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Cokie Roberts

Cokie Roberts died September 17, 2019, at age 75.


Cokie Roberts served as a congressional correspondent at NPR for more than 10 years. Later, she appeared as a commentator on Morning Edition. In addition to her work for NPR, Roberts was 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. In her more than forty years in broadcasting, she has won countless awards, including three Emmys. She was 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, wrote a weekly column syndicated in newspapers around the country by Universal Uclick. The Robertses also wrote From This Day Forward, an account of their more than 40-year marriage and other marriages in American history. The book immediately went onto The New York Times bestseller list, following Roberts' number one bestseller, We Are Our Mothers' Daughters, an account of women's roles and relationships throughout American history. Roberts's histories of women in America's founding era — Founding Mothers, published in 2004 and Ladies of Liberty in 2008 — also became instant bestsellers. Her most recent book, Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868,was published in 2015.

Cokie Roberts held more than twenty honorary degrees and served on the boards of several non-profit institutions and on the President's Commission on Service and Civic Participation. The Library of Congress named her a "Living Legend." She was the mother of two and grandmother of six.