On Nov. 7, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act into law, less than 20 years after the rise of television.
The goal was to create enriching educational programming beyond the country’s three major television networks.
At the time, radio was “sort of left for dead,” as Americans became increasingly captivated by television. But a handful of people operating small radio stations around the country successfully pushed lawmakers drafting the Public Broadcasting Act to include radio as part of the new public broadcasting system.
Out of that act emerged National Public Radio — NPR — and its growth can be attributed to four women, according to journalist Lisa Napoli, who spoke about the “Founding Mothers” of NPR at The Osborn Senior Living Community. Napoli authored the 2021 book, “Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR.”
NPR was born at the height of the women’s movement, and Bill Siemering — considered one of NPR’s founding figures — was committed to hiring women at a time when they were rarely viewed as serious journalists.
Enter Linda Wertheimer, the daughter of a butcher from rural New Mexico, who discovered her love of journalism while in college. She heard about NPR and showed up looking for a job.
Napoli recounted Siemering’s first meeting with Wertheimer.
“He almost didn’t hire her,” Napoli said. “He wanted real working people, real voices with real backgrounds, and she said, ‘Well, maybe I went to Wellesley, but I went on a full scholarship, and my father was a butcher.’ And he hired her.”
Siemering’s next hire was Susan Stamberg, the daughter of a salesman and a graduate of Barnard College. She first found a low-paying job at WAMU, a public radio affiliate in Washington, D.C., producing public affairs programming and traffic reports before eventually sitting in as a host.
“She didn’t sound like the usual network broadcasting male voices, and Siemering welcomed that about her,” Napoli explained.
Nina Totenberg, the daughter of a concert violinist, chose not to attend college because she wanted to begin working immediately as a reporter. She landed a job at a small publication and built her reputation through what Napoli described as “old-fashioned shoe leather reporting.”
“She went all around, to meetings and parties and galleries, and basically just worked it and earned it,” Napoli said. “She was feared and revered.”
Eventually, after someone left NPR, Totenberg was recommended for the position and hired.
A new NPR administrator, Frank Mankiewicz, later hired Cokie Roberts, the daughter of influential Louisiana politicians Hale and Lindy Boggs.
“She wasn’t necessarily on as direct a career path as the other three women,” Napoli said.
But coincidence, timing, and perhaps a little fate brought the four women together.
Napoli described how the four women — despite their vastly different backgrounds — formed a powerful on-air presence at a time when women were rarely covering politics on national radio.
“You have Linda Wertheimer, who worked like heck to get a job on the air, and Cokie Roberts, who was born into politics and knew everyone on Capitol Hill because she grew up around it,” Napoli said. “They should have become enemies, but instead they became best of friends.”
Napoli described the women as “running around Washington with microphones, asking men questions and broadcasting politics to the country.”
Meanwhile, Totenberg carved out NPR’s Supreme Court coverage, a reporting beat that Napoli said she essentially invented for broadcasting, while Stamberg became known for her warmth and conversational interviewing style.
“These four women were basically rocking it at public radio,” Napoli said, noting that they were once nicknamed “The Fallopian Jungle.”
Although opportunities for management positions existed, Napoli said the women understood that their influence came from being on the air.
“They basically ran the show,” she said.
“You might remember a time when news wasn’t everywhere — on a watch, an iPad, a phone — when you didn’t get a headline the instant something happened,” Napoli said, explaining what a different time it was when these women took to the airwaves. Through stories, slides, and archival recordings, Napoli guided the audience through the earliest days of public broadcasting.
The idea for the book came about in 2016 after Napoli had published her second book, which documented the lives of Ray and Joan Kroc, the couple behind the McDonald’s franchise.
“That book was really about Joan Kroc, Ray’s wife, a huge philanthropist who happened to donate a lot of money to NPR. So, all these things were sort of rattling around in my brain, and then suddenly Cokie Roberts passed away from breast cancer in the fall of 2019,” Napoli recalled.
“I was casting about looking for a new book subject, and I thought I would write about Cokie Roberts, because she was like a family member to everyone. And a friend said, ‘What you should really write about is the founding mothers of NPR.’ And I said to my editor, ‘That’s our story.’”
It was a story whose research she completed in just under a year, finishing it to coincide with NPR’s 50th anniversary.
