| When he’s not filling in for Matt Lauer as host of the Today show or subbing for Don Imus on the radio, Gregory, 35, usually rises shortly after the sun. Today he’s up around seven with his son Max, three, and one-year-old twins, Jed and Ava, helping his wife, Beth, get them breakfast and off to play dates. Striking the right balance between his demanding career and his roles as a husband and a father is critical to Gregory. “It’s a real juggling act,” he says. “It’s not easy, but being a family man really matters to me. It’s something I work at all the time.” Just before 10, he hops into his car for the 15-minute drive from his Northwest Washington house, neighboring AU, to his professional home at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. While Gregory’s job might be glamorous, his working environs most certainly are not. The West Wing space above the White House’s old indoor swimming pool was constructed for the media in 1970, and the paint that adorns the walls, the carpeting that blankets the floors, the antiquated vending machines in the break room don’t hide their age well. The press corps long since has outgrown the digs.
"It is still kind of surreal to me. I’m working in the same booth where Tom Brokaw was our White House correspondent. It’s sort of a daily reminder that this is an important beat with a lot of responsibility. It’s an honor and a thrill.”
- David Gregory |
Gregory slides his 6-foot-5-inch frame into a desk chair in a seven-foot-wide “office” that houses up to three other NBC News reporters and producers. When the room is filled to capacity, one gets the sensation of trying to negotiate an airplane bathroom. Yet, there is nowhere he would rather be. “It is still kind of surreal to me,” he says. “I’m working in the same booth where Tom Brokaw was our White House correspondent. It’s sort of a daily reminder that this is an important beat with a lot of responsibility. It’s an honor and a thrill.” Gregory first was bit by the reportorial bug at age 15. So focused was he on a career in television news that he taught himself to mimic Brokaw and the late ABC World News Tonight anchor Peter Jennings. “I really sort of fell in love with the news,” Gregory says. “Just the intensive urgency of it and all the places it took you. I really became enamored with that.” Realizing that Washington was the nexus of the political and the media worlds, Gregory decided to head East from L.A. for college and enrolled at AU. “The interesting thing was I immediately decided not to study journalism,” he recalls. “I had international interests, so I thought it would make more sense to study international affairs. But I was constantly thinking about how to get started in my [broadcasting] career. In fact, I spent too much time doing that. I remember sitting in my dorm room during the day calling people, trying to network.” He did find time to work at the AU television station, reporting and anchoring the news, an experience he calls “formative.” Gregory’s drive was evident to anyone who came in contact with him. After his freshman year at AU, he landed an internship at KGUN-TV in Tucson, Arizona. “That summer he got every crappy job you can think of in the news room,” says Ray Depa, KGUN’s vice president and general manager and the first person to put Gregory on the air. “He was more or less a gopher, but the way he handled himself, he never complained, just did what he was told. By the end of his internship we gave him some meaningful things to do. As little of an opportunity as he had, he took advantage of it. Before the summer ended I said, ‘David, you’re going back to Washington, every now and then we’d like you to cover some stories for us.’ He just didn’t wait for us to call him. He’d go get a bite with a congressman or a senator. He made contacts. Here he is in college, taking the initiative. The stuff he did for us in Washington was top-notch.” A paid journalist at age 19, Gregory never looked back. The next summer he returned to KGUN, where he filed investigative reports on Tucson Electric Power, which was going through bankruptcy. “There was never a doubt in my mind that this guy was someday going to be the president of the network news division,” Depa says. “He had a picture of Peter Jennings on his desk. Here’s somebody who is 20 years old running circles around most reporters in this market. There wasn’t a story that he couldn’t do or go get.” After graduating from AU’s School of International Service in 1992, Gregory returned to the southwest to work for a station in Albuquerque, New Mexico. continued next page >> top |
