Ted Koppel

Edward James Martin Koppel is a British-born American broadcast journalist, best known as the anchor for Nightline from the program's inception in 1980 until 2005. Before Nightline, he spent 20 years as an ABC broadcast journalist and news anchor. After becoming the host of Nightline, he was regarded as one of the outstanding serious-minded interviewers on American television. Five years after its 1980 debut, the show had a nightly audience of about 7.5 million viewers.

After leaving Nightline, Koppel worked as managing editor for the Discovery Channel, a news analyst for NPR and BBC World News America, and a contributor to Rock Center with Brian Williams. Koppel continues as a special contributor to CBS News Sunday Morning. His foreign and diplomatic correspondent career earned him numerous awards, including nine Overseas Press Club awards and 25 Emmy Awards.

Koppel, an only child, was born in Nelson, England. His parents were German Jews who fled Germany after the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism. In Germany, Koppel's father operated a tire-manufacturing company. To help the British economy, the Home Secretary invited him and his wife to move the factory to Lancashire, England, where he was promised they would be protected in the event of war. The factory moved in 1936, but when war broke out in Europe in 1939, Koppel's father has declared an enemy alien and imprisoned on the Isle of Man for a year and a half.

Koppel was born in 1940, shortly after his father was taken away. To provide for her infant son, his mother sold her personal jewelry and did menial work in London. After he was released from internment, Koppel's father was not permitted to work in England, nor would he allow his wife to work. Following the end of the war, the family earned some money from their confiscated assets and decided to leave for the United States.

While in England, Ted Koppel was a pupil at Abbotsholme School in Derbyshire. In 1953 at the age of 13, the family immigrated to the United States, where his mother, Alice, became a singer and pianist, and his father, Edwin, opened a tire factory. Koppel's boyhood hero was radio broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, whose factual reports during the bombing of London inspired him to become a journalist.

After attending the McBurney School, a private preparatory institution in New York, Koppel attended Syracuse University, graduating at age 20 with a Bachelor of Science degree. He was a member of the Alpha Chi chapter of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. His roommate recalls that Koppel "was incredibly focused and had a photographic memory. 

He remembers almost every conversation he ever had with anybody. And the man never needs sleep." Koppel then went to Stanford University, where he earned a Master of Arts degree in mass-communications research and political science. While at Stanford, he met his future wife, Grace Anne Dorney.