She's also not shy about disclosing that Larry King and Neil Simon made passes at her and that she turned down a date with Michael Jackson. If you want to know what designer clothes Couric wore at key moments in her career, she's more than willing to dish. So is snagging box seats at the Super Bowl, spending weekends in the Hamptons and throwing herself a 50th birthday party at Tiffany's with performances by Tony Bennett and Bette Midler.

She's nonchalant about buying an expensive vase for Nancy Reagan, arranging a tea party at the White House for her dying sister and planting her daughter on Hilary Duff's float during the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade - acts that would make a journalism ethics professor shudder.īut to Couric, it's all part of breathing rarefied air.

In one chapter, she addresses the controversy around 'Under the Gun,' the documentary she produced in which an editor made gun owners look like they couldn't answer the simplest of questions. She shares how she dressed as a flight attendant on a doomed air flight for a Halloween party and was tone-deaf in covering the 1992 Los Angeles riots.īut too often Couric paints herself as either the victim of her times or someone on the sidelines. She confesses that she 'protected' the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg from public scrutiny by cutting inflammatory comments that Ginsburg made in an interview about quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Lee.Ĭouric would argue that she's also tough on herself. While she spends much of the book drooling over her beloved (there's a little too much about their sex life) she questions his fascination with the Civil War and speculates that he had misguided affection for Robert E. Producer Jeff Zucker goes from being her staunchest ally to a smug know-it-all who helped doom their short-lived syndicated series, 'Katie.'Įven her late husband, Jay Monahan, doesn't escape criticism. She meticulously documents her relationship with Matt Lauer and how it slowly unraveled after he was fired for inappropriate workplace behavior, reprinting their text exchanges that became more and more chilly. The former 'Today' show and CBS news anchor paints a world full of masochist gatekeepers who get away with bad behavior - or at least they did during her rise to the top. Many of Couric's victims deserve the jabs.

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