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Anderson Cooper Is Still Learning to Live With Loss

Photograph by Mamadi Doumbouya
Anderson Cooper, Photograph by Mamadi Doumbouya for The New York Times.

For decades, Anderson Cooper, 56, has been a steady, humane and comparatively calm presence on TV news. But the longtime host of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360°” has recently entered an interesting and, in its way, fruitful period of emotional and professional flux. It started last year with  “All There Is With Anderson Cooper,” his podcast about grief. (When Cooper was 10, his father, Wyatt, died from a heart attack; his older brother, Carter, died from suicide when they were both in their early 20s; his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, died at 95 in 2019.) In doing so, he realized how little he had allowed himself to feel the losses and how much more feeling he still had to do. (Accordingly, a second season will air this fall.) He also spent time writing “Astor,” an upcoming nonfiction book about the storied, dynastic American family, which is a thematic follow-up to his best-selling 2021 book about his mother’s storied, dynastic American family, “Vanderbilt.” (The two books were written with Katherine Howe.) On top of all that, he and his colleagues at CNN underwent the brief and tumultuous tenure of its chairman and chief executive Chris Licht, who was fired in June after only 13 months on the job. “It all makes sense in my head,” Cooper says, about the twists and turns of his career. “Though it may not make much sense on paper.”

I assume projects like your books and podcast occupy a different emotional and intellectual space for you than your day job. But what do you bring back from them to CNN? Why I got into this line of work was a direct result of the early losses I experienced. It’s not an accident that I started by traveling to disasters and wars and wanting to be around people who spoke the language of loss. For me, joining CNN was to continue that work. But I didn’t set out to be an anchor. I found that I couldanchor and I enjoy it and I like the challenge. But it is different. It’s not the subject matter every night that I’m most drawn to personally, but there are interesting challenges in that. Every night, all I hear are the mistakes I make, and that provides a reason to try to get better, and I’m still interested in talking to people and trying to understand how they see things. But my first book came out in 2006. It was called “Dispatches From the Edge,” and it was about war, mixed in with my brother’s story and my dad’s death. I didn’t write again for 10 years. Then I wrote this book with my mom that was about the ripple effects of loss.1 

I didn’t plan to write another book, and then my mom died and I was having kids,2 and that’s how “Vanderbilt” came about. Then “Astor” was to see if I could write something that’s not directly about my family or experiences but just something I’m interested in.

 

How did you think about your ambitions in terms of reporting and researching “Astor”? Justin Kaplan’s book3 

on them, for example, is cited in it 69 times; Meryl Gordon’s4 is cited 39 times. Was it less about excavating new information and more about telling a particular story? Meryl Gordon’s book is fantastic; the Kaplan book is, too. Katherine Howe did a bunch of original research, but we also relied very much on other books and certainly cite those, and they’re great. Most of them focused on a particular aspect of the family. We wanted to tell a story that connected it all in a way that we didn’t think had been done before.

 

In the episode of your podcast with Stephen Colbert,5 

he talked about the idea of accepting that within grief is also a gift. In my own experience — I lost my best friend to suicide — I know I now feel more gratitude and appreciation for life because of that loss. Do you feel that with your losses? I do feel that. I’m not sure I fully understand it. I have the privilege of being able to be invited to step into somebody else’s pain and learn the name of their child who’s died and tell that person’s story if they want it told.6 None of that would be possible if I had not experienced the loss of my dad, my brother. It made me the person I am today. I’m blessed to be in the position I’m in, to be alive and have wonderful kids. I wish my dad and brother were here to witness it. I don’t know who I would be if they were still alive.

 
Anderson Cooper, left, in 1972 with his father, Wyatt Cooper; his brother, Carter; and his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt.Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Anderson Cooper, left, in 1972 with his father, Wyatt Cooper;
his brother, Carter; and his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt.
Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

I read your dad’s book, and the opening of the first chapter,7

knowing the trajectory of how things went — it’s a gut punch.Yeah.

So are you thinking about how your kids will understand the story of your losses? Oh, absolutely. I’m building a record for them. [Cooper chokes up.] Excuse me.

It’s OK. I don’t have him, but I had that book. I very intentionally want to leave a full body of documentation, of things my kids can touch base with throughout their lives and that their kids, if they have them, can do as well. God, what I wouldn’t give to have my dad’s dad’s journals. My mom’s mom seemed shallow, and my mom’s dad was an alcoholic and died at 45 — so didn’t seem very deep — but I would love their journals. Even writing “Vanderbilt,” it did, for the first time, make me feel grounded in history. I like feeling rooted, and I want my kids to have that feeling.

In one of the last episodes of the podcast, you say, “For a long time, I chose not to be vulnerable, but I think I don’t want to do that anymore.” How has becoming a dad affected your vulnerability? That’s a really interesting question. What I’ve realized in the last couple of months is how little I allowed myself to grieve my dad’s and my brother’s deaths. I did what a lot of kids do: I buried it deep inside. It’s only doing the podcast that I had this realization of, Holy [expletive], I’m still this 10-year-old kid. In terms of acknowledging grief and sadness and allowing myself to be vulnerable, I don’t know exactly how to do that, but that’s what I’m looking to learn. I used to see this sadness behind my mom’s eyes. I want my kids to not see that behind my eyes. I don’t want it to be behind my eyes anymore.

I think that a theme of your podcast and “Dispatches From the Edge” and “The Rainbow Comes and Goes” is trying to understand how you’ve come to be the person you are. Loss is central to that. I think for a lot of people, their understanding of whom they desire and their sexuality is similarly formative. But in all your books, I think there are only a few pages where you discuss your sexuality. Why is that a lacuna in the story that you tell about becoming who you are? I hadn’t thought about it in those ways. I grew up with a very well known mom who was recognized on the streets, and I didn’t particularly love that as a kid. Once I started to become well known, I realized I wanted to try to hold on to some privacy. But I don’t think I have any particularly interesting story on being gay. Figured it out early on, had crushes, didn’t really want to be gay, then came pretty quickly to accept it and embrace it, and it’s one of the great blessings of my life. The grief and the loss and the impulse to be around people who were suffering was a bigger unresolved driving force in my life than the gay thing.

The key word — I was living a very openly gay life in New York, but there was this sense that by not saying something publicly, it seemed like I was ashamed of it. So I finally realized, Oh, I need to say something even though it goes against my sense of privacy. I made a public statement. Even then, I didn’t want to do it in a way that was, like, the cover of People magazine, because I didn’t want to make it seem like I’m trying to do some promotional thing. I wrote a letter that I worked on hard, and I published it on Andrew Sullivan’s blog8 

on The Daily Beast. He’s an interesting person, and I liked his blog, and I said it how I wanted to say it. Anyway, to me, it’s just not a particularly interesting story. There’s nothing unresolved there.

 

I was going to say, “unresolved” is the key word. It’s the unresolved things that end up driving us more than things we’ve made peace with. Yes. I mean, the fact that I’m 56 and still realizing I never grieved when I was 11? That’s ridiculous. I could write maybe a little essay about my gay — I don’t know what. The path of it? But I couldn’t write a book
 

Cooper reporting for CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360°” in Ghana in 2009. ​​​​​​​Brent Stirton/CNN
Cooper reporting for CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360°” in Ghana in 2009.
Brent Stirton/CNN

There’s a profile of you from New York magazine, from 2005, in which the writer asked about your sexuality, and you said you don’t want to talk about your personal life because you’re a journalist and need to be able to insert yourself into situations without influencing the subjects’ perspectives.9

Probably that was a useful dodge at the time, but my question — It is actually true. I had all these rules early on for how I worked: no unnatural lighting; no tripod. I had a particular viewpoint on how things should be done, and I wanted to be a mirror to the person I was talking to. I didn’t want anybody knowing anything about me. I didn’t want to walk into a room and have them know that’s Gloria Vanderbilt’s son. I thought you get better results as a journalist if you are a blank slate to the person you’re talking to and they can project whatever they want onto you.

Can a reporter from a known media outlet be a blank slate anymore? CNN and Fox News mean something by themselves aside from the individual reporters. You’re right that some people view The Times as leftist, view CNN as whatever they view CNN as, Fox as whatever they view Fox as, and that’s going to determine things. I know also there are people who base things more on the individual. There may be people who watch Jake Tapper because they believe he plays it straight and does great interviews but are not going to watch me. There are people who will watch one person on Fox News and not other people. So I don’t think you can paint with quite as broad a brush. Certainly, more so than in the past, people have drawn ideological caricatures of various brands and make decisions based on that.

My understanding is that Chris Licht’s analysis10 

of what needed to change at CNN was that CNN represented something, and that there was a cohort of viewers out there that the network could get if its coverage were realigned. Is that a thesis you disagree with? I don’t know what Chris Licht’s analysis was. I don’t have much confidence that I actually know what he was thinking.

 

That’s a problem, right? Yeah, that’s a problem. I mean, I read things in the paper, but I’m not sure what the point of it all was.

So at no point did anybody communicate “this is what we’re doing now” to one of the most high-profile anchors at CNN? I met with Chris and had a general sense of what the concern was. I don’t want to be unfair. I understood what the idea and the vision was. Obviously I am a part of CNN, so I want CNN to do well and be respected, but I try to worry about stuff I actually have my hands on. For me, it’s the show that I work on. That is my priority, and I do whatever I can to make that as good as I can. My sense from Chris was there was not a lot we needed to hash out because I’m not an opinion host. I’m talking to people from different sides and trying to be straight down the middle and represent things fairly and accurately. I keep my head down. I just try to do the best I can. I don’t need to have a lot of meetings with anybody who comes in. With Chris, I had a meeting with him when he first started and touched base from time to time, but we didn’t have a ton of communications.11


People had problems with CNN’s town hall with the former president.12 

CNN was also criticized for giving him too much airtime during the 2016 primaries. It’s 2023, and he’s still around and raising questions about how best to cover him. What do you see as answers? Those are things everybody has struggled with and continues to. There are limitations to what journalism can do. You can point out facts. You can investigate and expose. You can confront, and you can do it over and over again, and people can consume that information and do what they will with it. There was a steep learning curve in figuring out how to deal with a candidate who is completely willing to lie and lies repeatedly and often. There’s a shamelessness in that and only so much you can do about it from a reporting standpoint. Then there’s questions about, well, should there have been a town hall? Should there have been a live event? Should there have been an audience? All those are completely fair. I defended the concept of hearing from the person who’s the front-runner in the Republican Party.13 I still believe that person can be challenged in an interview.
 
Cooper with Donald Trump during a CNN town hall in South Carolina days before the state’s Republican presidential primary in February 2016. Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Cooper with Donald Trump during a CNN town hall in South Carolina days before
the state’s Republican presidential primary in February 2016. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

If Trump’s team called and said, “We’d like him to come on your show,” would you do it? I don’t know at this point. I’m not sure. I personally would not have chosen to do a town hall. The town hall format is a specific format that CNN has done effectively for a lot of candidates. I don’t think the first time Donald Trump came back on CNN — I wouldn’t have done a town hall, and if he’d said no, I would have said fine, then he’s not on. But that’s not my choice. I wasn’t involved.

Is there something about TV news that needs to be fixed? Do I, as a viewer, watch hyperpartisan content? I don’t. Do I, as a journalist, want to be in the business of hyperpartisan broadcasting? No, I don’t. But I know that’s popular, and that’s fine. I’m not in the business of telling people what they should and shouldn’t watch. Look, CNN allowed me to do a week from eastern Congo on sexual violence on women. Is it important to every viewer? Probably not, and that’s OK. But I certainly wish there were a lot more networks doing what CNN does in terms of sending people around the world to cover what is happening. We’re in an age where it’s people commenting and having strong opinions, but actual news coverage is a really important thing. But it’s also easy to look back at Cronkite and Eric Sevareid14 

— people will say, “This golden age when you could trust those people.” But the newsrooms were all white and straight, and the subjects covered were very limited. It is easy to look at another time and think it was so much better.

 

You said you play it “down the middle.” Is that approach to TV news an anachronism? This is going to sound like a cop-out, but none of this stuff particularly interests me.

This is the future of your job! How could it not interest you? You’re not going to believe my answer, but I’m going to say it anyway: What interests me about my job is being able to go places and step into people’s lives. The business side of news — I used to worry about this stuff 20 years ago when I first started. I would stay up at night: “Do I have a future? What are my ratings?” That was not sustainable for me. I don’t like that sort of pressure. For me, the solution was to focus on what I had control over: getting better at interviews, improve my writing, stop saying “um.” I get all the business stuff. It just doesn’t interest me. Do I have a future? I’m 56 years old. How much longer can I be doing this? I don’t know. I fully expect someday my services will no longer be required or of interest and, like in a Charlie Brown spelling bee, some voice will go womp womp,and then I will blip off the screen. That is the way of this world, and I’ve been extraordinarily lucky. So I don’t worry about the long-term trajectory.
 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations.

David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and the columnist for Talk. He recently interviewed Alok Vaid-Menon about transgender ordinariness, Joyce Carol Oates about immortality and Robert Downey Jr. about life after Marvel.

Author: Editors Desk

Source: N.Y Times

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