Two for the Road

It was just a year and a half ago that Vargas became a co-anchor at "20/20," an assignment she is not giving up. Her reports on that program and in a series of prime-time hours have focused on the more emotional side of journalism: murders in Yosemite National Park; the JonBenet Ramsey case; same-sex marriages; and "Vanished" specials on people who have disappeared.

In 2002 Vargas married singer-songwriter Marc Cohn, and they have a son who is nearly 3. She is also stepmother to Cohn's 14-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. That "blended family," as she put it, prompted her to ask Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa -- whom she had met at a Hispanic awards banquet -- about his two out-of-wedlock children, born to different mothers, during an interview last week. It was the kind of question that came naturally to someone who had done numerous personal stories on prime-time magazine shows.

Her family narrowly escaped its own brush with tragedy. In August, Cohn was shot in the head by a would-be carjacker after a performance in Denver, but the wound to his temple turned out not to be serious and he has fully recovered. The alleged assailant is awaiting trial.

Vargas is well aware that she is the third woman to serve as a nightly news co-anchor, and that the two others -- Barbara Walters with Harry Reasoner and Connie Chung with Dan Rather -- suffered disastrous fates. But those women were thrust upon long-established stars.

"The beauty of this arrangement is that Bob and I come into this as co-equals," Vargas says. She appears unruffled by the skeptics.

"My entire career, there have always been people flashier than me, attracting more attention than me," Vargas says. "I've always been under the radar."

Woodruff, for his part, never set out to be a journalist. After growing up in suburban Detroit, he went to the University of Michigan Law School, where roommate Kevin Ruf recalls him as a great rugby and lacrosse player who liked to fish and hunt at his parents' cabin. "He's one of those guys, everything seemed pretty effortless for him," Ruf says.

After practicing law in New York, Woodruff learned Mandarin Chinese and in 1989 moved to Beijing for a teaching post with his new wife, Lee. When the violence erupted at Tiananmen Square, he became a translator and "fixer" for CBS. The couple moved to San Francisco, where Woodruff practiced law for another two years, but shortly after their first child was born, he quit.

"I had tasted something I thought would be so much more fulfilling to me," Woodruff says.

"While the rest of us were at big law firms making a lot of money," Ruf says, "Bob got poor Lee to move to Redding, California, so he could be a one-man band at some little Podunk station." From that $12,000-a-year job, Woodruff gradually jumped to stations in Richmond and Phoenix before joining ABC in 1996, where he was dispatched to Washington and London.

Woodruff says his goal was "to be the best damn foreign correspondent I could be," and he seemed to follow the Jennings model. After the 9/11 attacks, he spent four months in Pakistan. During the Iraq war, he was embedded with an Army unit. He was deeply affected by his hurricane coverage in New Orleans, recalling "people calling for help and not being answered, seeing bodies on the streets of a great American city."

Woodruff has four children, ranging from 12 to 5-year-old twins, and he and Vargas often talk about the struggle to balance family with their new jobs.