2013-7th Annual Eugene J. McCarthy Lecture – Cokie Roberts
Cokie Roberts is a political commentator for ABC News, providing analysis for all network news programming. From 1996-2002 she and Sam Donaldson co-anchored the weekly ABC interview program This Week. Roberts also serves as Senior News Analyst for National Public Radio. In her more than forty years in broadcasting, she has won countless awards, including three Emmys. She has been inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame, and was cited by the American Women in Radio and Television as one of the fifty greatest women in the history of broadcasting.
In addition to her appearances on the airwaves, Roberts, along with her husband, Steven V. Roberts, writes a weekly column syndicated in newspapers around the country by United Media. The Roberts are also contributing editors to USA Weekend Magazine, and in 2011 they published Our Haggadah, Uniting Traditions for Interfaith Families. Their earlier collaboration, From this Day Forward, an account of their more than forty year marriage and other marriages in American history, immediately went onto The New York Times bestseller list. All of Cokie Roberts’s other books have also been best-sellers, including the number one bestseller, We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters, an account of women’s roles and relationships throughout American history. Her other bestselling books —Founding Mothers, published in 2004 and Ladies of Liberty in 2008– are histories of women in America’s founding era.
Cokie Roberts holds more than twenty-five honorary degrees, serves on the boards of several non-profit institutions and was on the President Bush’s Commission on Service and Civic Participation. In 2008 the Library of Congress named her a “Living Legend,” one of the very few Americans to have attained that honor. She is the mother of two and grandmother of six.