He Spoke In Richmond

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Anderson Cooper addresses Richmond Forum

By John Reid Blackwell
Published: February 20, 2011

Though he graduated from Yale University, Anderson Cooper's real education came as a young reporter covering the conflict and famine in Somalia.

"It was in Somalia that I saw starvation for the first time," said Cooper, now the popular, globe-trotting and Emmy Award-winning anchor of CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360°."

Speaking to a packed audience at Richmond's Landmark Theater on Saturday night, Cooper, whose career has since taken him into disaster and war zones all over the world, described how he sat in a hut in Somalia with a husband and wife whose young son had just died of starvation.

"They were using what little water they had left to wash his body," Cooper said. "You could see the hollowed-out circles around his eyes. You could see the ribs which were unobscured by muscle or fat. I will never forget his legs were as thin as the twigs in the outer layer of the hut they were living in."

Cooper, who spoke as part of The Richmond Forum series, urged the audience not to turn away from the tragedies they see reported every day.

"It is very easy in this day and age to kind of look the other way," he said. "I think it is important for us not to look away, but to look directly at the things that frighten us most."

Cooper also charmed the crowd with stories of how he essentially stumbled into becoming a broadcast journalist. He didn't set out to be a TV anchor, he said, and he is suspicious when aspiring young reporters tell him that's what they want to do.

"It's like a kid telling me they want to be a politician," he said. "I think you need to be a real person before you want to become a fake one."

Cooper studied political science at Yale, and he focused his studies on communism. He graduated in 1989, just as the Soviet Union was crumbling.

"When the Berlin Wall came down, I was pretty much screwed," he said. "It was hard not to take it personally."

So he asked his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, for some advice on a career choice.

"She is a remarkable lady and a very fascinating lady, but practical she is not," Cooper said, recalling how as a teenager he had asked her for some advice on applying for a job as a waiter.

"Her advice was to wear a shirt with vertical stripes, because they are very slimming," he said.

Her advice on his career choice after college was to "follow your bliss."

Cooper found that bliss eventually in broadcast journalism. When he was unable to find a network job, he wasn't daunted. He sneaked into Burma with a fake press pass and a video camera in the hopes someone would pick up his coverage of a conflict there. His reporting earned him a spot on Channel One News, the cable network that broadcasts to schools.

Since then, as a reporter for CNN, he has covered some of the most significant news stories of our time, including the aftermath of the tsunami in Sri Lanka in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

He has reported multiple times on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and most recently covered the revolution in Egypt, which he described as one of the most important historical events of our time.

"When you are covering conflict, you expect to see darkness, but you also find light," he said. "You expect to see horror, but you also find humanity."

jblackwell@timesdispatch.com