Background

Cokie was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the United States on December 27, 1943, into a political family of Hale Boggs and Lindy Boggs. Roberts’s elder sister, Barbara Sigmund, also went into politics, and served as the mayor of Princeton, New Jersey before her death from cancer. Roberts’s brother, Tom Boggs, works for a prestigious Washington, D.C., lobbying firm.

Education

Cokie Roberts attended the Academy of the Sacred Heart then she attended Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart. Finally, she graduated from Wellesley College with a political science degree in 1964.

Career

Roberts did not specifically set out to be a newswoman. She was working for a television station in Washington, D.C., when she married Steven Roberts, who was a journalist. Afterwards, her husband’s work took the couple to several different areas of the United States and the world. When Steven Roberts was required to travel to Athens, Greece, Cokie went with him — and served as the CBS News radio correspondent from that corner of the world. Her reports on a Greek coup, however, were considered sufficiently important to provide her with a nationwide television audience.

Shortly after she and her husband returned to the United States, Roberts began her stint with National Public Radio. NPR had more women in major broadcasting and managerial roles than most other radio or television news operations, partially because they could not at that time afford to offer the high salaries that male broadcasters demanded. Roberts — along with NPR colleagues Nina Totenberg and Linda Wertheimer — is thus considered a pioneer among women correspondents. She has covered political matters for most of her career — her family’s wide circle of political acquaintance helped her to get more information than the average political correspondent, and the knowledge of politics she gained while growing up coming constantly to her aid.

Roberts’s work for NPR led to television assignments for Public Broadcasting System shows such as The Lawmakers and The MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour. Roberts began serving as a television correspondent for ABC News in 1988; this in turn led to her becoming the first regular female panelist on ABC’s political commentary program This Week, which at the time was hosted by famed newsman David Brinkley. Cast into the fray of punditry and surrounded by Brinkley, Sam Donaldson, and George Will, Roberts elicited positive response from the show’s viewers. Yet, though Roberts spends an ever-increasing amount of time on television - even occasionally substituting for Nightline host Ted Koppel — she still finds time to provide occasional reports and commentary for NPR.

In 1998 Roberts’s first book-length work saw print. In We Are Our Mothers' Daughters, Roberts discusses her experiences and her relationships with other women in order to address the subject of the various roles women play during the course of their lives. She is also the author of the national bestseller Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation. The book, published in 2004, explores the lives of the women behind the men that wrote the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Along with her husband, Steven V. Roberts, a professor at The George Washington University and contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report, Ms. Roberts writes a weekly column syndicated by United Media in major newspapers around the country. Her op-ed columns have appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and she has also written for The New York Times Magazine, USA Weekend Magazine and The Atlantic. In February 2000, she published From This Day Forward, an account of her more-than-30-year marriage, as well as other marriages in American history. Cokie Roberts currently serves as a senior news analyst for NPR, where she was the congressional correspondent for more than ten years. In addition to her work for NPR, Ms. Roberts is a political commentator for ABC News, serving as an on-air analyst for the network.

Achievements

• Cokie Roberts is one of the most successful and well-known news correspondents in the United States. She first came to national attention as one of the voices of National Public Radio (NPR), where she began working in 1978. Talking about her lifetime achievements and awards, Cokie Roberts won Emmy Awards for Outstanding Live Coverage of a Current News Story – Long Form for ABC News: Inauguration 2009 (2009). Likewise, she won Emmy Awards for Outstanding News and Documentary Program Achievement – Programs & Segments for ABC 2000: The Millennium (1999). In 2008 was named a “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • Records of Our National Life: American History at the National Archives

    (This highly illustrated volume takes the reader on a jour...)

    2009
  • Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868

    (In this engrossing and informative companion to her New Y...)

    2015
  • Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation

    (Highlighting the female explorers, educators, writers, an...)

    2008
  • Founding Mothers: Remembering the Ladies

    (#1 New York Times bestselling author and celebrated journ...)

    2004
  • We Are Our Mothers' Daughters

    (From the much beloved Cokie Roberts comes a revised and e...)

    1998
  • From This Day Forward

    (After thirty years together, Cokie and Steve Roberts know...)

    2009
  • Our Haggadah: Uniting Traditions for Interfaith Families

    (New York Times bestsellers Cokie Roberts and Steven V. Ro...)

    2011
  • This Is NPR: The First Forty Years 2010

Politics

Though Roberts obtained a degree in political science from Wellesley College, she never wanted to become a politician herself.

Views

Quotations: “It is true that I am deeply admiring of politicians — of my parents and sister. But I am a more private person than that. I want to go home at night and not have the interruption of constituents who demand your time and have the right to demand your time. I know how hard that work is and how it never ends. I want my day to end.”

Membership

• member of executive committee

  Radio and TV Correspondents Association

  1980 - 1994

• U.S. Capitol Historical Society

Personality

Physical Characteristics: Cokie’s hair color is light brown and her eye color is blue.

Connections

Cokie Roberts married Steven V. Roberts on September 10, 1996. They have two children, Rebecca Roberts and Lee Roberts.

Father:

Hale Boggs

Mother:

Lindy Boggs

Spouse:

Steven V. Roberts

Daughter:

Rebecca Roberts

Son:

Lee Roberts

Sister:

Barbara Boggs Sigmund

Brother:

Thomas Hale Boggs Jr.

Friend:

Libby Miller