Norah Goes To Washington

Norah O’Donnell takes CBS Evening News to D.C.70

- Melina Bellows

TELL ME SOMETHING I DON’T KNOW,” says Norah O’Donnell. She’s not being challenging, but instead stating what the audience should expect from her each evening as the CBS Evening News anchor. It’s the dream job for someone whose personal mission is to satisfy her own relentless curiosity by getting the facts, and getting them right.

Sitting behind her desk in her New York office at CBS News, O’Donnell projects authority, dressed in a vivid purple sheath dress, her hair and makeup camera-ready. As anyone who meets her can attest, the former anchor of CBS This Morning is also incredibly warm. She’s generous with full body hugs and has a contagious, husky laugh. But it’s O’Donnell’s intellectual rigor and inquisitiveness that define her.

Her desk holds stacks of books, including In Search of Light by Edward R. Murrow and A Reporter’s Life by Walter Cronkite, both CBS News legends, as well as The Mueller Report. There’s also a coffee mug with an image of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the phrase, “Women belong in all places where decisions are being made.”

For O’Donnell, that place is Washington, D.C., where CBS Evening News will soon move to a new studio from New York. “America is the most powerful country in the world, and Washington’s the most powerful city in the world,” she explains. “And we believe that the best way to tell a story and understand what’s happening is to get as close to it as we can.”

It will be a relatively easy transition. This month, she will relocate from Manhattan along with husband Geoff Tracy and their 12-year-old twins, Grace and Henry, and 11-year-old daughter, Riley. However, Tracy has owned restaurants in Washington since 2000. After two decades of the family’s commuting, O’Donnell is delighted to have one home base, and in the city where she was born.