Still mourning Jennings, ABC News is tested anew

The last time ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas saw her co-anchor, Bob Woodruff, he and his producers had their suitcases with them and were readying to leave the newsroom, bound on a week-and-a-half-long swing through Israel and Iraq.

“I was envious -- I wanted to go,” Vargas recalled in an interview. “I was sort of joking with him, ‘I can’t believe you guys are going without me!’ ”

Such good-natured banter over who got assigned the big trips had become regular repartee between the new partners in their first month together on “World News Tonight,” but it was rare that they had those exchanges in person. With one usually in the studio and one on the road, the anchors communicated largely through nightly e-mails, offering words of encouragement amid an exhausting swirl of travel.

“Despite massive geographical distances, we were really bonding and I feel jelling into a great team,” said Vargas, who had socialized for years with Woodruff and his wife but never worked with him directly until they were named co-anchors.

Six days after he left, she was awakened at dawn by a phone call: Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt had been badly wounded by a roadside bomb in Iraq. The attack not only interrupted the launch of the newly remade broadcast, but also triggered a wave of emotion in the ABC newsroom, where employees are still mourning anchor Peter Jennings’ death from lung cancer six months ago.

“This is a staff that has been tested already,” Vargas said. “I don’t think anybody can believe we’re asking this amazing group of people to endure this kind of experience again.”

For Jon Banner, executive producer of “World News Tonight,” last week’s flurry of events felt all too familiar: the alarming news about an anchor’s health, the scramble to temporarily replace him, the flood of calls and e-mails from concerned viewers.

“I sort of thought that having been through this once, it might be a little easier,” Banner said wearily at the end of last week. “It’s not.”

Woodruff and Vogt, who both sustained shrapnel wounds to the head, among other injuries, are now being treated at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. Vogt, who is awake and talking, will need further rehabilitation but is making excellent progress and could be released soon, ABC News President David Westin said.

Woodruff is also improving, but he remains sedated and the severity of his head injury remains unclear -- along with the question of how it will affect his ability to return to the anchor chair.

“I don’t know how long Bob is going to be recuperating,” Westin said. “At the same time, we have real reason for hope and for optimism.”

For now, the network has turned to “Good Morning America” co-anchors Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson to fill in for Woodruff. But ABC officials acknowledge that the solution is a temporary one, and all they can do now -- as they did when Jennings fell ill -- is to wait.

“I think we’ll just have to play it by ear,” Banner said. “It’s far too early to tell how long we’ll have to do this for. It’s a difficult time, but we’re very hopeful and we’re counting on Bob coming back as co-anchor.”

It remains to be seen what affect the changes will have on the ratings in the meantime. When Jennings fell ill last spring, the newscast -- split among substitute anchors Gibson, Vargas and Woodruff -- held steady behind top-ranked NBC.

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‘Rising to the occasion’

The effect of the attack was magnified, ABC staffers said, as it came less than a month after Woodruff and Vargas kicked off an expanded version of “World News Tonight” that features an afternoon webcast and two late editions for West Coast viewers. The network was still working on a new set and promotional campaign to showcase the anchor team, which officials hoped would be able eventually to catch up with “NBC Nightly News.”

“Everyone was getting used to each other and we were hitting our stride and starting to see the promise of what this new anchor team could produce,” Westin said. “To have that disturbed by an event like this is very upsetting.”

But he praised the newsroom for “rising to the occasion,” adding that Vargas has done “a terrific job at being very solid and stable throughout this.”

For her part, the anchor said that she’s determined not to let the broadcast falter in Woodruff’s absence.

“We had all sorts of great plans,” Vargas said. “We’re trying to figure out now how to persevere and to continue to put on the very best show we can, not only because we all want to, because we all know that’s what Bob would want. Selfishly, I want Bob to return to a strong show that we can all be proud of and that is competitive.”

In the meantime, ABC employees are trying to cope with the event on a personal level. George Stephanopoulos, the network’s chief Washington correspondent and host of “This Week,” was at his desk early the morning of Jan. 29, preparing for the day’s show, when the news came in that Woodruff and Vogt had been wounded.

“I thought, ‘It’s happening all over again,’ ” he recalled. “It’s a huge blow.”

“It’s difficult, I won’t lie to you,” said Kate Snow, co-anchor of the weekend edition of “Good Morning America,” who lives with her family in the same Westchester County town as Woodruff, his wife and their four children. “It’s on our minds all the time.”

In the last year, the two families have frequently gotten together over pizza and Chinese food with their children.

“He’s the kind of guy that makes scrambled eggs on the barbecue and goes to his kids’ games on the weekend,” Snow said. “He’s not in any way ostentatious or formal.”

The anxiety over Woodruff’s injuries comes with its own unique contours. Jennings, 67, was a broadcast icon, but his 44-year-old successor is a member of the network’s young generation of correspondents, many of whom have done stints in Iraq.

“What happened with Peter was beyond-description awful, but this was different,” said correspondent Dan Harris, whose fourth-floor office is next to the one Woodruff used before he was named anchor. Woodruff “is one of us and he was doing what we all do, so it is a different sort of shock and distress that set in.”

On the day they were attacked, Woodruff and Vogt had been traveling with members of the 4th Infantry Division but had switched into a less-protected Iraqi vehicle for a piece they were doing on the readiness of Iraqi troops. Minutes later, the vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device.

Vargas said that she “probably” would have made the same decision Woodruff did to get into the Iraqi carrier.

“Although, truth be told, if now I were confronted with the same decision, I would weigh all the things I know,” she said, but added: “I still might decide to do it.”

In December, Vargas spent a week reporting in Iraq and said she quickly realized that the only way to get an accurate sense of the preparedness of the Iraqi troops was to spend time with them.

“We saw soldiers who didn’t appear to be as ready as we were led to believe, and we had some very tough questions for the general in charge of training them,” she said. “But I couldn’t have seen that and made my own judgment call if I hadn’t spent two days out with them.”

Westin has emphasized that ABC had no intention of scaling back its coverage of the war or changing its approach to reporting in the region in the wake of the attack.

But much as Jennings’ illness drove the network to launch an extensive series on lung cancer and the dangers of smoking, the news president said the wounding of the two ABC newsmen has prompted the network to contemplate doing more stories about what happens to injured soldiers once they return from the battlefield.

“In an ironic sense, Bob is still reporting as an anchor,” he said. “He’s shining a spotlight on this.”