What ensued was a long goodbye at NBC, complete with a victory-lap final episode showcasing her newsmaking interviews and starry meet-cutes.

Lured by CBS boss Les Moonves (the now disgraced mogul she calls “a close-talker with bad breath”), they both had been caught up in the “get”: him stealing away a TV golden girl from a rival network, dreams of ginning up ratings for his third-place newscast she with a desire to make history (plus, well, ego). A classic case of not managing expectations. Couric making the cardinal sin of putting the cart before the horse.

It’s just one of the ways in which Couric’s new 500-plus-page “Going There” - a book as fervently dishy as it is fragrantly honest - rates as that rare celebrity memoir that also works as a workplace manual for the hoi polloi. Ignoring the advice from Beatty and others, while opting to take a pay cut (yet for a job that still raked in $15 million a year) - eager, too, to split from her toothsome, perky Katie persona - she took the gig. “Who cares about the evening news? Nobody even watches it. When Katie Couric was toying with the idea of leaving her perch on “The Today Show” after 15 years, in 2006 - tempted by an offer to become the face of the “CBS Evening News” and the first solo woman ever to host a network evening newscast - she ran it by the aging heartthrob (someone who’d become a “phone pal,” as she puts it, after her first husband died from cancer). In retrospect, she should have listened to Warren Beatty.

Katie couric going there book