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This is fresh air.
I'm dave davies.
If you're a regular npr listener, you may already know that public radio lost one of its iconic figures last week with the death of susan stamberg.
A host of all things considered in the network's formative years, she was eighty seven.
Stamberg wasn't just an influential voice on public radio.
She was the first woman to anchor a nightly national news program when she took the host's chair in 1972.
Her work has been honored with an Edward R Murrow Award, induction into the National Radio Hall of Fame and, in 2020, her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Today we're going to listen to excerpts of two of Terry Gross' interviews with Susan Stamberg, and another with Stamberg and Bill Seemering, the creator of All Things Considered, and for nine years the station manager at WHYY, where our show is produced.
Susan Stanberg grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and attended Barnard College.
She broke into journalism as an editorial assistant at The New Republic and became a producer at station WAMU in Washington before being hired at NPR.
She was a production assistant when All Things Considered was launched, but soon moved into the anchor's chair and became one of the network's most recognized voices.
She was known for her incisive questions, as well as her personal warmth and versatility, handling topics from international crises to her mother's cranberry relish recipe, which she shared for years around Thanksgiving.
She was also a distinguished public radio innovator.
As the first host of Weekend Edition Sunday, she introduced listeners to The Puzzle with Will Shorts and two wisecracking auto mechanics, Tom and Ray Maliazzi, who themselves became public radio icons.
After Weekend Edition, Stanberg became a special correspondent for the network, focusing on cultural issues.
She retired just last September.
Terry first spoke to Susan Stanberg in 1982 about her book Every Night at Five about all things considered and her decade on the air.
When you started out on all things considered, it still wasn't really accepted.
I think that women could be in that authoritative position.
A lot of people used to believe that no one would trust a woman reading the news, let alone interviewing newsmakers.
Did you have resistance either from within or from the listeners?
I tell you, Bill Seymour, your station manager, to whom my book is dedicated, by the way an extraordinary human being and a wonderful broadcaster, was telling me that apparently there was quite a bit of resistance at the beginning.
They very kindly protected me from that.
Maybe that's good management.
I don't know.
I didn't hear about it.
And probably if I'd heard it...
It would have shaken my confidence a lot and upset me greatly and changed in some way the way I broadcast.
The objection in the beginning was, you don't sound like CBS, you new network.
And his point was, that's right, because there is a CBS.
We don't need to sound like that.
We need to sound like real people.
And some of us are women.
They're real people too.
And they can certainly present information in a reliable and authoritative way.
You say in your book that you try to find the novel within the new story.
I don't mean the new, but like the literary novel.
What do you mean by that?
Well, it's the old English major in me.
I don't know, maybe it's fancier than I can explain or analyze to you, but I come to news from a background in the arts, in the humanities.
I still sketch for relaxation and I still play the piano.
And what I really love to do is read novels.
It's what I did in college as an English major.
And I come to events of life with that, against that background.
I'm not a journalist in that formal way, and I've never had any fancy journalistic training.
So what I want to know when hostages are taken is what difference does it make to the life of Mrs Moorfield out in?
Where was she in San Diego?
California.
I want to know the difference that that event is making in her life.
I want to know the difference it's making in all of our lives as citizens living here, the idea that that many Americans are being held in some foreign country by a very frightening group of people.
What does that tell us about ourselves?
How does it change our perceptions of ourselves?
So it's that that I mean, that kind of tension.
And conflict.
And the effect on personality and character is much more interesting to me.
And I come to news that way.
Something else I wrote was when I did a national column with President Carter.
I sat for two hours in the Oval Office with him while people all over the country phoned in.
People afterwards said to me, gee, that must have been the high point of your career.
But I was far more absorbed by changes in his eyes and what happened to his complexion when he was dealing with a difficult question, and how his posture changed and he sat up straight or he clenched his hands.
Much more than any of the words he was speaking, because those were words he'd spoken a lot before many, many times before.
But that glimpse of character, that to me was special, and that's what interests me the most.
One of the things that is very special about your interviews is the kind of rapport you're able to build with the people who you're speaking to.
You're pretty close to people, both newsmakers and artists.
I'm not scared of them.
Thank you.
I take that as a compliment.
I'm not scared much.
But I wonder how you try to balance that with politicians and newsmakers that desire to build rapport but the kind of journalistic distance that you need to keep with someone who might be very manipulative of the rapport that's built.
I don't know.
I'm trying to think of some example.
What's rushing to my mind is how good Sandy is at that, Sandy Unger.
And he tends to interview politicians a heck of a lot more than I do.
I'm not terribly interested in doing it.
Mostly because for some of the things you said, I like to get inside people.
And I don't think politicians are going to let me inside much.
They're not going to tell me anything they haven't said 700 times before.
He's terrific, though, Sandy, at breaking through that somehow.
And I'm not quite sure.
He's very quick.
And he doesn't mind a good fight.
He's a good fighter.
And he doesn't mind scramble, scrambling up with people.
My approach is different, and mine is to disarm in a way.
That sounds manipulative, and I don't mean it that way.
I'm just much more comfortable in quiet conversation or laughing more you know, having a good time and joking than I am in confrontations.
So the other example that I think of was John Ehrlichman, which Bob Edwards and I interviewed him after he had gotten out of jail and was going around touring with his first novel, And I was as scared before that interview as I've ever been in connection with radio.
And I'll tell you why.
I felt we covered Watergate so thoroughly and so carefully and all through it.
I felt he was the one that seemed to me the most malevolent, the one who would be most deceptive and most dishonest.
I've changed my view of him, by the way, in recent years and sort of reading new writings of his and seeing the kind of change that he himself has gone through.
But at that time, I was very frightened.
I thought ahead, how am I going to do this interview?
How will I do it?
If I do it in a prosecutorial fashion...
It'll be, you ever see two dogs worrying over a towel?
You know, each gets a towel and they shake their heads back and forth.
And that's what it'll be.
Plus, I don't have that kind of mind.
I cannot commit to memory every page of the White House transcripts and be able to say to him but Mr Ehrlichman, on the 3rd of June, you said Blackman on the 27th.
I just can't.
My mind doesn't work that way.
So I sort of discarded all of that and thought I'll do what I can do, and that is ask him extremely soft-sounding questions, questions which ended up.
You know things like Mr Eric tell me what happens when you go you live in Santa Fe and you drive up to a gas station for gas.
You drive your car and you say, fill them up, and they realize who you are.
What's the reaction you get?
Questions, just real personal ones like that.
Not, aren't you ashamed of yourself, you know, leading the nation down this thorny path.
None of that.
Just, you know, what's it like for you?
How's your life?
And it ended.
I don't remember the specific question that I asked, but it ended with something that he said that was more revealing to me about Watergate than I could have gotten with seven hours of, you know, really mean questions.
He said at the end, let me tell you something about Washington.
In this town there's one king of the mountain and everybody else in this town is out to shoot him off that mountain.
That's Washington.
That was Watergate in a nutshell.
You know, that was all the paranoia of the Nixon White House right there.
And if I'd said to him weren't you all terribly paranoid in that White House?
He never would have said anything.
So sometimes, just through that sort of softer approach, that comes, that comes.
I like listening to good arguments on the air.
I'm just not very good at it.
Sandy's good at it.
Did it ever happen to you that someone who you really cared for and respected turned out to not be an interesting interview?
And you kind of felt that for the sake of your listeners, you should erase the tape.
But for the sake of this person, you didn't want to hurt their feelings and not play it.
What a wonderful question.
I guess I won't answer your question because something else is occurring to me, so let me tell you this story.
I think I won't name a name, but it was a time when I had to go and interview a writer whose work I very much respected.
And I got to see the writer, and we talked for hours.
And everything, I'm trying not to even reveal sex, let alone identity in all of this.
The writer would talk and go on and on and on, and on and on and go into a million different directions and corners and angles.
And I couldn't make any sense out of what was being said.
Sentences would never be finished.
Ideas never completed.
And I got home with days' worth of tape and said to myself, what am I going to do here?
This is a writer of major talent, but clearly some damage has been done, some emotional damage or something.
Why reveal that?
Here's my choice here.
It's journalistically dishonest for me to clean up this tape, to build in through editing a logic that in life was not there.
On the other hand, look at the harm to do.
For what end?
To simply present... this kind of rambling to listeners.
It will neither edify them nor enlighten them, nor really be true to the spirit of the person.
So I ended up doing a fairly careful edit in which on tape the person came out far more logical than in life.
But I guess it was troubling enough to me that I'm telling it to you now, because there was a certain kind of dishonesty.
That it wasn't real.
It was edited.
Then again life.
You know, unedited life is fairly rambling and has very little shape or proportion to it.
And editing sort of imposes that structure on it.
But it was troublesome to me, Terry, I'll tell you.
It still bothers me, that kind of choice.
And it happens all the time, often.
Did you consider releasing it, too?
No, never, because I knew there were wonderful moments on it.
And the truth of the person came through.
As a matter of fact, there was enough of that sense of rambling and kind of disorganization that you got that, but not so much that you would end up throwing your hands up in the air and saying, why do I have to listen to this?
Because there were good nuggets there, useful nuggets.
But it's interesting.
It's such a good question because they're problems that we face, I think.
What do you do and I think this happens to every interviewer when you like the writer but you don't like their new book?
Well, that happened, as a matter of fact, with Joan Didion.
And I write about that in my book, as a matter of fact.
I discovered in preparing... She was one of my favorite writers and has been for years.
In fact, I hadn't known anything about her until the first week I set foot in the studios of National Public Radio.
And someone on the staff, a fellow named Doug Terry, said, read this woman's stuff.
She's fantastic.
And it was Didion.
It was her first collection of essays called Slashing Towards.
Because it's British, so it's got an S on the end.
Slashing Towards, Bethlehem.
Took them home and thought, oh, my Lord, I've never read reporting like this.
It's sensational.
Well, years later, that must have been around 71, 77 or 78, she went on a book tour, her only one.
So in preparation for interviewing her, I got out everything.
And she was touring with the novel, her last novel, A Book of Common Prayer.
Got out the first collection of essays, got out all the early novels.
And I guess that was all.
The White Album came out later.
Reread them.
And found, in fact, that I didn't like the novels very much at all.
Here's what I did, though.
That opened up the whole interview for me.
It gave me a talking point.
That is, I trusted those reactions.
I trusted that response.
I knew I felt that the journalism was first-rate, what she did.
So her powers of observation of life were wonderful.
Something else was happening between her page and me when she went to make fiction.
And I asked myself what it was.
What is distasteful to me here?
What am I not liking?
And what I found was, in figuring that out, a point of view, a talking point for when she came in the studio.
She was saying there's a void at the center of experience, and that's normal.
I felt that's horrible.
She thinks there's a void at the center of experience.
That's a nightmare.
I don't like that.
So we had a terrific time.
Interchange about it, because I went in with that viewpoint.
You don't need to be polite in front of these microphones.
You should trust your responses and your natural reactions and your own intelligence and figure why am I reacting that way.
Well, if I am, I'm not alone.
I'm like a whole lot of other people.
So I'll make that a talking point.
Let me work with that.
Let me use that.
And writers, gee, boy, they appreciate it.
Someone taking them so seriously that they formed an opinion about the work.
What?
Nothing's more flattering.
Oh, sure, they've got egos.
We, how do you like that?
Because now I wrote a book, I can say I'm a writer too.
And you want to please people and have them think that what you've done is terrific.
But also it's wonderful that someone else has taken the time to think so hard about something you've worked so hard at.
And that's exciting to start to talk about and to explain yourself.
And that's also exciting then for listeners to hear.
Susan Stanberg and Terry Gross recorded in 1982.
We're remembering iconic NPR anchor and correspondent, Susan Stanberg, who died last week at the age of 87.
Terry spoke to her in 1993, when Susan had published a book called Talk, which featured excerpts of her interviews and reflections on her work.
Terry asked what it was like for her to listen back to her early interviews and whether it seemed her voice had changed over the years.
I was so formal.
And in those early days, when there weren't a whole lot of women on the air in fact none doing news I was the first to anchor a nightly national news program.
1972 was all things considered.
We were imitating men.
So I was lowering my voice to sound as authoritative as I could.
And I hear in those tapes my getting looser and more relaxed with it.
I hear in more recent work speeding up to a point where it's almost too fast sometimes.
I've got to start slowing myself down again.
I hear those changes in voice, voice per se, but also, you know, a growth of confidence which I hope happens to you.
I used to feel that radio, you keep doing it until you get it right.
You know, you practice it every day and someday it'll kick in.
And I hope that that happens too over the years.
Let's go back to, was it 1972 when you started hosting All Things Considered?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, now the first time you hosted, it was a substitute.
Yes, I sat in.
Who were you filling in for?
I have to say Terry, there's a lot of first women and feminist stuff in this book, because I'm a believer in it.
But men gave me breaks. every inch of the way.
And...
He wasn't the first host of All Things Considered.
That was a man named Robert Conley.
But he was the second one, I think.
Mike Waters was doing the program.
And at that point, I was hired as a tape editor.
But at that point because things were so open and possible at NPR in those days I was also getting stuff on the air.
He said to me, I really like your work.
How can we hear you more?
I'm going on vacation.
Why don't you sit in?
And it was that kind of generosity.
He went away.
I sat there.
There was nice response to it.
And poof, we were co-hosts.
As the first woman to anchor a national daily news show.
Were there complaints that the network got from other listeners or stations that carried the show?
There were.
There were, but you know something, Terry?
I didn't know about it.
I write about this in talk, too.
There's a story that I heard 11 years after the fact, and I heard it from Bill Seemring, who was important in getting you on the air.
I know that when he was manager of the station.
Absolutely.
We would never have become a national show if it weren't for Bill Seemering.
We wouldn't exist, all things considered, NPR, if it hadn't been for Bill Seemering.
That's exactly right.
He was our first, I think they called him program director then and the man who really conceived of all things considered.
And he told me this story 11 years later that when I first went on the air, there was quite a bit of opposition, not from listeners, but from the managers of our stations who were worried on behalf of the listeners.
A woman's voice is not authoritative enough, they said.
Women will not be taken seriously.
A woman cannot do news.
And technologically, we were not nearly as sophisticated as we are today.
We had bad staticky telephone lines over which we broadcast to the country.
Today, we've got satellites, so things are clearer.
And the base band of women's voices is not as strong as it is in the voices of men.
And so maybe my voice didn't carry quite as well as it would today, but that was about it.
The rest of it was prejudice.
Anyway, Bill never said a word to me.
And this to me was such a remarkable show of the quality of his leadership.
He knew if he told me.
I was very sensitive about it all.
I was nervous as heck.
And it would affect me.
It would throw me in some way.
It would affect my work.
And he had enough confidence in me to let me keep going, sensing that I would prove myself as I did it and the criticism would go away.
And it did.
Did anyone tell you that you sounded too New York?
Oh, sure.
Did anyone ever say you sounded too Jewish?
Sure, yeah.
No, they don't say Jewish.
They say New York, and I always hear that as Jewish and maybe more than a little anti-Semitic.
I certainly didn't and don't sound like people who are on the radio today.
I really don't.
I have a distinctive sound.
And it is, you're right, I'm a New Yorker and I'm Jewish.
Your style, I think, is one that is very direct, very casual, very real.
And that wasn't really the style when you started broadcasting.
And, as you said before, you were really trying to kind of put on this air of authoritative and sound like more male.
Yeah.
To fit in, how did you start drifting away from that and becoming more of who you were?
Well, in those days, I was also editing my own tapes.
I mean, we had these skinny little skeletal staffs, so you had to do everything.
And I think it was in editing my own work really taught me a lot.
It taught me to hate that stiff stuff, a sound that I was trying so hard to produce.
To say, I could hear how phony it was and I just decided to stop.
Can you share with us one of the scary moments from an early broadcast of All Things Considered, when the staff was small and the show was still being defined?
Oh, you bet.
We had those every other day.
The tape would keep breaking or the tape wouldn't arrive.
In the control room one time, I can remember a very early program in which I introduced something.
The tape went on the air and the director, Rich Firestone, said in my head said wait a minute, the tape's on backwards.
Phil, and threw my microphone on, and I talked and talked and talked.
He got the tape, he turned it around, he ran it again, and he said in my ear, wrong, it's Russian.
Fill again.
It wasn't backwards.
It was a foreign language.
And he put my microphone on, and I got to talk some more.
I would come in in those days Terry, with reams of clippings and papers and books to use as film material.
I'll always take... a little something with me because you never know.
Susan Stamberg, speaking with Terry Gross, recorded in 1993.
Stamberg, the award-winning host of All Things Considered in NPR's formative years, died last week at the age of 87.
After a short break we'll hear a special remembrance of Susan that Terry recorded and we'll continue with their 1993 conversation and another interview Terry recorded with Susan and Bill Seimering, the creator of All Things Considered.
I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
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This is Fresh Air.
We're remembering iconic NPR anchor and correspondent, Susan Stamberg, who died last week at the age of 87.
Before we get back to hearing more of Terry's interviews with Susan, Terry has a few personal thoughts she wants to share.
When I started in public radio in 1974, I was just recently out of college.
Susan had been co-hosting All Things Considered for a couple of years.
She was proof that a woman could have a prominent and powerful position on a, and that, for me and so many women, was affirming and inspiring.
She also proved she could be a good news journalist, while also being immersed in covering the arts and culture and sharing with listeners some of her experiences as a mother.
Back then a lot of people in the news biz would have thought that compromised her credibility as a journalist.
It didn't.
It just got listeners to like her even more.
That made her a role model too.
I never got to know her well we lived in different cities but in addition to interviewing her a few times, i met her several times, mostly at station events, and she was always warm and we had good conversations.
She told me she often listened to Fresh Air during lunch.
I have emails from her dating back to 2015.
She didn't write often, but when she heard an interview of mine she especially liked or enjoyed hearing me interviewed she'd reach out to let me know.
I see that as an example of her generosity and her interest in encouraging other journalists.
Those emails meant and still mean a lot to me.
Thank you, Susan, for all you've done for public radio, for women, for your listeners, and for me.
That was Terry Gross.
Next we'll hear some more of Terry's 1993 conversation with Susan Stanberg after the publication of her book Talk, which featured excerpts of 20 years of interviews and reflections on her work.
You hosted All Things Considered for, I think it was 14 years?
Yes.
Why did you leave?
Oh, I left for a range of reasons.
I've been wanting to get off that program for quite some time.
It is an enormous grind.
Noah Adams and I...
We're wonderful partners on the air for five years.
And the only thing and we are dear friends, the only thing we ever fought about was who had the harder job in broadcasting, whether he did or I did.
I suppose it was for me because I did it for so much longer than anybody else did.
And that just was a lot of it, but it was a conscious decision that I really wanted to get off that daily carousel, something that I wanted to do for some time.
I write in this book that what really made the decision final was the fact that in 1986 I discovered I had breast cancer.
It was treated.
My prognosis is excellent.
But that was the point at which I said to myself okay, this is something you've wanted for a long time.
Now is the time to do it.
You don't need this kind of stress in your life.
I take my work very, very personally and I work awfully, awfully hard, and it doesn't come easily to me.
And I just wanted to move that quotient of stress out of my life and do less, and I did.
How many people did you tell about the breast cancer?
Very few.
I told family, of course, and a handful of really close friends and only a few people here at NPR who I felt needed to know.
Did you go through chemo?
No, I had a lumpectomy and radiation.
And you'd come to work after the radiation?
Yeah, I was working all through that, actually.
It was a salvation through that time.
I felt I needed to keep working.
Work has been important to me at a lot of rough times in my life, as it is for many of us, I think.
There must have been times when, after radiation treatment, if you'd go to the NPR offices, you'd really feel like saying to everybody listen, you don't know what I've been through this morning.
No, I don't.
That's not me.
Mm-hmm.
Long pause.
Yeah.
The most compelling thing you can do on the radio, keep quiet.
So you didn't, people did not need to know.
No, I didn't.
I wasn't ready to do that to people.
And I wasn't ready to handle their reactions to it.
I'm a bucker-upper.
It's part of my nature.
I like to make people feel better.
I'm the one that, in the All Things Considered days when the program was being put marked up on a big map on the wall, I'd come in that would start at 230 the order of the pieces, and who was going to be reporting what.
I was the one that would come up to that map and say, where is the joy in this radio program?
And I did what I could to be the bringer of joy whenever I could to the air.
And I felt that I didn't want to inflict this on people, and I also selfishly didn't want to have to cheer them up or make them feel better, which is a part of what happens with illness.
People become very upset with you, and I feel a certain obligation.
So this was in 1986?
Yeah, 86.
Susan, there's something I want to ask you, and this relates to breast cancer, but it's much more about interviewing.
I sense that the breast cancer is not something you're really interested in talking about in detail.
The question always comes up for me, as I'm sure it does for you how far do you go with somebody when there's something personal that's happened in your life that you'd maybe like to hear more about, but you have a feeling they probably don't want to talk about it more?
What's your general... How do you guide yourself when asking that question?
Well, I don't have a rule of thumb, but it happens often in this book.
I see evidence of it.
And I see an interesting development as well.
A rule with me and I think it's a current one too is if someone starts crying, I turn off the tape recorder.
It's why I wasn't meant to do journalism.
I have all the wrong instincts.
If it's that painful...
They need to be private about it, and I don't need to record that to broadcast that pain to others.
If they can talk about it, it's one thing.
I just hate when on television the camera zooms in and focuses.
The lens zooms in to show you the tears.
It's none of my business.
I turn away.
But I think I've also learned a lot about human resilience, and it's been something that's meant a great deal to me personally.
I write that one of the things that cancer did was to affect my work and make me much more interested in people who faced up to something terrible and gone on with their lives.
You don't understand what learning from someone's courage is until you need those lessons.
Susan, I know on those occasions when I'm interviewed there are two parts of me that kind of go to war each time I'm asked a question.
And one part of me is the professional part, that's saying well, as an interviewer, I ask people questions all the time and I expect that they'll kind of reveal as much as they can, and blah blah, blah.
And so I too should reveal as much as I can to the person answering these questions.
And besides, I know that...
If you don't reveal a lot, you stand the risk of being really boring and there's no greater sin, and so on, and so on.
Then the other part of me is saying you really don't need to be very personal and it's probably better if you're not.
Because particularly as an interviewer, you need to be a kind of neutral person.
Do you know what I mean?
I do know what you mean.
You want to keep people guessing, in a way, and you want to be able to draw on the parts of yourself that are most relevant to the interview that you're doing, and so on.
Mm-hmm.
So you don't want to reveal too much.
So these two parts of me go to war.
Is there a war like that that happens to you when you're interviewed?
And do you know how much you're comfortable with in revealing about yourself, whether it's your health or any other personal part of your life?
Yeah, I guess so.
It's not so much a war as I...
It's not a war I fight anymore.
I know what I will and what I won't speak about, and you hear the long pauses.
So I know how to do that now.
And getting older. makes that easier.
You know, Terry, my generation, we were raised as nice girls.
Philip Roth says this wonderfully too, and there's somebody who sends him an angry letter and asks him for lunch, and he goes.
And I said to him, how come you went?
Why did you do that?
He said, I was young.
When summoned, I went.
He wasn't raised as a nice girl, but I was.
You're asked a question, you answer it.
I don't leap to those answers quite as quickly now.
Maybe I've learned a kind of privacy.
And a professionalism.
And I also wonder as I said, this sort of cult of personality has a short string as far as I'm concerned.
There are other things to talk about.
There are issues.
There are ideas.
There's wonderful writing to talk about.
I'll give you an example of something that just happened to me.
I was interviewing Isabel Allende, the Chilean writer now living in the States.
And during the interview she'd mentioned that her daughter had died not too long – no, I knew her daughter had died, but it turned out her daughter had died in December, just a few months ago.
And I could just tell by the way she just said that parenthetically that this was something that was still obviously really close to the surface for her.
And then so I had to decide well, should I ask her more about it, or should I just kind of change the subject?
What did you do?
I changed the subject and moved on.
I just felt like, do I need to put her through this because she's written a new book?
And I decided no.
But in all honesty, on another day I might have said well, let me ask her something, and maybe then I'll pull back.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, I guess so.
It's a really, I think, difficult question.
It's a tough call.
It's a tough call.
But when you know the experience is very raw.
I feel the need to let people heal from it before I go poking around in those depths of their lives.
And I don't know what's to be served, really.
I don't know what good it does to do it.
And I don't want to make my living off the pain of someone else.
Have you ever wanted to stop interviewing?
It's real nice to take breaks.
It was good to take the year off to write talk.
Sure.
But I never want to stop asking questions.
That's the real issue.
It's not so much the interviewing.
I feel I am blessed that I found microphones in this world, because I spend my life talking to people away from the microphone.
It's something that I do naturally as a person.
Luckily enough, I found a place where they'll pay me to do that.
So no, I can't imagine it.
Susan Stamberg, speaking with Terry Gross, recorded in 1993.
After a break, we'll listen to some of Terry's 2021 conversation with Susan and Bill Seemering, the creator of All Things Considered, who put Susan in the anchor's chair in 1972.
This is Fresh Air.
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This is Fresh Air and we're remembering Susan Stamberg, the host of NPR's All Things Considered in the network's formative years and later host of Weekend Edition and then an NPR special correspondent until she retired in September.
Stamberg died last week at the age of 87.
Next we're going to listen to some of an interview Terry recorded just four years ago, in 2021, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of NPR and All Things Considered.
She spoke to Susan and Bill Seemering, who was the first director of programming at NPR.
He created All Things Considered and wrote the network's first mission statement saying that NPR should reflect the diversity of America and let the country hear itself.
From 1978 to 1987 Seemering was station manager here at WHYY where he played a critical role in making Fresh Air then a local product, a daily national show.
He also hired me in 1982.
In their interview, Terry asked Susan about the first days, of All Things Considered, when Susan was a production assistant on the show.
So Susan, what was your job that day, that first day that NPR signed on the air with All Things Considered?
Were you editing tape?
Were you actively involved with that first broadcast?
No.
Yeah.
The title was Production Assistant and it meant one of those, a handful of us.
Linda Wertheimer was another who had to deal with tape that the reporters were racing in with from the field.
I mean, if they came in with 20 minutes and hours worth of tape, we had to cut it down and get it wedged together with that sticky tape and get it into the control room and on the air.
So that was it, just being pelted with this raw tape that they had just gathered in the field.
Were you nervous?
I don't remember being a bit nervous.
I remember being thrilled to pieces.
It was all just so intense.
And we had to be working so quickly and efficiently and sometimes mindlessly, just uh, blading that tape and and getting it to move along and racing it again into the control room.
So it was, it was pressure, but i i felt we could all do it.
I was, you know, it wasn't nervous making pressure particularly, it was exhilarating pressure.
I mean, it was just thrilling Bill, you hired Susan Stamberg at NPR.
What did you see in her when you hired her?
You obviously made a brilliant choice, but you didn't know what she would become.
That was all the future.
So what did you see in her?
Why did you want to hire her?
Her curiosity and her energy and she has this wonderful voice that is expressive, has rich tone color, and it's the sound I really wanted for NPR.
It's a sound that I still think represents NPR the best.
This insatiable curiosity, And Susan has a lot of fun also.
I didn't need to look at her resume really.
I was really quite blown away by Susan when she came in the office.
And I knew that's what I wanted.
Bill.
It was suggested to you when you were first working on finding a host.
For All Things Considered, and Susan didn't start hosting until the second year, the show was on the air.
It was suggested to you that you hired an established network TV reporter to who was experienced and can come in.
People already had faith in and they'd have this like authoritative male voice.
And that's not what you wanted to do.
Why did you resist that?
And what did you have to do to resist it?
I didn't get a lot of pressure.
Fortunately, Don Quayle, the president, was very good about this.
And he also supported Susan.
He was the one that recommended Susan come in to see me.
Now, the stations were expecting the big voice.
They were expecting us.
Finally, we've got our own network and we'll sound just like CBS.
And we had a meeting of station managers a few weeks after all things started.
And it was kind of a hostile audience.
I mean, they were saying, who are these people?
And I said, well, your listeners will get to know them.
It's okay.
And they, of course, did.
But it took a while for people to get used to what we were doing and to accept it.
Susan, you said that Bill encouraged you to be yourself.
And that's what you became.
And you showed warmth and empathy as well as...
Having good news judgment and being really informed.
But you talk to a lot of artists and just kind of people and yeah, there was, there was warmth, you had a personality on the air and people loved that.
I mean you were famous for that that helped define what NPR stood for.
How did you gradually let yourself come through and figure out like what was your on air personality?
Who were you on the air, being true to yourself, but also being, you know, a radio professional?
Thank you for all of that.
It was all sort of an accumulation.
I mean, it certainly didn't happen all at once.
And I would listen carefully after we went off the air to what it sounded like and what struck my ear and changes that I thought I ought to make the next day.
But again, I had tremendous guidance from Bill, as always.
From a phrase from that mission statement, and it was that one of the goals of National Public Radio would be to celebrate life.
And I sort of devoted myself to that.
First of all, the arts were... always so important to me from the time that I was a child.
And I loved music, and I loved poetry, and I loved visual arts, all of that.
And being raised in New York, I was lucky enough to be able to be exposed to some of the best of that.
And I carried that love with me into the broadcasting that I did and, very unusually for those early days and even today, brought it to the news broadcasts.
As you were saying, you never heard anything like that on formal news programs, except when you turn to public radio and when you turn to the very first broadcast of ours, which was the flagship program.
And that continues, not as much as I wish it would, but that continues into today.
I just wanted to add, Susan has air presence, which is something that may be difficult to define, but you know it.
It's like stage presence.
And not all reporters have air presence like that that can host the program.
But when Susan comes on, you listen.
It's a quality that is important.
That isn't talked about much, but it was really what I liked about her, and you can hear that every time she comes on the air now.
Susan, I remember you telling me years ago that you were raised to be a, quote, nice girl.
What did that mean?
And what did you have to overcome of that experience?
To be a good host and journalist and learn how to ask hard questions.
And to sometimes, in spite of all your empathy, you sometimes really had to put somebody on the spot and insist on an answer to a difficult question.
Yes.
I must say, my dear, that I have the ghost of that continues to haunt me.
And it wasn't so much a nice girl.
It was a good girl.
And, you know, I'm a woman of the 50s.
It's when I came up.
It was before there was women's liberation, so we were expected to be married good housewives. and be homemakers.
There are wonderful homemakers in this world, and many people listening to this were raised by them.
But it didn't fascinate or interest me very much.
I always knew that there was more I wanted to do.
So I felt, even when there were movements to make women more equal and more authoritative, I felt I always straddled those two worlds the good girl world first, and the free and women's liberation girl.
And to some extent, I still do.
It was very often my impulse to almost talk to myself and say toughen up Susan, don't be too soft on this.
Put his feet to the fire.
Get an answer that you really do need.
Susan Stamberg and Bill Seemering spoke with Terry Gross in 2021.
We'll hear more of their conversation after a break.
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This is Fresh Air and we're remembering NPR's Susan Stanberg, who became the first woman to anchor a nightly news program when she hosted All Things Considered in 1972.
In 2021.
Terry spoke with Susan and Bill Seemering who, as NPR's Director of Programming, made Susan anchor of the flagship program.
Can you share a moment from the early days of NPR that you're particularly proud of?
It's not days from the very beginning, but it goes into around 1973 and the whole Watergate story, Richard Nixon and the Nixon administration being exposed for having essentially as Bob Woodward said on our air once tampered with the vote of every American by pressures that the administration exerted.
And what I remember, we did daily broadcasts.
It was the most sustained broadcasting that we did.
It was the biggest story because the Vietnam War had ended fairly soon after we went on the air.
The biggest story that we had to cover over a long period of time, the hearings in the Congress, et cetera, et cetera.
And I'm proud of having organized groups of citizens, that voice that Bill always wanted to hear, of ordinary people all over the country reacting to the news.
That was new in those days and very unusual.
And I had a banker in Kansas and a housewife in Wisconsin.
I'm not going to remember all of them, but there were about five different ones Democrats and Republicans.
And I would call them every week. and just say, so what do you think?
How did you react to what you heard this week on the hearings?
Because we were broadcasting those hearings live as well.
And when the Republican who had been the Nixon supporter all along over months and months and months, turned and said I really have started to have very big questions about what this administration has done and what their aims and what their goals were.
That's when we knew that the tide had turned.
We heard that on our air from someone whom our listeners had gotten very familiar with because they had heard him week after week.
So Susan, you were a mother by the time you came to NPR.
And your son, Josh, was how old when you started hosting All Things Considered?
He was a year and a half.
And when I started, I worked part time.
I wanted to be home every afternoon with him and was able to do that.
And I left him with a wonderful sitter in the morning and timed it so that I would be away from him for a big hunk of his nap time.
I missed him terribly when I started work, but I knew that I needed to move my mind away a little bit from goo-goo-ga-ga into some real human conversation.
So that was a perfect solution to be able to have that that part-time job.
And the network was wonderful, so enlightened in permitting me to do it.
But it was always.
It was really tough, as the parent and any woman will tell you or man that you're always moving things around on the burners.
That is, the family goes on the front burner, when it needs to, and then you move it to the back.
When the job has to go move up forward onto that front burner, you're always juggling.
Life is never just a straight line.
I want to express my gratitude to both of you for all you've done to create what we know as NPR.
And so happy anniversary and congratulations.
And on behalf of so many people, thank you so much.
Thank you so much, Terry.
Thank you, Terry.
Susan Stamberg and Bill Seemering spoke with Terry Gross in 2021, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of NPR and All Things Considered.
Stamberg died last week at the age of 87.
On Monday's show we'll speak with Cameron Crowe, who made the films Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Jerry Maguire Say Anything and Almost Famous.
His new memoir shows how his life parallels Almost Famous.
The story of how a boy in his mid-teens gets to write about his rock heroes for Rolling Stone and grows up along the way.
I hope you can join us.
She hasn't got time to make you cry.
Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.
Sam Brigger is our managing producer.
Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock.
Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman and Julian Hertzfeld.
We'll see you next time.
For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
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