Inside Jane Pauley’s office at CBS Broadcast Center in Manhattan hangs a large group portrait by Annie Leibovitz that ran in Life magazine in 1982. The group includes Pauley and other trailblazing newswomen such as Diane Sawyer, Lynn Sherr and the late Jessica Savitch.

Despite their distinct physical differences, identifying the journalists as individuals isn’t easy, given their nearly uniform Princess Diana helmet hair and ruffled blouses.

“Somebody — it might’ve been Diane Sawyer — called it ‘Blondes in Broadcasting,’” Pauley said recently as she pointed to a younger version of herself, sitting cross-legged near the center of the picture, with a burgundy mule dangling slightly off her left foot.

“The fact that I’ve got a shoe that’s kind of — it looks insouciant, is that the word?” — she attempted the French pronunciation — “betrays the fact that I was, like, What am I doing here? I was the youngest of that group and the least confident.”

Pauley, host of “CBS Sunday Morning” since 2016, has a different name for her peer group: “The Class of ’72,” referring to federal legislation enacted that year that helped bring significant numbers of women into print and broadcast journalism.

Pauley was 25 in 1976 when she was plucked from relative obscurity to replace Barbara Walters on “The Today Show” — winning the “female sweepstakes,” as she referred to it at the time. She grew to become one of the most beloved figures in American broadcasting, someone who seemed to embody the hopes, dreams and “Can I really have it all?” anxieties of a generation of women in the wake of the feminist movement.

Since her much-publicized departure from “Today” in 1989, she’s also demonstrated a knack for professional reinvention and resilience.

“The idea of transition has been thematic in my life,” says Pauley, who at 67 is thriving in her return to morning television. Since she took over for retiring host Charles Osgood, viewership for “CBS Sunday Morning” has grown to an average of roughly 6 million viewers a week. The enduringly popular newsmagazine ended 2017 with its largest audience in three decades.

Pauley’s “Today” debut in the ’70s — a meteoric rise from regional news to co-anchor of the country’s oldest morning show — made her an object of press fascination. “A corn-fed Catherine Deneuve” and a “Breck Girl with brains” were a few of the terms used by media observers.

Even today, Pauley has a way of downplaying her accomplishments and describes experiencing what we’d now call “Impostor Syndrome.”

“Everything that happened seemed like a magic carpet to me. I didn’t make it happen,” she said in her office after a session editing a story on another trailblazing woman, Tina Fey, and her Tony Award-nominated “Mean Girls” musical. “How do you get from the weekend edition of the big news at Channel 8 in Indianapolis, to one year later, almost to the day, when I’m the co-host of ‘The Today Show’? I knew that it hadn’t been by hard work. I was not particularly ambitious. I couldn’t explain it. Therefore, it had to have been an accident.”

To prepare for Pauley’s hosting debut at “CBS Sunday Morning,” executive producer Rand Morrison reviewed clips from her early appearances on “Today” and was impressed by “her poise, her dignity, her ability to deal with almost any subject” despite being only a few years out of Indiana University.

“She’d been on local television barely any time,” Morrison said. “Suddenly there she is on national television trying to hold her own with Tom Brokaw. Can you imagine that?”

What strikes Pauley now is how uncertain she was of her own voice — literally.

“Sometimes I was so down-home I’d be from Oklahoma,” she said. “Other times I would be doing sort of a Grace Kelly. Very elegant. And other times there was Barbara Walters. My Barbara Walters was really, really good.”

Like other young women in television, she took inspiration from Mary Tyler Moore — or rather, Moore’s fictional alter ego, Mary Richards. “We were all kinda making it up,” she said.

But if Mary Richards informed Pauley, Pauley in turn informed millions of women who saw themselves in her — particularly once she married “Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau, started a family and cycled through a series of regrettable ‘80s hairdos. Her pregnancies in 1983 and 1986 helped boost “Today’s” ratings and remove the prudish stigma around expectant mothers on television.

Pauley became an unwitting poster girl for “having it all” — the working mother with the lucrative career, handsome husband and healthy, happy children — an image of perfection she consciously pushed back against.

For a time, she kept a story on her refrigerator about a woman who said she coped with working motherhood by not reading articles about Jane Pauley. Today, Pauley is eager to claim the more humanizing aspects of her TV legacy, insisting, for instance, that she coined the term “bad-hair day.” (“Prove me wrong,” she said.)

Pauley is a talker with what she calls a “discursive” conversational style. Her tendency to meander is perhaps surprising for someone who spent years doing live TV, but it also yields entertaining anecdotes from her decades in the business, stories that often involve boldface names but are told in down-to-earth, self-deprecating ways.

A casual mention of a pending interview with Jimmy Carter — Pauley’s first — leads to a story about how, shortly after she joined “Today” in 1976, she went down to Georgia to speak to then-President-elect Carter but contracted “a wicked case” of conjunctivitis at the cheap motel where she was staying.

The kicker? “I couldn’t even get the ‘Today’ show on the television. They only had ‘Good Morning America.’”

Pauley’s departure from “Today” in 1989, amid the perception that she was being ousted in favor of the younger Deborah Norville, ignited a fierce media frenzy. Millions of viewers saw it as a personal affront, and ratings plummeted.

The controversy was “spooky,” she said, but useful in that it finally disabused her of the notion that she was simply “Jane Pauley from Indianapolis, daughter of Dick and Mary, sister of Ann.”

After “Today,” Pauley spent 11 years anchoring “Dateline,” helping NBC finally launch a successful newsmagazine, then, in one of the few disappointments on her resume, moved into daytime with “The Jane Pauley Show,” which lasted a single season in 2004-05. Pauley was 54 when the show was canceled — “which in television is when you cease to exist as an entity,” she noted.

She spent a few years “looking for reinvention.” A recurring segment on “Today,” sponsored by the AARP, spawned a 2014 book, “Your Life Calling: Reimagining the Rest of Your Life.” But just as she was embarking on a book tour, Pauley learned the AARP didn’t want to fund the segments anymore.

“The way it works for Jane Pauley, however, is apparently a little special, because it’s at those moments in my life, in my career, when I think, ‘Well, this is it. It is over,’ the phone will ring.”

It did: While promoting the book, Pauley had been profiled by “CBS Sunday Morning.” Viewer response to the piece had been overwhelmingly positive, and CBS News President David Rhodes soon offered her a contributor gig. When longtime host Osgood stepped down in 2016, Pauley beat some “estimable opponents” vying to fill his shoes, said Morrison.

Pauley was 65 when she started the job — “Hello!? That’s unprecedented,” she noted with pride — and has now hosted for a year and a half.

For a long time, “I only talked about my ‘job.’ I didn’t have a ‘career,’” she said.

“I aged into the confidence: You’ve had a career all along, you should respect it more. Maybe you didn’t make it happen, but you made it last.”