Leslie Cockburn

Leslie Cockburn (born Leslie Corkill Redlich on September 2, 1952) is an American investigative journalist, and filmmaker.

Her investigative television segments have aired on CBS, NBC, PBS Frontline, and 60 Minutes.

She has won an Emmy Award, The Hillman Prize, Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award, Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the George Polk Award.

The film alleged that the U.S. had covertly supported the Khmer Rouge in its return to power in Cambodia during a genocidal movement responsible for the deaths of millions in the 1970s.

In 1978, Cockburn moved to CBS.

During her career, she covered six wars including the U.S.-directed Contra War against Nicaragua.

Cockburn has won The Hillman Prize (1984), the George Polk Award (2010), and the 1991 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, along with Peter Jennings and Tom Yellin.

In 1987, Cockburn began producing and reporting documentaries for PBS Frontline in collaboration with her husband, Andrew Cockburn.

They created Guns, Drugs, and the CIA (1987), a documentary that claimed the CIA assisted and encouraged drug trafficking.

In 1990, Cockburn produced and co-wrote "From the Killing Fields" with Peter Jennings and Tom Yellin for the ABC News documentary show Peter Jennings Reporting.

In 1991, she and her husband produced the PBS Frontline documentary The War We Left Behind, which showed the effects of the Gulf War on Kurdish and Iraqi civilians.

In 1991, Cockburn and her husband, Andrew, published their first book together on the military and intelligence relationship between the U.S. and Israel after 1948.

This book detailed how, over several decades, Israel had served U.S. interests both through espionage operations in the former Soviet Union as well as covert operations in Central America and other third-world regions where the U.S. was loath to intervene directly.

The book also detailed Israeli nuclear activities, including U.S., assistance to its bomb-making program and Israeli cooperation with the South African apartheid regime's nuclear weapons program.

The book was a national bestseller in the U.S. and Canada.

Kirkus Reviews said it was "no thrown-together post-Gulf product, but an unflinching, fact-packed, closely reasoned exploration of our relations with our strongest ally in the Middle East."

The Chicago Tribune said the book "should stand for a long time as the alpha and omega of the relationship between the United States and Israel...the Cockburns present the history in rich detail."

In Israel, the response was more measured.

Haaretz reviewed it favorably at length, calling it "credible".

In 1997, Cockburn conceived and co-produced The Peacemaker, starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, a thriller positing a terrorist attack on New York City with a stolen nuclear weapon.

In 1998, Cockburn served as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.

Her work has received multiple Emmy nominations, and her 1998 documentary Yuri The Great won an Emmy Award in 1999.

In 2000, she produced "America's Worst Nightmare," a 60 Minutes report on political instability in Pakistan and fundamentalist groups linked to the Taliban, a piece that was recognized as "strikingly prophetic" in receiving the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award in 2001.

Cockburn and her husband began filming in January 2008, and documented the financial machinations and miscalculations on Wall Street that produced the disaster, and its effects on several Baltimore homeowners struggling to stay afloat.

In 2009, Cockburn directed and co-produced (with her husband) her first feature documentary for theatrical release, American Casino. It follows the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States, which led to the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The film premiered at New York's Tribeca Film Festival in April 2009.

Variety called it a "searing expose of the subprime mortgage crisis [matching] Wall Street's numbers and graphics to the flesh-and-blood individuals whose lives have been devastated by the deliberate machinations of bankers and traders."

The New Yorker said it was "a terrific documentary chronicling the subprime-mortgage mess and the financial collapse."

The New York Times said it was "a meticulously structured film."

Cockburn was the 2018 Democratic nominee for Virginia's 5th district in the U.S. House of Representatives, losing to Republican Denver Riggleman.

Leslie Cockburn (née Leslie Corkill Redlich) was born in San Mateo, California and raised in Hillsborough, California.

She is the daughter of Jeanne (Fulcher) and Christopher Rudolph Redlich, a shipping magnate.

She grew up in a family of hunters and supports gun control.

Leslie attended the Santa Catalina School.

She then studied at Yale University, entering in the second year that women undergraduates were admitted to the university.

She went on to earn a master's degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

Cockburn is a former investigative journalist for NBC, CBS, and PBS Frontline.

While living in London, she started working for NBC News.

Among her early reports was an interview with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Cockburn was the 2018 Democratic nominee for Virginia's 5th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives.