Bonus Episode: Remembering Susan Stamberg [Transcript]

Narration is in bold. 

Nahanni Rous: Hi, it’s Nahanni Rous, with a special episode of Can We Talk? in memory of public radio icon Susan Stamberg, who died this month at the age of 87. Susan was one of NPR’s founding mothers, and was a personal role model of mine. When I was very young, the sound of Susan Stamberg’s voice on my family’s kitchen radio was planted in my brain and became an inspiration to pursue a career in radio and later podcasting. I interviewed her in 2018 for a Can We Talk? episode about women’s voices in broadcasting, called "Breaking the Sound Barrier." Here’s an excerpt of that episode.

Susan Stamberg: Hi, coming, coming, coming, coming.

Engineer: She's on the line, just put your headphones on and smile. 

Susan: [Laughs] Okay.

Nahanni: Did I just hear her tell you that you should smile?

Susan: Yeah, she said to smile. [Laughs] Oh, this chair is so weird. Hello, how do you say your name?

Nahanni: Nahanni

Susan: Nahanni! Good! Nice to meet you, good morning.

Nahanni: Nice to meet you too.

Susan: Do you need a level from me, or am I okay? Okay, good, hi. Good morning, let’s go!

[Theme music plays]

Nahanni: In 1972, Susan Stamberg broke a sound barrier. She became the first woman in America to anchor a national nightly news broadcast. Susan co-hosted NPR’s evening news program All Things Considered for fourteen years, and her voice helped set the tone for public broadcasting.

In this episode of Can We Talk?, we’ll talk with Susan Stamberg about her watershed career and how it set the stage for women on the radio. 

[All Things Considered theme music plays, followed by clip]

Susan: From National Public Radio in Washington, I’m Susan Stamberg, with All Things Considered.

Nahanni: Susan’s voice is resonant, curious, and warm. She’s got a way of being fully in whatever story she’s telling. But Susan doesn’t practice.

Nahanni: Do you do any vocal warm-up exercises?

Susan: Never. And I really probably should now as I get older. And also, I get kind of phlegmy, and it would be a good idea for me to, but it never occurs to me since I've never done it all my life. 

Nahanni: And you've never been coached to do that?

Susan: No, uh-uh. Nobody ever told me nothin'! [Laughs]

Nahanni: Amazing! Still, everyone learns how to speak somewhere.

Susan: I’m the first woman who anchored a nightly network news broadcast. As the first, it means that I had no role models. 

Nahanni: Or rather, she had no role models who were women.

Susan: And so when I began anchoring All Things Considered, I very self-consciously lowered my voice and said, "Good evening. This is All Things Considered" because that's all I ever heard, and that's the only thing I could think to do. But Bill Siemering, who is the creator of All Things Considered and the person who decided I would be the first woman, I would be the woman to do our program, very quickly said to me, "Just be yourself. Just be yourself." And those were just the most enabling words for me. It meant that I didn't [lowers voice] have to do this anymore and that I could speak as I speak, and it would be okay. So, the work was to sort of pervert my natural speech. Once he said that I could speak as I do, it was—it was better. It was a great sense of freedom.

Nahanni: I used to be told that I should smile when I read my script, and I really don't like the way my voice sounds when I'm doing that.

Susan: Oh, interesting. Well, you feel so silly. [Laughs]

Nahanni: Yeah, and I think you end up sounding sing-songy almost.

Susan: Mmm. That may be.

Nahanni: Have you ever been told that you should do that?

Susan: No, no one ever told me, I just tend to. I smile a lot. And when I do, you hear it in my voice. People have told me that, that they hear it, and they smile back, which I love. I think that's just terrific.

Nahanni: Mmm…

Susan: I think it's more in terms of not sounding flat, you know, letting the music in your voice, if it exists, to come out, so that you're getting some range of sound that go—just as I did just now, range of sounds, so you're going up and then you're coming down. 

Nahanni: Your voice sounds to me very warm, kind of glowing, but also your delivery can be very newsy, and I'm wondering if you had to work for that.

Susan: I didn't work really for much. I spoke as I—as I have always spoken. I suppose I worked a little more on accent because I'm a New Yorker, and so in the beginning on All Things Considered, I had a problem saying "all" and I don't even do it well now. It sounds very self-conscious to me, because New Yorkers would say "awll." Or my kind of New Yorker did. And we would say, "tawlk," so I had to sort of work that way, but it's more accent than voice.

Nahanni: Why did you feel like you had to ditch the New York accent?

Susan: Um…yeah, I guess I was self-conscious about it. In those days, in terms of role models and broadcasting, well, there were no women doing news particularly, but women who were on the air spoke—were mostly actresses, they began as actresses and then they took on other—other roles, and so they were very carefully and theatrically trained. 

And I suppose that got into my DNA as well, that sense that I needed to speak a kind of national accent-less language rather than to sound regional. I'm sorry for that now, because I love that sound of local accents. I love a southern accent or a Texas acc—I love hearing them. Or a real New York accent, or a Bronx accent, but I seem to have lost it, because of that sense when I was young that it wasn't anything I heard except on the streets, so it wasn't the right accent for broadcasting.

Nahanni: Did you grow up with people who had that New York Jewish accent?

 

Susan: Yes, sure. I'm not so sure it's Jewish. How interesting you say it is. In my early days on All Things Considered, people would write in, the ones who weren't happy listening to me, and say, "She's so New York," and our president at the time, Frank Mankiewicz, the president of NPR, said to me, "That's always coded for Jewish." 

Nahanni: Hmmm.

Susan: Now you, of course, given where you're working and for whom you're making this recording, would have a different—and a more prideful—sense about it, but his was sort of, “Watch out because that's really antisemitic.”

Nahanni: Ah, and...

Susan: Isn't that interesting? Isn't that interesting?

Nahanni: Yeah. And his feeling was you should try to tone that part down?

Susan: No, no. There were no "shoulds" behind him. No, no, no. Not a bit of it. It was just merely an observation. But it intrigued me. But at that point, I'd pretty well lost most of my New York accent. It still creeps up from time to time.

Nahanni: In what cases?

Susan: When I'm very tired, yeah. Rarely on the air. Although sometimes in the course of an interview, and this is interesting to me, too, an interview when I'm very relaxed and really having a wonderful time, it'll pop up. [Laughs] It's like the braces are off, you know?

Nahanni: Does it depend on who you're talking to?

Susan: Yeah, sure, because accents are catching, and so when I'm talking to a real New Yawka, I can catch that and start—start speaking that way myself.

Nahanni: Susan now seems to relish her ability to slip in and out of her New York accent. But, she told me, she thinks it would have hindered her career.

Susan: I knew I was setting a certain standard, you know, and carrying the flame, so I had to work harder and also wanted to be good so that other women could follow me and could step in as well, so that kind of anxiety was certainly there.

Nahanni: Mm–hmm. Do you think it was present in your voice?

Susan: I'm not sure. Ehh...I'm not sure. I'm not too sure it affected my voice. I don't hear myself sounding nervous on old tapes.

Nahanni: Maybe this is a good time to play that old piece of tape. 

Susan: [Laughs] Okay, you've got something, eh?

[Clip of All Things Considered plays]

[Theme music plays] 

Susan: From National Public Radio in Washington, I’m Susan Stamberg, with All Things Considered. You could fly the friendly skies of United, Allegheny and National today, but the friendship got strained at airlines like Eastern. We’ll examine the impact of today’s pilot walkout and explore legal and international attitudes on sanctioning hijackers.

[Theme music plays]

Susan: Oh gosh. [Laughs] What's the year of that, do you know?

Nahanni: That is June 19, 1972.

Nahanni: That was Susan’s first day anchoring All Things Considered, about six weeks after it premiered.

Susan: What I hear is, well, my voice is younger, but it's not very different, but what I hear there, and you may have, too, is me working on my accent. I was STAHM-berg. I now say STAM-berg. You know? I was being really careful with that "a," to sort of flatten out rather than to sound New York-y. That, I heard. And much more formal. I wasn't nearly as easy, uh, at a microphone, and so I was more careful, I think, and more self-conscious about the way I was speaking than I certainly am now.

Nahanni: Besides occasionally being told she sounded so “New York,” I asked Susan if there were other critiques of her voice. She said there were...but they were kept from her. In fact, program director Bill Siemering waited eleven years to tell her.

Susan: Which to me was such a sign of his leadership and his compassion and skills. He told me that when I first began anchoring All Things Considered, there was some resistance by managers of our handful of member stations. A handful of managers at our handful of stations who said, "A woman's voice is not authoritative. She doesn't speak with conviction, and our listeners won't believe her when she's delivering the news."

Now, to some extent, there's some validity to that because in those days we were broadcasting over 10 kHz lines, just very bad telephone lines, which tend to bump up the upper part of the voice, the soprano part of the voice, and kind of depress the bass, the lower. And so I may have sounded a little shriller than my real life voice is. But otherwise, it was just, you know, uninformed ears—ears that were so unused to this that, uh, it was too unusual, and they didn't like it. 

Nahanni: But that didn’t matter, because for decades, Susan Stamberg brought the news to the nation: President Nixon’s resignation, the end of the Vietnam War, the Iran-Contra scandal. And she did it with authority. She moderated the first live call-in show with a sitting president, in which citizens from around the country asked questions. She also hosted the first live broadcast of a debate on the Senate floor. She became a news icon, and an inspiration to many, including me. It was her voice that brought news of the world into my childhood home.

Nahanni: Do you think that given your profession you listen to people's voices differently?

Susan: Yeah, I guess I do. I always notice a great voice, and I always say, "Oh, you really ought to be on the radio" when it's a really big, full, gorgeous, gorgeous voice. That's the kind of voice that I like. 

Nahanni: I asked Susan to describe a good voice.

Susan: A good one, uh, is warm, and it's got a little fizz to it, and you can hear a smile in it, from time to time, or a narrowing, when the speaker is being very, very serious.

Broadcasting does demand a different kind of communication, I think. It's not so much about voice, but it's about reaching out and projection—and grabbing the ear of your listener and you’re not going to grab their ear if you’re always speaking like this in a flat line.

[Theme music plays]

Nahanni: Susan Stamberg’s direct style did grab listeners by the ears. She paved the way for women who came after her. 

Susan Stamberg died on October 16,  2025.  You can hear our full episode, "Breaking the Sound Barrier," at jwa.org/canwetalk or wherever you get your podcasts. It includes an interview with Emily Bazelon of the Slate Political Gabfest and Bill Siemering, a founder of NPR, who hired Susan Stamberg to host All Things Considered in 1972.  

You’ve been listening to Can We Talk, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive. Our team includes Jen Richler and Judith Rosenbaum. Our theme music is by Girls in Trouble. Special thanks to the NPR Audio Archive and to my erstwhile editor Ibby Caputo. We’ll be back next week with another episode of Can We Talk?

I’m Nahanni Rous. Until next time.

[Theme music fades]

Susan: One story that I wanted to tell you, about being recognized, with the voice…because until we all open our mouths, nobody knows who we are, which is a great advantage of radio—you don't have to comb your hair, you really don't have to wear makeup. And nobody knows—as you walk down the street, you won't be recognized the way television people or movie people are. But then you speak, and someone will say, "Oh wait, aren't you…?" and they'll usually get your name wrong, and not get it right, but they'll make a public radio association.

And one of the very first times it happened to me, to my delight but also my horror—because you know, you're thrilled when someone recognizes you for the first time when you're out in this world of broadcasting—was at…I was standing on the sidelines of a soccer game that my son was playing. He must have been about seven years old, and I was doing All Things Considered in those days. And I'm on the sidelines screaming  “Go Green Dragons!” as loud as I could. And  somebody next to me said, “Say, aren’t you Susan Stamberg?” And I thought “Oh good lord, they caught me.”  [Laughs]