With distinguished salt-and-pepper hair, steely blue eyes and a wide smile, newsman Anderson Cooper grabbed audience attention and won far-reaching respect in an era of backlash against journalists, particularly with his emotional on-the-scene coverage of the devastation in New Orleans following 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. The son of fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt, Cooper was born June 3, 1967 in New York, and graduated from Yale University in 1989 with a degree in political science. After studying Vietnamese at the University of Hanoi, Cooper got his start in the news industry as a fact
