In fact, there is not much unexpected here including the portrait of the young Katie as wildly ambitious and manipulative when she was desperately trying to make her dream “of becoming the next Barbara Walters” come true. Though a bit surprising, Couric, who in her prime was always seen as a feminist icon, often relied on relationships with important men to help her in her climb. According to Klein, she had affairs with both a married CNN executive who saved her from being fired a couple of times, and a media spokesman for Metro Dade Police Department who tipped her off on big stories when she was a TV reporter in Miami.
At The Today Show, Katie’s success was primarily engineered by another man, her whiz-kid producer Jeff Zucker, the now president of NBC. The biggest splash in her early career, the serendipitous White House interview with president George H.W. Bush, was among those orchestrated by Zucker. While conducting a live TV tour of the White House with Barbara Bush, the President joined in, probably expecting a few moments of genial chit-chat. Instead “Couric grilled him for nineteen minutes on topics from tax policy to Iran-Contra…Bush seemed frazzled.” Katie’s reputation was thereby established as someone who could handle both morning-TV fluff and more substantive journalism. What was not known at the time was the important role Zucker played; he remained outside parked in a satellite truck in the White House driveway, shouting questions in her ear piece.
Klein also describes Katie’s testy relationships with her Today co-hosts Bryant Gumbel, whom she practically drove off the air, and Matt Lauer, whose air time she tried to cut into, and her jealousy of news reader Ann Curry, whose assignments she restricted. For a long time on-air on Today she was perkiness personified and her popularity grew while off-screen she was dressing down the staff and making enemies of many of her colleagues. Enemies who told Klein, for example, that employees at NBC were so cynical about her lack of compassion for her husband Jay Monahan, who was dying of colon cancer, that they started betting on how long it would take her to capitalize on his death. According to one NBC reporter, “some said 72 hours, others just 24 hours.”
Eek. While the Couric camp might attempt to pick apart the book as anonymously sourced gossip -- and any journalism debate can certainly begin there -- Couric and NBC (and CBS, for that matter) never let that argument stop them from promoting books slandering Republicans like Reagan or Nixon. Paging Kitty Kelley, or Anthony Summers....
