Book excerpt: Steven Roberts' 'Cokie: A Life Well Lived'

This is an excerpt from "Cokie: A Life Well Lived" by Steven V. Roberts, published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2021 by Steven V. Roberts. Published with permission.

Cokie always saw herself as an advocate for women, and she used her visibility to highlight the issue of breast cancer long before she was diagnosed with the disease herself.

A turning point came in 1991, when two of her friends died of breast cancer in the same week.

As she told journalist Ali Rogin: “They were in adjoining rooms in the funeral home. The masses were staggered so everybody could go to both. And I just got mad. I wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post that was picked up around the country. At that point the funding for all of cancer and all of heart disease combined was less than the funding for AIDS. And of course I’m for AIDS funding but that was because of advocacy. I do remember doing Nightline one night when I was the anchor, and there was some new data out on breast cancer. I insisted on doing a whole show on it, and they basically treated me like I wasn’t there, like I was just invisible. And everybody was just eye rolling. I remember saying to the executive producer, ‘You know men really might care because they want somebody to fold their socks.’ And of course, it turned out to be an incredibly well-watched show because it affects so many people.”

In 2005, three years after her own diagnosis, Cokie helped organize a panel of women from ABC to talk about their own experiences with breast cancer for a TV special.

One of them, Amy Entelis, describes Cokie’s role: “She created a space for all of us to talk about scary things and our experiences and share them widely. That was just another of those things that Cokie did that went far beyond anything anybody had ever tried before.”