlife adventures in the dating scene and deeply sorrowful and affecting regarding the experience of losing her husband to colon cancer as well as the deaths of other beloved family members, including her sister and parents. Throughout, Couric maintains a sharp yet cool-headed perspective on the broadcast news industry and its many outsized personalities and even how her celebrated role has diminished in recent years. “It’s AN ADJUSTMENT when the white-hot spotlight moves on,” she writes. “The ego gratification of being the It girl is intoxicating ( toxic being the root of the word). When that starts to fade, it takes some getting used to—at least it did for me.” Readers who can recall when network news coverage and morning shows were not only relevant, but powerfully influential forces will be particularly drawn to Couric’s insights as she tracks how the media has evolved over recent decades and reflects on the negative effects of the increasing shift away from reliable sources of informed news coverage. The author also discusses recent important cultural and social revolutions, casting light on issues of race and sexual orientation, sexism, and the predatory behavior that led to the #MeToo movement. In that vein, she expresses her disillusionment with former co-host and friend Matt Lauer.

Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-316-53586-1

Page Count: 528

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | WOMEN & FEMINISM | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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SEEN & HEARD

I'M GLAD MY MOM DIED

by Jennette McCurdy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2022

The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.

The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.

In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.

Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022

ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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clock This article was published more than  2 years ago

Here are the juiciest parts of Katie Couric’s new tell-all book

She dishes on matt lauer, martha stewart, ruth bader ginsburg, les moonves, louis c.k., jeff zucker, her former nanny and her own family.

Katie Couric, who became America’s morning-news sweetheart as the co-host of NBC’s “Today” show for 15 years, signaled to readers that her forthcoming book would be a warts-and-all account of her career by titling it “Going There.”

Over nearly 500 pages, the 64-year-old Couric definitely goes there. She relays details of private conversations with significant players from her time at NBC, CBS, CNN and Yahoo News, where she worked most recently as a highly paid “global anchor.” She even publishes what were clearly meant to be private messages from various TV big shots, including their candid reactions to longtime co-host Matt Lauer’s stunning 2017 termination for “inappropriate sexual behavior.”

The book hits shelves next Tuesday, but The Washington Post obtained a copy early.

While many A-listers come up for criticism in her telling, the biggest revelation in the book is one that arguably reflects poorly on the author herself: In a passage first leaked by the Daily Mail , Couric writes that she once selectively edited an interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg to “protect” the Supreme Court justice’s reputation.

Couric writes that Ginsburg, who died last year, told her during an interview for Yahoo in 2016 that professional football players such as Colin Kaepernick, who knelt during the national anthem to protest systemic racism, showed “contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life.” While Couric included some of Ginsburg’s criticism in the finished product, she decided to leave out that particular barb, concerned that it would besmirch the reputation of someone she was a “fan” of. In hindsight, she calls it a failure of her long effort to keep her personal feelings and politics “in check.”

“I lost a lot of sleep over that one and still wrestle with the decision I made,” she writes.

In the book’s prologue, Couric says that she intended to tell the full story of her life, beyond what her fans knew about her. The television business “made my dreams come true,” she writes. “But it is not the whole story, and it is not the whole me. The book is.”

She writes about having disordered eating during her teenage and early adult years, something she links to her mother’s unhealthy relationship with food. “Starve, cheat, binge, purge — the cycle would take years to break,” she writes.

Her attempt at radical transparency extends to her own family. She writes that much of her family “was blighted with racists,” including her Mississippi-born grandmother. She expresses remorse at the language and framing she used when interviewing Reginald Denny, a White truck driver who was attacked by a group of Black men during the Los Angeles riots in 1992, as well as the way the media covered the police beating of Rodney King that led to the unrest. “No one, myself included, was able to interrogate what any of this was actually about on a societal level,” she writes.

While taking out the family dirty laundry, she dishes on a live-in nanny who developed the “weird” habit of hugging her good night and eventually, as Couric saw it, “managed to grow deep, twisted roots into our family and my psyche” to the point of attempting to sabotage her marriage. ( Tracked down by the Daily Mail , the nanny described Couric as a slob who couldn’t function without her.)

Another stress point at home was her growing fame during her first marriage, to Jay Monahan, in the 1990s. She writes that her star turn on the “Today” show “took up residence in our marriage like an overbearing houseguest. … The bigger I got — the more I was photographed and splashed across magazine covers and gossiped about — the smaller he felt.” Monahan’s parents learned about his death from cancer in 1998 after being contacted by tabloid reporters. “I cannot put into words how that sickened me,” Couric writes.

Perhaps the most anticipated part of her book deals with her personal vantage on the toxic culture of broadcast news that would eventually spawn so many #MeToo scandals. She writes that she experienced sexism and inappropriate comments from male colleagues and managers throughout her career: A CNN executive, she wrote, said at a staff meeting in 1983 that Couric was successful “because of her determination, hard work, intelligence and breast size.” And CNN host Larry King made a “lunge” for her on a date in her late 20s. “The tongue. The hands,” she writes. “The whole scene was such a cliche, I began to laugh and gently pushed him away.” Couric writes that she told King she was looking for someone closer to her own age — he replied: “No problem. But when I like, I really like.” Couric “wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or a warning,” she writes. (They parted on good terms: “Every time we ran into each other in the years that followed, it gave us a big laugh.”)

Then there was Lauer, a colleague that Couric writes “exuded decency and kindness, on and off camera” (and was “less of a chauvinist” than his predecessor Bryant Gumbel, she writes more archly).

Yet rumors about Lauer’s behavior percolated in the newsroom. In one, Lauer allegedly sent inappropriate messages to the wrong producer, asking her “to wear that skirt that came off so easily or something to that effect,” Couric writes. But she concedes that she and her colleagues were all too inclined to look the other way. “The general attitude at the time was it’s none of your business,” Couric writes. “A don’t-ask-don’t-tell culture where anything goes, and everything did. Assuming Matt was having a consensual fling, I didn’t even consider talking to the young employee about it and embarrassing her.” (She later learned of a “secret office called ‘The Bunker’” that was allegedly used by an unidentified male anchor for sexual encounters.)

When reporters asked Couric in the fall of 2017 about Lauer’s conduct with women, “I took their calls and told them the truth — that it had been widely assumed Matt had a lot of problems in his marriage,” she writes. “I knew he was a player, but I didn’t know his extracurriculars were happening inside 30 Rock.”

The two had dinner together in early November 2017, a few weeks before the scandal broke, and Couric writes that Lauer mused that “this MeToo stuff feels like it’s getting kind of out of control. It feels like a witch hunt.” After the dinner, she sent her former colleague a joking message: “Omg what the hell did you put in my drink? Phenobarbital???? Thank you for being such a good friend. I treasure you.” Lauer replied: “The length of our friendship and the comfort that comes with that is more powerful than any drug in a drink!”

After his firing, Couric wondered, “Had Matt seen this up ahead — had he been fearful that the MeToo movement was coming for him next? … I imagined him sleepless, haggard, depressed … maybe worse.” She then sent him a message of support: “Matt, I am crushed. I love you and care about you deeply. I am here. Please let me know if you want to talk. There will be better days ahead.”

Now, she writes, she doubts they will ever speak again. “I know Matt thinks I betrayed him, and that makes me sad,” she ultimately concludes. “But he betrayed me, too, by how he behaved behind closed doors at the show we both cared about so much.”

(There’s another brush with pre-#MeToo infamy: Couric writes that comedian Louis C.K. asked her to do a cameo on his sitcom, “Louie,” that bore similarities to what two female comedians accused him of doing in their presence in real life. “In the scene he pitched, I’m on TV, reading the news, while Louie watches. And suddenly I break from the broadcast to speak to him directly: ‘Louie, just do it. You know you’re gonna do it. So just take off your pants and get started.’”)

Throughout, there are high-profile clashes and A-list smackdowns: Of Martha Stewart, she writes, it took her “a few years and some healthy humbling (prison will do that) to develop a sense of humor.” Television-producer ex-boyfriend Tom Werner was a “textbook narcissist.” She marvels at how another ex-boyfriend, who she said had at one point been engaged to conservative talk-show host Laura Ingraham, “could be attracted to two so radically different women.” CBS chief executive Les Moonves, later ousted from his high-paying perch in 2018 after accusations of sexual misconduct, is remembered as “a close-talker with bad breath.” At a deeply uncomfortable lasagna dinner at the home of investor Jeffrey Epstein (long before he was charged with sex trafficking and died by suicide), Couric’s boyfriend at the time pointed out how young the women staffing the event were.

And while tabloids have clucked over the book’s charge that Couric’s “Today” predecessor Deborah Norville alienated viewers with her “relentless perfection” (“I’m really too stunned and, frankly, hurt to comment,” Norville told the New York Post), Couric also calls her “stunning,” “whip-smart” and “incredibly hard-working.”

But many of the revelations concern her thoughts about her career — from her climb up the ladder to her disappointments at the top of her field. Couric reflects that it’s considered more acceptable for men than women to throw sharp elbows in the workplace and writes with some regret about being “way less welcoming” to a charismatic female correspondent: Ashleigh Banfield, a younger MSNBC and CNN journalist then considered a rising star.

She found the tables turned when she moved from morning fame on NBC’s “Today” to become anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” where she earned $15 million a year. Couric says she got a “chilly reception” from the cast of her new network’s flagship newsmagazine show “60 Minutes,” for which she also worked as a correspondent. And she claims top show producer Jeff Fager (who, like Moonves, was eventually ousted amid allegations of inappropriate behavior) made her life miserable.

She was insulted when, as her “CBS Evening News” ratings failed to maintain an early surge, Moonves suggested she leave the prime-time slot to host the network’s morning show, a competitor of “Today.” “I didn’t leave the morning show I helped make number one so I could go to the third-place morning show,” she says she told him.

(Another disappointment came after her 2011 departure from CBS, when Jeff Zucker — her former executive producer of “Today” and the short-lived syndicated talk show “Katie” — was angling for the top job at CNN and asked her to put in a good word for him. “This is really my last chance to have a big job like this,” she recalls Zucker telling her. “And, of course, if you want it, there will be a job for you too.” He got the big CNN job in late 2012, but Couric writes that she “never heard from him about that job” for her.)

“The fantasy that I would come in and miraculously put CBS in first place had faded,” she writes, arguing that she faced sabotage from within the network. “The situation was unwinnable — we were trying to bring change to a place that didn’t want to change,” she writes. “We’d thought we’d been greeted as liberators; instead, we got an insurgency.”

Katie Couric will appear in conversation with Kara Swisher (“'Going There’ Live”) at The Anthem in Washington, D.C., Sat. Oct 30, 7:30. Tickets $35.00-$95.00. More information here .

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It’s Official, I’m a Grandma! Meet My Grandson, Jay

“I’m going to try to enjoy every moment.”

I have a new screensaver. It’s my brand-new Grandson.

On Saturday at 8:23 a.m., I officially became a grandmother. My son-in-law Mark suggested Molner, Carrie, and I get to the hospital at 8:30 a.m., but it took Ellie less than an hour to push out the baby. (Special thanks to everyone at St. John’s hospital!) By the time we got outside the maternity wing, Mark had sent us a text saying, “IT’S A BOY!” They were getting Ellie ready for visitors and we sat in the waiting area like kids on Christmas morning. 

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, we came into the room. Ellie looked exhausted but beautiful, and Mark was sitting on a chair with his shirt off so he could have skin-to-skin contact with his new son: John Albert Dobrosky, who came in weighing 6 pounds 15 ounces and was 19-and-a-half inches long.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Katie Couric (@katiecouric)

The John is for all the Johns in Ellie’s life: her father, John Paul Monahan; her grandfather, John Martin Couric; her uncle, Johnny (I’ve called him that since we were little); and her stepfather, John Paul Molner. Her paternal grandfather was also John. The branches of our family are covered in J’s!! 

Albert is Mark’s beloved grandfather who died at 92 the year before Ellie and Mark were married . They will call their baby Jay, after Ellie’s father and my late husband , which is both moving and bittersweet. Major milestones remind me of everything Jay has missed. Graduations, weddings, and now this. He would be so thrilled to meet his namesake. Both he and Mark played lacrosse in college. In my mind’s eye, I can see them tossing the ball around with their sticks, teaching little Jay how to play the game in the park. 

Witnessing your baby have a baby is wild. Ellie had an easy pregnancy and took good care of herself. I know she’s going to be a wonderful mother, and I know Mark will be a parent who is an equal partner. Jay was like that. It makes all the difference in the world.

I am so excited to watch Baby Jay go through all the stages — smiling, crawling, walking, talking — and to see the world unfold through the eyes of a child. I’m going to try to enjoy every moment. It’s so true what they say: The days are long, but the years are short. As a grandparent, I’m hoping the years will be long! The “grand” in front of “mother” makes me keenly aware that time is precious. I can’t wait to take him to the beach, the library, get an ice cream cone, bring him to his first Broadway show. I’m going to spoil this kid rotten and not worry about it. We are going to have to make a lot of trips to the West Coast — but thank goodness for FaceTime. 

For now, I am Gogo. My sister’s nickname is Kiki, so I couldn’t choose that. I felt like everyone is Gigi — and while that was going to be my name, I decided on Gogo after a friend told me that was what she used. I also learned that’s what Babe Paley’s grandchildren called her. (Unfortunately, if you watched Capote vs. the Swans , she wasn’t a very good mother or grandmother!) Plus, it seemed fitting, because I’m like the Energizer Bunny, always on the go-go. I had a Lingua Franca sweater embroidered with “Gigi” but I changed the i’s to o’s, so for now, Gogo it is. But this boy can call me whatever he wants. 

Meanwhile, I’m sharing photos of the baby as a very modern baby announcement. But Ellie and Mark don’t want their baby to be featured on social media. I’m actually so proud of them for feeling that way. I’ve long worried about the impact of featuring children on social media platforms before they have a chance to develop a healthy sense of self. This little guy deserves to grow up in private. 

As Joni Mitchell sings, “The seasons, they go ‘round and ‘round and the painted ponies go up and down.” But the line that really gets me is “cartwheels turn to car wheels through the town.” No matter what stage you are in, life is full of joy and wonder. After Saturday morning, I have yet another reason to feel very, very lucky. 

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Katie Couric Is a Grandma! Daughter Ellie Welcomes First Baby, a Boy, with Husband Mark Dobrosky

"Mom and Dad are over the moon, I am thrilled to have my first grandchild," Couric wrote on Instagram as she shared the happy news of the baby's arrival

Erin Clack is a Staff Editor for PEOPLE. She has been writing about fashion, parenting and pop culture for more than 15 years.

Katie Couric has a new name — grandma!

The veteran journalist's daughter Ellie, 32, welcomed her first baby with husband Mark Dobrosky on Saturday. Couric announced the happy news on Instagram on Sunday, sharing a series of photos of the newborn along with his birth details and name, which has a touching significance.

"John Albert Dobrosky was born on his due date, Saturday, March 23rd at 8:23 am, just shy of seven pounds. He will be called Jay in honor of his maternal grandfather," she wrote, referring to her late husband and Ellie's father, Jay Monahan, who died in 1998 at age 42 from colon cancer.

"Mom and Dad are over the moon, I am thrilled to have my first grandchild, Carrie can’t wait to be a cool Aunt and Molner is enjoying handing out cigars. We feel so blessed. 💙🥰🍼👶🏻💙 We’ll have more tomorrow in Wake-Up Call ⏰❤️," Couric added, teasing more updates to come about the baby in her daily newsletter.

Couric's post included a photo of the proud parents posing with their tiny son in the hospital. Another shot showed Couric holding her grandson and making an exaggerated surprised face as the baby appeared to yawn.

 Katie Couric/Instagram

She also shared a photo of her daughter Carrie meeting her new nephew. Another snapshot showed Couric's husband, John Molner , holding a celebratory cigar as he stood next to Dobrosky.

Katie Couric/Instagram

In December, Couric announced that her daughter  Ellie was pregnant by sharing the moment she first learned that Ellie was expecting.

Along with Carrie, 28, Ellie  told her mom the news  before the trio attended a  Taylor Swift  Eras Tour show earlier this year.

Before heading to the concert, Ellie and Carrie participated in one of the tour’s most popular traditions,  bringing beaded friendship bracelets to trade  — and used the accessory to tell their mom that Ellie is pregnant.

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Couric posted a video of the moment, which appeared to be captured by Dobrosky, Ellie’s husband of two years.

In the sweet clip, Carrie handed her mom a bracelet and the former  Today  anchor thought out loud as she tried to decipher what it said (“brand, brandy, B, granny…”) before saying what the beads actually spell: “Granny to be.”

Still laughing at her attempts to decrypt the bracelet’s message, Couric’s face went blank as she realized what the message meant.

Then Ellie said, “I’m pregnant,” and her jaw dropped.

"You are?” Couric said, covering her mouth, seemingly in shock. “Wow.”

After the mom-to-be asked Couric if she is “freaked out,” the journalist said, “No,” and laughed again.

In the caption, Couric wrote that she has “been dying to tell” her followers the good news.

“This is what happens when you go to a @taylorswift concert last summer and forget your friendship bracelet and your daughters say, ‘Don’t worry, we made one for you!’” she wrote, adding the hashtags “#omg #omg #omg #omg #needmy🤓.”

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