Good Morning America was in free fall by the autumn of 1998, with the new anchor team ridiculed in the press as airheads. “The numbers were crashing,” says Westin. “There were serious discussions—maybe we should give the time back to the affiliates, or give it back to Entertainment and do a Rosie O’Donnell kind of program.” He asked Phyllis McGrady, a senior ABC News exec who had produced GMA during its glory years, to run a task force to figure out what to do with the time slot. Several producers were asked to pitch their ideas. The GMA executive job was given to Shelley Ross, a talented and hard-charging L.A.-based producer who worked with Sawyer on stories for the anchor’s magazine show, Primetime Live. The consensus on how to contain the damage was to get McRee and Newman off the air as soon as possible.

Gibson’s gravitas and low-key, comforting presence were suddenly seen as valuable again, and he was asked to return to stabilize the broadcast until the network brass could come up with a new anchor team. “I said no,” Gibson recalls, insisting he didn’t turn down the offer out of anger but because “I really did feel my time had passed.”

Ross recalls being on an airplane from Los Angeles to New York, trying to figure out how to persuade Gibson to return, when suddenly it came to her—what about partnering him with Sawyer? “I knew she had this aloof persona,” Ross says, “but I thought if people could see her, in her Coke-bottle glasses, with her self-effacing manner and blotchy skin, they’d see that she’s real.” Ross picked up the Airfone, somewhere over Kansas, and called Sawyer to pitch the idea. Meanwhile, ABC’s News executives, meeting in Manhattan, seemed to have almost simultaneously come up with the same notion. “Diane’s name was thrown out, and we all just looked at each other and held our breath for a second,” says one high-level staffer. “The way the air hung in the room, it felt right at that very second.”

What Sawyer remembers is sitting in her ABC office on Christmas Eve with Gibson, as the two of them played the equivalent of anchor chicken. “I said to Charlie, ‘I’ll do it if you’ll do it,’ ” she says. “He said, ‘I’ll do it if you do it.’ We thought it was a lark. We’d never worked together like this. We said hello to each other in the halls. We didn’t know whether it would be a disaster.” At the press conference to announce the new pairing, a reporter asked how long the arrangement would last, and Sawyer scribbled “three months” and handed the slip of paper to Westin. (It’s become a running joke: “Every three months we have a conversation,” Gibson says. “Are you ready to quit yet?”)

The first Sawyer-Gibson broadcast aired on January 18, 1999. GMA soared a remarkable 25 percent in the ratings that first week—picking up a million viewers—and then held on to that gain. But the show was still a poor relation to Today, and there was skepticism at ABC as to whether Sawyer, who had co-anchored the CBS morning news in the eighties, first with Charles Kuralt, then Bill Kurtis, would wear well over time. “I had people telling me that you’re making a terrible mistake,” says Westin. “They thought she did not have the engaging personality that Katie did in the morning, and that it might also damage Diane.”

There was no one moment when Sawyer and Gibson officially became the permanent GMA anchors—it just happened. Why did Sawyer take the job? At first, she did it out of corporate loyalty. Then, it turned out, she liked it. Ten hours of live TV a week afforded her tremendous visibility, and the fact that she got to keep her Primetime job meant she could do more in-depth reports as well. Traditionally, morning anchors want to move up and out of the job, Barbara Walters or Tom Brokaw style. Is Sawyer a candidate for Jennings’s job should he retire or be unable to return? Out of respect for Jennings, ABC insists, it is not making succession plans. Gibson is thought to be a potential replacement, since he’s been filling in three nights a week. But it stands to reason that Sawyer, the more luminous of ABC’s morning-TV stars, would have to be considered. She has only one thing to say on the matter: “We all want Peter back.”

With the Sawyer-Gibson experiment under way, Ross, who had never done a live morning show, was charged with giving Good Morning America a new identity. Although the ABC marketing department came up with the slogan “Start Smart” to herald the Sawyer-Gibson pairing, Ross was not interested in crafting a program that highlighted the anchors’ intellectual prowess. Instead, she set out to create a brash show with a tabloid sensibility and an emotional, real-people bent. “Today has traditionally tilted to politicians, celebrities, athletes, and authors,” says Tyndall. “It’s been a hallmark of Good Morning America to be more of a populist, just-folks show.” That meant fewer stories about world affairs and Congress, and more tear-inducing tales of missing children, quirky laugh-out-loud features from around the country, frequent health stories, and faster-paced segments.