Anderson University alum Loretta Rogers Cooper was an ABC news correspondent based in Washington, D.C. She covered the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and the scandal and impeachment proceedings involving President Bill Clinton.

Fresh from college, she worked a radio spot in Kokomo and then TV in Lafayette. Then, ABC News asked her to cover the Mike Tyson rape trial in Indianapolis.

On TV, she was known as Lauren Rogers. “I never liked the name Low-retta,” she said. “I looked in a baby book and Loren was an abbreviated version of it.”

Born in Phoenix, she graduated from AU in 1988. Top stories she covered ranged from the 2001 execution of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing to an interview with ex-Beatle Paul McCartney.

She is now a communications consultant. Married, she has two children. She recently visited with AU students and then chatted with Madison. Here are excerpts from the interview.



Madison: How did you come to choose AU?

Cooper: I grew up in the Church of God. My parents grew up in the Church of God, and my grandparents grew up in the Church of God. So for them, Anderson University was Harvard. And I was the first member of my family to go to college. Especially for my dad, this was his dream for me. This was a big deal for him. ... They came to camp meetings for years and years. I was potty-trained at camp meetings.



Madison: You knew you wanted to go into communications?

Cooper: My mother was actually an actress, she was part of what grew up to be the Arizona Opera Company and my father was very involved in Republican politics, so the hybrid of those two people is quite obviously a political reporter. ... I remember the first time I saw Mary Jo West, who was anchoring on a CBS affiliate in Phoenix, was the first time I’d ever seen a woman on the air in television, which is hard to imagine now, but it was like 1970 something. I was just sort of entranced. I remember my mother stopped and stared and stared at the television. And my mom turned to me and said, ‘You could do that.’ I actually called Mary Jo West and she became a mentor of mine.



Madison: You could tell us of your big stories but we’re thinking of Mike Tyson and the Timothy McVeigh execution. Those seem like those would be media circuses.

Cooper: They were. They were. Bigger than that, I covered the whole (Monica) Lewinsky scandal and impeachment process. I was at the White House the day the House impeached President Clinton. That was quite extraordinary especially during the grand jury hearings. That was quite a media circus out in front of the Federal Courthouse.



Madison: Were you pressured into getting a scoop? How could you with so many media members there?

Cooper: When you work for a large organization like ABC News, it’s a little bit like a widget factory. Everybody has their own little piece of the project.

I really loved reporting but by that time, I was preliminarily tasked with standing in front of the camera and reporting other people’s discoveries.

We had an investigative unit that was really plugged into what was going on in the grand jury room. The grand jury room all summer long was leaking like a sieve. People walked out and, within moments, we all had readouts on what allegedly was being told to the grand jury. It was lawyers from both sides trying to influence public opinion so we were being manipulated by the attorneys to tell their side of the story and we all knew it.



Madison: What stories are you proud of?

Cooper: I had an opportunity to do a piece about a young woman who as a child was held in Theresienstadt (in World War II) in Czechoslovakia, which was one of the Jewish ghettoes that the Nazis used to prove to the Red Cross that Europe’s Jews were being treated well. They brought by all the artists and the intellectuals to Theresienstadt and created this sort of model city and they brought the Red Cross in. The children did a small children’s opera and I was able to go back and find the Red Cross footage and interview the woman who had survived who played one of the leads in this. After the Red Cross came in, the Nazis leveled this community and sent virtually everyone to Auschwitz, so about all the children died in the ovens a short time later. And this woman was one of the few to survive. That was a remarkable story.



Madison: What are among your memorable interviews?

Cooper: Paul McCartney was a good one. I was not a huge Paul McCartney fan. I kind of missed it. But he was just absolutely charming and I was a fan by the time it was done.

I had an opportunity recently to interview Bill Clinton again. That was in the context of the Clinton Foundation and an outside video project I was working on. He’s still Bill Clinton. He’s exactly who you expect him to be.



Madison: Any embarrassing moments on air?

Cooper: It’s kind of legendary among ABC News crews. ... It was during the Monica Lewinsky thing and I was doing a live shot with a BBC television host. ... It was the middle of the night our time. He was quite fascinated with our president’s predilections and preferences ... The host actually asked me, ‘So how do you Americans define sexual intercourse?’ He asked me that on the air. I looked at my producer and I looked at the cameraman and said, ‘Well, I guess there are as many definitions of that as there are people who practice it.’