Anderson Cooper had just concluded his junior year at Yale when Carter Cooper died, New York magazine noted. “At first he didn’t want to go back; he wanted to stay with me to protect me,” Gloria Vanderbilt said. “But of course I wouldn’t let him.” Up until then, the political science student had no clear vision of where to take his career. But Carter’s death pushed him toward journalism.
In 1992, Anderson headed to East Africa with nothing but an amateur camera and a fake press pass in an attempt to become a reporter. At least that’s what he told everyone. “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,” he wrote in a 2003 essay for Details magazine (via CNN). “Somalia seemed a good place to start.”
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Anderson’s senior year had been marked by grief. Not only did he miss Carter, but he was also afraid. “I’d spent most of my time trying to figure out what had happened, and I worried that whatever impulse drove my brother might be lurking out there, somewhere, waiting for me,” the CNN anchor detailed. Vanderbilt believed the tragedy that befell her family armed Anderson with the right skills to excel in journalism. “When he became a reporter, it enabled him to do this with compassion and maturity way beyond his years,” she told New York.
