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NEW DAY

Anderson Cooper Retraces His Roots

Aired December 25, 2014 - 08:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: There we go. Welcome back to a special holiday edition of NEW DAY. This year several of our anchors got the rare opportunity to retrace their roots. They got to travel to their homelands and find out some very interesting things about their backgrounds and boy, were they in for some surprises.

We're joined now someone with an emotional story, he's the anchor of "AC360," Anderson Cooper. Great to have you here.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST, "AC360": I went to my homeland, New York City. It was a long journey.

PEREIRA: It's exhausting.

CAMEROTA: So what did surprise you?

COOPER: You know, it was really interesting. I thought I kind of knew everything about my families, my mom's side of the family but my dad's side always interested me. I was born in a small town in Mississippi, grew up in a very poor family.

So while like the Vanderbilt side is very well-known, I didn't know too much about my dad's side and there were some big surprises. Let's take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

COOPER (voice-over): My dad, Wyatt Cooper, died when I was 10. When you're a kid, you lose a parent, it's like the world as you know it comes to an end, clocks are reset.

The calendar goes back to zero. After my dad died in 1978, it was just me, my mom, and my brother, Carter. My mom and dad met at a dinner party in 1962. They couldn't have been from more different backgrounds.

That's the thing that interests me the most about my heritage. The different branches my family tree mapped out by ancestry.com started off so apart and have come together in me.

My mom is Gloria Vanderbilt. She was born into a family of great wealth, but it was a different time, when parents like hers had little to do with raising their kids. Her dad was Reginald Vanderbilt. He died when she was an infant. Her mom, Gloria Morgan, was just 18 and had no idea how to raise a child. When my mom was 10, her father's sister, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, a sculptor who founded New York's Whitney Museum went to court to take custody of my mom away from my grandmother.

At the time, it was called the trial of the century. It was at the height of the depression and made headlines around the world. It's hard to believe, but the court decided my mom should be taken away from her own mother and raised by her Aunt Gertrude, who see barely knew. For my mom, that wound, that pain is something that's never gone away.

(on camera): Whenever people ask me about my family history they're usually just referring to the Vanderbilt side of my family which is understandable, I suppose. The first Vanderbilt came to America back in 1650.

His name was Ian Arten Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt means from the Bilt, which is a town in Holland. Ian Artsen settled in New York's Staten Island. He was an indentured servant but within self-generations the family's fortune took a dramatic turn.

(voice-over): In 1794 my great, great, great grandfather was born in Staten Island. At 16, he borrowed money and bought a small boat, began ferrying cargo on the Hudson River.

Cornelius Vanderbilt was a tough businessman, to say the least. He undercut his competitors and built a fleet of steamships and eventually moving into railroads.

(on camera): This is New York's Grand Central terminal, an extraordinary structure. Back in 1869, Cornelius Vanderbilt bought 23 acres of land here in what's now Midtown Manhattan to build a depot for his New York Central railroad. It wasn't called Grand Central Terminal until 1913.

(voice-over): There's an imposing statue of him outside the building. For years I thought all grandparents turned into statues when they died. They built huge mansions. Excess was what they became known for.

Some enormous houses in Newport, Rhode Island that are now museums open to the public, but many of the mansions they built in New York have been torn down.

This was my great grandmother's house, which once occupied an entire block on New York's Fifth Avenue. It's gone and now the department store Bergdorf Goodman stands in the spot.

(on camera): Growing up, I never really paid much attention to the history of the Vanderbilt's. I read about them in school books, but they never seemed real to me. It was like reading about strangers. The truth is I was glad not to have the Vanderbilt last name and the baggage that came with it. I always wanted to make a name for myself.

(voice-over): The part of my mom's family that did interest me as a kid was her mother's side. Her mom, Gloria Morgan, was incredibly beautiful and had an identical twin, a sister named Telma. Their father was an American diplomat and their mother was half Chilean.

Laura Kilpatrick Morgan's father married a Chilean woman when he was the American council general to Chile in 1865. His name was General Judson Kilpatrick. He'd been an infamous Calvary officer fighting for the union in civil war.

They called Kilpatrick "Kill Cavalry" because he got so many of his own men killed. He was one of Lincoln's youngest generals, a graduate of West Point deeply opposed to slavery, but he was also deeply political and apparently corrupt.

(on camera): In tracing the history of General Kilpatrick I was stunned to learn the two different branches of my family nearly met, it happened on the battlefield in the civil war.

The battle of Rusaka, my great, great grandfather, General Kilpatrick was shot and wounded and had to leave the battlefield. The very next day, Burrell Cooper, my great, great grandfather on my father's side joined the battle except he wasn't fighting for the union. He was fighting for the Alabama Infantry fighting for the confederacy.

(voice-over): I find it amazing that these two branches my family came so close together here on this field in Georgia, one opposed to the evils of slavery, fighting for the union, the other for the confederacy, fighting to support slavery.

(on camera): My dad was born here in Mississippi in 1927, though growing up as a kid I never felt all that connected to the Vanderbilt side of my family, I was always really interested in my dad's southern roots.

(voice-over): My dad and I look a lot alike. This was him as a kid. This was me. My dad's dad, Emmitt Cooper, was a former. I like this photo of him a lot, his heavy lidded eyes, the air of sadness about him. He married my grandmother, Jenny Anderson, when she was a teenager. My dad was born in this house in 1927.

(on camera): The house my dad was born in has long since been torn down. There's no sign of it anymore. The land is mostly forest, still owned by Coopers.

My dad wrote a book a few years before he died called "Families." It's a memoir about growing up in Mississippi and also a celebration of the importance of family. I read it every year and think of it as a letter from my dad to me.

(voice-over): My dad's memoir is full of family stories, the tales of people whose names will never appear in history books or newspapers, but who raised families, worked hard, and struggled to make a living off the land.

People like my great grandfather, William Preston Cooper, apparently he wasn't very religious and on his death bed, they tried to baptize him. He refused, yelling that all they needed to do was bring him a woman and he'd have no need of dying.

My second cousin, Reesey Harrison met me and offered to take me to see the graves of some of these family legends.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes, that's it.

COOPER (on camera): Wow.

(voice-over): Deep in the woods, we found an overgrown cemetery from another branch of my family.

(on camera): So this is the Burrells cemetery. This is incredible.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Haven't been in here in a long time.

COOPER (voice-over): The bulls married into the Cooper family back before the civil war.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That's Grandpa Burrell's wife.

COOPER (on camera): OK, so that's Burrell Cooper's wife?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Wife, yes.

COOPER: Wow.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Watch for snakes.

COOPER (voice-over): I grew up reading stories about Burrell's ancestors.

(on camera): He would kill men for cussing in front of women.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Right.

COOPER (voice-over): Reesey also wanted to show me another cemetery. I'd read about it in my dad's book, but I'd never been there myself.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PEREIRA: This is extraordinary this voyage you got to go on.

COOPER: It was really cool and it was nice to go back to Mississippi and see cousins and relatives, who I hadn't seen in a long time. It was interesting and gets more surprising coming up.

CAMEROTA: That was a cliffhanger.

CUOMO: I liked Coop's signature, Cooperness, when he was discussing how his family used to kill people, but didn't deserve it and if they cussed in front of women.

COOPER: He's like um-hum, yes, he used to do that.

CUOMO: You cleaned up the language just in case. The great part is there's a lot more to the journey and we're going to dig deeper when our holiday edition of NEW DAY continues.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: Welcome back to our special holiday edition of NEW DAY. We're turning back to Anderson's journey finding out more about his past. You cannot wait to see what more Anderson found out. Let's take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

COOPER: I'm trying to find the old Cooper family cemetery. It's here along the Mississippi/Alabama border, deep in the woods, hard to find, near a house where my great grandfather, William Preston Cooper used to live.

(voice-over): We traveled along a dirt road for miles through forests of trees and canyons of kudzu before we finally found it.

(on camera): Relatives trying to clear the undergrowth and cut down trees to clear the cemetery, but one of the amazing things about it, the cemetery is so old a lot of the head stones have disappeared or just worn away by the elements. You can't see the names of people anymore. It's even hard to tell what is a headstone.

(voice-over): Here we found the grave of Burrell Cooper, my great, great grandfather.

(on camera): Confederate States of America.

(voice-over): Who fought on the same battlefield during the civil war of my other great, great grandfather, Juddson Kilpatrick.

(on camera): Burrell Cooper was shot in the right hand during the civil war, lost one of his fingers and partially paralyzed in his right arm. Records indicated that because of that paralysis, he struggled the rest of his life to earn a living for his six kids. He died at the age of 54.

(voice-over): His life was a far cry from Juddson Kilpatrick's life who survived the war and went on to become U.S. ambassador to Chile. Lot of people in my family fought for the confederacy, nearly all were too poor to own slaves except for one, Burrell Cooper's grandfather.

(on camera): I recently discovered one of my ancestors owned slaves, my great, great, great grandfather, Burrell Boykin, he won 12 slaves. He was killed by one of the slaves in 1860, one year before the civil war began.

(voice-over): It's one thing to read about slavery in history books. It's another to learn that a distant relative of mine took part in that evil.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'm so glad you came.

COOPER (on camera): Thank you. (voice-over): My dad and his family left Quitman during World War II and moved to New Orleans. His mother, my grandmother, Jenny Anderson, worked in the Higgins Hughes factory making landing craft for the war. She also sold ladies hats at the department store.

(on camera): Back in 2005, when I was in New Orleans reporting in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, completely by coincidence, I stumbled across my dad's old high school, it had been flooded during the storm. This is the school now.

Back then it was called Francis T. Nichols Public High School. He was a confederate general, governor of Louisiana. One of the things I love about New Orleans is that it's a city that embraces its past, even if that past is painful.

They don't try to erase history no matter what that history maybe. In fact, Francis T. Nichols name is still on my dad's old high school, still etched in stone. His likeness still etched above the door. He was most likely racist, definitely segregationist.

But they haven't removed his name from the school even though the school itself is now the Frederick A. Douglass High School named after the famous abolitionist.

(voice-over): We were invited to take a look around. People work at the school said they had old files, but I couldn't imagine they'd have any of my dad's.

(on camera): Wow, look at this.

(voice-over): They showed me closets full of old records and posters dating all the way back to the 1940s.

(on camera): They moved back after the war.

(voice-over): I couldn't find anything that belonged to my dad. As I was leaving, the school nurse came outside with a surprise for me.

(on camera): My God!

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That's all, a report card but they have the file cabinets back there.

COOPER (on camera): This is his photo.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That's him. Yes. There you go.

COOPER: Ma'am, that's sweet of you.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I love you.

COOPER: My dad's report card. It's crazy. Can you believe they had my dad's report card all the way going back to 1944? They just had it in a file somewhere in the back. That's awesome.

This is what I'm talking about in New Orleans in history. They don't throw away the history. It's all here. It's all, the past is very much alive in New Orleans.

(voice-over): My dad worked as an actor for years, appearing on stage and TV. Even had a tiny bit part in "The Seven Hills Of Rome." We stayed up late one night when it was on TV when I was a kid.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hi, Mark.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Wyatt.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Good luck tonight. I'll be out front leading the cheering section.

COOPER: He then became a screenwriter and wrote for magazines as well. My dad is buried in Staten Island next to my brother, who died in 1988. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about them both. I wonder what they would think of me, of the person I've become.

The thing about death is that, after a while, you can't remember what a person sounded like. You forget all the little things that you once knew, the sound they made when they opened up the front door, the way they walked, the way they laughed.

A couple months ago Clock Tower Radio restored an interview my father did back in 1975.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My relationships with my sons, which are both quite extraordinary, I mean, my relationship with each son is quite extraordinary.

COOPER: I listened to it in my office at work. It was the first time I had heard my father's voice since I was 10 years old.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They ask me questions, and ask, how much does a stuntman make, because that's what he would like to be, you know?

COOPER: The thing about the past is, one can't help what zip code one was born in, what country or family you're descended from. All you can do is learn the lessons of those who came before you, their stories action their mistakes, and their successes. You can't choose what family you're born into.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I have certain expectations.

COOPER: All you can really do is choose how you want to live your own life.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They will behave with honor and with dignity.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PEREIRA: Anderson that's a powerful statement. We don't get to choose the family we're born into. We often think about that when we look at the stories that we cover in the news is that these people in the stories that we're covering don't choose the existence they're in. COOPER: We all have heroes and villains in our past and there's nothing you can do about it. It's just about learning the lessons of the past and also to be able to hear my dad's voice for the first time since he was 10-year-old was extraordinary and that I was sort of a great blessing, something I didn't expect and a rare treat.

CAMEROTA: Wow, that's so poignant. There were a lot of surprises for you. You think you know most of it.

COOPER: That is true, yes.

CAMEROTA: And yet --

COOPER: There are records for everything out there. It's really, you can find it if you're interested in going back and looking.

CUOMO: Did it wind up making you want to know more? Do you feel you know enough?

COOPER: I don't know what more there is I could possibly know. There's a lot I'd actually, I learned my great, great, great, great grandfather on my dad's side was the only person on that side of the family who owned slaves and most of the relatives who fought for the confederacy were too poor to own slaves.

They probably would have if it they could have but they didn't. I'd like to know about the descendants of those enslaved people. One of them killed my great, great, great, great grandfather with a garden hoe. It would be fascinating to know about that person's descendants and where they are.

CAMEROTA: Where those people are.

COOPER: Yes.

PEREIRA: It's interesting. Because we've been talking about what this did for each of us that took this roots journey, I'm curious, have you reconnected with some of the family members?

COOPER: Definitely. Lot of the Mississippi relatives I hadn't been in as close touch, Recey I'm in touch with and her grandkids have been sending e-mails so it's nice to reconnect. That's the other thing.

It reminds you of all your roots and it's great to see relatives you haven't seen for a while and you realize my head is like, there's that weird Cooper shape of the head and little mannerisms I do, that's a Cooper mannerism. That's nice to see.

PEREIRA: Happy Christmas, Merry Christmas to all the Coopers in Mississippi, too.

CAMEROTA: Thanks so much for coming in.

COOPER: It was a pleasure.

CUOMO: Appreciate you doing that. Merry Christmas to you, my brother.

CAMEROTA: They've been wonderful all morning and truly made this Christmas day edition of NEW DAY very special for us. So in a moment we'll hear more from the Young People's Chorus of New York City. Stick around.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CUOMO: Thank you so much for joining us on this Christmas morning especially the holiday edition of NEW DAY. We wish you and yours a very, very happy holiday and whatever you celebrate. We just hope you have a great day together every day for us.

CAMEROTA: Absolutely.

CUOMO: It's great to be together. In fact you got your beautiful little hat. What's this I found? Hello! Hello mistletoe. Come on, a little bit. Little bit of sugar, pretend you like it. There it is.

PEREIRA: On this year more than ever don't you think we need peace on earth. May there be peace in 2015.

CAMEROTA: Yes, wishing you a healthy and peaceful year to come. Thanks for joining us.

CUOMO: A lot of news this morning. Let's get you to CNN NEWSROOM. We thank the Young People's Chorus of New York City. They are going to leave us with "Deck The Halls."

(CHOIR SINGING "DECK THE HALLS")