Reporting Live

No TV news blond has more steel than 60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl, whose Reporting Live is one impressively substantive celebrity memoir. As a rookie in the CBS Washington, D.C., bureau in 1972, she got an assignment too grubby and unpromising for the big reporters: Watergate. She didn't just date Bob Woodward, she vied with him for scoops. For a quarter century, workaholic Stahl saw more of presidents and fellow bulldog newshound Sam Donaldson than her own daughter and husband, Urban Cowboy writer Aaron Latham.

Stahl's book belongs on any political-history shelf. Besides a briskly readable account of epochal events witnessed up close, she offers canny insights into what broke Nixon, backs up Tom Shales's opinion of Carter as "a combination Mr. Rogers and John the Baptist," assesses Reagan's mysteriously fogbank-like mind, and paints a startlingly warm portrait of George Bush (though not Barbara). Not only can Stahl fire fierce questions at world leaders against hair-raising deadlines, she can analyze trends with cool detachment, sometimes busting her profession or herself as guilty parties. She laments the "moral McCarthyism" of our times and compares her profession to a pack of wild dogs she'd encountered on an African safari.

What did it mean to be a woman in a man's world? Menachem Begin sexually harassed her, but her experience with teenage girls proved useful in understanding Reagan's bitchy, backstabbing male staff. Stahl sketches her personal life (and Latham's near-fatal depression), but her stuff on media and politics is the real news here. --Tim Appelo