Sawyer is equally careful not to crow. “Anything that happens can be reversed tomorrow,” she says. Still, when I relate to her the Manson-family snipe, Sawyer, whose habit of being politic can be maddening, nearly falls out of her chair laughing.

As Diane Sawyer describes her schedule, just listening to her makes you want to take a nap. She may have warmed to soccer moms, and they to her, but she’s still an alpha female. Sitting in an ABC office, she tells me she arrives at work most days about 4:15 A.M., an hour before most of her colleagues, because she likes the quiet time to read newspapers online, watch early TV-news shows, and look over the day’s script. She doesn’t sleep at all on Sunday nights, she says, and goes to bed by 8:30 on Mondays. On subsequent nights of the week, she sleeps less. On Thursdays, she often goes out with Nichols—“I’ll get three hours of sleep,” she says. On Fridays, she crashes for seventeen hours. “Poor Mike,” she says. “He puts a mirror under my nose to see if I’m still breathing.”

By all accounts, Sawyer is obsessive about putting her imprint on the production, from arguing for particular stories to using her clout as a booker to reel in big-name guests. “Diane is much more involved than I am,” says Gibson. “She’ll turn to you when you’re about to do an interview and say, ‘Are you going to ask about such-and-such?’ ” This could be annoying, but Gibson insists he doesn’t mind because her ideas are often so good. Producers have been known to get e-mails at all hours from Sawyer. Jessica Stedman Guff, a GMA senior producer, received a recent 2 A.M. BlackBerry message; the anchor wanted to mention on-air an intriguing Italian study on menopause.

Sawyer has been in public life too long, and is far too cautious about her image, to behave badly. If anything, she’s absurdly deferential. When Roberts was named co-anchor, Sawyer urged her to choose her outfits first (Sawyer synchronizes her own color combinations to avoid a clash). “I should defer to her,” says Roberts. Sawyer insists that her competition with Couric is not a catfight. “She is so talented. Matt is equally wonderful. We’re just different.”

As guarded as she can be, there’s an openness that surfaces at unexpected moments. On the Friday morning I watched the broadcast, Sawyer regaled a group of visitors to the set with the familiar beauty queen’s tale of how she was so “dorky” in high school that she didn’t get invited to the prom. She made further protestations of her insecurity to me. “This is a very hard schedule on the zipper,” she said. “You can’t imagine what it’s like to do this for a living. You look at the camera and think, Heavens, hold your stomach in. Or, What an idiotic thing I’ve just said. I don’t watch the show; it would be too painful.” It had the ring of truth.

The current revival of Good Morning America is a result not just of the popularity of Sawyer and Gibson and ABC’s prime-time success, but of years of tinkering. By the late nineties, GMA was barely treading water in a business in which you move forward or you die. This was a remarkable turn of events for a network that had grown accustomed to being No. 1 in the morning (GMA was first in the ratings for years). The show had long been run by the Entertainment division, featuring two charismatic anchors. “David Hartman and Joan Lunden were unassailable, no matter what Today tried to counterprogram against them,” says Tyndall. But winning formats tend to have an eight-to-ten-year life span, he says (Today, it bears repeating, has been No. 1 for nine-plus years), and GMA “became stale.” GMA underwent a series of cast changes, ranging from the relatively smooth (Hartman was replaced by the respected correspondent Gibson in 1987) to the catastrophic—dumping Lunden for Lisa McRee in 1997. That move was the equivalent of remaking Waterworld: NBC had unhappily played out that exact drama about seven years earlier, when it ousted the popular veteran Jane Pauley, 39, for the untested 31-year-old Deborah Norville, with unhappy results.

But ABC’s corporate suits paid no heed to that lesson, fantasizing instead about the ad dollars to be gained from a younger demographic. GMA’s viewers were infuriated enough by Lunden’s departure to vote with their remotes, succumbing to the charms of Couric, who was, at least, several years more tenured and older than McRee.

By the mid-nineties, Good Morning America had been moved under the auspices of ABC’s News division. In 1998, nine months after Lunden was let go, Gibson was told that his services were no longer needed on the dawn patrol; he was replaced by a handsome, young Canadian, Kevin Newman. “My sell-by date had arrived,” Gibson says. He adds that he wasn’t entirely sorry to leave because the show had become a mishmash of jarring stories and weird camera angles. “They were doing this hippie-dippy thing. It was like MTV—they were desperate to get a younger audience.” Offered a job at CNN, Gibson was persuaded to stay on at ABC and ultimately worked on the magazine show 20/20.