As Hot as He Is Cool

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Ted Koppel brings sparkle and unflappability to television

At the outset of last week's televised debate among eight Democratic presidential candidates, Ted Koppel smiled into the camera and said, "The moderator will try to have complete control." That drew a laugh, but as usual, he was in earnest. Indeed, during the half of the debate that he moderated, Koppel, cool and cerebral, kept the discussion crisply controlled--and confirmed his reputation as perhaps the best serious interviewer on American TV.

Koppel, 43, has established himself as the thinking person's anchor on ABC's late-evening news show Nightline, which since March 1980 has built an average audience ranging from 5.1 million to 6.8 million viewers for discussions of issues as sensitive as child abuse and as complex as nuclear war games. Unlike the early-evening anchors, who help select stories but have little role in the coverage of most of them, Koppel controls almost every word that is spoken during Nightline. Most of each show is live interviews conducted by him. Often he must interweave five or six participants who represent conflicting viewpoints and speak by satellite from several countries.

Koppel is adroit at interpreting other people's answers without seeming to put words into their mouths. He neatly exposes hypocrisy, but without raising his voice or resorting to rhetoric. On occasion he can become testy, as he did while interviewing a California district attorney who jailed a twelve-year-old for refusing to testify against her stepfather; but when he does let his feelings show, he quickly apologizes on air. His buttoned-down style and unflappable calm could make him seem dull, but he works with express-train speed and almost never lets an interview become repetitive. He thinks faster and more subtly than most other television reporters, yet always does his homework and never seems to be using his wit just to score points. Well versed in the details and jargon of Washington, he nonetheless talks about ideas in layman's terms; he often says that one must not overestimate the audience's specific knowledge or underestimate its intelligence. His most difficult feat is avoiding the twin pitfalls of overaggressiveness and overfamiliarity. Says U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Jeane Kirkpatrick: "He is tough enough to make it interesting to engage in the discussion, but the questions are always straight and fair."

The New Hampshire debate may have been Koppel's most sensitive assignment ever, and he handled it ably but with restraint. He explains, "I could not be quite as tough as on Nightline. The point was not for me to elicit any particular piece of information or to trap someone in an inconsistency." Still, some of the discussion displayed him at his deflating best. When the candidates talked about cutting the military budget, Koppel asked which domestic military bases they considered unnecessary. When they kept emphasizing that none of them downgrade the importance of peace, Koppel noted, "In fairness, you don't think that the fellow in the White House does either, do you?"

Four days later, Koppel took on another demanding showcase: his occasional ABC series Viewpoint, a live discussion of journalistic ethics with comment from the public. The show focused on the conflicting demands of freedom of information and national security. Among Koppel's strengths is that he almost never indulges in special pleading for his craft. Although he is somewhat conservative in a business that Viewpoint participants lambasted as liberal, Koppel was careful not to interject his views.

Last year Koppel was sounded out about, and rejected, the network's most coveted news job, anchor of World News Tonight. The post, vacated by the death of Frank Reynolds, went to Peter Jennings. Although the job might have boosted his reported $700,000 salary, Koppel says he never wanted it. When ABC News President Roone Arledge telephoned to ask if he was interested, Koppel said, "Let me make it easier for you," and opted to stay on Nightline. His choice makes sense to TV journalists. Says CBS Morning News Anchor Diane Sawyer: "The format of Nightline has to be the envy of every serious broadcast journalist. He has control and, above all, time to explore a subject."

Koppel started in journalism in 1962 as a radio correspondent and three years later switched to ABC-TV. By 1969 he had become the TV network's Hong Kong bureau chief, and he spent nearly two years reporting from Viet Nam. During the Nixon and Ford Administrations, as a diplomatic correspondent, he logged more than 250,000 air miles.

After a dozen years of dedicated careerism, Koppel astonished colleagues in 1976 by giving up his coveted beat and taking almost a year to be a house husband while his wife Grace Anne started law school. Says he: "I finally understood viscerally what women go through. People focus on those few months I took off and not on the years that my wife put her career on hold." Koppel worked part-time anchoring an ABC weekend newscast until Arledge became president of ABC News in 1977 and stripped him of the job.

His career remained in a slump until 1979, when he substituted for Reynolds on a late-night special newscast. Says Arledge: "We discovered Ted had this wonderful ability to keep the conversation going in a way that everyone could follow."

Koppel was born in Britain, the only child of German Jews who fled Hitler's regime. His family moved to New York City when he was 13, and he grew up revering Edward R. Murrow and Alistair Cooke. After completing a B.A. at Syracuse, he received an M. A. in journalism at Stanford, where he met his wife.

The Koppels, their children (Andrea, 20; Deirdre, 18; Andrew, 13; and Tara, 12) and Grace Anne's father live in a modern house in Potomac, Md. They spend little time on Washington's social scene. Says NBC Correspondent Marvin Kalb, who collaborated with Koppel on a bestselling 1977 novel about diplomatic intrigue, In the National Interest: "Ted has very strong family feelings and does everything with dedication." Says Koppel: "Our idea of an enjoyable evening is dinner, usually Japanese, and a movie." His hobbies include reading, running, skiing and playing tennis. "I do them all at the same time," he says, with a lopsided grin.

In recent years, Koppel has seemed enough of a boy wonder to achieve just such impossibilities. He gets all but universal praise from journalists and from officials he has interviewed, for both skill and affability. "In all the years I've known Ted," says ABC Morning News Anchor Steve Bell, "I've yet to detect the flaw."

Koppel is even renowned among colleagues for quick humor and dead-on impersonations of Gary Grant, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

Koppel has suffered one setback.

Nightline, which since last April has been the only hourlong news show on any commercial network, will be cut back to half an hour on Feb. 8, coincidentally Koppel's 44th birthday. At the hour length, ratings sagged. Says Koppel: "We were on a downward spiral." Often the show gave a topic too much time, or jumbled together unrelated segments, some of them less than urgently newsworthy. Admits Executive Producer William Lord: "By thinking larger, we diluted the focus of the show." The biggest roadblocks, however, were local ABC affiliates. When the show expanded, twelve stations dropped it outright and 18 began to delay its broadcast time; in all, only 123 of ABC's 211 affiliates were carrying the show live.

Koppel spoke to executives of affiliates at a meeting in Dallas last week, and some 20 stations have pledged to pick up the new half-hour Nightline. The show's potential seems perhaps as sound as Koppel's. His view: "The spiral is going upward again."

Koppel remains hot enough and cool enough to propel it. --By William A. Henry III.

Reported by Richard Bruns/New York and Christopher Redman/Washington

With reporting by Richard Bruns, Christopher Redman