Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR

by Lisa Napoli

Overview

A group biography of four beloved women who fought sexism, covered decades of American news, and whose voices defined NPR

In the years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, women in the workplace still found themselves relegated to secretarial positions or locked out of jobs entirely. This was especially true in the news business, a backwater of male chauvinism where a woman might be lucky to get a foothold on the “women’s pages.” But when a pioneering nonprofit called National Public Radio came along in the 1970s, and the door to serious journalism opened a crack, four remarkable women came along and blew it off the hinges.
Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie is journalist Lisa Napoli’s captivating account of these four women, their deep and enduring friendships, and the trail they blazed to becoming icons. They had radically different stories. Cokie Roberts was born into a political dynasty, roamed the halls of Congress as a child, and felt a tug toward public service. Susan Stamberg, who had lived in India with her husband who worked for the State Department, was the first woman to anchor a nightly news program and pressed for accommodations to balance work and home life. Linda Wertheimer, the daughter of shopkeepers in New Mexico, fought her way to a scholarship and a spot on-air. And Nina Totenberg, the network's legal affairs correspondent, invented a new way to cover the Supreme Court. Based on extensive interviews and calling on the author’s deep connections in news and public radio, Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie will be as beguiling and sharp as its formidable subjects.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781419750403
Publisher:	Abrams Press
Publication date:	04/13/2021
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	199,755
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Lisa Napoli has had a long career in print, radio, TV, and online journalism. She has worked at the New York Times, Marketplace, MSNBC, and KCRW. She is the author of three previous books, Radio Shangri-La, Ray & Joan, and Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News. She lives in Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Author's Note xi

Prologue: Living Legend 1

Chapter 1 Susan 11

Chapter 2 "…and sex" 26

Chapter 3 "The airwaves belong to all the people" 37

Chapter 4 Linda 48

Chapter 5 Purposes 66

Chapter 6 Nina 75

Chapter 7 Ms. 90

Chapter 8 Scoop 101

Chapter 9 Cokie 113

Chapter 10 "Not even slightly a feminist" 144

Chapter 11 Woman, Ascendant 151

Chapter 12 Transition 161

Chapter 13 Frank 178

Chapter 14 Star Wars 197

Chapter 15 The Drive to Survive 218

Epilogue: Hollywood Walk of Fame 245

Acknowledgments 279

Timeline 283

Notes 287

Methodology and Bibliography 323

Index 329

Editorial Reviews

"NPR gave a voice to women in news before many other news outlets, and NPR's founding mothers used their powerful voices to tell the stories that explained and changed people's lives. Lisa Napoli impressively chronicles how these four pioneers paved the way for women journalists everywhere."

author of The Good Girls Revolt - Lynn Povich

Public radio fans will treasure this book.

Brian Stelter

Lisa Napoli’s can’t-miss account of four female journalistic titans who banded together in the nonprofit radio organization’s early days.”

Harper's Bazaar

Napoli chronicles not just the camaraderie of Stamberg, Wertheimer, Totenberg and Roberts, but their commitment to help the careers of younger women who aspired to follow them. The founding mothers, in word and deed, offer a powerful lesson on what can happen when we carry as we climb.

The Washington Post

"Lisa Napoli's Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie is an intimate and beautifully told tale of the extraordinary coming together of four women who would help shape a network, the news business, and each other's lives. I feel immensely grateful to these women for all they have done for NPR and for women in journalism and also incredibly proud to work alongside them."

Stacey Vanek Smith

"[Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie] illuminates the terrifying, thrilling energy of NPR as start-up....The book is a lesson in how the fringe project of one generation becomes the mainstream of the next....Napoli portrays the network’s endearingly experimental, chaotic beginning."

The New York Times Book Review

Histories, biographies, and behind-the-scenes narratives about the news biz typically idolize swaggering, chain-smoking, tough-talking dudes who tower over testimonies with testosterone-infused personalities. But with Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie, Napoli honors not the dog-eat-dog variety of journalist, but the fortitude of sisterhood, of women supporting each other.”

Oprah Daily

04/01/2021

Journalist and author Napoli (Up All Night) weaves a fascinating, highly readable account of the women of National Public Radio. Written to coincide with the 50th anniversary of NPR's launch, this book is however much more than the group biography its title proclaims it to be. Veteran and pioneering journalists Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer, Nina Totenberg, and Cokie Roberts are the central players in the narrative, but this book also presents a nostalgic retrospective of the major political, social, and cultural events that helped shape that alternative media. While telling the story of both NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Napoli traces the career paths of these four women against the backdrop of key historical events: the civil rights movement, the idealism of the Great Society, the emergence of Ms. magazine, and the heady days of feminist activism. Readers are left with inspiring insights into the pathbreaking work of these four women, but more importantly with a sense of how the status of some women and the role of the media have both changed in the last 50 years. VERDICT Readers interested in feminism, women's history, and biography will be rewarded with a great story that deserves to be widely known.—Marie M. Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ

Library Journal

2021-01-27
How four of the most important women journalists of the past five decades ended up together at the then-fledgling National Public Radio.

In this natural follow-up to Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News (2020), Napoli narrates the origin stories of NPR’s female journalistic superheroes: Susan Stamberg and Linda Wertheimer, who launched the network’s groundbreaking, signature show All Things Considered; preeminent legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg, an expert on the Supreme Court; and pioneering political journalist Cokie Roberts. Though their early paths differed, they joined forces at NPR, overqualified and underpaid due to the widespread gender discrimination of the day. At the time, writes the author, “there were no jobs for women or the company already ‘had its woman.’…Even women with degrees from elite schools, it seemed, attended secretarial courses after graduation in order to equip themselves for the working world.” The quartet banded together (their area of the newsroom was nicknamed the “Fallopian Jungle”) to push for change for women and minorities. “Regarding hiring and union matters and management issues,” writes Napoli, “they did not hold back….They weren’t women in power—though, had they wished, they could likely have seized it—they were women of power.” Though they sound like journalism’s Justice League, the author doesn’t provide adequate documentation of them springing into action together, and she dwells more on their struggles than their successes. She wraps up the primary narrative with NPR’s near bankruptcy in the 1980s even though the “founding mothers” had little to do with either causing or solving the network’s financial woes. In a history filled with so many powerful moments and fascinating details about journalism, perseverance, and gender bias, Napoli could have chosen a higher note for her conclusion.

A flawed yet well-researched deep dive into the careers of the journalists who helped make NPR a household name.

Kirkus Reviews