Joining the Boys' Club

Brown, who is pulling for her former NBC colleague Katie Couric to succeed as CBS anchor, is disheartened by Couric's struggle: "The emphasis on Katie's appearance -- I hate it, it's so frustrating. You don't hear the same kind of comments about male anchors. You just don't."

The daughter of a former Louisiana secretary of state who spent six months in jail for lying to an FBI investigator -- he was caught up in a broader scandal involving former governor Edwin Edwards -- Brown has a Cajun's spicy approach to life. Friends say she plays as hard as she works.

"You wouldn't want to drive with her in a car," says one friend, Slate correspondent John Dickerson. "She goes after driving in the same way she does a story."

At 16, Brown was kicked out of the Madeira School in McLean for sneaking off campus to go to a party (which hasn't stopped school officials from constantly inviting her as a speaker). She was a self-described Colorado ski bum while in college, taught English in Czechoslovakia (where she acquired a banana tattoo on her ankle), and worked as an intern at Washington's NewsChannel8 and Montgomery Cable.

After that, the best that Brown could do was a $6-an-hour reporting job at the NBC station in Topeka, Kan. She moved up to the NBC station in Richmond, but "I could not for the life of me get a job in D.C.," Brown says. She finally made it to Baltimore's WBAL and did some freelancing for Washington's WRC before landing a job with NBC's affiliate service, churning out reports for local stations.

Brown's break came in 1998 when she was detailed to MSNBC, covering politics for Brian Williams's cable newscast. As for the broadcast side, she was a young woman in a hurry. "I could not get on 'Nightly News' to save my life," she grouses.

After covering George W. Bush's 2000 campaign for the cable channel, Brown got her shot at the big time when NBC made her a White House correspondent. Tom Brokaw and Williams, who was in line for Brokaw's anchor job, served as her mentors, and Brown's career quickly took off.

While living in Adams Morgan, she began hosting off-the-record gatherings with such administration hotshots as Karl Rove, Paul Wolfowitz and Lynne Cheney. Only female correspondents were invited.

In 2003 Brown packed her bags for New York. She had been tapped as co-host of "Weekend Today" and eventually became Williams's primary substitute on NBC's nightly newscast.

Brown acknowledges she had problems adjusting to the fluffier side of morning television. She was accustomed to grilling then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, she says, and "you don't have to do that to the woman coming in to make pasta."

During a reporting trip to Iraq in 2004, Brown found herself at odds with Dan Senor, the spokesman for the U.S. civilian authority. "I wanted access and he didn't want me to have access," she recalls. "We just butted heads a lot."

Back home, she watched Senor's televised news conferences and told friends he was cute. Brown invited him to dinner to discuss foreign policy, and Brokaw somehow got included. That prompted a distress call to Brown's best friend, Washington reporter Anne Kornblut.