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PART 6 Don't Let the Turkeys Get You Down
On Rejection and Resilience
If I had listened to the critics I'd have died drunk in the gutter.
-Anton Chekhov
If I thought I had experienced challenges early in my career, I hadn't seen anything yet. The time in my professional life that required every drop of resilience in my personal reservoir came during my first two years as the anchor of the CBS Evening News. There had been a great deal of hype over my hire. I was the first woman to solo-anchor an evening newscast on a major network, and the significance of that wasn't lost on me. In fact, when I was offered a job on the Today show fifteen years earlier I told Michael Gartner, then the president of NBC News, that I would accept the job only if Bryant Gumbel and I were going to be equal partners. I didn't want to be relegated to cooking and fashion segments, and I wanted assurances that that wouldn't happen. So in a moment of extreme moxiness I told him “It's really important to me that there's a fifty-fifty division of labor.” I had been covering the Pentagon and didn't want my news chops or credibility to be eroded. So he relented. Almost. “Fifty-two, forty-eight,” he told me. “And that's my best offer.” I agreed. I think I had the audacity to insist on an equal division of labor because I was well aware of how images from television can shape attitudes and values. God knows I was influenced by watching the adventures of a career woman named Mary Richards every Friday night on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and by the show Julia, starring Diahann Carroll, about an African-American nurse and single mother.
