Diane Rehm, a native Washingtonian, is host and executive producer of "The Diane Rehm Show". Her daily two-hour syndicated show, produced on WAMU 88.5 fm (local listeners may tune in 91.5 FM, 105.7 FM or 89.5 FM), is now in its twenty-fifth year. NPR and NPR Worldwide have distributed it since 1995.

Rehm began her radio career in 1973 as an assistant producer for talk shows at WAMU and has been with the station for 17 years, first as host and producer of two health-oriented programs. In 1979, she was selected to host WAMU's local morning talk show, Kaleidoscope, which was renamed "The Diane Rehm Show" in 1984.

Rehm is a master at presenting the personal essences of others, her list of guests is impressive - Bill Clinton was on her July 6 radio show this year. Rehm also interviewed with him in the Oval Office when he was still President. Guests include John McCain, Madeleine Albright, Sandra Day O'Connor, Ralph Nader, Tim Russert, Cokie Roberts, Arlo Guthrie, Judy Collins, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Deepak Chopra, Maurice Sendak and Maya Angelou.

Rehm started her radio career the day she volunteered at WAMU on the campus of American University. She stayed with radio. Women she met while attending a one-semester course supported her. Rehm found kindred spirits in these women, describing them as "interesting, most of them married with children, reaching out, as I was, for some unknown future beyond the obligations of wife and mother.

"We make choices about which we don't necessarily know why," Rehm said in her interview with Networking magazine, "And it turns out that the choices somehow fit into our life patterns." She grew up adoring radio and relayed a feeling of almost wanting to get inside the radio. So when the volunteer opportunity opened up, it felt natural. "There wasn't anything about it that felt foreign," she said. "Of course, the idea of sitting behind a microphone did feel foreign! I never really thought that there were lots of people out there listening because I was lucky enough to start when very few people were listening so I didn't worry about that!" she said, laughing.

When we hear her radio show, we are listening to Rehm think, feel, and strike a chord with the
interviewee. This is the highest dimension of radio, to be able to afford the listener a connection to a voice that they may not hear under any other circumstance. Newsweek described her show as one of the most interesting talk programs in the country.

"Radio is the most personal medium. It's just the voice. I'm going directly from my head and voice to your head with nothing in between," she said. "You're not thinking about anything but hearing the sounds. That is mind-to-mind transmission. And that's why I love radio."

Early in her career, after only a few years on the air, people began to suggest to Rehm that she try television. She had the knowledge, the wherewithal; she certainly has the looks.

"I tried it without any training at all and it just didn't work," she said. "If I had been in a small town, I think it would have been different. But to start out in a market like Washington, where the demand is greater just didn't work. But that's exactly the way it should have been. It worked out for the best because I do believe that radio is my medium and I've been very fortunate," she said.

To see Rehm in action during one of her weekday shows is to witness her drawing from skills other than her ability to squeeze out the best of the story through the questions she asks. Rehm is enthusiastic when she is asked to tell of her tools of the talk trade.

"I make eye contact or avoid eye contact. If someone wants to jump in when someone else is speaking, with my eyes and expression, I indicate, - just hold your horses!"

"I'm also typing messages back and forth to the call programmer, Dorie Anisman, or to one of my producers who is sitting in the control room. I have a computer in front of me that has a screen that tells me which callers are on the line, their names, where they are, and a few words about what they want to say. What I'm trying to do is work into the conversation at the appropriate moment the questions that that person wants to ask.

How did Rehm learn her craft and how does she know how to get a story out of someone?

"I have no idea!" she erupted, laughing. "I started back in 1973 before we even had computers. The engineer then would just hold up his fingers and tell me there was a caller on line 2. Like any other skill, it comes to you in the doing. Ask what you're really interested in," she urged. "I've never thought to myself, ÔI've got to ask this question because somebody out in Twin Falls, Idaho wants to know this.' I'm assuming there are an awful lot of other people out there who have the same question."

If there are three or four people in the studio, Rehm's focus broadens to incorporate predicting dynamic shifts in the conversation so that guests don't step on one another or get into shouting matches. Even if there is only one person, she has to know what the facts are before she begins, knowing ahead what information she wants her guest to reveal. For this, she needs to be well prepared. "I, as host, have to be in control of what happens in that studio."

Rehm will take a stand if need be. She plainly states, "I'm not a barker on the air. I don't scream at people. By the tone of my voice and my choice of words, I can get across a point of view. I can elicit the kind of information from a guest that I think listeners want to hear about without being rude or harsh. Too many people use confrontation and theatrics. That's just not my way. I think I can use very few words and get across a lot."

Rehm's own story is no less impressive than any of the dignitaries whose stories she gives airtime. Mother's Day 1998 was Rehm's most memorable because she was unable to speak, pray, or sing in church.

"It seemed like a bad joke, since, for the past 20 years, I've earned my living as a radio talk show host." Then, Rehm had not yet been diagnosed with the rare neurological disorder, spasmodic dysphonia that affects the muscles that control speech. While the cause remains unknown, her treatment has been injections of botulin every four to six months into the overactive muscles that control the vocal cords. Botulin is a powerful bacterial toxin that paralyzes muscles. She admitted that one of the hardest things she ever had to do was take herself off the air during the time before diagnosis and treatment when the ailment claimed her voice, reducing it to a barely audible raspy whisper.

After finding treatment, she wrote articles and produced a program about the little-known disorder. The National Council on Communicative Disorders recognized Diane Rehm's work with a Communication Award and the Maryland Speech-Hearing-Language Association honored her with a Media Award. ABC's Nightline host Ted Koppel devoted an entire program to a conversation with Rehm about her disorder.

"The absence of my voice has shifted my way of thinking, in that I now have greater appreciation for silence," Rehm said. Yet appreciation was not always the case. Rehm confessed an aversion to silence, something evident in the very course of her life: radio.

"My aversion to silence goes back quite far. The way my mother used to punish me was not to speak with me. She would not speak to me for weeks on end. Not only did I hate it but it frightened me because it just made me feel so separate from her and so alone."

Silence and solitude were two thorns that Diane and her second husband, John Rehm, had to work out. His work and his required travel were trying times in their marriage. They were wed in 1959 and have two grown children: David and Jennifer.

For Diane Rehm to broadcast her way out of silence and separateness, and for her to write a book with her husband may be two good coincidences, but are better viewed as examples of her best opportunities to express personal courage and undeterred instinct. The book she co-authored with John Rehm is her second autobiography and is titled Toward Commitment: A Dialogue about Marriage. Published by Knopf in 2002, it is about building and maintaining a strong relationship.

Rehm was not always so able to shine. Her first marriage broke up finding Rehm shuddering under the weight of obligation with lack of communication. In her own words from her 1999 autobiography, Finding My Voice, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, now in its fourth printing, most of all she "hated the silence."
Her first book came about when a Washington agent and friend kept insisting that Rehm write a book about all the people she had interviewed.

"I kept saying, I think that's just totally boring," she said. This would have been a book about other people's stories, and, using a portion of the transcripts; it would have recounted the interviews that Rehm had already conducted with some of her perspective sprinkled in. "I didn't want to go back," she said. "Once they were done, they are done."

"Then when I started having my voice difficulties, I thought maybe this has to do with my whole life." She believed it was the perfect time to start writing. Her husband, John, had left for Africa, leaving her alone to do this book.
Rehm let out a loud chuckle when recounting that the book was not what her agent had anticipated. There are more surprises. She recalled her visit to New York to meet Bob Gottlieb of Knopf, editor of Bill Clinton's book, "My Life." "Gottlieb is probably the most revered, respected editor in the world," she said. The book suddenly took shape the moment she met him. "He wanted to do the book and he wanted to work with me. So, that's how it all happened! There is magic!" Rehm said.

Diane Rehm will be the first to warn you that magic does not happen without a lot of perseverance and preparation. On a typical day, the active, platinum-haired, green-eyed Rehm is up at 6 o'clock and arrives at the office by 8:30 to ready herself for her 2-hour live radio program. Even before the program starts, she has tasks to complete, namely all the behind-the-scenes work which makes the show one smooth continuum. She does recordings and intros. After the program, by 12:15 she opens all her snail mail, answers her barrage of email, answers her phone messages and meets with staff while eating lunch at the same time. Another hallmark about Rehm is that she is driven.

She writes in Finding My Own Voice, "The early seventies were years when young married women, with or without a college education, were just beginning to respond to Betty Freidan's The Feminine Mystique, asking themselves what they could do to improve their lives." A number of these women had taken a course at George Washington University they jokingly referred to as Feminism 101.

"Its formal name was "New Horizons for Women," a course designed to assist women like me who were trying to figure out how to spend the rest of their lives."

She said, "I am very sympathetic to men and the changing roles that they are being confronted by. I do fully agree that there remains a glass ceiling and that there are still no-equal non-parity salaries in the workplace. At the same time I do believe that some men are trying very hard to be good and decent men. They are trying hard to be the kind of friends or spouses or partners that we would all like to have. I think they have to work very hard because our demands have risen. We don't settle any longer for somebody who comes home - I know my own daughter and daughter-in-law don't - for someone who comes home and stretches out on the sofa while we serve them dinner.

Rehm added, "Frankly, I always felt that I was contributing to this household equally as much as John, even though in the early years of our marriage, I wasn't bringing in a dime. He was doing the paid work but I have always had this feeling inside me that my worth was worth as much as his work because I had the entire family for which to care. That included the children and keeping the house and when the time came, getting the kids to school and piano lessons and ballet and everything else. It was all left to me because John was furthering his career. Of course he was doing very important work but at the same time I've always believed that the importance of family is paramount. And that's what I was doing: taking care of our family."

"Being able to move into volunteer work on radio was slowly advancing my whole career. My sense is - and I say this over and over - young women can have it all but not necessarily all at the same time. There is time for us because we are living longer. We do develop skills in the home and can translate these skills into opportunities, if we apply them. The one difference now is that so many people expect college education. And of course, I had not had a college education. I don't know if this particular career path could be replicated now but who's to say it couldn't. You just never know."

Of those she has interviewed, it may come as a surprise but the personality who has touched her the most has been Fred Rogers, of "Mr. Rogers Neighborhood" on PBS.

"I probably had the last interview with him of anybody before he died," she said. "I asked him out of the blue, Ôwhat do you do when you feel sad?' He said, ÔI sit down and play the piano. And I think I'm going to be playing the piano a lot today.' And I said, Ôwhy are you sad?' He said, Ôbecause my stomach hurts.' And, of course, two months later he was dead.

"He was just so kind to me. Two days after the interview, I received from him his little book, You are Special." The book has a tiny mirror on the front of it. "He signed it to me and said, ÔJust remember, Diane, you are so special. Don't ever forget it.'

"He is one of my real heroes," she said.

When Rehm looks back over her life, the biggest surprise was that she started where she did and that she has ended up where she has. Regarding her career interviewing such world leaders as the President of the United States, Rehm mentioned that her husband John and she would jokingly say, ÔThat's pretty good for a little Arab girl!' " (Rehm is the daughter of a Turkish father and an Egyptian mother and was raised in a strict Christian Arab household.) She adds, "You never know. Its a total surprise to me for that sort of thing to happen to a girl with no education, with no high-falutin' background, with nothing but support from family, my husband. John believed in me a lot more than I believed in myself. It still surprises me that I have 25 years behind me and to have been able to accomplish what I have.

She spoke paradoxically about silence and solitude now, as they have come to have new meaning now that she has come through the challenges of her recent past and put them behind her.

"I love to come out in the garden and work and not have a radio, not hear a sound, just have quiet. I've come full circle."

Ms. Rehm has received many personal honors over the years, including:

• 2003 Calvary Women's Services Hope award. The honor recognizes Ms. Rehm's commitment to offering hope and empowerment to people, specifically women in need, through her volunteer and professional work.

• 2003 Montgomery County Chapter of the National Organization for Women's Susan B. Anthony Award. The award recognizes Ms. Rehm's exceptional work and commitment as an advocate for women's rights throughout the community.

• 2002 & 2000 Women in Communications. Ms. Rehm was honored with the International Matrix Award for achieving the highest level of professional excellence in communications.

• 2000 Society of Professional Journalists. Ms. Rehm was named a Fellow, the highest honor the society bestows on a journalist, received for extraordinary contributions to the profession.

• 1999 Washingtonian of the Year. Ms. Rehm was named a Washingtonian of the Year by Washingtonian Magazine. Ms. Rehm serves on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Award Foundation. She recently became a board member for the International Women's Media Foundation and is a trustee for Western Maryland College.

Listeners are invited to speak on the air during The Diane Rehm Show by calling 1-800-433-8850 or email DRShow@WAMU.org Networking magazine readers may reach the broadcast on one of these affiliate stations:

Westport, CT, WSHU 1260 AM
Brooklyn, NY, WNYE 91.5 FM
Selden, NY, WSUF 89.9 FM