Anderson Cooper

He has two older half-brothers, Leopold Stanislaus "Stan" Stokowski (b. 1950) and Christopher Stokowski (b. 1952), from Gloria's ten-year marriage to conductor Leopold Stokowski.

Anderson Hays Cooper (born June 3, 1967) is an American broadcast journalist and political commentator currently anchoring the CNN news broadcast show Anderson Cooper 360°.

In addition to his duties at CNN, Cooper serves as a correspondent for 60 Minutes on CBS News.

At the age of three, Cooper was a guest on The Tonight Show on September 17, 1970, appearing with his mother.

At the age of nine, he appeared on To Tell the Truth as an impostor.

From age 10 to 13, Cooper modeled with Ford Models for Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and Macy's.

Wyatt experienced a series of heart attacks while undergoing open-heart surgery, and died January 5, 1978, at the age of 50.

Cooper considers his father's book Families to be "sort of a guide on... how he would have wanted me to live my life and the choices he would have wanted me to make. And so I feel very connected to him."

When Cooper was 21, his older brother, Carter Vanderbilt Cooper, committed suicide on July 22, 1988, at age 23, by jumping from the 14th-floor terrace of Vanderbilt's New York City penthouse apartment.

Gloria Vanderbilt later wrote about her son's death in the book A Mother's Story, in which she expressed her belief that the suicide was caused by a psychotic episode induced by an allergy to the anti-asthma prescription drug salbutamol.

Carter's suicide sparked Anderson's interest in journalism:

"Loss is a theme that I think a lot about, and it's something in my work that I dwell on. I think when you experience any kind of loss, especially the kind I did, you have questions about survival: Why do some people thrive in situations that others can't tolerate? Would I be able to survive and get on in the world on my own?"

Cooper attended the Dalton School, a private co-educational day school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

At age 17, after graduating from Dalton a semester early, Cooper traveled around Africa for several months on a "survival trip".

He contracted malaria on the trip and was hospitalized in Kenya.

Describing the experience, Cooper wrote "Africa was a place to forget and be forgotten in."

Cooper attended Yale University, where he resided in Trumbull College and was a coxswain on the lightweight rowing team.

After graduating from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1989, he began traveling the world, shooting footage of war-torn regions for Channel One News.

He was inducted into the Manuscript Society and majored in political science, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1989.

During college, Cooper spent two summers as an intern at the Central Intelligence Agency while studying political science.

He pursued journalism with no formal journalistic education.

He is a self-proclaimed "news junkie since [he] was in utero".

After his first correspondence work in the early 1990s, he took a break from reporting and lived in Vietnam for a year, during which time he studied the Vietnamese language at Vietnam National University, Hanoi.

After Cooper graduated from Yale, he tried to gain entry-level employment with ABC answering telephones, but was unsuccessful.

Finding it hard to get his foot in the door of on-air reporting, Cooper decided to enlist the help of a friend in making a fake press pass.

At the time, Cooper was working as a fact checker for the small news agency Channel One, which produces a youth-oriented news program that is broadcast to many junior high and high schools in the United States.

Cooper then entered Myanmar on his own with his forged press pass and met with students fighting the Burmese government.

Cooper was hired by ABC News as a correspondent in 1995, but he soon took more jobs throughout the network, working for a short time as a co-anchor, reality game show host, and fill-in morning talk show host.

In 2001, Cooper joined CNN, where he was given his own show, Anderson Cooper 360°, in 2003; he has remained the show's host since.

He developed a reputation for his on-the-ground reporting of breaking news events, with his coverage of Hurricane Katrina causing his popularity to sharply increase.

For his coverage of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Cooper received a National Order of Honour and Merit, the highest honor granted by the Haitian government.

From September 2011 to May 2013, he also served as the host of his own syndicated daytime talk show, Anderson Live.

Cooper has won 18 Emmy Awards and two Peabody Awards, as well as an Edward Murrow Award from the Overseas Press Club in 2011.

A member of the Vanderbilt family, he came out as gay in 2012, becoming "the most prominent openly gay journalist on American television".

In 2014, Cooper appeared in Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Finding Your Roots, where he learned of an ancestor, Burwell Boykin, who was a slave owner from the southern United States.

Cooper's media experience began early.

As a baby, he was photographed by Diane Arbus for Harper's Bazaar.

In 2016, Cooper became the first openly LGBT person to moderate a presidential debate, and he has received several GLAAD Media Awards.

Cooper was born in Manhattan, New York City, the younger son of writer Wyatt Emory Cooper and artist Gloria Vanderbilt.

His maternal grandparents were millionaire equestrian Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt of the Vanderbilt family and socialite Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, and Reginald's patrilineal great-grandfather was business magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who founded the prominent Vanderbilt shipping and railroad fortune.