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Speaker 1: Good morning everyone. We have to begin today with some news that has hit close to home for all of us. Here at ABC our World News Tonight co anchor Bob Wintruff and his cameraman Doug Vote. We're reporting today from Taji, Iraq when their convoy was hit by an I E. D. What more do we know? Bob and Doug were in a convoy and they were with US military as well, from the fourth Infantry Division. And then came the call from Bob's boss at ABC, David Weston, telling me that he had been hit by a roadside bomb. He had taken shrapnel to the brain and he was getting rushed into surgery and they weren't sure he was going to make it. They've been trying to reach me, and they've been holding this news for six hours because of the time difference. This idea explosion ripped through the left side of us, shattered the left part of my skull, my left part of my jaw, scattered my scapula, which is the triangle bone in the back. That also the impact to the days blinded me on the upper right hand quarters of both my eyes just barely missed my eyes to make me blind. That's Lee and Bob Woodruff. You probably recognize Bob's voice. He's a long time fixture on ABC News. Back in two thousand six, Bob was the co anchor of ABC World News Tonight. He had just started the job when he got sent over to a rock During that trip, where he was interviewing troops about George Bush's state of the Union, Bob's transport vehicle hit a roadside bomb. In the ensuing explosion, Bob was critically injured, sustaining shrapnel wounds to the head. He was eventually evacuated to Bethesda, Maryland, where he was put into a medically induced coma for five weeks to allow his brain to heal. I somehow was just determined to wait for Bob to wake up and see what the baseline was, so I wasn't going to rush to judgment. I didn't want ABC to rush to judgment and you know, write him off. And I somehow, I think just was sort of by staying off the Internet and not asking the doctors a lot of questions, I was able to sort of stay in this world of dumb hope, which really helped me. And I'm sure a lot of it was just shocked too. Bob was in that comap for thirty six days, and when he woke up, the road to healing was a long one for both of them. So I've gone from being the mother of four basically with a husband who can leave on a you know, drop of a dime with a phone call, to now mothering him. And what is this going to look like? And what is going to be left of me? If this is our life? I'm Joe Piazza and this is committed. Lee Woodruff has written about her love story with Bob many times, particularly in her number one New York Times bestseller In an Instant, And I've got to say at the start of this podcast that I adore Ly. I just I've really I've got a girl crush. Only we happen to share a book editor, and over the past few years, I've gotten to know her through her books, her newsletter, and through doing some really fun events with her for my own books. I knew her love story with Bob. I read about the incredible journey they're only took following Bob's injury when her book came out. But I've got to say that there was nothing like hearing both Bob and Lee tell their story together in this interview, starting all the way back at the very beginning there in the restaurant, I saw this amazing woman and approached and asked for a date, and then that happened and then ended extremely well and we ultimately got married. Beau, such a dude response, Let's just rewind that a little bit from the storytelling perspective. Details. Well, I think most women like a good true story. But essentially we went to the same college. We went to Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. She was a class ahead. I was a cougar, but we did not date to college. I knew who he was. In fact, I have a super vivid memory that I shared with him when we started dating of seeing him in the cafeterier at college. I was a sophomore, he was a freshman, and my girlfriends and I had snuck into the cafeteria illegally because we didn't feel like cooking, and I remember seeing this guy with incredibly deep set, beautiful eyes holding his books like Bucky Beaver is what I is. What I called him, and I said, you guys, look at that freshman. He looks so young. Now, if someone had told me then like, that guy is going to be your husband. Someday, You're gonna marry him. No, if they had no but I would have fallen off my bar stool. I don't think there were barstools in the cafeterias, but it's just it's funny to think about that moment. Bob ended up dating the same girl throughout college. He and Lee never ended up having a thing. They both graduated well. He went to New York City for work and Bob went to law school. But one day they randomly ran into one another. I was down at the South Root Seaport doing a photo shoot with my sister for a newsday and Bob was walking through Doug Flutie's restaurant, being taken out to lunch by his law firm team, trying to woo him to come there from law school. And I recognized him. My sister said, look at that cute guy, and I said, oh my gosh, I know him. So I called Bob over and introduced him to my sister as Bob Woodward, and he said was He's like, that's the Watergate guy, and my name is Bob would Rip. So that started, you know, our relationship. Anything to add to ironically, I've become the journalist, and Bob ended up asking Lee out to dinner. I remember the first time that I asked Lee out for for dinner. We went to this awesome restaurant. She was living in Chelsea in New York City, and I literally could not stop laughing for about three straight hours when I realized, oh my god, this woman is not only beautiful, but she's also funny and brilliant. So that was the beginning. And then who knows that I had to go back to ann Arbor they'll finish my third year in law school and Lee was in New York. Lee was working with this one company that brought her to Detroit all the time, and Detroit is so close to ann Arbor. So we started dating and it lasted. And it wasn't long after that that I proposed to her because I had to go to head over to China for a year, and I said, no, I want you to. Let's get married and let's go over there. So we did. Let's Bob had been working in mergers and acquisitions right after graduating from law school, but then the market started failing and he got this chance to take a year off and teach law in China. What did you think when Bob said, I'm going to China for a year. Do you do you want to come with me? Were you just like, yeah, I'm all in. Well I sort of said, hey, I think I need This is such a New York answer, right, I'm not going to give up my apartment without some kind of commitment committed hence the name right of the podcast. And I didn't need to be married, but I just I knew that this I wanted to spend my life with this guy, and that I had led this really stayed pretty exist you know, existence of a New York centric person who grew up in Albany, New York, went to college and Upstate New York, then ended up in New York City. And Bob had been this guy who had a pretty suburban upbringing in Detroit but was so curious about the world. And that was so appealing to me because I did even though I, you know, it was in the Beaver Cleaper family growing up, which was wonderful, I knew that we just kind of had one go around probably at this and I wanted to experience a lot of things and make up for time. So when he said, do you want to call. I said, yeah, but but we you know, I feel like if I'm going to give everything up here, we should have some kind of commitment. And so it's a another add on to the story. Okay, so Lee wanted some kind of commitment. She's like, I'm moving all the way to China unless we're in this or the long ish run. But Bob had something else he had to do first. Being the adventurous dude that he is, he had just signed up to do a two week mountain climb in South America where the goal was this is seriously the goal. And I get tripped up every time that I say this because it seems crazy, but he did it. The goal was to go with a bunch of doctors to see how high you could climb on a mountain without oxygen before you passed out. That was it. And so Bob goes on this crazy journey and Lee is just back home in New York waiting, thinking, all right, are we are? We? Are we doing this? So for three weeks I thought, are we going to get married? Is he going to propose? What's going on? Should I go to Klein Fields and look for a wedding dress? Like right. We had a really short runway because it was May and he had to be in China in September. So when he came back from that trip, he asked me to meet him in Central Park and he was all scruffed out and he had My joke was he had like cracker barrel cheese and some tiscuits, and he proposed and I don't know if I can swear on this podcast, so I'll keep it. Okay, you can, don't you worry? Yeah, okay. But I literally said to him, are you fucking kidding me? Because that's like really cruel. I thought he was joking, and he was dead serious. And so in three months we pulled a wedding together and we went to China and it was literally Peace Corps conditions. It was China. No, sorry, it was really I cried for three days when I got there and saw our little cement dorm room. But then I thought, you know what, divorce is an option? If I really hate this, yeah, I don't. I don't know why she put up with We came to the school. First of all, we got our our honeymoon. We went through Hong Kong and the law firm was awesome. He gave us access to the junk so we can cruised around to the islands of Hong Kong. It sad was starting so great. This looks like amazing. Their honeymoon was amazing. But suddenly they're about to start living full time in China, which was a completely different China than it is now. The country was just emerging out of the Mao Jadong era, and Bob and Lee were literally living in a college dorm. You know, Doug shell Ping was now in power, and the dorms were not even modernized yet. Literally there were holes in the floor for the toilets, including for Lee, and they actually you know, they didn't put any of the paper or yes, women's sanitary products were just you put it, didn't put them down in the hole because it was night soil that was used for the crops that you'd walk in the bathroom, you'd be like WHOA, Like this is too much to eat. There was a dining thing in the middle where literally at the in your own ball and just kind of get it through the window to get into the kitchen so they could fill it up with with food. And there were no showers in our in our dorm itself, you had to take a shower in the middle of the campus, which was opened I think from eleven and one the middle of the day, which which none of us were even there. So this woman went through amazing stuff. But the people there were incredible. It was a great experience. China was interesting. It was growing. Everybody was still equal back then. There wasn't that much pollution. There was not There was no traffic, there were no cars, really was. We biked everywhere and everything was going up. So Chinese to actually tell us that was the happiest part of their history because they were all together going up. I love the start of a marriage because you can really only go up from there, guys. It can really only get a little bit easier. Well, you know, there was a lot to that, and I also think there was a lot to the fact that we went all the way across the world, so we had no in laws, no parents, no emily. If like we had the first year tip or whatever, we had to figure out how to work it out. We also became a really solid unit in that year with just the two of us, and that was I also, I often say that was the foundation for a marriage that would go through the dings and dents that any marriage does. And then maybe a little bit extra when when Bob was injured in in a rock. But that foundation we built that year with just the two of us was really special. Yeah. I think that traveling with your spouse early on tells you almost everything you need to know about that human being. I mean, it really was the ultimate test. In the beginning. You know, we'll we be able to put up with us. Well, I'd be put up with us. It was not easy. We knew that ultimately we were in the middle of history. What turned out to be one of the most interesting important stories in fifty years what happened at Tianamen Square and we just happened to be there. Bob gets a little quiet there if you couldn't hear him, he said that they just happened to be there when one of the most important stories of the past fifty years happened, and it was Bob students who are among those protesting that happened to give him some free time, and he decided to scratch his reporter's hitch. He went straight to the local CBS news offices and he offered his services on the ground. It was quite an experience to go through and have Lead next to me would have I don't know what I would be doing if I did not have her with me. The tanks rolled in. It was just a really it was a war zone essentially, and Bob was going out with the cruise every day, and we both moved had to move out of the school and into the hotel with CBS because Bob had actually been teaching animal farm to his students. So I think he was on some list of like, you know, if you're a dissident. Yeah, that's exactly right, Joe. He still is that school. That that school is what's considered to be one of the four Black Nests or Tienam Scroll, which was the government later called it, because we had the one filled with all of these dissidents, to all these ones that were protesting and marching and anti government, and so we we assumed, certainly I assumed that I would not be allowed back into China after everything we did. We were right. We were right there alongside them, you know, just watching this. You know, I wasn't the position was shooting anything back then, but I was there with CBS reporting about it, and and I think we'll never be allowed back in, so I kind of gave up on Shina Lee, and I kind of gave up on Shina, came back, had a bunch of kids, and then assumed would never get back anyway, And then ultimately they did eleven years later, came back this cover story and they never never kicked us out. So kicked me out and then you lived there. You were the Asia bureau guy for a bunch years. Recently, Yeah, the circle came around in our marriage. It always does. It always does. Look at everything that happened next after a quick break, So we came back. We came back to San Francisco instead of New York because I felt like Bob had even though he was really a buzz with this journalist thing being in PR. I said to him, look, dude, you're not a gounna be like translating for CBS. When you switched the screw, you're gonna be covering like coupons at the grocery store in super local news, and you're gonna have to pay your dues because that's the way this field works. So then Bob was in San Francisco practicing, and he still was yearning for this thing, and I knew I was about to have a baby. I knew that if my husband wasn't happy and what he was doing, then that would leach into our marriage. It would leach into how he showed up as a parent. And so he was well, he was in the law firm, he was waking up super early. He'd gotten an intern non paying job over across the Bay at kt X B or whatever in San Francisco. But put this in the chronological. The first thing that we came back from China, we moved to San Francisco, and since we were just coming out of this major disaster out of out of Beijing, suddenly there was a huge earthquake ripped through San Francisco. This was yeah, the big earthquake. Yep. We had just moved there like two months earlier. We were both in our offices and my first thought, being in New Yorker was oh my god, I didn't know there were subways in Sanrancias. We were all under the table before we knew it, and it was bob Own office building was shaking. But here's where I knew that, like, this is what our future was. Because Bob called me to make sure I was safe and he said, I'm going home to get the video camera and I'm going to go out and shoot stuff. And I was like, Okay, this lawyer thing isn't gonna last for very long. That's obvious. Well, I didn't have any more law to do that day, Let's put it that way. I was on the eighteenth floor of the office and my chair started bouncing up and down to the side, and from like, oh my god. And I was on the phone with an old friend of mine said listen, I gotta go. I think it's an earthquake. Gotta go. Ran eighteen floors now with my assistant down to the to the floor and out there that all these like the brick walls had fallen. The dust was still rising, all the places were closed, and I thought, oh my god, don't follow us around. We've come. We're cursed. That was a joke for a little while, like where the winterest moving next? We won't move there. But fast forward to being pregnant with my son, and Bob had put a tape together and he just knew that this is what he wanted to do, and so I knew that I would support it, and I found freelance gigs. I mean, we moved up to Redding, California. That was his first TV market. He was a one end band, so he would run out, shoot interview people, do the stand up with it by setting his camera up, you know, alone and talking to the headquarters with a walkie talkie, and then run back and edit it and get it on the news that day. And I just had a couple of clients in San Francisco that I It took me on when I left, and we sort of stayed afloat that way. His salary was twelve thousand dollars a year, and I knew that I was going to have to put out my shingles somewhere. And then about every two years we moved to a different local market until you got to the network. So from it took him five years to get to the network. That was his goal. He wanted to get to the network before forty and go overseas. So we had a baby, our baby in San Francisco, moved to Reading and then went to Richmond, meant and had our daughter. He was now twenty eight, and Engage and then a bunch of other cities overseas to London. That's where we were when September eleven, happened, added two babies, twin girls, and when we were in Washington, when I was forty almost forty, and here we are. We I mean, there were a couple of things that happened before that. But we got back to New York in two thousand two from London, and we've really been in New York since Bob came back to take the weekend anchor job. I don't think people that aren't in media often realized just how much moving is involved for someone that's trying to move up the ranks to get to the network. And it's almost, in some ways, can be similar to being a military spouse. You're moving every couple of years to a different city and uprooting your whole family. It really it's a family effort. It's a spouse's effort to to get your spouse to this place that they really want to be. It's so precident, Joe, and I'm jumping ahead a little bit, But when Bob was injured and I really had no exposure to military families or military culture, I realized in some way is that there were so many similarities without the tribe of wives that are on basis. But it is a sense of picking up every two years. You know contracts going to be up, and you know that if your spouse's ambition is to get to the network, you're gonna have to move. You have to move out to move up. And I used to teach them all the time and say, like, you sure you don't want to just like be a weather man and put down roots here, you could just be like the local dude. And he just was always focused on international news and wanting to cover events as they were unfolding. And that's who I think you are, Bob. And also I think where you found the most interest in news was those kinds of big historical things that were happening. Bob had a passion. He had a passion for covering these big historical events, but only it likes to remember, he wasn't all that good in the beginning. I remember one time with my little baby Mac and he was one of his early shot to where like the camera floated over and or he moved the microphone. He was talking with his hands and the mic was in it so it was cutting out every fourth word. And I turned to my son, I said, Mac, I think we had to pack up our crap. This TV. Thing's not gonna work. That's so little money we're living in it. Essentially was a trailer up there and read in California. And I remember coming back after that first on camera thing I did, and I talked Mary, you know who's the one who owned this place was renting us too, And I saw her, I said, hey, Mary, what do you think? What do you think about my camera thing? That was the worst damn thing I've ever seen him all that, So that was the beginning. I don't know why she's so where to put up, but you did. You went up, and you ended up at the network. You ended up as a co anchor of ABC World News Tonight, which is really at the pinnacle of the career. You guys. You guys got there and in no small part because you had this amazing woman supporting you and being willing to move all over the country at a moment's notice. Yeah, I don't I don't know how many people would have been well, I did hear. I would hear from people friends and stuff like I don't know if I could do what you do, and it sometimes it would make me feel like, well, you know, life is an adventure, like why not? And then sometimes it would make me feel like, well, what what what kind of an idiot? Am I very little? I'm kind of joking about that, but it was. I mean, we were always in this together, it was, and we loved every place we lived. You know, our Christmas card list grew too out of control because you get to meet all these great people and stay in touch with people, and I don't know, it was just it was a lot, I guess when I look back and think about all the moves, but I wouldn't have changed anything. Time for a quick break. When we get back, we'll hear from Bodily in their own words about the story that completely changed both of their lives. Bob ended up succeeding Peter Jennings as the co anchor of ABC World News Tonight in December of two thousand five. On January two thousand and six, Bob went to Baghdad to meet with the troops before President George W. Bush's State of the Union address. It wasn't the first time that he had been to Iraq, and it wasn't even the most dangerous situation that he had ever been reporting in. Bush was doing the State of the Union and so Bob was just hopping over their for a couple of days to just report on sort of the good parts of the war, how the troops were helping with the Allied forces to do good things like you know, sanitation plant and all this other stuff. In two thousand three when we invaded Iraq, Bob was part of that. He was embedded with the Marines, and that to me was the scarier thing. But I knew, you know that this was who my husband was. And I'm I'm stealing his line, But Bob, I remember you saying when people would say, like why what is it about wartime reporting that fascinates you? And your answer was always you see the best and the worst of humanity, like a war zone is an incredible place to see, you know, the best of us and the worst of us. And it was the first war right where you were the media could fully embed with the troops and and be able to side by side really report on what was happening versus the Vietnam where you could go out a little bit but then would always retreat behind the line as a journalist. So it was a it was a new era in journalism. And my dear friend Melanie Bloom, whose husband, David, worked for NBC and died in Iraq from a pulmonary embolism. She was really the only person that I could call at night, and we mitigated one another spear, I think by knowing that we each had young children same age and husbands in this war zone. I guess I don't didn't think about worst case scenarios. You can't. It would be like waking up every day and thinking, Wow, I might get hit by a city bus. So you just believe, and you want to believe that there's a sort of immunity with a journalist or a war zone which is no longer exists. Yeah, I don't. I never thought of all that. That was the for I Rock. I think that was the sixth time I'd reported out of Rock, and twice within Saddam Hussein was still there in power before our before the invasion itself, and then I essentially lived in Afghanistan covering that after nine eleve them, because we were in London when that when that hit in New York, and we within five hours our team was already on the plane, the b A flight heading over to Islamabad in Pakistan. And so we lived in these kinds of places for a long time, you just never thinking, you think, Okay, maybe I'll get hit and maybe my blow off my left finger or something, you know. I think the extremity, I don't think is something that people think about those that are covering war zones. Otherwise, why why the hell would they be there, you know? So I never I just wanted to be in these places, and I didn't really think that I was going to be killed put that one. So I think that's why I was, Okay, we're Lee putting up with it, and we had four kids at home when even hit. Nevertheless, I went to these places and I never really felt guilty about it. I think Lee was always such a great supporter of it. And there's a lot of problems arguments that we would have, but very my comedy. But never it was never about you going somewhere. I think I also understood Joe, and this is part of I think what makes a great marriage is the baseline for a really good marriage, that people are essentially happy, right, So if you if you love what you do. I don't know, there's just a freedom that I think we both have with each other that we give each other a lot of grace on on what makes us take and what makes us happy, and I just want to make the kids were happy, right, Yeah, I mean I think that happiness making sure that your spouse is doing the things that they love and they feel supported, and your kids are doing the things they love and feel supported. There's a lot to be said for creating that kind of baseline. My biggest feeling of guilt was almost, well, if I'm gone a lot, what about the impact of my kids. You know, our kids needed the parents around. But then I wasn't told by all sorts because I really wanted to hear. This answer is that studies have been done or what essentially doctors those in the the medical world and the mental world, and that's just not really so much the number of hours you spend with your kids raising them, but it's more the quality of the time when you are And I think it's some ways. When I did come back from from overseas and they put up with Lee the whole time, they kind of wanted some other stories. So I would tell all the stories and we would I would be the one that had to go to school and and be the representative of the family, So I was like making up for it. When you said when I returned, well, you were like, you know, everybody was excited to see you, and you were excited to see them. So I could take a step back. And you know, Joe, you've got little ones. It's full on. You've fallen to be exhausted. You know, you just do what you have to do. And I always worked. I always wanted to work. I feel like I was a better mother because I did have something that I got some sense of accomplishment from, whether it was a client telling me a good job on writing this or a check a paycheck right, because you're not going to get that from your kids for a very long time. And that made me a better mom with them because I have this thing that I did that was my side hustle. So back to Bob traveling to Iraq to cover the troop response to Bush's State of the Union. I was actually in Disney World. You can imagine, with all four kids. We were shooting a pilot for a TV show, and we were done, and we were going to get up and go to like Epcot the next day or something. And I had scheduled a wake up call, and right at the time of the wake up call, came the call from Bob's boss at ABC, David Weston, telling me that he had been hit by a roadside bomb. He had taken shrapnel to the brain and he was getting rushed into surgery and they weren't sure he was going to make it, but they need They've been trying to reach me, and they'd been holding this news for six hours because of the time difference and their inability to find me, and they needed to release it because it was a, you know, big story. So that was how why learned. And I went outside to have a conversation. I made a couple of calls to my mom, to Bob's mom, and then too my friend to just kind of get a gut check on how to tell this to my children. And I came back in went into the bathroom. It was on CNN. My kids were unfortunately awake and seeing the news on CNN, and I went to the bathroom to just sort of like break down for a second, and my daughter was on me. You know, she was like right there, smelling blood. You know, she's my really intuitive one. And I realized, you can't do this, you can't fall apart right now. Gotta hold it together for all of them, get them out of here, get them home to New York from Orlando, and then just you know, get over to Germany where they had taken Bob. So I was in like go mode. I was in general mode, and I was not going to go on Google. I was not gonna I just needed to sort of set the tone for my kids and just sort of stay hopeful the very weird, you know, brain place to be in. And Bob tell me a little bit up leading up to the accident for you what what happened there on the ground we were actually with I was ultimately ended up in the tank with the Iraqi military because it was a combination project that was being done by them together. The US was trying to eventually passed the power over to the Iraqi military. So we're going village to village to try to essentially convince the people that isis is not as good as we are. It's been the bottom line, and it was what it really was, to try to help them to get their their villages back to normal, if it was such a thing. But we're going down the road and then we were actually in the tank right in front of eight vehicles the others with US military tanks and then but it was me and my cameraman and my my producer, my soundman, and me and my camera Douve Vote. We decided to do some shooting popping up out the top of the tank and it had been completely safe. But we're going down this road. The the rocky driver, who was also standing up over the top, told us maybe you should should get down because this is a slightly dangerous road for I E D s, which at that time I didn't really know exactly what I improvised de fighting device was. And he was still up so he wasn't getting down, but anyway it was. It was within three seconds, so I don't have the chance to go down along with Doug this idea explosion ripped through the left side of us, shattered the left part of my skull, my left part of my jaw, scattered my scapula, which is the triangle bone in the back. The impact that you know to this days blinded me on the upper right hand corters of both my eyes just barely missed my eyes to make me blind. When you get hitten hit by an I E D like that, you know, I was knocked out instantly, fell back into the tank. Doug Vote was also hit and he fell on a back in the top of the tank. And when I fell down, I actually woke up after about two minutes, and I looked up at Mini Mahotra, who was the producer. I said, we are are we alive? He said, you live? And that's the last thing I remember until thirty six days later when I was up in as enabled back in the United States. They got us out of the vehicle just when they were getting out of their vehicles to come to ours. The one who shot or blew up the I D or a team of them, which we still don't know to this day. The insurgents fired at them from four different corners. Remarkably, they didn't hit any of these guys. They were able to get into the tank and the insurgents had disappeared. Who knows where they went. They got us out and helped to save me and my sound man who was with us, I mean, I mean the interpreter was with us. He held his hand over the the blood was pouring out of the left side of my head. He held that probably saved me. The other ones who all had the ability to be medics, I every one of the U. S Military were able to save me. They brought in a helicopter whizzed us out to Bagdad Hospital and they didn't think I was going to survive, but I did. And then they got us two blah. They removed sixteen centimeters in my left skull to try to keep the two make the brain have the ability to breathe and to expand because it was expanding, and then got us off to the Germany and then back to Bethesda. So I don't have a lot of memories, except I do kind of get hit, kind of saw the bank floating underneath me. I remember when my my brother back in Bethesda, when I finally did wake up, he asked me how it was, and I said, you know, I kind of want to go back. It was such a peaceful time, no pain, no real memories. It was just kind of whiteness. And and I told him, Ike, I would like to go back to where I just was, because it was pretty painful when I woke up. Really I could not sleep. There's a lot of pain and lee. What was this like for you? Bob was in the comment was was in for forty forty days? Thirty six days? Yeah, crazy and really out, like really out. They were basically telling me that, you know, it wasn't good that he was Probably I should be looking at acute care nursing facilities. And I, you know, had incredible friends and my family was around me. The kids were back in New York and I was in Washington. That was really hard, but I soon realized that, you know, they're Bob's brothers, and my sisters were with them, so that kind of kept them in their world, which is where they needed to be. The worst thing I could have done probably was dragged them down to Washington and put them in a strange school and disrupt their little lives. But I somehow was just determined to wait for Bob to wake up and see what the baseline was, so I wasn't going to rush to judgment. I didn't want ABC to rush to judgment, you know, write him off. And I somehow, I think just was sort of by staying off the internet and not asking the doctors a lot of questions, I was able to sort of stay in this world of dumb hope, which really helped me. And I'm sure a lot of it was just shocked too. But when Bob woke up, it was just an amazing day. It was suddenly all at once in a way that it's not supposed to happen. You're supposed to sort of tight trait off the meds on a in a coma, which they had continually tried with him, and it just he was just too agitated, and so he just woke up on his own and began sort of, you know, yabbering with gibberish words first, and then it was like watching a computer comeback online. His brain began to reboot and begin to talk, and you know, it was still jumbled up. It took probably a good year for his language to come back, but it was incredible, it was and you're so happy when that happens. You know that it's you. It's just this the euphoria on on all sides, and you're so happy he's coming back online. But you didn't know how far how much he would he he would reboot in the beginning, right, And no one can tell you because everybody's brain is different, everybody's injury is different with a head injury, so it's just you just you have to live in this world of not knowing and just being in the moment every day which for a type of control freak organized mother for that was not easy. But that was an incredible life lesson. And I can't say that change who I am, but I am able to call upon that, you know, feeling that moment, that experience when I need that kind of patience where I feel anxious as we all have during COVID or or what's craziness going on in the world right now and in our country. You know, I think that I don't really have memories really at all now. I think I when I woke up, I was able to tell the stories of what are numbered. You know, well, you really had a near death experience. That was the white light that you saw in float your body. Yeah, I did have that, But I do also remember that it was very I think when I woke up, as far as I remember is, I was ecstatic. I couldn't believe I'm still now they're in a bed with all my family around, because the last thing I remember was there in a tank in the middle of the sand of a rock. It was not nearly as loving as it is back back there at the hospital where I was. But I don't remember much about exactly what I was, you know, what I can't remember very well exactly what I saw, but I do tell people is that when you when you recover from something, when you wake up in the hospital and suddenly you're awake, and the first week or so you're you're extremely happy because you feel so lucky just to be alive. But I did not realize how bad I had become. It turns my ability to thank, my vocabulary was completely gone. I didn't know. I thought I was going to be back on my feet again, as if I was just in a football playing football and got a concussion and been out for a minute and then woke up again and I can go back into the game at least the next day. I thought I'd be a normal again, you know, within a matter of weeks or months. But then people realize that when you realize and when you do understand exactly what you become, that's when a lot more depression starts to kick in. So I was extremely happy. I would stately what for a few months for sure, and then I start to realize, you know what, I don't think I can do what I used to do. And that's when you know, you really kind of figure out what you are and what you can do, and you just have to find alternatives to life and tell back to a lot of people that have gone through something similar that you will get better every single day, every month, you will be better than you were the month before in the beginning, but you just have to realize you can't just keep hold on to exactly what your life was before. You have to figure out a different path. And I think I've learned that within the year. It's just really hard to adhere to and it's hard to continue and follow it well. It's and it's hard to watch someone you love who has so loved what they've done and been so independent not be able to do exactly what they want to do. And that's one advice I think that people have gone through with others in the family who have gone so rough something. Those are the two things. Remember they will get better, but you also have to try to advocate with them to find something something else, funky, cool, you know, not a different thing to do, and sometimes it could even be more fun than the ones they were doing before. It's kind of like what happens with with COVID, right, I mean, people are now you don't have to go to do your job in the office all the time, like you did, to figure figure out a different with a number of people have changed jobs and going to different taking different paths, but they couldn't go to the office anymore. So this is obviously more severe, but I did learn that, you know that you do have to figure out a different way to love. I think the short answer is you you do what you need to do. And so I think for a year I was more of a cheerleader splash maybe nurse. And I'll never forget this. I remember when it when things Bob was looking at our we changed our wills and we made sure we had everything updated and we put certain things in my name because we didn't know where Bob's you know, cognition was going to come back. And he had been a lawyer, and I remember him looking at the wills and saying, I don't understand any of this. And this was really early on, but I remember that just terrified me, thinking, okay, so I'm gonna be responsible for all of them. So I've gone from being the mother of four basically with a husband who can leave on a you know, drop of a dime with a phone call, to now mothering him. And what is this going to look like and what is going to be left of me if this is our life? And certainly there are plenty of marriages that have you know, had this happen, whether it's an illness or or an injury. But as one day, maybe about a year in, we were having a fight about money, something about finances, and I looked up at him and I said, oh my god, we're fighting. And he sort of looked at me like guiltily, like, oh, this is a bad thing, and I said no, no, no, no, no, this is like this is what normal couples do. And I realized, Okay, we're moving in to that zone where he's like, little by little without me noticing it, I've ceeded things back to him and we're moving on more equal ground. I think what happens in your life when you've had a traumatic experience, though it always lives inside of you. So there's a point which the phone rings after you know, my heart probably jumps a little bit, and I don't think you ever get past that moment, and that's probably just life, but you learn to live with it a little bit. As Bob covered, the experience inspired the would just to do something to give back to ensure the veterans, service members and their families have access to the highest level of support and resources that they deserve for as long as they need it. And so together they all created the Bob Woodruff Foundation. And the foundation piece was easy. We sat there in the hospital and Bob was still in his comment. We saw all of these other young mostly men at the time in two thousand and six in Bethest Naval Hospital getting fantastic care because it's the best hospitals in the world for the military. And then we would see them leave and go back to their homes in Nebraska or Texas or somewhere, and new through stories that filtered back that they're in when they got to their local towns, they weren't necessarily getting the same kind of care or didn't have access to it without driving three hours or whatever through the v A system. So we realized there were all of these families that were going through the after effects of war, but we weren't hearing about it at the time in the country. And so Bob's brothers and I said it, Boy, if Bob comes out of this and he recovers, we need to do something and use the crazy amount of attention we've gotten for his injury and and do something about it so that Bob would Your foundation was born, and sixteen years later we're given away something like eighty million dollars in grants and have an incredible team, and we're really proud to look for the cracks and the places where people need help. Families need health caregivers need help beyond what our government provides. And that's been the legacy to take something so bad and so sad and do something good with it so that you can not wake up every day and I feel like you've lost something. I guess you know as you as you know that this is a This is a war that was very different than wars that we've experienced before the government was not ready for how bad this would be in terms of the needs for those that were badly wounded. Probably is the previous wars more percentage wise, more died than they did get wounded. Bob would be dead if it had happened five years earlier. Medical miracles and things, and and you know, techniques changed enough. I had no idea what the word tb I was traumatic brain injury. Nor did Lee no idea. And then suddenly became part of our our lives, and then suddenly this wound, of course, and our experience now within the military completely changed our lives. I was a reporter covering the news. Now we became a very central close part. Well, we became the story. And that was really weird. Yeah, and friends, because they were there in the hospital with us, you know, we knew the families of those that had served over there. And the sad thing too, is that I was forty almost forty five years old on its hit, with a pretty remarkable life with so many things that you know, and had had four great kids, and I got a great wife. And these are that same third floor, but as enabled and there's my whole family watching these guys unconscious and they're like twenty two years old. They hadn't really done much. They don't have a big company like ABC standing right behind them. They had the government which was overwhelmed by this where lives were saved. But that makes it even more complicated how to take with those that were wounded. If you're killed in the war, it's pretty simple, you know, you give, give a little bit of money and have a great, amazing funeral and that's it. So this became a very complicated situation and it was just ready for a foundation like Lee and my family, my brothers did and and talk to me about choosing to celebrate the alive day, which I think is beautiful. I love the idea of creating celebrations and traditions that are for you. How did you choose to come to that that's actually a military tradition that yeah, we had, and whether or not that's something that just started with this war, I couldn't tell you. But it's a beautiful tradition of basically saying, I am not going to grieve the person I was before. I'm going to celebrate the fact that I am alive after this you know, life changing event in the war. And my alive day is the day that I crawled out of you know, what could have been my death and decided to become this is the next generation of me. So it's a really cool moment because if you really think about it, and this is so true in a marriage too, nothing is stasis. Everything is constantly iterating. I remember one of the coolest things Bob said to me when I said I was worried because they told me he would be super depressed when he woke up, you know, and he realized how much he had lost, including the anchor chair at ABC News. And so I was really watching for this and wondering, you know, what kind of husband I would have. And I remember Bob when I sort of tentatively said, so, are you feeling ripped off? Like you just got to this chair and you were in it for you know, all of ten weeks or whatever, and you know, it's I can tell him that he'd lost it, but I knew that he wouldn't be able to go back to that position. People couldn't wait, ABC couldn't wait, you know, for him to recover. And he said, well, well, why shouldn't it be me? What makes me anymore special than the twenty five year old, you know kid who's in a tank in Kansas just because I'm on TV? And I thought, all right, well that's a you know, pretty cool answer. And if that's the way that he's looking at this, then then that's the way we all need to look at this too, because and the other joke he would say to me was, well, who says I was going to succeed at this job? I could have sucked and then gotten fired. So at least he went out on top with an injury. That's always possible. How do you think it changed your marriage and your relationship for the better for the worst? Just how are you different? It's kind of like with Lisa, who knows it could have been a disaster. Could my whole crisis would have been a crash for some thing that really reflected on our inability to do this job instead of was one that ended quickly because of this, And what would be happen if I was still the anchor of a show. I mean, it's life is impossible to predict. It could have been worse if I was not tough. You know it better now than before. I think sometimes what we've been able to do through our foundation has been the most fulfilling thing I've ever done in my life. You know, I know that journalism plays a very important role in the world, and I think people that very experienced countries outside the United States realize how good journalism is. Where there's a lot of criticism within our country because basically, I don't understand what your alternative would be if we didn't. So I did feel very fulfilled by the fact that we've been able to do with the military because they listen. A lot of our lives became. Spending a lot of time involved together and doing something for I think made us a very good couple that way. I just I don't know this Sholways. Your dissatisfaction with what I became after this is the one that's always my concern. We'll see. I think that that's the interesting thing about a marriage. I think when you really love somebody, and I feel that from Bob, I think Bob has this sense that he's let me down, and I don't feel that. I think that's you project on your partner because you do care so much about them. And I think that my life is a continual role. My role in this marriage is to try to convince Bob for the rest of his life that I accept who we are now and that I didn't marry the anchor of ABC News. I married a lawyer. I didn't want any of this necessarily. I was along for the ride and doing my job to support his dream and having a fun ride. You know, well that happened. But I think there are days that I feel profoundly sad for him, not for me. But I want when you love somebody, you want them to realize their dream, and Bob got there, he got to the top of the mountain. But I wish that there had been more years to enjoy that. So I think there's a constant toggling and that also happens in this place in marriage after three decades, where you know somebody so well and you realize that nobody gets it perfect, no one gets But it's a balance, Joe. Every like it's reaching for joy some days and other days just waking up joyous. And I think the adjustment was hard. But you know, life is an adjustment, isn't it. Marriage is an adjustment. Yeah, I love ending marriage is an adjustment, and we're supposed to end with like real nice now you're nice. No, No, because that is not real. That is that is not real and true and honest. There was so much love in this, but I think marriage is an adjustment is really something we should all take away. It's true. Thank you for this, and separate bathrooms, Joe. This episode was hosted and reported by Joe Piazza and a very special thanks to Lee and Bob Woodruff. Committed as produced by Ramsey Yacht. The executive producers are Joe Piazza and Tyler Klang theme song by Tristan McNeil. For comments, suggestions, or to be part of the show, give us a call at four zero four that's four zero four three, or send us an email at Joe at Committed podcast dot com. That's j O at Committed podcast dot com. You can pick up a copy of Katie urs new memoir, Rough Draft wherever books are sold. Committed as a production of iHeart Radio and produced in our studios located in Atlanta, Georgia. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1: Good morning everyone. We have to begin today with some news that has hit close to home for all of us. Here at ABC our World News Tonight co anchor Bob Wintruff and his cameraman Doug Vote. We're reporting today from Taji, Iraq when their convoy was hit by an I E. D. What more do we know? Bob and Doug were in a convoy and they were with US military as well, from the fourth Infantry Division. And then came the call from Bob's boss at ABC, David Weston, telling me that he had been hit by a roadside bomb. He had taken shrapnel to the brain and he was getting rushed into surgery and they weren't sure he was going to make it. They've been trying to reach me, and they've been holding this news for six hours because of the time difference. This idea explosion ripped through the left side of us, shattered the left part of my skull, my left part of my jaw, scattered my scapula, which is the triangle bone in the back. That also the impact to the days blinded me on the upper right hand quarters of both my eyes just barely missed my eyes to make me blind. That's Lee and Bob Woodruff. You probably recognize Bob's voice. He's a long time fixture on ABC News. Back in two thousand six, Bob was the co anchor of ABC World News Tonight. He had just started the job when he got sent over to a rock During that trip, where he was interviewing troops about George Bush's state of the Union, Bob's transport vehicle hit a roadside bomb. In the ensuing explosion, Bob was critically injured, sustaining shrapnel wounds to the head. He was eventually evacuated to Bethesda, Maryland, where he was put into a medically induced coma for five weeks to allow his brain to heal. I somehow was just determined to wait for Bob to wake up and see what the baseline was, so I wasn't going to rush to judgment. I didn't want ABC to rush to judgment and you know, write him off. And I somehow, I think just was sort of by staying off the Internet and not asking the doctors a lot of questions, I was able to sort of stay in this world of dumb hope, which really helped me. And I'm sure a lot of it was just shocked too. Bob was in that comap for thirty six days, and when he woke up, the road to healing was a long one for both of them. So I've gone from being the mother of four basically with a husband who can leave on a you know, drop of a dime with a phone call, to now mothering him. And what is this going to look like? And what is going to be left of me? If this is our life? I'm Joe Piazza and this is committed. Lee Woodruff has written about her love story with Bob many times, particularly in her number one New York Times bestseller In an Instant, And I've got to say at the start of this podcast that I adore Ly. I just I've really I've got a girl crush. Only we happen to share a book editor, and over the past few years, I've gotten to know her through her books, her newsletter, and through doing some really fun events with her for my own books. I knew her love story with Bob. I read about the incredible journey they're only took following Bob's injury when her book came out. But I've got to say that there was nothing like hearing both Bob and Lee tell their story together in this interview, starting all the way back at the very beginning there in the restaurant, I saw this amazing woman and approached and asked for a date, and then that happened and then ended extremely well and we ultimately got married. Beau, such a dude response, Let's just rewind that a little bit from the storytelling perspective. Details. Well, I think most women like a good true story. But essentially we went to the same college. We went to Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. She was a class ahead. I was a cougar, but we did not date to college. I knew who he was. In fact, I have a super vivid memory that I shared with him when we started dating of seeing him in the cafeterier at college. I was a sophomore, he was a freshman, and my girlfriends and I had snuck into the cafeteria illegally because we didn't feel like cooking, and I remember seeing this guy with incredibly deep set, beautiful eyes holding his books like Bucky Beaver is what I is. What I called him, and I said, you guys, look at that freshman. He looks so young. Now, if someone had told me then like, that guy is going to be your husband. Someday, You're gonna marry him. No, if they had no but I would have fallen off my bar stool. I don't think there were barstools in the cafeterias, but it's just it's funny to think about that moment. Bob ended up dating the same girl throughout college. He and Lee never ended up having a thing. They both graduated well. He went to New York City for work and Bob went to law school. But one day they randomly ran into one another. I was down at the South Root Seaport doing a photo shoot with my sister for a newsday and Bob was walking through Doug Flutie's restaurant, being taken out to lunch by his law firm team, trying to woo him to come there from law school. And I recognized him. My sister said, look at that cute guy, and I said, oh my gosh, I know him. So I called Bob over and introduced him to my sister as Bob Woodward, and he said was He's like, that's the Watergate guy, and my name is Bob would Rip. So that started, you know, our relationship. Anything to add to ironically, I've become the journalist, and Bob ended up asking Lee out to dinner. I remember the first time that I asked Lee out for for dinner. We went to this awesome restaurant. She was living in Chelsea in New York City, and I literally could not stop laughing for about three straight hours when I realized, oh my god, this woman is not only beautiful, but she's also funny and brilliant. So that was the beginning. And then who knows that I had to go back to ann Arbor they'll finish my third year in law school and Lee was in New York. Lee was working with this one company that brought her to Detroit all the time, and Detroit is so close to ann Arbor. So we started dating and it lasted. And it wasn't long after that that I proposed to her because I had to go to head over to China for a year, and I said, no, I want you to. Let's get married and let's go over there. So we did. Let's Bob had been working in mergers and acquisitions right after graduating from law school, but then the market started failing and he got this chance to take a year off and teach law in China. What did you think when Bob said, I'm going to China for a year. Do you do you want to come with me? Were you just like, yeah, I'm all in. Well I sort of said, hey, I think I need This is such a New York answer, right, I'm not going to give up my apartment without some kind of commitment committed hence the name right of the podcast. And I didn't need to be married, but I just I knew that this I wanted to spend my life with this guy, and that I had led this really stayed pretty exist you know, existence of a New York centric person who grew up in Albany, New York, went to college and Upstate New York, then ended up in New York City. And Bob had been this guy who had a pretty suburban upbringing in Detroit but was so curious about the world. And that was so appealing to me because I did even though I, you know, it was in the Beaver Cleaper family growing up, which was wonderful, I knew that we just kind of had one go around probably at this and I wanted to experience a lot of things and make up for time. So when he said, do you want to call. I said, yeah, but but we you know, I feel like if I'm going to give everything up here, we should have some kind of commitment. And so it's a another add on to the story. Okay, so Lee wanted some kind of commitment. She's like, I'm moving all the way to China unless we're in this or the long ish run. But Bob had something else he had to do first. Being the adventurous dude that he is, he had just signed up to do a two week mountain climb in South America where the goal was this is seriously the goal. And I get tripped up every time that I say this because it seems crazy, but he did it. The goal was to go with a bunch of doctors to see how high you could climb on a mountain without oxygen before you passed out. That was it. And so Bob goes on this crazy journey and Lee is just back home in New York waiting, thinking, all right, are we are? We? Are we doing this? So for three weeks I thought, are we going to get married? Is he going to propose? What's going on? Should I go to Klein Fields and look for a wedding dress? Like right. We had a really short runway because it was May and he had to be in China in September. So when he came back from that trip, he asked me to meet him in Central Park and he was all scruffed out and he had My joke was he had like cracker barrel cheese and some tiscuits, and he proposed and I don't know if I can swear on this podcast, so I'll keep it. Okay, you can, don't you worry? Yeah, okay. But I literally said to him, are you fucking kidding me? Because that's like really cruel. I thought he was joking, and he was dead serious. And so in three months we pulled a wedding together and we went to China and it was literally Peace Corps conditions. It was China. No, sorry, it was really I cried for three days when I got there and saw our little cement dorm room. But then I thought, you know what, divorce is an option? If I really hate this, yeah, I don't. I don't know why she put up with We came to the school. First of all, we got our our honeymoon. We went through Hong Kong and the law firm was awesome. He gave us access to the junk so we can cruised around to the islands of Hong Kong. It sad was starting so great. This looks like amazing. Their honeymoon was amazing. But suddenly they're about to start living full time in China, which was a completely different China than it is now. The country was just emerging out of the Mao Jadong era, and Bob and Lee were literally living in a college dorm. You know, Doug shell Ping was now in power, and the dorms were not even modernized yet. Literally there were holes in the floor for the toilets, including for Lee, and they actually you know, they didn't put any of the paper or yes, women's sanitary products were just you put it, didn't put them down in the hole because it was night soil that was used for the crops that you'd walk in the bathroom, you'd be like WHOA, Like this is too much to eat. There was a dining thing in the middle where literally at the in your own ball and just kind of get it through the window to get into the kitchen so they could fill it up with with food. And there were no showers in our in our dorm itself, you had to take a shower in the middle of the campus, which was opened I think from eleven and one the middle of the day, which which none of us were even there. So this woman went through amazing stuff. But the people there were incredible. It was a great experience. China was interesting. It was growing. Everybody was still equal back then. There wasn't that much pollution. There was not There was no traffic, there were no cars, really was. We biked everywhere and everything was going up. So Chinese to actually tell us that was the happiest part of their history because they were all together going up. I love the start of a marriage because you can really only go up from there, guys. It can really only get a little bit easier. Well, you know, there was a lot to that, and I also think there was a lot to the fact that we went all the way across the world, so we had no in laws, no parents, no emily. If like we had the first year tip or whatever, we had to figure out how to work it out. We also became a really solid unit in that year with just the two of us, and that was I also, I often say that was the foundation for a marriage that would go through the dings and dents that any marriage does. And then maybe a little bit extra when when Bob was injured in in a rock. But that foundation we built that year with just the two of us was really special. Yeah. I think that traveling with your spouse early on tells you almost everything you need to know about that human being. I mean, it really was the ultimate test. In the beginning. You know, we'll we be able to put up with us. Well, I'd be put up with us. It was not easy. We knew that ultimately we were in the middle of history. What turned out to be one of the most interesting important stories in fifty years what happened at Tianamen Square and we just happened to be there. Bob gets a little quiet there if you couldn't hear him, he said that they just happened to be there when one of the most important stories of the past fifty years happened, and it was Bob students who are among those protesting that happened to give him some free time, and he decided to scratch his reporter's hitch. He went straight to the local CBS news offices and he offered his services on the ground. It was quite an experience to go through and have Lead next to me would have I don't know what I would be doing if I did not have her with me. The tanks rolled in. It was just a really it was a war zone essentially, and Bob was going out with the cruise every day, and we both moved had to move out of the school and into the hotel with CBS because Bob had actually been teaching animal farm to his students. So I think he was on some list of like, you know, if you're a dissident. Yeah, that's exactly right, Joe. He still is that school. That that school is what's considered to be one of the four Black Nests or Tienam Scroll, which was the government later called it, because we had the one filled with all of these dissidents, to all these ones that were protesting and marching and anti government, and so we we assumed, certainly I assumed that I would not be allowed back into China after everything we did. We were right. We were right there alongside them, you know, just watching this. You know, I wasn't the position was shooting anything back then, but I was there with CBS reporting about it, and and I think we'll never be allowed back in, so I kind of gave up on Shina Lee, and I kind of gave up on Shina, came back, had a bunch of kids, and then assumed would never get back anyway, And then ultimately they did eleven years later, came back this cover story and they never never kicked us out. So kicked me out and then you lived there. You were the Asia bureau guy for a bunch years. Recently, Yeah, the circle came around in our marriage. It always does. It always does. Look at everything that happened next after a quick break, So we came back. We came back to San Francisco instead of New York because I felt like Bob had even though he was really a buzz with this journalist thing being in PR. I said to him, look, dude, you're not a gounna be like translating for CBS. When you switched the screw, you're gonna be covering like coupons at the grocery store in super local news, and you're gonna have to pay your dues because that's the way this field works. So then Bob was in San Francisco practicing, and he still was yearning for this thing, and I knew I was about to have a baby. I knew that if my husband wasn't happy and what he was doing, then that would leach into our marriage. It would leach into how he showed up as a parent. And so he was well, he was in the law firm, he was waking up super early. He'd gotten an intern non paying job over across the Bay at kt X B or whatever in San Francisco. But put this in the chronological. The first thing that we came back from China, we moved to San Francisco, and since we were just coming out of this major disaster out of out of Beijing, suddenly there was a huge earthquake ripped through San Francisco. This was yeah, the big earthquake. Yep. We had just moved there like two months earlier. We were both in our offices and my first thought, being in New Yorker was oh my god, I didn't know there were subways in Sanrancias. We were all under the table before we knew it, and it was bob Own office building was shaking. But here's where I knew that, like, this is what our future was. Because Bob called me to make sure I was safe and he said, I'm going home to get the video camera and I'm going to go out and shoot stuff. And I was like, Okay, this lawyer thing isn't gonna last for very long. That's obvious. Well, I didn't have any more law to do that day, Let's put it that way. I was on the eighteenth floor of the office and my chair started bouncing up and down to the side, and from like, oh my god. And I was on the phone with an old friend of mine said listen, I gotta go. I think it's an earthquake. Gotta go. Ran eighteen floors now with my assistant down to the to the floor and out there that all these like the brick walls had fallen. The dust was still rising, all the places were closed, and I thought, oh my god, don't follow us around. We've come. We're cursed. That was a joke for a little while, like where the winterest moving next? We won't move there. But fast forward to being pregnant with my son, and Bob had put a tape together and he just knew that this is what he wanted to do, and so I knew that I would support it, and I found freelance gigs. I mean, we moved up to Redding, California. That was his first TV market. He was a one end band, so he would run out, shoot interview people, do the stand up with it by setting his camera up, you know, alone and talking to the headquarters with a walkie talkie, and then run back and edit it and get it on the news that day. And I just had a couple of clients in San Francisco that I It took me on when I left, and we sort of stayed afloat that way. His salary was twelve thousand dollars a year, and I knew that I was going to have to put out my shingles somewhere. And then about every two years we moved to a different local market until you got to the network. So from it took him five years to get to the network. That was his goal. He wanted to get to the network before forty and go overseas. So we had a baby, our baby in San Francisco, moved to Reading and then went to Richmond, meant and had our daughter. He was now twenty eight, and Engage and then a bunch of other cities overseas to London. That's where we were when September eleven, happened, added two babies, twin girls, and when we were in Washington, when I was forty almost forty, and here we are. We I mean, there were a couple of things that happened before that. But we got back to New York in two thousand two from London, and we've really been in New York since Bob came back to take the weekend anchor job. I don't think people that aren't in media often realized just how much moving is involved for someone that's trying to move up the ranks to get to the network. And it's almost, in some ways, can be similar to being a military spouse. You're moving every couple of years to a different city and uprooting your whole family. It really it's a family effort. It's a spouse's effort to to get your spouse to this place that they really want to be. It's so precident, Joe, and I'm jumping ahead a little bit, But when Bob was injured and I really had no exposure to military families or military culture, I realized in some way is that there were so many similarities without the tribe of wives that are on basis. But it is a sense of picking up every two years. You know contracts going to be up, and you know that if your spouse's ambition is to get to the network, you're gonna have to move. You have to move out to move up. And I used to teach them all the time and say, like, you sure you don't want to just like be a weather man and put down roots here, you could just be like the local dude. And he just was always focused on international news and wanting to cover events as they were unfolding. And that's who I think you are, Bob. And also I think where you found the most interest in news was those kinds of big historical things that were happening. Bob had a passion. He had a passion for covering these big historical events, but only it likes to remember, he wasn't all that good in the beginning. I remember one time with my little baby Mac and he was one of his early shot to where like the camera floated over and or he moved the microphone. He was talking with his hands and the mic was in it so it was cutting out every fourth word. And I turned to my son, I said, Mac, I think we had to pack up our crap. This TV. Thing's not gonna work. That's so little money we're living in it. Essentially was a trailer up there and read in California. And I remember coming back after that first on camera thing I did, and I talked Mary, you know who's the one who owned this place was renting us too, And I saw her, I said, hey, Mary, what do you think? What do you think about my camera thing? That was the worst damn thing I've ever seen him all that, So that was the beginning. I don't know why she's so where to put up, but you did. You went up, and you ended up at the network. You ended up as a co anchor of ABC World News Tonight, which is really at the pinnacle of the career. You guys. You guys got there and in no small part because you had this amazing woman supporting you and being willing to move all over the country at a moment's notice. Yeah, I don't I don't know how many people would have been well, I did hear. I would hear from people friends and stuff like I don't know if I could do what you do, and it sometimes it would make me feel like, well, you know, life is an adventure, like why not? And then sometimes it would make me feel like, well, what what what kind of an idiot? Am I very little? I'm kind of joking about that, but it was. I mean, we were always in this together, it was, and we loved every place we lived. You know, our Christmas card list grew too out of control because you get to meet all these great people and stay in touch with people, and I don't know, it was just it was a lot, I guess when I look back and think about all the moves, but I wouldn't have changed anything. Time for a quick break. When we get back, we'll hear from Bodily in their own words about the story that completely changed both of their lives. Bob ended up succeeding Peter Jennings as the co anchor of ABC World News Tonight in December of two thousand five. On January two thousand and six, Bob went to Baghdad to meet with the troops before President George W. Bush's State of the Union address. It wasn't the first time that he had been to Iraq, and it wasn't even the most dangerous situation that he had ever been reporting in. Bush was doing the State of the Union and so Bob was just hopping over their for a couple of days to just report on sort of the good parts of the war, how the troops were helping with the Allied forces to do good things like you know, sanitation plant and all this other stuff. In two thousand three when we invaded Iraq, Bob was part of that. He was embedded with the Marines, and that to me was the scarier thing. But I knew, you know that this was who my husband was. And I'm I'm stealing his line, But Bob, I remember you saying when people would say, like why what is it about wartime reporting that fascinates you? And your answer was always you see the best and the worst of humanity, like a war zone is an incredible place to see, you know, the best of us and the worst of us. And it was the first war right where you were the media could fully embed with the troops and and be able to side by side really report on what was happening versus the Vietnam where you could go out a little bit but then would always retreat behind the line as a journalist. So it was a it was a new era in journalism. And my dear friend Melanie Bloom, whose husband, David, worked for NBC and died in Iraq from a pulmonary embolism. She was really the only person that I could call at night, and we mitigated one another spear, I think by knowing that we each had young children same age and husbands in this war zone. I guess I don't didn't think about worst case scenarios. You can't. It would be like waking up every day and thinking, Wow, I might get hit by a city bus. So you just believe, and you want to believe that there's a sort of immunity with a journalist or a war zone which is no longer exists. Yeah, I don't. I never thought of all that. That was the for I Rock. I think that was the sixth time I'd reported out of Rock, and twice within Saddam Hussein was still there in power before our before the invasion itself, and then I essentially lived in Afghanistan covering that after nine eleve them, because we were in London when that when that hit in New York, and we within five hours our team was already on the plane, the b A flight heading over to Islamabad in Pakistan. And so we lived in these kinds of places for a long time, you just never thinking, you think, Okay, maybe I'll get hit and maybe my blow off my left finger or something, you know. I think the extremity, I don't think is something that people think about those that are covering war zones. Otherwise, why why the hell would they be there, you know? So I never I just wanted to be in these places, and I didn't really think that I was going to be killed put that one. So I think that's why I was, Okay, we're Lee putting up with it, and we had four kids at home when even hit. Nevertheless, I went to these places and I never really felt guilty about it. I think Lee was always such a great supporter of it. And there's a lot of problems arguments that we would have, but very my comedy. But never it was never about you going somewhere. I think I also understood Joe, and this is part of I think what makes a great marriage is the baseline for a really good marriage, that people are essentially happy, right, So if you if you love what you do. I don't know, there's just a freedom that I think we both have with each other that we give each other a lot of grace on on what makes us take and what makes us happy, and I just want to make the kids were happy, right, Yeah, I mean I think that happiness making sure that your spouse is doing the things that they love and they feel supported, and your kids are doing the things they love and feel supported. There's a lot to be said for creating that kind of baseline. My biggest feeling of guilt was almost, well, if I'm gone a lot, what about the impact of my kids. You know, our kids needed the parents around. But then I wasn't told by all sorts because I really wanted to hear. This answer is that studies have been done or what essentially doctors those in the the medical world and the mental world, and that's just not really so much the number of hours you spend with your kids raising them, but it's more the quality of the time when you are And I think it's some ways. When I did come back from from overseas and they put up with Lee the whole time, they kind of wanted some other stories. So I would tell all the stories and we would I would be the one that had to go to school and and be the representative of the family, So I was like making up for it. When you said when I returned, well, you were like, you know, everybody was excited to see you, and you were excited to see them. So I could take a step back. And you know, Joe, you've got little ones. It's full on. You've fallen to be exhausted. You know, you just do what you have to do. And I always worked. I always wanted to work. I feel like I was a better mother because I did have something that I got some sense of accomplishment from, whether it was a client telling me a good job on writing this or a check a paycheck right, because you're not going to get that from your kids for a very long time. And that made me a better mom with them because I have this thing that I did that was my side hustle. So back to Bob traveling to Iraq to cover the troop response to Bush's State of the Union. I was actually in Disney World. You can imagine, with all four kids. We were shooting a pilot for a TV show, and we were done, and we were going to get up and go to like Epcot the next day or something. And I had scheduled a wake up call, and right at the time of the wake up call, came the call from Bob's boss at ABC, David Weston, telling me that he had been hit by a roadside bomb. He had taken shrapnel to the brain and he was getting rushed into surgery and they weren't sure he was going to make it, but they need They've been trying to reach me, and they'd been holding this news for six hours because of the time difference and their inability to find me, and they needed to release it because it was a, you know, big story. So that was how why learned. And I went outside to have a conversation. I made a couple of calls to my mom, to Bob's mom, and then too my friend to just kind of get a gut check on how to tell this to my children. And I came back in went into the bathroom. It was on CNN. My kids were unfortunately awake and seeing the news on CNN, and I went to the bathroom to just sort of like break down for a second, and my daughter was on me. You know, she was like right there, smelling blood. You know, she's my really intuitive one. And I realized, you can't do this, you can't fall apart right now. Gotta hold it together for all of them, get them out of here, get them home to New York from Orlando, and then just you know, get over to Germany where they had taken Bob. So I was in like go mode. I was in general mode, and I was not going to go on Google. I was not gonna I just needed to sort of set the tone for my kids and just sort of stay hopeful the very weird, you know, brain place to be in. And Bob tell me a little bit up leading up to the accident for you what what happened there on the ground we were actually with I was ultimately ended up in the tank with the Iraqi military because it was a combination project that was being done by them together. The US was trying to eventually passed the power over to the Iraqi military. So we're going village to village to try to essentially convince the people that isis is not as good as we are. It's been the bottom line, and it was what it really was, to try to help them to get their their villages back to normal, if it was such a thing. But we're going down the road and then we were actually in the tank right in front of eight vehicles the others with US military tanks and then but it was me and my cameraman and my my producer, my soundman, and me and my camera Douve Vote. We decided to do some shooting popping up out the top of the tank and it had been completely safe. But we're going down this road. The the rocky driver, who was also standing up over the top, told us maybe you should should get down because this is a slightly dangerous road for I E D s, which at that time I didn't really know exactly what I improvised de fighting device was. And he was still up so he wasn't getting down, but anyway it was. It was within three seconds, so I don't have the chance to go down along with Doug this idea explosion ripped through the left side of us, shattered the left part of my skull, my left part of my jaw, scattered my scapula, which is the triangle bone in the back. The impact that you know to this days blinded me on the upper right hand corters of both my eyes just barely missed my eyes to make me blind. When you get hitten hit by an I E D like that, you know, I was knocked out instantly, fell back into the tank. Doug Vote was also hit and he fell on a back in the top of the tank. And when I fell down, I actually woke up after about two minutes, and I looked up at Mini Mahotra, who was the producer. I said, we are are we alive? He said, you live? And that's the last thing I remember until thirty six days later when I was up in as enabled back in the United States. They got us out of the vehicle just when they were getting out of their vehicles to come to ours. The one who shot or blew up the I D or a team of them, which we still don't know to this day. The insurgents fired at them from four different corners. Remarkably, they didn't hit any of these guys. They were able to get into the tank and the insurgents had disappeared. Who knows where they went. They got us out and helped to save me and my sound man who was with us, I mean, I mean the interpreter was with us. He held his hand over the the blood was pouring out of the left side of my head. He held that probably saved me. The other ones who all had the ability to be medics, I every one of the U. S Military were able to save me. They brought in a helicopter whizzed us out to Bagdad Hospital and they didn't think I was going to survive, but I did. And then they got us two blah. They removed sixteen centimeters in my left skull to try to keep the two make the brain have the ability to breathe and to expand because it was expanding, and then got us off to the Germany and then back to Bethesda. So I don't have a lot of memories, except I do kind of get hit, kind of saw the bank floating underneath me. I remember when my my brother back in Bethesda, when I finally did wake up, he asked me how it was, and I said, you know, I kind of want to go back. It was such a peaceful time, no pain, no real memories. It was just kind of whiteness. And and I told him, Ike, I would like to go back to where I just was, because it was pretty painful when I woke up. Really I could not sleep. There's a lot of pain and lee. What was this like for you? Bob was in the comment was was in for forty forty days? Thirty six days? Yeah, crazy and really out, like really out. They were basically telling me that, you know, it wasn't good that he was Probably I should be looking at acute care nursing facilities. And I, you know, had incredible friends and my family was around me. The kids were back in New York and I was in Washington. That was really hard, but I soon realized that, you know, they're Bob's brothers, and my sisters were with them, so that kind of kept them in their world, which is where they needed to be. The worst thing I could have done probably was dragged them down to Washington and put them in a strange school and disrupt their little lives. But I somehow was just determined to wait for Bob to wake up and see what the baseline was, so I wasn't going to rush to judgment. I didn't want ABC to rush to judgment, you know, write him off. And I somehow, I think just was sort of by staying off the internet and not asking the doctors a lot of questions, I was able to sort of stay in this world of dumb hope, which really helped me. And I'm sure a lot of it was just shocked too. But when Bob woke up, it was just an amazing day. It was suddenly all at once in a way that it's not supposed to happen. You're supposed to sort of tight trait off the meds on a in a coma, which they had continually tried with him, and it just he was just too agitated, and so he just woke up on his own and began sort of, you know, yabbering with gibberish words first, and then it was like watching a computer comeback online. His brain began to reboot and begin to talk, and you know, it was still jumbled up. It took probably a good year for his language to come back, but it was incredible, it was and you're so happy when that happens. You know that it's you. It's just this the euphoria on on all sides, and you're so happy he's coming back online. But you didn't know how far how much he would he he would reboot in the beginning, right, And no one can tell you because everybody's brain is different, everybody's injury is different with a head injury, so it's just you just you have to live in this world of not knowing and just being in the moment every day which for a type of control freak organized mother for that was not easy. But that was an incredible life lesson. And I can't say that change who I am, but I am able to call upon that, you know, feeling that moment, that experience when I need that kind of patience where I feel anxious as we all have during COVID or or what's craziness going on in the world right now and in our country. You know, I think that I don't really have memories really at all now. I think I when I woke up, I was able to tell the stories of what are numbered. You know, well, you really had a near death experience. That was the white light that you saw in float your body. Yeah, I did have that, But I do also remember that it was very I think when I woke up, as far as I remember is, I was ecstatic. I couldn't believe I'm still now they're in a bed with all my family around, because the last thing I remember was there in a tank in the middle of the sand of a rock. It was not nearly as loving as it is back back there at the hospital where I was. But I don't remember much about exactly what I was, you know, what I can't remember very well exactly what I saw, but I do tell people is that when you when you recover from something, when you wake up in the hospital and suddenly you're awake, and the first week or so you're you're extremely happy because you feel so lucky just to be alive. But I did not realize how bad I had become. It turns my ability to thank, my vocabulary was completely gone. I didn't know. I thought I was going to be back on my feet again, as if I was just in a football playing football and got a concussion and been out for a minute and then woke up again and I can go back into the game at least the next day. I thought I'd be a normal again, you know, within a matter of weeks or months. But then people realize that when you realize and when you do understand exactly what you become, that's when a lot more depression starts to kick in. So I was extremely happy. I would stately what for a few months for sure, and then I start to realize, you know what, I don't think I can do what I used to do. And that's when you know, you really kind of figure out what you are and what you can do, and you just have to find alternatives to life and tell back to a lot of people that have gone through something similar that you will get better every single day, every month, you will be better than you were the month before in the beginning, but you just have to realize you can't just keep hold on to exactly what your life was before. You have to figure out a different path. And I think I've learned that within the year. It's just really hard to adhere to and it's hard to continue and follow it well. It's and it's hard to watch someone you love who has so loved what they've done and been so independent not be able to do exactly what they want to do. And that's one advice I think that people have gone through with others in the family who have gone so rough something. Those are the two things. Remember they will get better, but you also have to try to advocate with them to find something something else, funky, cool, you know, not a different thing to do, and sometimes it could even be more fun than the ones they were doing before. It's kind of like what happens with with COVID, right, I mean, people are now you don't have to go to do your job in the office all the time, like you did, to figure figure out a different with a number of people have changed jobs and going to different taking different paths, but they couldn't go to the office anymore. So this is obviously more severe, but I did learn that, you know that you do have to figure out a different way to love. I think the short answer is you you do what you need to do. And so I think for a year I was more of a cheerleader splash maybe nurse. And I'll never forget this. I remember when it when things Bob was looking at our we changed our wills and we made sure we had everything updated and we put certain things in my name because we didn't know where Bob's you know, cognition was going to come back. And he had been a lawyer, and I remember him looking at the wills and saying, I don't understand any of this. And this was really early on, but I remember that just terrified me, thinking, okay, so I'm gonna be responsible for all of them. So I've gone from being the mother of four basically with a husband who can leave on a you know, drop of a dime with a phone call, to now mothering him. And what is this going to look like and what is going to be left of me if this is our life? And certainly there are plenty of marriages that have you know, had this happen, whether it's an illness or or an injury. But as one day, maybe about a year in, we were having a fight about money, something about finances, and I looked up at him and I said, oh my god, we're fighting. And he sort of looked at me like guiltily, like, oh, this is a bad thing, and I said no, no, no, no, no, this is like this is what normal couples do. And I realized, Okay, we're moving in to that zone where he's like, little by little without me noticing it, I've ceeded things back to him and we're moving on more equal ground. I think what happens in your life when you've had a traumatic experience, though it always lives inside of you. So there's a point which the phone rings after you know, my heart probably jumps a little bit, and I don't think you ever get past that moment, and that's probably just life, but you learn to live with it a little bit. As Bob covered, the experience inspired the would just to do something to give back to ensure the veterans, service members and their families have access to the highest level of support and resources that they deserve for as long as they need it. And so together they all created the Bob Woodruff Foundation. And the foundation piece was easy. We sat there in the hospital and Bob was still in his comment. We saw all of these other young mostly men at the time in two thousand and six in Bethest Naval Hospital getting fantastic care because it's the best hospitals in the world for the military. And then we would see them leave and go back to their homes in Nebraska or Texas or somewhere, and new through stories that filtered back that they're in when they got to their local towns, they weren't necessarily getting the same kind of care or didn't have access to it without driving three hours or whatever through the v A system. So we realized there were all of these families that were going through the after effects of war, but we weren't hearing about it at the time in the country. And so Bob's brothers and I said it, Boy, if Bob comes out of this and he recovers, we need to do something and use the crazy amount of attention we've gotten for his injury and and do something about it so that Bob would Your foundation was born, and sixteen years later we're given away something like eighty million dollars in grants and have an incredible team, and we're really proud to look for the cracks and the places where people need help. Families need health caregivers need help beyond what our government provides. And that's been the legacy to take something so bad and so sad and do something good with it so that you can not wake up every day and I feel like you've lost something. I guess you know as you as you know that this is a This is a war that was very different than wars that we've experienced before the government was not ready for how bad this would be in terms of the needs for those that were badly wounded. Probably is the previous wars more percentage wise, more died than they did get wounded. Bob would be dead if it had happened five years earlier. Medical miracles and things, and and you know, techniques changed enough. I had no idea what the word tb I was traumatic brain injury. Nor did Lee no idea. And then suddenly became part of our our lives, and then suddenly this wound, of course, and our experience now within the military completely changed our lives. I was a reporter covering the news. Now we became a very central close part. Well, we became the story. And that was really weird. Yeah, and friends, because they were there in the hospital with us, you know, we knew the families of those that had served over there. And the sad thing too, is that I was forty almost forty five years old on its hit, with a pretty remarkable life with so many things that you know, and had had four great kids, and I got a great wife. And these are that same third floor, but as enabled and there's my whole family watching these guys unconscious and they're like twenty two years old. They hadn't really done much. They don't have a big company like ABC standing right behind them. They had the government which was overwhelmed by this where lives were saved. But that makes it even more complicated how to take with those that were wounded. If you're killed in the war, it's pretty simple, you know, you give, give a little bit of money and have a great, amazing funeral and that's it. So this became a very complicated situation and it was just ready for a foundation like Lee and my family, my brothers did and and talk to me about choosing to celebrate the alive day, which I think is beautiful. I love the idea of creating celebrations and traditions that are for you. How did you choose to come to that that's actually a military tradition that yeah, we had, and whether or not that's something that just started with this war, I couldn't tell you. But it's a beautiful tradition of basically saying, I am not going to grieve the person I was before. I'm going to celebrate the fact that I am alive after this you know, life changing event in the war. And my alive day is the day that I crawled out of you know, what could have been my death and decided to become this is the next generation of me. So it's a really cool moment because if you really think about it, and this is so true in a marriage too, nothing is stasis. Everything is constantly iterating. I remember one of the coolest things Bob said to me when I said I was worried because they told me he would be super depressed when he woke up, you know, and he realized how much he had lost, including the anchor chair at ABC News. And so I was really watching for this and wondering, you know, what kind of husband I would have. And I remember Bob when I sort of tentatively said, so, are you feeling ripped off? Like you just got to this chair and you were in it for you know, all of ten weeks or whatever, and you know, it's I can tell him that he'd lost it, but I knew that he wouldn't be able to go back to that position. People couldn't wait, ABC couldn't wait, you know, for him to recover. And he said, well, well, why shouldn't it be me? What makes me anymore special than the twenty five year old, you know kid who's in a tank in Kansas just because I'm on TV? And I thought, all right, well that's a you know, pretty cool answer. And if that's the way that he's looking at this, then then that's the way we all need to look at this too, because and the other joke he would say to me was, well, who says I was going to succeed at this job? I could have sucked and then gotten fired. So at least he went out on top with an injury. That's always possible. How do you think it changed your marriage and your relationship for the better for the worst? Just how are you different? It's kind of like with Lisa, who knows it could have been a disaster. Could my whole crisis would have been a crash for some thing that really reflected on our inability to do this job instead of was one that ended quickly because of this, And what would be happen if I was still the anchor of a show. I mean, it's life is impossible to predict. It could have been worse if I was not tough. You know it better now than before. I think sometimes what we've been able to do through our foundation has been the most fulfilling thing I've ever done in my life. You know, I know that journalism plays a very important role in the world, and I think people that very experienced countries outside the United States realize how good journalism is. Where there's a lot of criticism within our country because basically, I don't understand what your alternative would be if we didn't. So I did feel very fulfilled by the fact that we've been able to do with the military because they listen. A lot of our lives became. Spending a lot of time involved together and doing something for I think made us a very good couple that way. I just I don't know this Sholways. Your dissatisfaction with what I became after this is the one that's always my concern. We'll see. I think that that's the interesting thing about a marriage. I think when you really love somebody, and I feel that from Bob, I think Bob has this sense that he's let me down, and I don't feel that. I think that's you project on your partner because you do care so much about them. And I think that my life is a continual role. My role in this marriage is to try to convince Bob for the rest of his life that I accept who we are now and that I didn't marry the anchor of ABC News. I married a lawyer. I didn't want any of this necessarily. I was along for the ride and doing my job to support his dream and having a fun ride. You know, well that happened. But I think there are days that I feel profoundly sad for him, not for me. But I want when you love somebody, you want them to realize their dream, and Bob got there, he got to the top of the mountain. But I wish that there had been more years to enjoy that. So I think there's a constant toggling and that also happens in this place in marriage after three decades, where you know somebody so well and you realize that nobody gets it perfect, no one gets But it's a balance, Joe. Every like it's reaching for joy some days and other days just waking up joyous. And I think the adjustment was hard. But you know, life is an adjustment, isn't it. Marriage is an adjustment. Yeah, I love ending marriage is an adjustment, and we're supposed to end with like real nice now you're nice. No, No, because that is not real. That is that is not real and true and honest. There was so much love in this, but I think marriage is an adjustment is really something we should all take away. It's true. Thank you for this, and separate bathrooms, Joe. This episode was hosted and reported by Joe Piazza and a very special thanks to Lee and Bob Woodruff. Committed as produced by Ramsey Yacht. The executive producers are Joe Piazza and Tyler Klang theme song by Tristan McNeil. For comments, suggestions, or to be part of the show, give us a call at four zero four that's four zero four three, or send us an email at Joe at Committed podcast dot com. That's j O at Committed podcast dot com. You can pick up a copy of Katie urs new memoir, Rough Draft wherever books are sold. Committed as a production of iHeart Radio and produced in our studios located in Atlanta, Georgia. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
