George Stephanopoulos

Born to first-generation Greek immigrants in Fall River, MA on Feb. 10, 1961, Stephanopoulos grew up in Purchase, NY and Cleveland, OH. His father, Robert George Stephanopoulos, a Greek Orthodox priest, later became Dean Emeritus of the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in New York City, the home parish of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. His mother, Nickolitsa Gloria Stephanopoulos, served as director of the national news service of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese. A then sports-minded Stephanopoulos wrestled for Orange High School in Cleveland, then attended Columbia University in New York, where he was a sports broadcaster for the university radio station. He was awarded a Harry S. Truman Scholarship and was salutatorian of his class, receiving his BA in political science in 1982. His very traditional father wanted him to become a lawyer, but Stephanopoulos instead chose to serve as an aide to Cleveland congressman Ed Feighan until winning a Rhodes Scholarship to attend the University of Oxford in England, just as Bill Clinton once had.At Oxford, Stephanopoulos earned a master of studies in theology. After college he served as Congressman Feighan's chief of staff before leaving to work on the 1988 presidential campaign of Democrat Michael Dukakis, a fellow Greek-American liberal from Massachusetts. After Dukakis' crushing loss to George H.W. Bush, Stephanopoulos became House majority leader Dick Gephardt's executive floor assistant. In 1991, Stephanopoulos became deputy campaign manager for communications for the presidential campaign of then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton - a man who, during the early days of the campaign, was regarded as a longshot to win. One of the campaign's inner circle of advisors, Stephanopoulos and lead strategist James Carville worked closely together and would eventually gain some measure of fame at the same time. Upon Clinton's victory in 1992, the 31-year-old Stephanopoulos became the White House Communications Director and often briefed the press, the pressure of which would sometimes make his face break out into hives. In Clinton's autobiography My Life (2004), he later apologized for the outsized demands he put on the young Stephanopoulos. Following several public relation gaffes, Stephanopoulos was switched to Senior Advisor on Policy and Strategy, where he worked on the ill-fated health care plan led by Hillary Rodham Clinton.Because the whole administration was regarded as somewhat of a changing of the guard and of intense interest of people of all ages - particularly the younger voters - everyone from Clinton on down garnered a large amount of media interest. Carville and Stephanopoulos would be the focus of seminal documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker's "The War Room" (1993), not long after their guy swept the election. Stephanopoulos also served as the model for the character Henry Burton in journalist Joe Klein's anonymously written 1996 roman à clef, Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics. Adapted into the 1998 film directed by Mike Nichols, the movie starred John Travolta as a Clinton-like politician and Adrian Lester as a young idealist who must confront his conflicted feelings towards the charismatic candidate with noble goals but an addiction to philandering. Writer-director Aaron Sorkin used Stephanopoulos as the inspiration for Michael J. Fox's character when he wrote the screenplay for director Rob Reiner's feature "The American President" (1995). When Sorkin created the NBC drama "The West Wing," he again used Stephanopoulos as a model, this time for Rob Lowe's character Sam Seaborn.But in the era of Newt Gingrich and the Whitewater investigations, the liberal Clinton Administration was under siege. Exhausted and depressed, Stephanopoulos resigned after Clinton's landslide reelection in 1996. In Stephanopoulos' 1999 New York Times best-selling memoir All Too Human: A Political Education, he described Clinton as a "complicated man responding to the pressures and pleasures of public life in ways I found both awesome and appalling." In 1997, an exhausted Stephanopoulos moved to New York City and became a professor of government at Columbia University. He also began working for ABC News as a political analyst, appearing regularly on most of their various news broadcasts. In 2005, ABC dubbed him their Chief Washington Correspondent and made him anchor of Sunday morning's "This Week," rechristening it "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."In 2008, Stephanopoulos was one of the moderators of the final Democratic Presidential debate between Illinois Senator Barack Obama and New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. The following year, he came under criticism when The Politico newspaper did a story on the daily call Stephanopoulos engaged in with his friends Carville, former Clinton advisor Paul Begala, and Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Conservatives attacked ABC for allowing the presumably biased Stephanopoulos to serve as journalist, but he continued to move up, leaving "This Week" in January 2010 to replace Diane Sawyer as co-host of "Good Morning America" with Robin Roberts - a position he was well-suited for, due in no small part to his fast-on-his-feet wit and affable charm. In an even more prestigious move, he also became the primary substitute anchor for "World News Tonight with Diane Sawyer" (1953-) if the legendary newswoman was on assignment or vacation. In no small part due to the chemistry between himself and Roberts, "GMA" saw their ratings rise to the point that by 2012, the usual second-place show was beating the one to beat for over a decade, "Today" (NBC, 1952-).