TAKING THE SHOW ON THE ROAD TO COVER THE NEWS

Kathleen Sullivan and Harry Smith may be based in New York, where "CBS This Morning" originates weekdays, but they've spent a lot of time in Washington lately and will hang out here for a whole week before the inauguration of President-elect Bush on Jan. 20.

Visits to the District on their year's end agenda included Sullivan's Thanksgiving Day "at home with" segment featuring homeless activist Mitch Snyder and Smith's interviews earlier this month related to the annual Kennedy Center Honors. (The telecast airs Friday on CBS.)

"We plan to go to Washington for a whole week before the inaugural," Sullivan said, "and do a lot of little stories: Is this the way L'Enfant would have liked it? A day in the life of a lobbyist. Moving in and moving out. That kind of thing."

Washington isn't the only place Sullivan and Smith go for stories, of course. As heirs to CBS' hard-news tradition, they have reported from Moscow and London, following President Reagan's visits to Mikhail Gorbachev and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Sullivan reported from Cuba for two days, expecting the arrival of Gorbachev after he visited New York earlier this month -- a visit cancelled when he returned to the Soviet Union in the aftershock of the earthquake in Armenia. They also plan to be in Paris for the upcoming Bush-Gorbachev summit of 1989.

In addition, they have reported from Atlanta and New Orleans during the Democratic and Republican national conventions, and Smith went to the Texas gulf coast to cover Hurricane Gilbert from Galveston and Corpus Christi. Add to that medical reporter Bob Arnot's four-part series in Bangladesh, and his upcoming reports from quake-devastated Armenia, and "CBS This Morning" begins to appear as a show that wants to be taken seriously. Indeed, Sullivan becomes adamant when she insists that "we don't believe in junkets." Nor does "CBS This Morning" arrange interviews with some celebrity merely to get an "exclusive," as its competitors have been known to do. "We're a news show," she said flatly.

A month after "CBS This Morning" marked its first birthday on Nov. 30, the show was still toiling away in third place among network morning shows. But it had achieved a landmark of sorts: Sullivan and Smith have been together longer than any other "CBS This Morning" team since Bill Kurtis and Diane Sawyer, who lasted from March 1982 to July 1984.

After Kurtis and Sawyer, CBS began to tinker, trying four sets of hosts and anchors in two different formats. The last was "The Morning Show" with Mariette Hartley and Rolland Smith, an entertainment-oriented, 1 1/2-hour program that lasted less than a year and was replaced in November 1987 by Sullivan and Smith.

Fortunately for Sullivan, who caught the public's eye in 1984 when she became the first woman to cover the Olympics (winter sports in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, and summer Games in Los Angeles) for ABC, sports coverage is also a part of news.

Sullivan, 35, grew up in Pasadena and played tennis for the University of Southern California, where she majored in marketing and communication. Before graduation, she decided to market herself and snared a job at KTVX in Salt Lake City. Less than 16 months later, she had moved to Cable News Network in Atlanta where she co-anchored CNN's evening news. Then it was on to ABC, where she covered the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, the 11th Economic Summit in Bonn, West Germany, co-anchored "World News This Morning" and worked on segments -- and occasionally anchored -- for "Good Morning America."

Sullivan still enjoys sports, still plays tennis and recently took up golf -- "Golf Digest came to photograph my swing sequence," she recalled with some pride.

She is also proud of "CBS This Morning's" sports-related segments. "We did 'at home with' with {Los Angeles Dodgers manager} Tommy Lasorda in the dugout months before he won the championship," she pointed out. "During the 1988 Olympics, we had everyone who made a moment during the Games -- Greg Louganis, Matt Biondi, Florence Griffith Joyner. I was very proud of that." Sullivan did her interviews live, via satellite.

Smith, 37, is youngest of eight children of a Lansing, Ill., milkman who also worked as a policeman to supplement the family income. Smith recalled watching Jack Paar on television and dreamed of meeting celebrities, but went to small Central College in Pella, Iowa, on a football scholarship intending to become a high school coach. He credits the school, which he called an intellectually "dangerous" place for a young athlete, for changing his aspirations.

He worked on the college's 500-watt AM station and majored in communications and theater, then worked for radio stations in Cincinnati and Denver. Discovering that doing interviews was more fun than jockeying discs, he joined Denver's public TV station, KRMA, and co-hosted a weekly talk show on public affairs. In 1982, he moved to the Denver CBS affiliate, KMGH, and anchored the noon news with Andrea Joyce. They started out as "just friends," he said, using their news assignments as dates. On one occasion, he played tuba for and conducted the Denver Symphony Orchestra.

Smith moved to CBS' Dallas bureau nearly three years ago, married Joyce back in her hometown of Dearborn, Mich., and was sent immediately to Pakistan to cover the plight of Afghan refugees. Back in Dallas, Joyce worked as a news anchor and Smith continued to man CBS' bureau when he was tapped for the revised "Morning Show." After their move to New York, she joined ESPN and the Madison Square Garden Network.

Smith no longer plays football, but said he enjoys the sport "vicariously," following his nephews Greg Smith, playing for Vanderbilt, and Dave Smith, a rookie with the Cincinnati Bengals.

Smith's laid-back image belies a man who works hard and still likes being a reporter so much that he asked CBS News to let him return to his job as a "CBS Evening News" correspondent if they ever take him off "CBS This Morning."

"I didn't think I could work any harder than I did at a one-man bureau {in Dallas} ," he said. "I thought I was on a breakneck pace before, and the pace has doubled. This has been a year in which I've literally been on a dead run. But as the show becomes more and more comfortable, it's hard to believe it's gone by so fast."

Smith and Sullivan are well aware that their show still comes in third to NBC's "Today" and ABC's "Good Morning America." But Smith believes the problem is one of wooing back reviewers who left during the network's several overhauls.

"I don't see any dramatic changes," he said. "I think we feel very good about where we are editorially. We work real, real hard, at that. We try to do a show that, segment by segment, you can get your teeth in. We hope that every time a segment comes on, it's going to mean something to somebody."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.