Journalist Anderson Cooper receives Lifetime Achievement Award from YCC 

Journalist Anderson Cooper receives Lifetime Achievement Award from YCC

Anderson Cooper takes a photo of the audience before his remarks.

YCC president Joseph English \'17 introduces Cooper to a sold-out crowd at Battell Chapel.

Cooper had some time after the talk to pose for selfies with students.

Before his first job interview, when he was just 11 years old, Anderson Cooper ’89 asked his mother for some advice on how to prepare. He was applying to be a child model and was feeling nervous.

“Her advice, which took her a long time to think of, was to wear vertical stripes because they’re slimming. And that’s really the best advice I could give you today,” he said, laughing, during a talk before a full audience at Battell Chapel.

Cooper returned to campus on April 22 to receive the Yale Undergraduates’ Lifetime Achievement Award. The Yale College Council (YCC) and the President’s Office established the award last year with the goal of bringing prominent college alumni back to campus to interact with undergraduates both en masse and in smaller, more intimate settings. The award is the only one in Ivy League history that is elected and administered entirely by students, said YCC president Joseph English ’17.

Undergraduates last semester selected Cooper as the recipient in a student body-wide vote administered by the YCC. In his introduction, English said the award recognizes Cooper’s lengthy career in journalism and his dedication to his work.

“He is known for defining a new brand of journalism: he is a journalist who is both physically and emotionally invested in the topics he covers. He takes it as a personal responsibility to understand his subjects and covers them fairly but also represents them and treats them with empathy,” English said.

While the advice Cooper’s mom offered him before his first job interview was not as helpful as he had hoped, her advice after he graduated from Yale “turned out to actually be pretty good advice” in shaping his path beyond Yale, the journalist said. Not knowing what he wanted to do after graduation, his mom advised him to “follow your bliss.” Again it wasn’t what Cooper wanted to hear — he had wanted something a little more “practical,” he told the audience — but he took the advice to heart and decided to travel across southeast Asia.

Growing up, he said, he had watched a lot of TV news and he realized he wanted to become a war correspondent. After failing to find an entry-level job, he had a friend make him a fake press pass, borrowed a camera, and snuck into Burma to cover the students fighting the Burmese government.

“It was my first time being in a combat zone, and I knew after shooting the story on that first day that that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” he explained. “I basically spent the next two or three years going to war zones … and I’ve been a reporter ever since.”

His interest in covering war zones stemmed from his own experiences growing up: His father died when Cooper was a child, and his brother committed suicide when Cooper was a senior at Yale. Those experiences shaped his worldview and led him to seek out places where he could learn about issues of survival, he said.

“For two brothers who grew up in the same household, why does one survive and why does one not? Why did I survive and how could I survive?” he asked. “I wanted to be around people who were dealing with survival everyday, who spoke the language of loss. I was grieving, and I wanted to be [in] places where it’s okay to grieve, where life and death is very much an issue.”

Using his own career an example, Cooper urged students to not focus too much energy on creating a “clear path,” remarking that for many of the most successful people he has met, their path to success only became clear at the end with hindsight. Although sneaking into Burma with a fake press pass ultimately worked out for him, he said, he wouldn’t advise any student interested in being a correspondent at CNN to try it.

Cooper spent the next few years traveling across the globe visiting war-torn regions, covering fighting in Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. When English asked what his mother thought of his work, he replied that he lied to her for the first three years, telling her he was going to Frankfurt, which was “technically true” because he had to fly through there to get to Somalia. While the events he was covering put him in danger, Cooper said he is a big believer facing his fears. He described himself as “lucky” for not being killed by a mob like his fellow reporter Dan Eldon was in Mogadishu, Somalia, even though Eldon was “doing exactly the same thing.”

“When you’re fearful, it often leads to a paralysis and, at least for me, it makes you more indecisive,” he explained. “It was a very liberating moment when I realized I just need to plunge headfirst into the stuff that scares me.”

Another freeing moment for him came when he was only a child: Cooper’s mother told him that his college education would be paid for but after that he was on his own. Cooper said this was a huge advantage that allowed him to stay true to himself and reconcile the risks associated with the work he wanted to do. An added incentive was that he realized early on that he had to make journalism work for him as a career and motivated himself to succeed.

“At the time when I graduated, I didn’t have a plan B. It’s not something I would recommend for anybody else but I felt like I didn’t have a lot of options; I felt like I had to make this work. This is the only thing I can imagine doing for the rest of my life,” he said.

Cooper’s commitment to his work often meant he kept cancelling on his friends from college, eventually losing contact with most. On the occasions where he did visit friends, he felt like a “space alien” due to his drastically different experiences. After coming back from Somalia one day, for example, he went to a friend’s dinner party where his friends were talking about facial products. Feeling isolated, he decided to leave. Covering war-torn regions gave him a “greater range of humanity” but it also meant it was harder for him to “do normal,” he said.

Ultimately, Cooper’s passion for journalism drives him to continue visiting communities across the globe and telling other people’s stories, he said.

“There’s nothing more extraordinary than telling the realities of somebody else’s life and bringing that to a wider audience … I think there’s a particular horror in people living a good and decent life who die in silence or who die without their voice ever being heard … and I’ve seen that time and time again. For me, it’s important to learn somebody’s name, to learn what happened to them, and to tell their story so at least we carry those people with us.”

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