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Anderson Hays Cooper (born June 3, 1967) is a television journalist currently working for the CNN television network. He anchors Anderson Cooper 360°, which since November 2, 2005, has aired from 10 pm to midnight EST. The program is normally broadcast live from New York City, except during Cooper's frequent trips to sites of major stories.

Background

Family

Cooper is the younger son of writer Wyatt Emory Cooper and artist, designer, writer, and railroad heiress Gloria Vanderbilt.

He is of mostly English, Irish, and Dutch ancestry. Cooper is also part Spanish, through his direct descent from the Union general Hugh Judson Kilpatrick and his second wife, Luisa Fernandez de Valdiviseo, who was a member of an Andalusian family that settled in Peru in the 17th century.

His father died on January 5, 1978 at the age of 50 after a series of heart attacks. This is said to have affected the young Cooper "enormously." In retrospect, he has said "I think I’m a lot like my father in several ways", including "that we look a lot alike and that we have a similar sense of humor and a love of storytelling." Cooper considers his father's book Families as "Sort of a guide on how he would have wanted me to live my life and the choices he would have wanted me to make. And so I feel very connected to him."

Cooper's older brother, Carter, took his own life on July 22, 1988 at age 23 by jumping from the 14th floor terrace of Vanderbilt's New York City penthouse apartment. Gloria Vanderbilt later wrote about her son's death in the book A Mother's Story, in which she expresses her belief that the suicide was caused by a psychotic episode induced by an allergy to the medical prescription drug Proventil. Carter's suicide is apparently what sparked Anderson to become a journalist; "Loss is a theme that I think a lot about, and it’s something in my work that I dwell on. I think when you experience any kind of loss, especially the kind I did, you have questions about survival: Why do some people thrive in situations that others can’t tolerate? Would I be able to survive and get on in the world on my own?"

Education

Cooper attended The Dalton School in New York City and graduated from Yale University in 1989 with a BA in Political Science. After his first correspondence work in the early 1990s, he took a break from reporting and lived in Vietnam for a year, during which time he studied Vietnamese at the University of Hanoi.

Television work

Channel One

After Cooper graduated from Yale, he tried unsuccessfully to gain entry-level employment with ABC answering telephones, so instead took a job as fact-checker for the much smaller Channel One, which produces a youth oriented news program that is broadcasted to many junior high and high schools in the United States.

After six months, Cooper decided that he wanted to switch to reporting, but "figured if I told anyone they wouldn't give me the chance I quit my job and moved overseas and started shooting with my own video camera. I figured if I put myself in situations where there weren't many Americans around and I shot little stories, then I could sell them to Channel One. I wanted to make it impossible for them to not put me on air. I had a friend of mine make a fake press pass on a Macintosh, and I snuck into Burma and hooked up with some students fighting the Burmese government. I had met the person who was involved in the Burmese student movement in New York, and they gave me the name of a contact in a town in Western Thailand. So I found my way to this town that was like a Wild West border town, and I contacted the person and said I was a reporter. We met in an ice cream parlor, and then they agreed to take me in, and they smuggled me across the border into Burma."

After reporting from Burma, Cooper lived in Vietnam for a year and then returned to filming stories from a variety of war-torn regions around the globe, including Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda. Haunted by his brother's suicide, "The only thing I really knew is that I was hurting and needed to go someplace where the pain outside matched the pain I was feeling inside." Cooper describes himself as having become "fascinated with conflict" during this dangerous period of his life in which he was occasionally shot at. While "witnessing history" was an incentive for him to report from such locales, "I also found that I felt that the molecules in the air were different. In all the places where there was conflict it was sort of a highly charged atmosphere and there was something about it that appealed to me. I found I was very interested in issues of survival and why some people survive and others don't. I wanted to see first-hand. I felt very comfortable in those places."

ABC

In 1995, Cooper became a correspondent for ABC News, eventually rising to the position of co-anchor of ABC World News Now. In 2000 he switched career paths, taking a job as the host of ABC's reality show The Mole: "My last year at ABC, I was working overnights anchoring this newscast then during the day at 20/20. So I was sleeping in two- or four-hour shifts, and I was really tired and wanted a change. I wanted to clear my head and get out of news a little bit, and I was interested in reality TV —and it was interesting." One executive publicly predicted his move to reality TV would mean the end of his career as a newscaster.

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