White tuxedo-pleat V-neck cotton shirt ($210) and black leather skirt (price on request), Karen Millen. 1259 Wisconsin Ave. NW, 202-333-0280. Black kid leather empire shoe, Jimmy Choo ($495). The Collection at Chevy Chase, 240-223-1102. Stainless steel and leather Mark watch, Tiffany & Co. ($2,200). The Shops at Fairfax Square, 703-893-7700. 18k white-gold earrings, Bulgari ($2,300). The Collection at Chevy Chase, 301-986-8610. Ring, Sawyer’s own

D

	Black and cream paint-effect stretch piquet coat with belt, Moschino Cheap and Chic ($1,845). Saks Jandel, 5510 Wisconsin Ave., Chevy Chase, 301-652-2250. Black stretch cotton buttondown shirt, Dolce & Gabbana ($395). Saks Fifth Avenue, 5555 Wisconsin Ave. NW, Chevy Chase, 301-657-9000. Black leather skirt, Karen Millen (price on request). 1259 Wisconsin Ave. NW, 202-333-0280. Black kid leather empire shoe, Jimmy Choo ($495). The Collection at Chevy Chase, 240-223-1102. 18k whitegold earrings, Bulgari ($2,300). The Collection at Chevy Chase, 301-986-8610. Stainless steel and leather Mark watch, Tiffany & Co. ($2,200). The Shops at Fairfax Square, 703-893-7700. Ring, Sawyer’s own
	Black double-silk coat with front pocket and zip detail, Moschino ($2,530). Visit moschino.com. Stainless steel and leather Mark watch, Tiffany & Co. ($2,200). The Shops at Fairfax Square, 703-893-7700. Gold hoops, Roberto Coin (price on request). Neiman Marcus, Mazza Gallerie, 202-966-9700

iane Sawyer is an all-American, self-made success story. Her distinguished, diverse career—from a staffer in the Nixon administration to first female anchor of CBS’ 60 Minutes—has led to a spot at the top of the ever-changing media industry. It’s an impressive feat for anyone, let alone a woman who came up in an era when being female was often a liability in the newsroom.

Even more impressive is how well Sawyer handles the considerable pressure and demands of her current position. She’s at the center of the main moneymaker in the network news business—morning news—and has sat in its most powerful seat as co-anchor of ABC’s Good Morning America for 10 years. Sawyer constantly reasserts her position as one of the most talented television journalists today, covering most every major live event and winning countless awards for her ambitious, enterprising and groundbreaking work. In addition to being the first person to deliver developing stories at daybreak, she’s often the last one to talk to Americans about compelling social issues at night through her Primetime specials, which have covered topics like foster care and poverty.

Beginning in the new year, Sawyer will helm the anchor desk at ABC’s World News when Charles Gibson, her former GMA co-anchor, retires. This career pinnacle, which she deems “an enormous honor,” makes her the second female after Katie Couric on CBS Evening News to anchor a nightly news program.

For Sawyer, though, getting a good story isn’t about beating the other networks or securing bragging rights. It’s about an old journalism credo: Uncover the truth— ugly or otherwise—and inform the public with spot-on reporting. “We’re here to witness and observe and be the best possible vessels for good questions, not answers,” Sawyer says. Indeed, she’s posed tough questions to some of modern history’s most notorious newsmakers: Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro and Manuel Noriega—in his first interview from prison— to name a few. But Sawyer has also won coverworthy chats with some of pop culture’s icons—she sat down with Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley for their only interview as a couple and did the Clintons’ first interview at home after the ’92 presidential election.

Connections and influence notwithstanding, she shies away from the spotlight when not in front of the lens to deliver a story. Preferring a quieter existence away from red carpets, Sawyer rarely speaks publicly about her home life and spends much of her free time with husband, film director Mike Nichols. Here, Capitol File catches up with the news icon in an exclusive interview about her professional accomplishments, personal passions and politics.

CAPITOL FILE: What do you love covering?
DIANE SAWYER: Appalachia and Appalachian poverty, Camden poverty, children and gun control, children in foster care—and there are half a million out there—which is one of my constant repertoires. The challenge is really deciding which questions are most urgent in my heart.

CF: What have been the biggest changes you’ve observed in television journalism?
DS: Three networks [once] controlled a sense of informational priority in America, and it had a reassuring consistency. Now we’re on a giant planet of nonstop yakking—all of us, all the time— and we’re redefining what it is to be informed. And the traditional sources are no longer the defining ones.

CF: There’s a certain responsibility and honesty that comes with being a great journalist. By getting a story out there, do you think that the media has an influence on the masses?
DS: I do and I feel that I need to go door-to-door. If I can just nag enough people enough of the time then something can change. You can make small changes that will ultimately ripple out into big ones.

CF: Do you have a political stance?
DS: No, and even my husband says he couldn’t tell anyone what my politics are. I love that.

CF: Any predictions for politics in this country?
DS: I think we’re re-engaged because the issues are so big and we are forced to grapple with complicated ideas like health care. Everybody on the spectrum seems to feel that some kind of action must be taken.

CF: When does it become apparent to you that the media has taken a topic too far, like with Michael Jackson’s death?
DS: We have this conundrum in that individually we all have a sense of proportion and we say, “I’ve only done what was good, strong reporting on a story.” Yet collectively, the wall-to-wall carpeting of stories makes it seem that we’re in some frenzy, some obsessive viral coverage. I can understand that collectively we project something that each of us individually feels we’re guarded against. I think at ABC we’ve gotten it right. We’ve advanced the story and it’s always been driven by good questions.

CF: What are your least favorite stories to work on?
DS: I will confess I find the stories about transient TV shows to be a little hard.

CF: Who was most intriguing of all the world leaders you’ve interviewed? There are so many!
DS: So many! There’s a Shakespearean drama in most of them. I think we [as humans] are such a complex mix of saint and sinner, truth-teller and BS-er, so I like to see people in three dimensions. Boris Yeltsin in the middle of the upheaval when Russia was becoming Russia and not the Soviet Union was intriguing. He was this wildly unruly creature who, in his own unfathomable way, was dug in against some kind of roll-back into Soviet territory and he was the least likely person you would have cast for that part. Every time I talk to Nelson Mandela I come away feeling we’ve seen something pure—a concentrated visionary courage that is all the more beautiful because it’s so simple.

CF: What have been some of your most harrowing interviews?
DS: Saddam Hussein wasn’t easy. I did feel I had the crew as my responsibility, too. The room was ringed with Saddam aides who gasped every time I asked a question. A couple of times the interpreter looked at me like, Oh, please don’t make me ask him that. So that was a tightrope walk—to ask him the questions I wanted to ask, like “How many people have you killed personally?” and “Aren’t you embarrassed by all those posters of you around your city?” and still to get us out of there with our tape.

CF: What about Noriega?
DS: God, yes. It was fascinating because of his famously red underwear he wore [to ward off evil], which was revealed in the middle of the coup.

CF: When you interview someone like Ahmadinejad, how does his archaic view of women affect you?
DS:: I’m fairly used to being dismissed, particularly in certain parts of the world and it was even truer a few decades ago when I was starting out. I would walk in and they would all think, You’re not the interviewer, are you? You’re not actually going to be asking me questions. I remember walking in to meet with the Taliban shortly after they moved into Kabul. The look on the available leader’s face was of extreme horror that this was who had been sent to interview him.
With Ahmadinejad I felt a couple of things. First of all, I’m so tall. He’s not. I could tell there was a little bit of a dance going on to make sure we weren’t photographed in ways that emphasized that. At the end of the interview, he did say to me, “Why are you asking these questions? You should be asking questions about romance.” So much of what he is doing is political theater anyway, internally and externally, and he sees it all as a game. These interviews are entertainment for him.

CF: Have you ever been nervous going to a country like Iran or North Korea?
DS: I’ve only been nervous about getting the crew in and out, getting the tape in and out. This is probably insane, but I have never been nervous for myself.

CF: What did you admire about Nixon?
DS: Well, I think that anybody who met with him got a sense of his breadth of instinct about the planet and it’s geopolitics, rivalries and selfinterests. I never failed to see anyone come away stunned by the way he could take a subject and travel the world with it and then show you how the pieces of the international psychological puzzle were rearranging themselves. He was a very young VP who had a long time to learn. He took it seriously. It mattered. He could renew his determination like no one I had ever seen before.

CF: Tell me about some of your mentors.
DS: How lucky I’ve been to have worked with Don Hewitt on 60 Minutes, Roone Arledge at ABC when I first arrived and my very first boss in Louisville, Kentucky, who is still in my life. He was old-fashioned, right out of central casting, a filled with integrity just-get-me-the-facts kind of newsman. An e-mail from him is still better than a Nobel Prize.

CF: I know you do it all—reporting, writing, producing—but when do you love the work the most?
DS: There’s something different to love at each stage. It’s wonderful when you come back and you’re looking at some of what you shot and it’s alive in the way it was when you were there. It’s filled with a pressing and urgent story, and you feel that you’ve captured the way things smelled, felt, and hurt. Sometimes you thought you got wonderful reporting and you put it up on the screen and can’t find it in there! I do love the moment when you have the story with its heart pounding. Also, when you’re in the middle of the interview and something you never could have thought of happens and you remember the infinite surprise in the world—that the world is always fresh and new.

CF: How do you personally take something that’s mediocre and make it better?
DS: It’s in the writing. You have to fuse it with what you’re thinking. If it’s not visible on the screen, you have to try and make sure it’s provocative enough that people are wrestling with something in the middle of it. That is in the language.

CF: When are you happiest?
DS: Saturday morning with my husband and the spontaneous call to friends who wander in—somebody’s cooked something, somebody brings a child.

CF: What’s dinner conversation like with your husband at home?
DS: It’s mostly about the fact that he wants to eat sausages and I’m trying not to allow it without being the person who never lets him eat anything he wants. That’s our life at home. He’s hilarious… he wakes up funny. There’s nobody else I’ve ever been able to imagine waking up as funny as he does.

CF: Is that what drew you to him when you met?
DS: Yes, and a sense that I would never get to the end of who he is. I think I haven’t even gone halfway.

CF: Where is that one place you can relax the most?
DS: Wherever I didn’t expect to. It’s like staying home a day from school when you thought you were going someplace, and you wake up, and all of a sudden you don’t have to and nobody knows you didn’t. It’s that feeling of hiding out in your tree house.

CF: Freedom.
DS: Yes! Part of me still wants to hide out in that tree house and never be found.

CF: Is your summer home on Martha’s Vineyard one of those hiding places for you?
DS: It is for my husband. He loves the ocean, sand, sun. I really would like a log cabin in the woods someplace.

CF: What do you love about Washington?
DS: Well, I loved my apartment on California Street. I wish I still lived there. I wish I could still go up on the roof on California Street and look out over the Capitol. I worked at the White House. I still love the sensation of those gates opening and the walk down that driveway. You pinch yourself. There are great restaurants in Washington. I loved going to the restaurants and clubs at night and I remember Roberta Flack was singing one night. I was happy there for eight years and I would come back in a minute. I simply love Washington.

CF: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?
DS: Maybe four, which is a good night for me. Five is a complete luxury. About 14 a night on the weekends.

CF: What do you like to do in your free time?
DS: Cooking, reading and pretending that I can still someday be a really good tennis player. Biking, too, in Central Park.

CF: What book are you reading right now?
DS: Well, let’s see. I just finished The American Wife. It’s fiction, but it’s supposed to be about Laura Bush and she’s just so complicated and interesting. I need nonfiction. I also read Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned—amazing stories—pick-me-up-off-the-floor-in-a-couple-of-weeks kind of stories.

CF: Are you a spiritual person?
DS: I pray for good lighting! [Laughs] Yes, in some undefined way. There’s a lot we cannot know—a lot we cannot fathom.

CF: Is there a philosophy you live by?
DS: Simply, it’s not enough to have good intentions. You have to try to change the lives of the people who need help.

CF: Do you ever regret not having children of your own?
DS: I would love to have been with my husband earlier and have had children and been in a different life, but no more than I love the life that we’ve had. I never felt that I had to have my own biological children to complete anything in my life. My life is filled with children I adore—my three stepchildren, a granddaughter, nieces and nephews and their children.

CF: Is there anything you would want to tackle if you were ever to leave TV?
DS: It will probably always be some form of trying to help people have a voice and explaining the wonder of life as I see it—the great theory and joyful wonder of life. To keep reminding everyone that it is an adventure every day.

CF: Well, you’ve also done everything.
DS: You’re probably right.