By SALLY SINGER | February 17, 2012  On a blustery weekend afternoon, I am sitting in the living room of Lara Logan’s house in a leafy neighborhood in Washington, D.C., waiting for the CBS reporter to come home from the office. From my perch on a leather sectional sofa, I can see a plastic children’s fort in the garden; hear the creak of the front porch swing; marvel at the length of wooden train track snaking across the floor; peruse a guide to world armies; sip a cup of Nescafé with Coffee-mate. Also anticipating Logan’s arrival are her husband, Joseph Burkett, a work-at-home Congressional liaison, who is doing what all work-at-home dads do, i.e. strategically skirting past areas populated by children; Joseph and Lola, ages 3 and nearly 2, in pj’s and pacifiers, just up from their naps and on the prowl for snacks; and Ruby, the nanny, installed at the kitchen table from which she can attend to everyone’s needs with minimal motion. Logan, a “60 Minutes” correspondent, is now 90 minutes late, but one gets the sense from Burkett’s periodic updates (“she’s just been held up, leaving soon”) that a long office stint on a weekend is not out of the ordinary. When she eventually arrives — in flat boots and skinny fleece, looking freckled, tousled, sporty — she is greeted by the siege on Mommy, an attack of love and neediness all working mothers know too well. “I don’t think about career ambition,” she tells me later. “I don’t think about access. I think about how fast can I get home. That’s it.”  What it means to come home, for Lara Logan, 40, has changed dramatically in the past year. Last February, it was this house to which she returned after being attacked and sexually violated in Cairo’s Tahrir Square by members of the crowd gathered to celebrate the revolutionary end of Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year regime. She is reluctant to discuss the details of that experience again — she gave one interview to CBS last May — but it is clear that she and those close to her are still coming to terms with the ramifications of it for her family and her career. “What happened to Lara is as horrible an event as can happen to a human being,” says Jeff Fager, the chairman of CBS News.  “She came so close to losing it all in Egypt. I find it amazing that she can carry on.” He adds that she “doesn’t have the same drive to be in the frontlines because of her children.” Her sister Lisa Herr says, “I think that for the first time in her life she’s torn. She’s realizing what it’s like to have something that is more important than work.”  The attack occurred just one week after she’d been taken into custody overnight by the Egyptian military and denied any contact with her family. “Joe and I sat here,” Logan tells me, pushing her palms into the leather sofa, “six weeks after Egypt, and it was the first time he talked about how it affected him. He said, ‘I sat here one week when you went into radio silence and I knew you were in the custody of the Egyptians, and I didn’t know if I was ever going to see you again. And a week later I sat here and answered the phone and I didn’t even recognize the person on the other end of the line. I had no idea if my wife was coming home.’ He said, ‘That is twice in a week. I would rather be the person on the other end. I would rather be dead than be the one raising the children without you. Don’t do this to me again. Please. I am begging you not to do this to me again.’ ”  And she agreed. In the past year Logan’s assignments have taken her to the backstage of an Aerosmith concert, a Michael Bublé show, a game reserve in Texas, a polo field. She is the co-host, with Charlie Rose, of “Person to Person,” a reworking of Edward R. Murrow’s classic show of the 1950s, in which the interviews are conducted via a feed from a studio in New York. She still talks rapidly and excitedly about her more precarious stories — the arrest of a Colombian drug cartel, say — but is quick to downplay the threat involved in them. “We have a different scale of what’s really risky,” she says, laughing. This summer she is scheduled to return to Afghanistan and is clearly excited to be heading back to an arena she knows well. She may no longer have the drive to be on the frontlines, but there is something twitchy about her that seems to crave the battlefield and the singular obstacles it presents. Like the military personnel she has trailed for a decade, Logan is a returning soldier of sorts, befuddled and fearful of bedtimes (her children are often still awake at 11, to her horror) and bills and all the other banalities of civilian life ­— which, to be fair, are still relatively new to her.
Having survived a brutal sexual attack, Lara Logan remains a tenacious journalist, albeit one steeped in risk assessment.