[Editor's Note: The following article was originally authored by Ms. Marggi Roldan and published in the Oct. '93 issue of The Beta Journal. Diane Sawyer is currently a co-anchor on Good Morning America.]
 
“Think of the thing you like to do most. Make that your career,” says Diane Sawyer, co-anchor of ABC’s PrimeTime Live” and former Beta from Seneca High School, Kentucky.
 
“I do not know anyone who is a big success at something who did not start doing it because they just loved it,” she said in an April 1992 interview for WSOM News. “And success wasn’t the reason they did it. The did it because they loved it and believed in it, “ said Ms. Sawyer.
 
Judging by her own words, Ms. Sawyer must love her career because she is one of the most successful women in broadcast journalism. You can see her every  Thursday night on “PrimeTime Live.” On occasion, Ms. Sawyer is a substitute anchor for “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings” and ABC News “Nightline”
 
She began her career in broadcasting in 1967 in Louisville, Kentucky, where she was a reporter for WLKY-TV. Before developing her career in network news broadcasting, she also spent eight years as a staff assistant to former President Richard Nixon, and helped him write his book when he left office.
 
Then in 1978, she signed on with the CBS News Washington Bureau as a general assignment reporter. With her unsurpassed knowledge of politics learned while serving in Nixon’s press office and her ease before the cameras, she rose from this relatively low postion to co-anchor for the “Morning News” and then correspondent and co-editor of “60 Minutes.” Diane Sawyer was the first woman correspondent for the slickly-produced, multi-Emmy-winning “60 Minutes.”
 
In1989 she joined ABC News as a co-anchor of “PrimeTime Live” with Sam Donaldson. Over the past few years, Ms. Sawyer has conducted several news breaking investigations that garnered some of the top awards in American journalism. Her revealing hidden camera investigation of racial discrimination, which documented the different experiences of blacks and whites in America, won the Grand Prize in the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. Her undercover investigation of day-care center centers, which featured disturbing footage of unsanitary conditions and inattentive workers, won the National Headliner Award, the Ohio State Award, and the Sigma Delta Chi Award.
 
In a special, hour-long program, Ms. Sawyer exposed the questionable business practices of three prominent televangelists—W.V. Grant, Larry Lea and Robert Tilton. The report triggered investigations of Robert Tilton by the FBI, the IRS, the Postal Service and the Texas Attorney General’s office, and the aftermath prompted several “PrimeTime Live” updates. The investigation was honored with the Investigative Reporters and Editors top prize and a National Headliner Award.
 
During the 1990-91 television season, Ms. Sawyer conducted a revealing investigation exposing patient neglect and doctor incompetence at a Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio. The report prompted the Secretary of Veteran Affairs to send a team to investigate conditions at the facility. It was also honored with an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for Outstanding Investigative Reporting, as well as a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Citation.
 
THE EARLY YEARS
The second of two children of E.P. and Jean W. Sawyer, Diane was born in Glasgow, KY, on December 22, 1945. Her father was a county judge, her mother an elementary school teacher. She grew up attending public schools and was active in many artistic activities including tap dancing, ballet and piano.
 
At Seneca High School she was editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper, The Arrow. In her senior year she won first place in the annual national Junior Miss contest. As she told Jamie Loughridge for Harper’s Bazaar (Nov. 1984), this title gave her the opportunity to make public appearances around the country, which gave her a great deal of experience in speaking extemporaneously “without panicking.” Certainly, this quality has helped propel her career.
 
HER SUCCESS
Ms. Sawyer has made her mark in broadcast journalism as a poised, composed interviewer. With her businesslike questions and warm, amiable manner, Ms. Sawyer manages to get a story that abrasive and interrogational techniques would fail to reveal.
 
As she told Ashley Farmer (Louisville Magazine, Nov. 1992), “…the most important thing is really paying attention. You need to listen, thinking more about [the person you’re interviewing] than about yourself. That is how you know the right questions to ask. That is how you know whether someone is telling the truth…”
 
She has interviewed politicians, movie stars, nobility: important people such as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan’s King Hussein. She traveled to Moscow to speak with Boris Yeltsin in the Russian Parliament Building during the Soviet coup.
 
Ms. Sawyer conducted the first interview with former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze after his dramatic resignation. In addition, she was the first American television journalist in history to conduct an interview with the head of the KGB and to tour in notorious headquarters in Moscow.
 
While that reveals the glamour in the job, most of us want to know what a typical day for her is like.
 
“Well, the ‘typical’ day is atypical,” says Ms. Sawyer. “That’s the thing to remember around here, because some days you go for two days and you get up in the morning and you work on scripts. Then you record some scripts, and then you rearrange some other scripts you’re working on because you’re usually working on about five stories at one time. But, ah, on the third day you get on a plane and fly off to shoot still another story, and then you come back. Then show day, we start in the morning about 9:30 or 10:00 and work until 11:00 at night and go on the air. So every day is varied, depending on where you are and which of your five scripts you’re working on at any given time.”
 
This 1967 graduate of Wellesley College (B.A. in English) spends her free time, what little she has, reading and going to the movies.