Dana Bash of CNN loves her small-town New Jersey roots

During a press briefing in the runup to the Iraq War, Dana Bash, then CNN's White House correspondent, learned that the Bush administration had given Iraqi president Saddam Hussein a deadline to leave his country. Eager to broadcast the news, she ran down the White House lawn to get on air, with one particular viewer in mind. "I knew it would be on CNN International and Saddam would see me reporting it, because we were the network he watched," she says.

Reflecting on this and other scoops from her years as a producer and reporter, Bash, 51, says she feels lucky. She also points out that she has "journalism in (her) blood"; her father, Stuart Schwartz, is an award-winning former senior producer for ABC News.

But the people who know her best say that the recipe for her success — she is now a CNN news anchor, chief political correspondent and co-host of the Sunday morning show State of the Union — relies on a key ingredient: She's a phenomenally hard worker.

"One day in Florida, she wrote two TV packages, one digital text piece, planned her next story, and did 18 TV hits in one day on CNN, CNN International, and HLN," says Adam Levy, a supervising producer at CNN who has traveled the country with Bash and known her for more than a decade. "That evening, she still stopped on the street to talk to people as if she hadn't been working since 6 a.m."

Bash's work habits have been legendary since she attended Pascack Hills High School in Montvale, studying hard while also being a football cheerleader for the Pascack Hills Cowboys (now Broncos) and holding part-time jobs.

Bergen County's Ridge Diner 'was my diner'

A self-avowed Jersey girl, Bash lived in Teaneck as a preschooler before moving to the Washington, D.C. area. She learned that the family would be moving back to New Jersey right before her bat mitzvah ceremony. "My parents tried to keep it from me till afterwards, but a family friend unwittingly broke the news," she says. It wasn't welcome news, at first. "When you're 13, you have a lot going on everywhere," she says. Montvale, where she would live until college, "was a very different environment. It was a small town."

It turned out to be a small town she thrived in, where she became instant best friends with the girl next door, Romy Scheck; the two were inseparable, and dated boys who were also best friends. "It was kind of a typical John Hughes experience, in a good way," Bash says, referring to the director of '80s movies known for depicting teenage hijinks. "We lived within walking distance of the famous Dairy Queen on Chestnut Ridge Road that never changed since the '50s." At 14, she worked at Van Riper's Farm in Woodcliff Lake, which was followed by jobs at a bagel shop, Friendly's, and the Great American Party Store, which was owned by Scheck's parents. "The Ridge Diner was my diner," she says.

"I grew up in Fair Lawn, and we bonded over our love for New Jersey," says Adam Levy, the producer. "I can text her any day to ask for a favor, talk about a story she did on air, or send her pictures of my son — she loves those a lot."

Bash opted to attend college at George Washington University because she had such fond memories of Washington. "It had nothing to do with politics," she says. "I wanted a liberal arts education." She applied herself to her school work with such dedication that Scheck, who stayed in regular touch, was in disbelief. "I called her every day and was told she was in the library," Scheck recalls with a laugh. "I thought she was blowing me off. I asked her, 'Are your roommates lying to me?' She was the smart one who was always studying."

By the end of her freshman year, Bash says, she had the politics and journalism bug. "I wasn't sure if I wanted to be a lawyer, work at NPR or in politics in general," she says. "So I went with the DNA flowing through my veins, and did a lot of internships to figure it out." She interned at CBS News, Capital Cities (then the parent company of ABC News) and NBC in New York during the '92 Democratic Convention. "Then I was hooked," she says.

The second semester of her senior year at GW, she decided she was done with internships that didn't pay. Through contacts, she got a foot in the door at CNN, and after graduation, started a job in the company's tape library. The network has been her home ever since.

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A presence on both sides of the camera

As an associate producer and then producer of public affairs shows for CNN, Bash booked guests, wrote scripts and worked in the control room for Evans & Novak, and Inside Politics with host Wolf Blitzer. She was at the assignment desk during the Clinton impeachment in '98, when "It was all hands on deck," she says. "I was sent up to the Senate to be an extra set of eyes and ears, and I thought, 'This is the coolest thing I've ever seen or done.'" She kept an office in the Capitol building and worked there for years as a producer and correspondent.

Bash wasn't sure she wanted to work in front of the camera, but she loved breaking news, and "got that adrenaline high pretty quickly," she says. She started breaking stories, first giving them to correspondents to report and then delivering them herself.

She got a major scoop, she says, after 9/11: Congress was told in a classified briefing that the NSA had intercepted someone saying "Tomorrow is zero hour, tomorrow is game day," but the message hadn't been translated until 9/12. While covering John McCain's presidential bid, she was present during the famous moment at a Minneapolis town hall when a woman asked the candidate if his opponent was a Muslim.

A major career highlight came on July 30-31, 2019, when Bash and colleagues Jake Tapper and Don Lemon moderated the second Democratic presidential primary debate in Detroit (there were so many candidates that the event took place over two evenings). "It's like being back in college, because you take a seminar in how to ask questions, and you hold mock debates with the CNN team submitting questions and playing opponents and moderators," she says. "Doing the debates is among the coolest, most important experiences I've had in my career. They're so consequential."

At a time when every day seems to bring developments of consequence to viewers, Bash now has a highly visible role exploring them. As co-host, with Jake Tapper, of Sunday morning's State of the Union, Bash grills the week's top newsmakers — a job that puts her focus and determination on display. "There are times when you really have to push, and it's incredibly obvious to the viewer that the person isn't answering the question," she says. "At a certain point, the non-answer is the answer." It's easier to press people when they're in the room with her and she can make eye contact with them, she notes, while people she interviews remotely look into a monitor and can't see her.

Meanwhile, Jonah, Bash's 11-year-old son with colleague and former husband John King — she was previously married to national security analyst Jeremy Bash — is "super into baseball," she says. On a recent Saturday night, Jonah played in a tournament 1 1/2 hours away that didn't end till 10 p.m., and Bash had to be up at 5 a.m. the next day for work.

She says she does "the same balancing act that any parent in any career does" — that is, if that parent works long hours and has to look fresh for TV.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Dana Bash of CNN loves her New Jersey roots