***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof*** Copyright © 2014 Shelia Weller INTRODUCTION The News You Give Begins with the News You''ve Lived Diane, Christiane, Katie: 1969, 1997, 2000 I. Pushing Past Grief: Diane, 1969 Twenty-three-year-old Diane Sawyer (she used her real first name, Lila, ironically, only in affectionate letters) was working as the first ever full-time female news reporter in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky-- on WLKY, Channel 32--in mid-September 1969. She had been on the job for two years, and she--a Wellesley graduate and former beauty queen-- was itching to leave for a bigger opportunity, in the nation''s capital. Still, Diane''s years at WLKY had not been uneventful. Louisville in the late 1960s had a roiling temper. Some of its residents were hell-bent on overturning the recent federally mandated civil rights advances. When black demonstrators peacefully marched through the streets to protest the stubbornly still segregated neighborhoods, angry whites rushed them, bearing swastikas, hurling bottles. On top of that, the country had just passed through a nightmare of a year, and Diane Sawyer of WLKY had reported on all of it.

Diane and her colleague Bob Winlock--who rejected being "the black reporter" as much as she disliked being "the female reporter"--witnessed painful backlash against advances they had both been a part of. Diane was kept off the riot-scene beat by her gallant bosses--at least one frontline reporter had gotten beaten--but the city''s racial anguish was on clear display everywhere, including during the emotionally fraught press conferences she covered for the station. Violence became commonplace. Early in her tenure at WLKY, Martin Luther King Jr. had been spat upon by a little white girl who couldn''t have been more than seven. During another visit, the civil rights leader''s skull had barely evaded a rock hurled through his car window (he later held the rock high and pronounced it a "foundation" of his struggle there). Then, of course, came Dr. King''s murder--close by, in Memphis--and that of Bobby Kennedy, in Los Angeles, during that surreally violent patch of spring to summer 1968.

"Diane was disconsolate" at both assassinations, the station''s general manager, Ed Shadburne, says. Still, she dutifully went out to get person-on-the-street responses. That was being a reporter: Tuck in the pain and do your job. You were a witness. But that was the ironic thing. Diane had already been a witness-- indeed, a participant--in some amazing ground-level integration gains almost a full decade earlier. Her junior high and high school, Seneca, had integrated startlingly early, in 1957, well before the city''s neighborhoods, restaurants, restrooms, and theaters had stopped barring blacks or roping them off in dingy "Coloreds" quarters. By a fluke of the school''s newness and geography, the 1957-1963 Seneca kids ("a third white, a third Jewish, a third black," the alums today like to proudly exaggerate) and their teachers were on their own, improvising a racial amity.

In 1958, when Diane was in the eighth grade (four years before James Meredith''s federally assisted singular integration of the University of Mississippi), white boys in ducktails and low-slung jeans had written GO HOME, NIGGER! on the walls when the first black students bravely but nervously entered, and some of the kids were beaten. But by the time her class reached eleventh grade, in 1961, the students were protesting restaurant segregation together. When the boys'' basketball team traveled to racist Kentucky towns for away games, the white players refused to go into the coffee shops that didn''t allow their black teammates; they all ate in their bus. Now, in 1969, the still resonating killings of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy seemed like a Molotov cocktail hurled against those fragile, cherished Seneca High advances. Diane''s family was her stable haven during a period of violence, regression, and sadness. Even as a working reporter four months shy of twenty-four, she was still living at home with her parents. The elder Sawyers had come to their security and respectability the hard way. Erbon Powers Sawyer and Jean Dunagan Sawyer had grown up during the Depression in dire poverty in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, just north of the Tennessee border.

Diane''s father was one of nine siblings. Diane''s mother, whose parents had the folksy names of Foxie and Norma Belle, was one of four daughters. The Dunagan children teetered on the brink of starvation. "There were sometimes only pennies and a few potatoes in winter--there were bruises, real bruises in that life" of theirs, Diane has said. Erbon and Jean had limited themselves to two children. Diane''s two-year-older sister, Linda, was the vivacious, prettier girl; Diane was the adoring little sister--circumspect, awkwardly tall, her poor eyesight requiring thick glasses. The Sawyer family was comfortable but not seriously prosperous. The bar was very high in Louisville, a city of century-old debutante balls and Kentucky Derby Winners'' Circle families of six generations of gentry who patronized the exclusive fox-hunting clubs in Lexington.

Diane''s father had made it up from a tiny junior college all the way through law school, and by 1969 he had long been the Jefferson County judge--Judge "Tom" Sawyer his jaunty sobriquet. Jean Sawyer--"Mrs. Sawyer" to decades of students--officiated at the blackboard at Hite Elementary. She was known as the best third-grade teacher in the city. The Sawyer family was deeply Methodist. Diane had attended Methodist Youth Association camp, and, as busy as she now was as a reporter, she still made it to practice two evenings a week to blend her gifted soprano, on classic hymns, with a mélange of other voices in the St. David''s Church-based choir called the Motet Singers. When Diane was growing up, the Sawyers had hosted home Bible meetings on Sunday and sometimes Wednesday nights at their home, while their family church, St.

Mark''s, was under construction. "Purpose" was a word heard in many sermons. The ideal--to live a life "of purpose"--was also fortified by Judge Sawyer. "Diane''s father was the one who really put the idea of ''purpose'' in her life; he was her moral compass," says her close friend ABC producer Mark Robertson, on the basis of what she has told him. "She always says, ''Those are real lives at stake!''" of her responsibility to the people whose stories she is telling on television. "That came from her father." Judge Sawyer was a serious man--a thoughtful intellectual. Diane''s love of D.

H. Lawrence and e. e. cummings seems to have derived from his respect for literature. Diane was very close to him, a closeness amplified by the serendipitous fact that she was the spitting image of his sister Lila, after whom she''d been named. She''d even tried law school for one semester, mainly, friends say, because law was what he did. Judge Sawyer was paternal in an old-fashioned way. Just after Diane had been hired at WLKY, he had pointedly dropped in one day, unannounced, on the station''s general manager to make good and sure that this man who''d hired his daughter did not have any designs on her.

He was a fierce Republican--Diane''s eventual, abiding loyalty to Richard Nixon, incomprehensible to so many, owes much to his strong party affiliation. Yet the judge was not stern; he had a palpable sense of compassion. The judge''s "love for his family, intellectual curiosity, and evenhandedness were as perfect as a person''s could be," says Diane''s high school English teacher and confidante, Alice Chumbley Lora. Finally, Judge Sawyer had given Diane the yardstick by which she chose her profession. "Answer three questions," he said one day. "One: What are you passionate about? Two: What can you have adventure doing? Three: What can you do to make a difference?" Four decades later she would recount those unforgettably impactful words to a young ABC News female protégée. Diane''s mother was perhaps an even greater influence. Jean Sawyer was not an intellectual ("I never saw Mrs.

Sawyer reading a book," one friend says), but she was a seizer of life, an ambitious perfectionist--and Diane was awed by this. "Growing up, I didn''t have distant idols, I had proximate ones," Diane once made clear. Jean Sawyer had a tremendous hold on her daughters. "Diane''s mother was a very, very aggressive woman. She was a force of nature," says Greg Haynes, a Louisville friend whom Diane dated in college. "She pushed her daughters into all these beauty contests." And lessons: Diane took piano, ballet, tap, voice, classical guitar, and fencing, sacrificing her social life for the palette of activities her mother lined up. "Mrs.

Sawyer was a 1950s version of the Tiger Mom," says one who knew the family: pushing her daughters, using criticism to make sure they did their best. Every opportunity Jean Sawyer hadn''t had, she made sure her daughters did have. "Mrs. Sawyer was very ambitious for her daughters," Haynes says. "She was extremely devoted to their achievement." Sometimes it seemed that was all she cared about. It was as if so much insecurity had suffused Jean''s and Erbon''s youths, the opposite would now be fiercely willed. A pristine security, unmarred by lack of opportunity--and certainly unmarred by tragedy--would be obtained for the Sawyer girls, come hell or high water.

And then, on September 23, 1969, that plan--that dream--fell apart in an instant. Diane''s father had risen early that morning and gotten into his car to drive to work. The route was familiar enough to be rote; he had driven it innumerable times. Somehow, this morning, s.