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The High-Stakes Story
Say this about Diane Sawyer: After 31 years as a broadcaster, she's nowhere close to coasting. In the past year, she scored coups for ABC News by interviewing leaders of Iran, Syria and North Korea. She was not always treated kindly. In Iran crowds chanted, "Death to America," and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told her she should stick to stories about love and family. Sawyer never missed a beat. Which is pretty much the way it's been since she became a TV journalist for CBS News, after an eight-year stint working on President Richard Nixon's staff. Sawyer, 61, was the first woman reporter and coanchor on 60 Minutes, and now, as a host of both Good Morning America and Primetime, she gets up at 4 a.m. and operates on next to no sleep during the week. (On the weekend, it's a different story. Sawyer confesses that she's been known to "go down" for 17 hours at a stretch.)
We caught up with the newscaster in her Midtown Manhattan office, which is filled with orchids, Emmys and other awards too numerous to count. She talked about the danger of terrorists who could gain access to nuclear devices yet said she still believes that people can work together to resolve their differences. She's in love with both her job and her husband, director Mike Nichols, whom she married at the age of 42, and says she's convinced that age 60 is much more interesting than 40.RD: You recently reported from three countries that are hostile to America. What prompted you to go on this mission?
Sawyer: I believe people are starved to learn not just about our friends but our enemies too. So at GMA we decided we would go to the places least known but most central to America's next decade. We know that it's just no longer possible to live in this world and not know more about Islam and the difference between Syria and Iran. North Korea is fascinating because it's inaccessible and access to the average North Korean is almost impossible. Still, we know we didn't see everything. We don't know the whole story.
RD: Did North Korea feel like the nightmare that George Orwell wrote about in 1984, with Big Brother controlling everything?
Sawyer: It's hard to believe that in this day of Internet access, there is a country in which kids studying to be scientists have no idea what Google is. You have passionate students of culture and politics who have no prospect of leaving the country.
RD: Has anything changed in your life that has made you go after these high-stakes interviews more aggressively?
Sawyer: I've always done it. I did the big Saddam interview in 1990 when he came out of hiding. I did the first American TV interview with the head of the KGB. I went to Siberia to the biochemical weapons factory.
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