George Stephanopoulos

George Stephanopoulos Biography

George Robert Stephanopoulos (born February 10, 1961) is an American television journalist and a former political advisor.

Stephanopoulos rose to early prominence as a quick-witted communications director for the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign of Bill Clinton, subsequently becoming White House Communications Director then Senior Advisor for Policy and Strategy before departing in December 1996. Today he is chief political correspondent for ABC News, co-anchor of ABC News' Good Morning America, host of ABC's Sunday morning This Week, and primary substitute for ABC network anchor Diane Sawyer on ABC World News.

In recent years, he has co-hosted ABC News' special live coverage of political events with Sawyer and Charles Gibson and launched an ABCNews.com blog, George's Bottom Line.

Stephanopoulos is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Early life and education

Stephanopoulos was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, to Greek immigrants, Robert George and Nickolitsa "Nikki" Gloria (née Chafos) Stephanopoulos. His father is a Greek Orthodox priest and Dean Emeritus of the Archdiocesan Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in New York City, and his mother was for many years director of the national news service of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. Young George also became a follower of his parents' faith and long considered entering the priesthood himself.

Following some time in Purchase, New York, Stephanopoulos moved to the eastern suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio where he attended Orange High School in Pepper Pike. While at Orange, Stephanopoulos wrestled competitively. In 1982, he received his bachelor of arts degree in political science from Columbia University in New York, where he was a sports broadcaster for WKCR-FM, the university's radio station. Stephanopoulos was the salutatorian of his class and was also awarded a Harry S. Truman Scholarship.

Stephanopoulos' father always wanted his son to become a lawyer, if not a priest. Promising him he would attend law school eventually, George took a job as an aide to Cleveland congressman Ed Feighan in Washington, D.C.. Though he rose to Feighan's chief of staff, Stephanopoulos agreed to cede to his father's wishes and attend law school if he succeeded in a second attempt to earn a Rhodes Scholarship after having been rejected for the Rhodes Scholarship during his senior year at Columbia. He earned a M.A. in Theology at Balliol College. He maintains he spent much of his time trying to root his political leanings in the deeper philosophies that he studied there.

Early career

In 1988, Stephanopoulos worked on the Michael Dukakis 1988 U.S. presidential campaign. He has noted that one of his attractions to this campaign was that Dukakis was a Greek-American liberal from Massachusetts. After this campaign, Stephanopoulos became the "floor man" for Dick Gephardt, U.S. House of Representatives Majority Leader; he held this position until he joined the Clinton campaign.

Clinton Administration

Stephanopoulos was, along with David Wilhelm and James Carville, a leading member of Clinton's 1992 U.S. presidential campaign. His role on the campaign is portrayed in the documentary film The War Room (1993).

At the outset of Clinton's presidency, Stephanopoulos served as the de facto press secretary, briefing the press even though Dee Dee Myers was officially the White House Press Secretary. Later, he was moved to Senior Advisor on Policy and Strategy, when Myers began personally conducting the briefings (following several verbal missteps by Stephanopoulos) and David Gergen was brought in as the new White House Communications Director. The move was largely viewed as a rebuke to Stephanopoulos's handling of public relations during the first six months of the Clinton administration.

On February 25, 1994, Stephanopoulos and Harold Ickes had a conference call with Roger Altman to discuss the Resolution Trust Corporation's choice of Republican lawyer Jay Stephens to head the Madison Guaranty investigation, that later turned into the Whitewater controversy.

Stephanopoulos resigned from the Clinton administration shortly after Clinton was re-elected in 1996.

His memoir, All Too Human: A Political Education (1999), was published after he left the White House during Clinton's second term. It quickly became a number-one bestseller on The New York Times Best Seller list. In the book, Stephanopoulos spoke of his depression and how his face broke out into hives due to the pressures of conveying the Clinton White House message. Clinton referred to the book in his autobiography, My Life, apologizing for what he felt in retrospect to be excessive demands placed on the young staffer.

Stephanopoulos's book covers his time with Clinton from the day he met him in September 1991 to the day Stephanopoulos left the White House in December 1996, through two presidential campaigns and four years in the White House. Stephanopoulos describes Clinton in the book as a "complicated man responding to the pressures and pleasures of public life in ways I found both awesome and appalling".

Real Estate Loan Controversy

In 1994, columnist Jack Anderson reported that Stephanopoulos sealed an $835,000 commercial real estate deal consisting of a two-story apartment including an eyeware retailer with a below-market loan rate from a bank owned by Hugh McColl who had been called by President Clinton "the most enlightened banker in America". A NationsBank commercial loan officer said that this loan did "not fit our product matrix" as banks typically only offer such loans for customers with deep pockets and on a short-term adjustable rate basis. Stephanopoulos' real estate agent explained that "nobody making $125,000 could qualify for the property without the commercial property (lease)". One former senior bank regulator told Anderson that, "If his name were George Smith, and he didn't work in the White House, this loan wouldn't have gotten made." Regarding the controversy, NationsBank stated, "The loan described by Jack Anderson as a commercial loan to George Stephanopoulos was, in fact, a residential mortgage loan. At the time the loan commitment was made, Mr. Anderson (or his imaginary 'George Smith' who 'doesn't work in the White House') could have walked into any NationsBanc Mortgage Company office in the D.C. area and received the same excellent rate and term for the same deal." However, Stephanopoulos' realtor states that he would not have qualified for the loan without the commercial property rent. One NationsBank source states that the issuance of a residential loan on mixed-use properties is such a rarity that it was not even addressed in the "NationsBanc Mortgage Corporation's Program Summary" or its "Credit Policy Manual". A NationsBanc underwriting memo revealed that one of the three restrictions for mixed-use properties is that "the borrower must be the owner of the business entity". The source claims that NationsBanc told the listing agent that, "We're not (interested in mixed-use properties), but we do have an appetite for this particular loan." NationsBank's primary regulator at the time was Comptroller of the Currency Eugene Ludwig, a Rhodes scholar who attended Yale Law School with President Clinton, and who had been asked to investigate NationsBank by Democratic congressmen Henry B. Gonzalez and John Dingell.

ABC News

After leaving the White House at the end of Clinton's first term, Stephanopoulos became a political analyst for ABC News and served as a correspondent on This Week, the Sunday morning public affairs program; World News Tonight, the evening news broadcast; Good Morning America, the morning news program; along with other various special broadcasts.

Host of ABC's This Week

In September 2002, Stephanopoulos became host of This Week, and ABC News officially named him "Chief Washington Correspondent" in December 2005. The program's title added the new host's name.

When named to the position, Stephanopoulos was a relative newcomer to the show, usurping longtime panelists and short-term co-hosts Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts who, for a few years, briefly replaced the long-term original host, David Brinkley.

Opinion columnist and part-time ABC News commentator George Will is the only remaining member of the original This Week panel from the Brinkley days to participate consistently in the weekly show; Donaldson and Roberts still appear on the program on a very limited basis. Fareed Zakaria was a weekly panelist during the first two years of Stephanopoulos's tenure, broadening the show with his perspective on world and Middle Eastern issues.

This Week ratings

ABC News executives reportedly offered Ted Koppel, former Nightline anchor, the This Week host job in 2005 after the program's ratings had become a regular third-, fourth-, and sometimes fifth-place finish after competitors NBC, CBS, Fox, and syndicated programs. However, This Week beat Meet the Press on January 11, 2009, when Stephanopoulos interviewed president-elect Barack Obama.

In February 2009, the gap between NBC's Meet the Press and its competitors " CBS's Face the Nation and ABC's This Week " began closing. Meet the Press posted its lowest ratings since NBC's David Gregory became moderator in early February, with the show airing Sunday, February 1, averaging just 3.9 million viewers. Face the Nation averaged 3.33 million total viewers, while This Week came in just behind with 3.32 million total viewers.

2008 U.S. presidential debate

On April 16, 2008, Stephanopoulos co-moderated, with Charles Gibson, the twenty-first, and ultimately final, Democratic Party presidential debate between Illinois Senator Barack Obama and New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for the 2008 election cycle. While the debate received record ratings, the co-moderators were heavily criticized for focusing most of the first hour of the debate on controversies that occurred during the campaign rather than issues such as the economy and the Iraq War. Stephanopoulos acknowledged the legitimacy of the concerns over the order of the questions, but said they were issues in the campaign that had not been covered in previous debates.

Good Morning America co-host

In December 2009, the ABC News president offered Stephanopoulos Sawyer's job on Good Morning America after Sawyer was named anchor of World News. Stephanopoulos accepted the new position and started on December 14, 2009. Stephanopoulos announced on January 10, 2010, that that would be his last broadcast as the permanent host of This Week. He is now the co-host of Good Morning America. It was announced that he would return as host of This Week in December 2011.

World News

Stephanopoulos substitutes for Sawyer on nights when she is away on assignment or unavailable.

Raid on Osama Bin Laden's compound coverage

On May 1, 2011, Stephanopoulos broke into regular programming at approximately 10:15 p.m. to provide coverage of a special U.S. presidential address, which ended up being that Osama Bin Laden had been killed. He hosted coverage along with Christiane Amanpour, David Muir and Brian Ross through 1:00 a.m.

Criticism

Stephanopoulos was quoted in a January 27, 2009, article "Power, Politics, Gossip on a Daily Call" by John F. Harris in The Politico. The article was about a daily call Stephanopoulos participates in with his friends James Carville, Rahm Emanuel, and Paul Begala. Harris describes the call as " a street-corner bull session between four old friends who suddenly find themselves standing once more at the busiest intersection of politics and media in Washington".

In the article, Stephanopoulos says he does not surrender his reputation as an independent journalist during the daily information-sharing calls. "We are all good friends", Stephanopoulos is quoted as saying. "We just like talking to each other, and I learn a lot from it...and that's why we have been doing it for so long".

After the article ran, conservative media critic Brent Bozell and some conservative bloggers launched a campaign against Stephanopoulos: "Will Stephanopoulos be critical of the White House's plans when he spends every morning helping to craft them? Not likely. He must from this point forward recuse himself from any reporting involving the Obama administration", Bozell said in a press release. Conservatives deluged ABC with emails and calls on the topic.

Politico's Ben Smith reported: "I don't think they have the story quite right, nor does its author, John Harris, who emails: 'The calls are certainly a fascinating Washington ritual, but by no means do I think George Stephanopoulos is participating in strategy sessions. To my mind, he established his journalistic bona fides more than a decade ago, even as the Clinton administration was still underway, when he showed his willingness to report aggressively on Democrats as well as Republicans.'"

Online

During the 2008 presidential election campaign, Stephanopoulos launched a blog George's Bottom Line on the website of ABC News. Stephanopoulos blogs about political news and analysis from Washington.

In October 2008, Stephanopoulos began posting updates to Twitter, a social-networking website. He also launched a public profile page on Facebook.

In popular culture

Stephanopoulos was the inspiration for the character of Henry Burton in Joe Klein's novel Primary Colors (1996). Burton was subsequently portrayed by Adrian Lester in the 1998 film adaptation.

Michael J. Fox's character, Lewis Rothschild, in the film The American President (1995), written by Aaron Sorkin was modeled after Stephanopoulos. He was also used by Sorkin as the model for Rob Lowe's character, Sam Seaborn, on the television drama series The West Wing. According to Stephanopoulos, his role in the Clinton administration was more like Bradley Whitford's character Josh Lyman than Seaborn or Rothschild.

Stephanopoulos also appeared as himself in the first season of Spin City starring Michael J. Fox in an episode entitled "An Affair to Remember". Fox's Deputy-Mayor character was partially inspired by Stephanopoulos, but this is turned around for comedic effect with Fox commenting at the end of the episode "I don't know what the big deal with that guy is anyway... all he does is copy from me".

In an episode of the first season of the TV series Friends titled The One With George Stephanopoulos, the characters of Monica Geller, Rachel Green, and Phoebe Buffay realize that Stephanopoulos is staying in an apartment across the street from theirs and, being attracted to him, they proceed to spy on him throughout most of the night.

In an episode of the animated TV series American Dad! titled "Iced, Iced Babies", Francine breaks into a sperm bank in pursuit of injecting herself with the first sample she finds. The first vial she grabbed was Stephanopoulos' and threatened her husband she would impregnate herself using a turkey baster. Her husband countered back saying he had "only the third-best rated talk show".

Stephanopoulos appeared in the Pawn Stars episode "Buy the Book", where he bought a first edition of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls for $675, after haggling with owner Rick Harrison.

Stephanopoulos returned to his alma mater, Columbia University, in 2003, serving as the keynote speaker at Columbia College's Class Day.

In May 2007, he received an Honorary Doctor of Laws from St. John's University in New York City.

Mentioned in "Up All Night" as Ava's one-time affair.

Personal life

He married Alexandra Wentworth, an actress, comedian, and writer, in 2001 at the Archdiocesan Cathedral of the Holy Trinity on New York's Upper East Side. The couple have two daughters: Elliott Anastasia Stephanopoulos and Harper Andrea Stephanopoulos. The family lives in New York City.

In 1995, after a collision with a parked vehicle as he was pulling out of a parking space in front of a restaurant in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., Stephanopoulos was arrested and charged with leaving the scene of an accident and driving with an expired license and license plates. Only the charge of leaving the scene of an accident was subsequently dropped.

Along with a number of other notable Greek Americans, he is a founding member of The Next Generation Initiative, a leadership program aimed at getting students involved in public affairs.