 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nicaraguan peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation with Steve Roberts and Rebecca Boggs Roberts about Steve's new book, Kauke, A Life Well-Lived. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Thursday, November 4th, at 1 p.m., Philip Bigler, the author of Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, will share the history of the tomb, which marks its 100th anniversary this year, and is America's most cherished and revered military shrine. And on Tuesday, November 16th, at 1 p.m., Gail Jessup White, a black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemming's family, will discuss her new book, Reclamation, which explores her journey to understand her heritage. Historian Annette Gordon-Reed will join the author in conversation. To many people, Kauke Roberts is most well known as a journalist, but she was also an advocate, best-selling author and historian. She had a long and devoted relationship with the National Archives. She worked tirelessly on behalf of our education and outreach activities. I'm so grateful to have had the privilege of working with her for 10 years and calling her friend. She spoke at many of our public events, including July 4th celebrations, and played a leading role in our commemoration of the Centennial of the 19th Amendment. Whenever Kauke and I walked through the rotunda of the National Archives, talk would turn to the murals there that depict the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The author of two books about women who helped shape our nation, Kauke always pointed out that there were no women depicted. On the night she would have received the National Archives Foundation's Records of Achievement Award in 2019. Images of Abigail Adams, Dolly Madison, Martha Washington, and Eliza Hamilton were projected onto the Constitution mural and tribute to her dedication to telling the stories of her nation's founding mothers. Kauke had an amazing career in public life, and in Steve Roberts' new book, we also learned about the generosity and inspirational qualities she demonstrated in her private life. Thank you, Steve, for giving us the chance to get to know Kauke a little better. Kauke Roberts was a long-time member of the National Archives Foundation. I'm pleased to introduce historian and journalist and Chair Emeritus of the National Archives Foundation, Alulia Bundles, who will share some thoughts about Kauke and the National Archives Foundation. Thank you, David. We at the National Archives Foundation are proud to partner with you to advance the work of the National Archives. Kauke Roberts, our board member, of course, was very committed to that work. She set the bar for all of us, with her deep knowledge of Congress and the workings of the federal government, with her personal diplomacy, her honesty, her ability to cut through the, shall we say, fog, her wicked critique of the high and mighty, her compassion for those who needed an advocate. She was grounded and unpretentious. She also could rise to the occasion to spar with the best of them. We miss her mightily, and we are very glad that Steve Roberts, the love of her life, is with us this evening to share his stories. Thank you, and now I will pass it back to the Archivist of the United States, who will introduce tonight's speakers. Thanks, Alulia. Steve Roberts has been a journalist for more than 50 years, including 25 years with The New York Times. Since 1991, he has taught journalism and politics at George Washington University, while serving as the Chief Political Analyst for ABC Radio and writing a syndicated newspaper column. Rebecca Boggs Roberts is curator of programming for the Planet Word Museum in Washington, D.C. She's the author of Suffragists in Washington, D.C., and co-author of the Suffragists Playbook. Now let's hear from Steve Roberts and Rebecca Boggs Roberts. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you all so much for having us. We are delighted to be here. We both really care about the archives. Mom was always involved in the archives. I'm involved now, and I think Dad has grown to appreciate the archives and the records they keep as he has started to do his own research for this book and others. Dad, you need to unmute yourself, but when you do that, congratulations on the book. You need to unmute yourself. Hi. Now can you get me? Yeah. All right, good. All right. So congratulations on the book. It came out yesterday, right? That's right. And you're right about my appreciation for the archives. And I'm a journalist. I don't do a lot of historic research, but pouring through the archives and your mother's archives, including many appearances you made right here for the National Archives was enormously helpful. You know, the book is lovely, and it tells all these stories. And for us in the family, it's so nice to have. What do you hope people outside the family get from it? Why did you write the book? Well, two reasons. You know, after mom died, I did a ulogy at the funeral, and I just told stories about her. And you remember a lot of laughter echoing through the cathedral and a lot of tears at the same time. And people seemed hungry for stories about her. And I just wanted to write more stories. But there was another factor too. The public cokey was pretty well known. We had known for many years, all of us in the family. You know, I traveled with her. People come up to her all the time and say, you're so important to me. You're such a role model. There were so many young women and girls throughout the country who heard her on radio, watched her on TV and said, I could be that smart. I could be that strong. And I could be me. I don't have to accept that, you know, what other people think of me and predict what other men think of me. And that was that enormously valuable impact that she had. But there was the private cokey too. The cokey lived the gospel. She was a very devout Catholic. She lived the admonition to be a good Christian every day. And she did something good for somebody else, almost every day, acts as generosity, friendship, charity. She was the first person that everybody's maternity wore. She was a baby freak, as you will know. She was the first person to offer to go with a friend who was facing a diagnosis of breast cancer, to go to their doctor's appointment. She was the first person to show up at the funerals of people's relatives. She just decided that every single day she was going to take time to be a good friend. And the public doesn't know that cokey. And, you know, not everybody can be a TV star. Everybody can be a good person. Everybody can learn something from the way she lived their life. And that's really the most important message of the book. Yeah. You know, I mean, I think that the idea that part of her public persona was very much herself. You know, her laugh and her sense of humor and her ability to skew her pomposity. And so I, all the time I get people say like, I feel like I knew your mom, right? I woke up with her on Monday mornings or she felt like someone I would want to be best friends with. Yeah. And because she was herself on air, she was that person off air too. I mean, maybe a little bit weirder. But, you know, this completely normal approachable person, including her name, right? I love that story of in early days at NPR when a foolish, foolish editor thought that cokey was a little too silly and preppy. Yes. Right. And it was Frank Mankiewicz. He's the head of NPR and he thought it was too cutesy, you know, not serious. We're serious people here at NPR. And of course, mom was so mischievous and devilish. And she said, okay, pal. And signed off one night as Mary, Martha, Kareen, Morrison, Claiborne, Boggs, Roberts, which is in fact her full name. Finally, Frank said, I give up. I surrender. Cokey will be. And it served her in very good stead because she was the only one. And she wasn't quite like Lady Gaga or Madonna, but people knew her just as cokey. And it was so approachable, although when she became a grandmother, of course, you had your three children, your brother had three. And people would say, well, what's your grandmother's name going to be? And she would say, Cokey. One cutesy nickname is quite enough. But, you know, when you talk about approachability, just that happened earlier today, I was doing a radio show in Southern California about the book. And a woman calls in and says, I always trusted Cokey. And yeah, there were a lot of guys who trusted her, a lot of guys who thought she was smart, a lot of guys who thought she was sexy. But it was women in particular. And she knew that she understood this. And when she started doing TV and radio, women would say, countless women would say, finally, someone who asked the questions, I would like it. Finally, someone who says what I'm thinking. Finally, someone who has lived the life I've lived and has that experience in that perspective. And I think that a big part of the influence she had was women finally saying, it's not just old white guys up there, someone who looks like me, thinks like me, talks like me. And as you point out, goes to the grocery like me, you know, mom did her own grocery shopping at the Safeway three blocks from the house. And people would stop her in the Safeway and say, Cokey Roberts in the Safeway doing your own shopping and say, who else is going to do my shop? Would you like to do it for me? She would but you know, she was she was down to earth that way. So you all met as teenagers in college. How much of the sort of fundamental Cokey did you recognize them? Yeah, I was one year younger than your twin boys are now. Just think about that. Yeah. And I knew, honestly, I did know pretty early that I was married to this extraordinary dating, knowing this extraordinary long before we're married. In addition, you know, the typical hormonal urges of teenagers, I never met anybody like this. I've met anybody who, you know, was was that knowledgeable and that self confident. Now, she she just had a an ability to make you feel comfortable to, you know, with all of her smarts. And I knew from the beginning that I was married. Why didn't you ask her on a second day? Well, I asked the second day wasn't the third day. It's true. I was such an idiot. In fact, you know, she asked me out. She was a performer, a singer like you were in college. And she asked me to the junior show at Wellesley fall of 1962. And I went and we had this really lavish date afterwards at the Howard Johnson's. I mean, nothing was too good for your mother. And and then I stopped calling. And fortunately, about six months later, we were both coming to Washington for a student political. We had met at the National Student Association that summer between our sophomore junior years. And I we were both due to come back to Washington. And we're going to share the same car. We're riding in the same car just accidentally, really. And I remember approaching the car and seeing her through the window in the backseat. And I said to myself, you idiot, this is the girl. And that weekend, we drove together to Washington. And we'll end up staying up all night talking in the house, you know, where you grew up, where you moved in when you were seven. And she was eight when she moved into it, you were seven when you moved into it. And that was the first time we could see a way forward. We were an interface couple. She was Catholic, I was Jewish. We're being told by everybody who cared about us, our parents, our friends, it was never going to work. But that weekend, we sort of talked our way through and started seeing dimly our way forward. And really, we were together from that weekend. What did you see? What was the way forward? It's a good question. The way forward was, it was addition and subtraction. The subtraction was take away the labels, take away the prejudices, take away the stereotypes, take away the assumptions that people were trying to impose on us. To say, just because you are of different religions, you can't possibly make it work. As we talked, as we thought, as we cried, as we struggled, not just that night, but for the next couple of years, we came to realize that the most important things were not theology and not the labels and not the differences. It was what we shared. It turns out that we were both deeply committed to our own traditions. She was a deeply faithful Catholic. I was not a practicing Jew, but I was deeply loyal from a tribal point of view. My grandfather's both been refugees, basically political and religious refugees from Eastern Europe. History and tribe had stamped me as Jewish. And I was deeply devoted to that tradition. And in some ways, the fact that we both were deeply, both so old-fashioned and both devoted tradition. This is the middle of the 60s when everybody was challenging every tradition. And yet we looked at each other and said, you too, you still believe, you still are loyal to where you came from and who your people are and what your traditions are. But it took us a long time to figure out that we shared so much more than the doctrinal differences. And eventually we figured it out. Figured it out, wrote a book about it, continued to counsel interfaith couples. I mean, you get asked about it weekly, don't you? I do. And I just the other day at one of these book events, someone said to me, a rabbi actually asked the question, I have so many of my parishioners who have children and interfaith marriages, what would you advise them? And I, similar to what I just said, that focus on the person. Look, I was not marrying a cardinal. I was not marrying a priest. I was not marrying a nun. I was marrying one gorgeous, brilliant, loving woman. And it took years for my parents to understand this, but your mother and your grandmother, when they put on a charm offensives, it was not a lot of defenses. And they decided that instead of chance, yeah, they were going to convince my father, who was very reluctant, or my father wrote me a five page single page spingles. And it took years explaining to me exactly why parents understand this, but your mother and your grandmother said, I will, when they put on a charm offensives, it was not a lot of difference in my own household. I understood years later, he was saying he feared that he would always be a stranger. But as we spent so much time just trying to convince him that, you know, I was, I was not making a mistake. I wrote him a letter back and I said, dad, you know, I understand everything you're saying, but there's one difference between us. I'm in love and you're not. And eventually he fell in love. Eventually he came to raise your mother at one point he said to me, you know, Steven, it would be so much easier to oppose this match. If it wasn't so obvious, she's the perfect girl for you. And I knew it was going to be okay. And so you got married in 1966. That was the circus, 1500 guests and a priest and a rabbi and the president of the United States. Welcome to the family. It's an intimate family gathering. And you moved to New York because you were on the city desk of the New York Times. Well, mom, well, years right. Yeah. And mom was already a TV star in a way. I mean, she was hosting her own show on the local NBC station. A lot of people don't realize this, but her first job at a college, she's worked for a small TV production company. And the woman who read it was the first of many TV producers to realize that the camera loved Koki Bugs. And they started this small show. It's called Meeting of the Minds. It was on NBC. In fact, in here in Washington, it was the lead in to meet the press. And mom was the host. And she, she's 22 years old. And it was a measure of life in 1966, 67 that we just assumed that my job would be more important. And we didn't even have a conversation. Maybe the fact that she was actually running her own TV show, maybe that was important. She moves to New York and she runs into a wall of discrimination. Now, this is a woman who wrote five national bestselling books. And she was told flat out by Newsweek magazine and many other people, we do not hire women to be writers. I think after those five bestsellers, she proved them wrong. Just saying, right? But at the time who's deeply depressing, and she tells this wonderful story, just to illustrate how deeply depressed she was and how frustrated how she could barely, how she could barely wake up and get to just get dressed. And one day she said, I have my pathetic, her words, pathetic little tasks that I would do every day just to get out of the house. And she had a wedding present that she wanted to return. And so she goes to this store on the east side of Manhattan called Yorg Jensen, a big fancy store. And as she told the story, she couldn't quite have the energy to get dressed. So she put on her coat over her nightgown and goes to the crosstown and goes to the store and she's standing there online. And to her horror realizes that the guy of the couple who is giving us the wedding present she's returning is standing on the line in front of her. Now, eight million people in New York City and this guy is standing in front of her. And she thinks, but it's the guy, he has no clue what the present is. So maybe I'm safe. And he gets to the front of the line, there's some question about what he's returning. He calls his wife says, Hey, guess who I ran into? His wife starts laughing, says put Coke on the phone. She says, you know, because she knew exactly what the present was that she what are the odds, right? So our friend Terry says to her, says to mom, no hard feelings here. He was a New York Times reporter. He was about to cover Governor Rockefeller swearing in in his new term. He says, come with me to the Rockefeller swearing. It's actually not far from here in Manhattan. So mom in her nightgown says, okay, Terry, and they show up and it's all of these hot TV lights and everybody's saying, ma'am, can we take your coat? I'm from the south. I'm always cold. I'll keep my coat. So she stays through the whole ceremony and then Terry is being very nice to her and says, well, how about I'll take you to lunch just to show no harm. And at that point, mom says, no, no, no, Terry, I'm going home. I'm not really sure. But you know, it was it was hard on her and and she was genuinely depressed. And it wasn't really till 11 years later, when we returned to Washington that she became a full time journalist. But that wasn't, I mean, she didn't take a big break between them, right? You all moved to LA, she produced a children's television show. We as a family together moved to Athens, Greece. And that's when she first kind of became a breaking news journalist. Tell that's true. She decided that, you know, she couldn't produce children shows in Greece. So she decided to try to hook up with one of the networks and had this agreement with CBS that maybe they'd use the phrase as a stringer as a part time reporter. They already had a reporter in Athens, but maybe they'd find out a little work for it. But they're only three months. And there's a coup in the island of Cyprus, part of my territory. And so every journalist from that part of the world flies to Cyprus about a day or two after the coup. And as a result of the coup back in Athens, the military government, there's a military government that starts crumbling. Now that was a much bigger story. You know, Greece's NATO country, the decline of the military government, and she was virtually the only English language reporter left back in Athens. So CBS cables her and says the Turks have, and then as a result of the Cyprus coup, the Turks invade Cyprus. And so that morning, two days after I left, she gets a cable from CBS saying the Turks have invaded Cyprus. Can you file a radio spot in 30 minutes? She had never done a radio spot in her life. She figures out how to do it because, you know, she was smart. And then the Greek government falls. And she's covering this whole story because CBS can't get anybody into the country because the airports have all closed. Now, I'm totally out of touch with it because I'm on the island of Cyprus. I'm on their fire. There's a war going on. If I could occasionally get a phone line, I had to talk to my editors in New York. I come home back eight days later to find I'm married to a veteran foreign correspondent. When I had left, she had not done a radio report in her life. Eight days later, she had been filing continuously. So, yes, she, that was really her first breakthrough. And we were there three and a half, four years? Three and a half, yeah. And then moved back to Washington, which was not mom's choice, it must be said. For someone who lobbied her children very hard to come back to Washington, she resented that move herself. But it worked with you. Well, it was because for a lot of reasons. This was where she had grown up. This is where she was handling Lindy Boggs' daughter. She was not as independent. Even though she had had that success with CBS, she was very nervous about entering the job market here in Washington. I mean, she was 33, turning 34 years old. She'd never been a full-time working journalist in her life. And we, she loved living abroad. And she kept saying, you know, I'm a really good foreign correspondent's wife. Let's go. And she was always more adventurous than I was. And New York Times wanted to send us to Bangkok. And she was all for it. And I said, I'm tired. I've been traveling for nine years and I got a chance to join the Washington Bureau. So we came home. And my first day here in Washington, I go to the Washington Bureau of the Times. I look around. I'm given a desk and there's a young woman sitting at the next desk. I don't recognize her. I say, hi, I'm Steve Roberts. She says, my name's Judy Miller. I said, I don't recognize your violin. Where did you use to work? She said, National Public Radio. And I said, what's that? Because it had been in existence for six years, but we had been abroad for four of those years. And she tells me and I said, wait, that's the perfect place for my wife to work. I just know it. What do I do? She's crying herself to sleep and Bethesda every night. And Judy says, call my friend Nina Totenberg, who of course, who many of our folks tuning in tonight know exactly who Nina Totenberg was then and is today, the Supreme Court correspondent of NPR. I never met her. I call her up and she says, I know who you are. I know who Cookie is. And bring me her resume tomorrow. And so I hurry over there the next day, meeting her on the street corner outside of the NPR. And back, this was the first time I had seen the old girls network at work where women at NPR had the ability and the impulse to help each other in the way men had always done this for each other. And Nina takes her resume and immediately starts pushing it through the NPR system. Linda Wertheimer is there and says, wait, I know who that is. I went to Wellesley with her. And the two of them put the hard press on and that's when NPR hired her. Do you think NPR was distinctive in its hiring of women in those days? Absolutely. Without a question. Now, Nina always said, because they paid so little. And that certainly was part of it. But there were two other reasons. You know, I worked three blocks away at the New York Times Bureau. There have been white male White House correspondence with the New York Times for 100 years. It was a deeply encrusted prejudice and assumption about what a White House correspondent looks like and sounds like. And it was a white guy, right? But for NPR, they were new. They were nimble. They could reinvent themselves in different ways. And so they didn't have anything like the same prejudices. But there's another interesting reason which the producer at NPR told me that, you know, on TV, it's easy to distinguish genders and it's easy to distinguish voices. But on radio, if you have a bunch of male voices, it's much harder if there's a conversation for the audience to know who was who. So that by putting women on the panels and in the conversations, people had a much better idea of the identity of each person who was talking. And so there was just from a production point of view, there was also that impulse to add women at NPR. And, you know, I mean, I feel like those years, the 80s, mainly in 90s, NPR was growing in scope and loyalty and reach and mom was falling in love with the medium of radio. And I think that kind of grew up together in some ways, you know? Sure. You know, she fell in love with radio as did you at another point in your life. She always loved radio because she felt it was a great storytellers medium and a great writers medium. TV, it's a cliche, but it's true. You're so overwhelmed by the visuals, by the images. You know, and any of us who have been on radio and TV, you know, you know this, I know this, if someone stops you and says, oh, gee, I saw you on TV and you say, oh, cool. And they'd say, yeah, I like your tie or you need a haircut or, you know, and if someone says, I heard you on radio, they quote back to you big chunks of what you said. There's an ability to make so much more of a sophisticated complex argument. First of all, you have more time, right? If you're on TV, you get a minute and a half. A spot on NPR will be three, four, five, six minutes. But also it's the nature of radio. There's only one sensory input. People listen to the words and as mom always said, they create the pictures in their head. And that's one of the reasons why she stayed loyal to NPR her whole life, even after she moved her base to ABC. She loved being on NPR every Monday morning, because she knew that she could make arguments and analysis there that she couldn't really even do on TV. You know, I think she was always a really good writer, but I think it makes you a better writer too, because you can't have a lot of dependent clauses. You can't lose your antecedent, right? Because they lose the thread if they can't go back a sentence and check. And so when mom started writing books and trying to bring history alive in this very vivid and approachable way, I think that radio training came through at all of those books. Absolutely, because she was such a clear writer and also such a passionate writer. There's a clear arc that runs through almost everything she did back and that was supporting, promoting, encouraging women in one form or another. So there's a direct line between that line of young women outside her office door seeking counsel and encouragement and her focus on women in history. But one of the reasons why she was so sensitive to that and interested in it, because she grew up with it, your grandmother, her mother, was the modern incarnation of Dolly Madison. Mom even made that comparison when she said, you know, my mother reminds me of Dolly Madison or the other way around because she saw right in front of her all these enormously talented and powerful and important women in Washington, whose influence derived from being the counselors and advisors of their husbands. Whether it was Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, Pauline Gore, the wife of a senator, the mother of a senator and vice president, she saw them as her mother's pals and she saw the influence that they had. And that made her, you know, Lady Bird Johnson was the modern equivalent of Abigail Halips in the same way. But of course, what happened to your grandmother when your grandfather Hale, Kokie's dad, was tragically killed in a plane crash, 1972. Suddenly, your grandmother runs for his seat and moves from backstage to center stage. And there's a wonderful story in the book where she calls her lifelong friend Lady Bird Johnson and says, Bird, I've just decided I'm going to run the Hale seat and I want you to know that before you read about the paper. And Mrs. Johnson says, why darling, Lindy, that's a wonderful idea. But how are you going to do it without a wife? So mom's father, my grandfather Hale Boggs was a member of Congress. My grandmother, Lindy Boggs was a member of Congress. My uncle Tommy Boggs, mom's brother ran for Congress and lost. My aunt Barbara Sigmund, Barbara Boggs Sigmund lost for Congress, but was mayor, elected mayor of the town of Princeton. Do you think mom ever regretted not running for office? Yes. And she was, she described herself as semi-guilty. I think, yeah, whatever that means. I think if she'd married someone else, I mean, she always said I became a journalist because I married one. And she said, you know, Stephen was going to be a journalist from the time he was 12, which is true. And that once we were committed to each other, politics was off the table. I couldn't run for office. I was married to a journalist. I think she always felt that journalism quite rightly was in fact a former public service. But it wasn't the kind of direct advocacy that she always really wanted to do. Now, she never did run for office, never became a political partisan. But she made a very conscious decision at one point in her life to retire from the anchor desk at ABC. She was running the Sunday show for six years. She left that show for a lot of reasons. Maybe the single biggest reason was that she really did want to be an advocate for causes she cared about. And again, this bright line that runs everything she did. The woman who wrote these bestselling books about women in history also wanted to be an advocate for women and children. And she joined the board of a wonderful organization called Save the Children. She traveled the world advocating for women and children, learning about their programs, spokesmen for their causes. And she was always particularly committed to the notion of keeping girls in school in developing countries. She felt this was always the key if they put off getting married. They developed a marketable skill. They were independent people. They had an economic basis. Just everything, everything good flowed from keeping girls in school. And I remember once, you know, she went to Malawi to open a school that saved the children and helped finance. And she did this all over the world because, you know, she just believed so deeply. You know, her friend Diane Sawyer, former ABC star and also a graduate of Wellesley said, once said, I court her in the book. I think Koki believed women would save the planet. And that's right. She did believe that. Of course, did it entirely in her own way. Actually, it's one of my favorite memories. I ended up going to Vietnam with mom on a Save the Children trip. It was, I finished grad school and was about to start a new job and had this sort of unusual time when I could go halfway around the world. And we took these terrifying vans up and up and up and up almost to the Laotian border to a Hamong village where there was a Save the Children funded school. And you just can't imagine how remote this was. And it was really muddy. So you're on a steep hill in the middle of nowhere in ankle deep mud. And the rest of us are all in, you know, athleisure and sensible shoes. Mom's in a linen pencil skirt and little strappy sandals. And is picking her way through the mud of this Hamong village. And absolutely, you know, joining in the classes and having her picture taken with all the girls and just couldn't be more enthusiastic or more on task. But she was not going to wear ugly clothes while she did. And I think that was the time when, because she was so muddy, the Carolyn Miles who was on the trip tells the story that she started jumping up and down to get the mud off her shoe. And the little kids thought this is about the funniest thing they've ever seen this crazy American lady jumping up and down. So she kept doing it. She kept jumping up and down. The kids kept laughing. But yeah, some of my favorite images and there are a couple of them in the book of her and her affection and her joy at being there with these kids is just so tangible. It just comes right through. Yeah. You know, we've talked a lot about successes and happy times and the joy that mom was so capable of and capable of spreading. But her life was certainly not without hardship. Her father died young and in a very difficult, hard way. He was lost in a plane crash. Her very beloved sister was the age I am now when she died. And you were there for all of that. Tell us a little bit about mom weathering losses. Well, it's true, you know, her dad disappeared, you know, in a plane crash. And I don't think she ever fully got over it. She was the baby. She was his favorite. I think she deeply mourned the fact that, you know, you were two years old. Your brother was four when your grandfather died and you have no memory of him. And that pained her always that not only that you wouldn't know him, but he wouldn't know you. And I also think that I thought a lot about this. I think that she had pained her not out of pride so much, but I think he she knew that he would be really proud of her, you know, because he spent his life devoted to the US Congress. He was a member of Congress for 30 years. He was the majority leader when he was killed. He probably would have been speaker if he had lived. And she revered the Congress. She was a correspondent there, but it was more than just reporting about Congress. She was on the, you know, not only on the National Archives Board, but on the Congressional Historical Society. She she was deeply devoted to the respecting the institution. You know, she and I covered Congress together for eight most of eight years from 78 to 86. I was at the New York Times then and she was an NPR and would commute together would have lunch together cover the same stories. And when we would leave at night in those old days, you could, if you were a reporter, you could park your car right on the ground for the Capitol and we would go to our car and she never failed to do this. She'd look up at the dump and if it was night, it would be lit up. And she would just say, isn't that beautiful? And she didn't just mean it was beautiful because of the site. It was because of what it symbolized. So I think she really deeply regretted it more than the fact. And then her father's death, it was so, as you say, it was so odd because he was lost in a plane crash and the body was never found. The plane was never found. Wreckage disappeared. We think it probably sank into a Prince William sound, but she had this, she would say this, and it's quoted, I quoted in the book, now she had this absolutely strange impulse that maybe someday he'd come back. And of course we lived in the house that she grew up in. So she said for years, I couldn't bear to change the wallpaper in the kitchen because I had this fear that Paw Paw, as we called them, Paw Paw would come back somehow. And if the wallpaper was different in the kitchen, you'd think they were strangers living in the house. I mean, that's borderline weird, right? It was really ugly wallpaper. Yeah, really ugly wallpaper. So it was very emotional. Her sister, some ways it was even more, I mean, if her sister was only 51, as they say, say how exactly well you are now. You of course know the story about very well, you were an undergraduate at Princeton when Barbara was the mayor of Princeton and you helped nurse her through her last year. She died during your junior year in college. And in her last year, as her cancer took hold, you were a wonderful caretaker for mom would, you know, get there as much as she could. And the night Barbara died, she held her in her arms after she died and sang to her in the middle of the night till dawn broke. And she had to deal with the doings of death. But she and I don't think she ever got over her sister's death either. And she once wrote about this, didn't do it very often, but she once wrote about this in a little note she wrote for a Wellesley book, you know, that classes publish, you know, we're members of the class will write little memories. And she writes in this, in this book, it never occurred to me that I wouldn't grow older as my sister. And I always thought I always pictured us sitting side by side on these rocking chairs and some porch somewhere. And she said that image of Barbara's empty chair, you know, haunts me. And it was more than that. But she said, you know, as the younger sister, I always went to Barbara, if I had a question, what really happened? She said, Barbara was part of my memory. She was part of my identity. And when you lose someone like that, you lose part of yourself, you lose part of your own memory, you don't have anybody to go to, to ask questions. And she and Barbara shared a view of the world, they had very little tolerance for male pomposity, including in their husbands, by the way. But also kind of strange things people did. And mom tells a story about one day reading a story about elderly women in their fifties, trying to get pregnant through IVF. And she just thought that was the kookiest thing she could imagine. And she literally picks up the phone to call her sister, to have a laugh over it. And as she's dialing her number, realizes she's not there. So, yes, her life was definitely marred by those two tragic losses. I will say, and I don't know if it was because of those losses, but mom was really good at death. That's a strange thing to say. But, you know, not only did she advocate for doctors, you know, not being, not acting like gods and helping people through a good death and, you know, making sure that her mother, who was 97, was able to be home and surrounded by everyone she loved. But also, she is why, mom is why I don't let a friend go to the funeral home to pick out a casket alone. She was always the one who managed the details of things, told people what they needed to know, made sure those awful, awful errands were okay, and that she was by someone's side. She had a couple of things that, I mean, she was an incredibly devoted friend. But there were a couple of things that she would always make sure she was there for, babies, oncology, and funerals. Absolutely. And her dear friend, Nina Totenberg, tells a story. It's in the book. Nina married a much older man, Floyd Haskell, the former US senator, who's 26 years older than Nina. She always knew the odds were that she would have to bury him. And he struggled through a number of illnesses. Mom went with Nina to all of the appointments with the doctors, all through Floyd's illnesses. He had fallen, hit his head. And she was the one, she always said, when you're in those situations, you don't, you're not thinking clearly. You need someone with you to take notes and ask questions. And then Floyd died, and he died in Maine. And they had to ship his body back to Washington with enormously complex and traumatic different circumstances. And Nina said, direct quote, cokey managed Floyd's death, and she just took it over. And then finally, after helping you get him buried at Arlington and all these things that she did, it came to picking out a casket. And Nina tells the story, tells in the book, that they're looking at these caskets. And Nina's this white faced, obsequious character, the funeral home, is trying to sell her a more expensive version. And she says to her, Ms. Totenberg, your husband was a very tall man. So he'd be more comfortable in this casket. And Nina and cokey look at each other and burst out laughing. Now, you got to be, as Nina said, you got to be a pretty darn good friend to share a laugh over your husband's casket, but that's exactly what they did. And she was there, she was there for funerals. Here's another story that a friend of hers tells, an African American woman's brother died. And cokey had been a counselor to this young woman taking care of a child who was not her own. And trying to work, trying to go through college, cokey was there every step of the way counseling her. And then Sonya's brother dies. And there's a funeral at a big downtown black church in Washington. Sonya tells the, describes the scene that middle of the day in in walks, cokey, she's the only white person in the church. She walks down the aisle, everybody's looking at her. She walks down the aisle, comes to the family in the front and embraces Sonya's mother. Sonya said it was like my two moms embracing and she was never afraid of it. She was never, she never flinched from those tragic moments because she knew that people needed someone at their side of those moments. We've got a couple of questions from the audience. Somebody asks, where did cokey get all that joy and all that selflessness? Good question. I try and to answer that question in the book. A couple of the answers, one was her faith. She lived the gospel. You'd trace her generosity of spirit directly to her religious training by the nuns of the sacred heart. And she believed what she was told as a young girl in catechism class. Every person is fashioned in the image and likeness of God. I'm not going to get the quote right, but she believed that and she lived it. I think her faith was very important. And the nuns hammered home to her the adage to whom much is given, much is expected. And she absolutely embraced that, lived it and practiced it. And I think some of it came from her mother, who was very much the same way, who set a great role model for her. Cokey always said, mothers of my mother's generation were often guilt inculcators. My mom was the great guilt eraser. She always said, you're going to be okay. You know, you can do all of these things. I think also another very important element was her sense of continuity with women. She was this fascinating combination of radical and traditionalist at the same time. No one fought harder for women's rights. No one promoted women more ferociously at ABC or anywhere ever she was. And yet she always said, no matter what we do, no matter how far we come, no matter how visible and celebrated we are and how successful professionally, we cannot as women forget who we really are and what our historic missions have always been to be the nurturers and the caretakers and the mothers. And she had a great sense of that continuity. And I think that was part of it too, that she wanted women to understand that you could be both, you could be both an enormous professional success, but don't forget what the essence, the basic nature we have as women. And in terms of that joy, I would also add, first of all, she had a wonderful group of friends. She was a very good friend, but also, you know, absorbed the support and, you know, camaraderie of wonderful, wonderful friends. And also a wicked sense of humor, right? So I think that that ability to see the strange and absurd in almost every situation keeps that true selflessness and decency and desire to be good from tipping on into sort of deadly earnest. Because while she was doing all of that, she was also poking fun of herself and everybody else. Oh, absolutely. And you, mainly. And me, mainly. Absolutely. You know, we did a book about our interfaith marriage many years ago. And we originally thought that we would write it in one voice and we couldn't do it because we disagreed so much. And so we wound up doing it in dialogue form and we would tape, you know, talking with tape recorder. And I would tell stories like, Steven, that's not how it happened. And we kept that all in the book because it was so typical of her. And she did not rest easily with male pomposity, as you say, particularly her husbands. And I learned that. And one of the moments I learned this, we had written, she had written many years before, because she joyfully, even as a devout Catholic joyfully embraced my Jewish heritage. And, in fact, my mother often said the first Passover satyr she ever went to, my Jewish mother, was at her Catholic daughter-in-law's house. And so Koki decided she was going to write a Haggadah. This is the book that the Passover service is written in the prayers, the stories, the symbols are all contained in this book. And that's how you conduct the service by using this book. So she decided, of course, she was going to be serious about this. She was going to write her own Passover Haggadah because none of the ones she sampled were good. Thousands of years of tradition, unacceptable. Thousands of years. She was going to write her own. And because she wanted one that was crafted with an eye toward our interface marriage. Anyway, she writes one. We use it in the family, as you well know, for many, many years, sanctified by wine stains and food stains. And then it was just on minimum graph paper. And then people after 25 years republished it. But still, it was just in the family. And some editors, Jewish Book World, hear about this and say, well, you should really publish this as a book. So great, we decide that's a good idea. So we start, we start editing. And I start reading it. And I think, oh, this could use some freshening. And she's furious. I mean, absolutely furious. And she says, you cannot change a word. This is sacred text. I said, I did not stay happily married to your mother for 53 years, ignoring her at those moments of extreme adamancy. So yes, darling, whatever you say, dear, then she starts editing. And I said, we're way toky. You said I couldn't change a word. And she said, that's right, Steven. I said, you couldn't change a word. But because I wrote it, I can change anything I want. Very typical. And we came to a detente, and we both edited it. But, you know, she laid down the law. But with a smoke. And that laugh back, that laugh, I can tell you how many people I talked to said that the best part about listening to her on television was her laugh. And there was one writer who really understood her pretty well in magazines, the profile said, watching Koki on television, you think fun is about to break out somewhere. Someone in the audience has asked, what was Koki's favorite job? Mother. I mean, without question, right? Without question. I mean, grandmother, but yeah. Maybe grandmother. Absolutely. She says, you know, from the time, I can tell you, from the, no, maybe 10, 15 minutes into our marriage, she started loving for maybe, took a couple of years. But she loved being a mother and she loved being a grandmother. And I think she would say that you asked her that question. That's exactly the same answer she would give. I will say you asked about regrets. And, you know, when she died, her oldest grandchild was 18. You know, your boys were still in high school and one still is. And I think her deepest regret as the illness took hold and as she could see her mortality becoming more and more tangible was not being able to see the grandkids grow up. That was by far her single biggest regret because she loved being a mother and grandmother. So when she would travel with him, you know this, she took one of your boys to Maine once and he's never gotten over it. One of your twin boys who now, you know, was 20 in college, but she made him carry home live lobsters. The whole thing so wacky. He was like 14 and she called him up one day and said, I have to be in Maine for 24 hours, come with me, which was classic grandma Koki, right? Who knows where she was going or why she had to be in Maine for 24 hours, but she was going to be bored without company. So she called up teenage grandson and set up on a plane with me and he, you know, trailed her to whatever events and made all the polite noises that, you know, the reception she had to attend. And then it was time to go home. She bought a box of live lobsters on his lap and told him it was his job to take care of her. She loved traveling with the grandkids. And, you know, she took your every one of them to the White House Christmas party one year or another and took your youngest Roland to Maine again to Maine. And where you got to meet President Bush 41, just a month or two before he died. So she loved showing them off, but she loved just being with them. You know, her youngest grandchild, you know, your niece, Cecilia, when we were at the beach altogether or a beach house in South Carolina, they had a deal where they would watch the big red ball and they would both get up really early and watch the sun come up out of the ocean together, the big red ball. You know, she found some connection with these one of them separately. Yeah. No, I don't think there's any risk that they won't remember her well and funny. We are almost out of time, Dad, but I want to just give you one chance to sort of say what you hope people will take from this book and encourage them to buy it. I will encourage them to buy it on your behalf. Well, it's really very simple. As I said earlier, not everybody can be the public cokey. Not everybody can be famous. Not everybody can be recognized in the grocery store in the airport. Everybody can be a good person. Everybody can learn something from her. And one of her friends said to me, one of her best friends, you know, I think about cokey, I'm not going to get one of those bracelets that says WWJD. What would Jesus do? I'm going to get one that says WWCD. What would cokey do? In fact, there's a hashtag now, WWCD, that I know several of my former students are circulating. And the story that ends the book, as I was writing this book about a year after mom died, my younger brother Glenn died. And I knew he was fading and phone rang at six o'clock in the morning was my sister-in-law saying we lost him overnight. But now you can go back to bed. And I sat there literally with the phone in my hand saying to myself, what would cokey do? And I knew I got up, got dressed and started driving to my brother's house, which is about 15 minutes away. I called my sister. And I tell her that I'm going over there now because that's what cokey would want me to do. And that's what cokey would have done. And she said, Stephen, you have it wrong. Cokey would have been there last night sleeping on Glenn's couch. So later in the day, I talked to your brother and I tell him this story and he says, dad, you're both wrong. Mom would have been there the last three nights sleeping on the couch. Well, what would cokey do? If you just read this book and ask that question, you'll learn something wonderful. I agree. Thank you for writing it. Thank you for joining me for the last hour. And thank you everyone in the audience. And thank you to the Archives for having us.