“Lee’s face becomes a canvas of beet-red as he hugs his mom,” then News and Observer journalist and current Assembly contributor Billy Warden wrote in a profile of UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Lee Roberts way back in 1990. (The piece is not on the N&O website, but can be found on newspapers.com.)
Roberts’ mother, famed NPR journalist Cokie Roberts, was in town for a fundraiser, so Warden spent a day with her son, then a Duke University senior.
“What an amazing pair they make,” Warden wrote. “Cokie in her dark checked outfit with her dazzling eyes; Lee in his blue blazer and spiffy tie with his perfectly combed blond hair. Both of them so sharp, so poised, so reasonable.”
I’ve known that Lee is the late journalist’s son since I started on this beat, but until I read Warden’s profile I didn’t consider how useful the family context could be for me. Roberts is a reserved public figure—to take a line from my colleague Korie Dean out of context, he is not one to say more about that. But Cokie and Lee’s father, longtime New York Times journalist and current George Washington University professor Steve Roberts, wrote about their son publicly for decades. They even coauthored a 2000 book about marriage and family, From This Day Forward, that was helpfully available at my local county library (though curiously only in large-print format). What nuggets does the book include?
It is there that I learned that Steve missed Lee’s first birthday for work, promised Cokie he’d never do it again, and drew the short straw to take Lee and some friends to see the band Foreigner for Lee’s 13th. “The six of them were probably the youngest people in the building and I was probably the oldest,” Steve wrote. The elder Roberts spent the night listening to a World Series game on a portable radio.
That maybe isn’t so helpful for The Assembly’s reporting. But understanding Lee’s upbringing does shine some light on his perspectives.
Cokie’s father was the former Democratic U.S. House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, and his prominence meant Lee rubbed shoulders with powerbrokers throughout his childhood. The Robertses had a family saying—”I guess the raisins were a bad idea”—that stemmed from Lee and Tom Brokaw’s kids throwing raisins around the room one Thanksgiving. Another time, Cokie broke a tradition of Sunday family dinners to meet with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
“Tell your children that I’m grateful they let you come, and tell them that President Kennedy loved and admired their grandfather very much,” Onassis told Cokie.
Other details could offer some insight into Lee’s psychology, like a time the family tried to talk their way onto a Greek ferry without proper papers for their car. A yelling match in Greek made a young Lee cry, and the attendant let them on. The next morning, Cokie and Steve warned Lee there would likely be another argument to disembark. Lee turned to his dad and asked, “How am I going to know when to cry?”
But the detail surest to capture Tar Heel attention is that Lee didn’t just attend Duke; it was the only college he ever seriously considered, and he went over the objections of his father, who preferred the Ivy League.
“Being the child of professional journalists has its pros and cons,” Lee told The Assembly. “You learn a lot, but nothing is really ever off the record.”
If Lee needs some inspiration for handling the awkward questions that brings up, he can just reflect on his mother’s fundraising tour. “I was amazed at how well she ad-libbed,” Lee told Warden after the event in Chapel Hill. “I wonder if she has a standard speech. Probably does. She probably gets a lot of the same questions, too.”
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