For twenty-five years, Mary Mapes has been an award-winning television news producer and reporter-the last fifteen of them for CBS News, primarily for The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather and 60 Minutes II.

In 2004, her last year at CBS, in addition to the George W. Bush National Guard story, she broke the stories of the existence of Strom Thurmond's unacknowledged bi-racial daughter, Essie Mae Washington, and the Abu Ghraib prison tortures, for which she won a Peabody Award in 2005.

She began her career at KIRO-TV in Seattle, Washington in 1979.

She lives in Dallas, Texas.