Diane Sawyer

Today, Diane Sawyer is known to millions as the host of the daily evening newscast ABC World News, but she long been familiar to American television audiences through her decade as the host of the same network's Good Morning America program, and for her previous career at CBS News.

Sawyer grew up in Louisville, Kentucky and attended Wellesley College, assisted by a scholarship she had won as America's Junior Miss. After graduation, she returned to Louisville, where she began her broadcasting career with the local ABC affiliate. She was hired as a White House aide to President Richard Nixon. She remained at the White House during the administration of Gerald Ford, and later assisted former President Nixon with the writing of his memoirs, as well as the preparation for his historic series of television interviews with British broadcaster David Frost.

She joined CBS News as a political correspondent in 1978 and was soon named co-anchor of the CBS Morning News. Sawyer left CBS for ABC News in 1989 to co-anchor the news magazine Prime Time live with Sam Donaldson. During the same period she co-anchored the twice weekly prime time program 20/20. She became host of Good Morning America in 1999, a post she held for nearly a decade, before assuming the weekday evening anchor responsibilities at ABC World News in the last days of 2009. She received the broadcast news profession's highest honor, the Peabody Award, for her 2009 story "A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains."

Over the years, she has won a reputation as an adroit interviewer. In addition to the celebrities and entertainers she has faced in the news magazine setting, she has held her own in broadcast conversations with four American presidents, as well as such difficult foreign leaders as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Fidel Castro, Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein.

At the time of this 1987 address to the Academy of Achievement in Scottsdale, Arizona, she was a regular correspondent for 60 Minutes, the venerable CBS Sunday news magazine, and was already one of America's most popular broadcast news personalities.