Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  This happens at crime scenes of every size and dimension. The reality of your job becomes the scrim that shields you from the emotion of the moment. At its worst, it explains how reporters can ask family members how they feel at the scene of a tragedy. People ask me, “How can you be objective as a reporter?” I answer that it becomes an automatic reflex. You have to filter out your personal point of view. Your role as a neutral-as-possible witness imposes its own set of rules.

  A journalist can be viewed as unfeeling, yet in times of war or other crises, this neutrality provides an essential separation from the events swirling around us. It is how a broadcast pioneer like John Chancellor of NBC was able to stand up to local abuses and tell the world what was happening when those young students first crossed the color line and entered Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. It’s how many sons and daughters of the Deep South were able to cover the civil rights struggle so brilliantly, ignoring cultural taboos from their own childhoods. The reporter becomes cloaked in an invisible shield that makes it possible to report the story without becoming emotionally engaged. At the same time, inevitably, reality does penetrate that shield. But we try to deny it.

  My report on the massacre was, if not a disaster, completely undistinguished. I was so new to the network that Gilbert Millstein, an NBC script editor known for his sardonic wisecracks, looked up at the screen and asked the newsroom: “So who’s the Peruvian handmaiden?” (At the time, I was a brunette.)

  It didn’t take long for the network to send in the cavalry. Veteran correspondents Bob Hager and George Lewis took over. Both would later become good friends and colleagues, but we never discussed Guyana. I flew home, embarrassed and defeated, still not fully absorbing what I’d experienced in that muddy field. The dynamic behind the carnage was hard to fathom. This was before the disaster at Waco, before we understood cults and deprogramming and all the psychological dimensions of mass deaths. It wasn’t until the cab dropped me off at my cottage in Washington and I climbed the steps to the front porch that the accumulated fear and revulsion of the past weeks flooded over me.

  I felt nauseated, sweaty and cold at the same time. Crying hysterically, I tore off my shoes and clothes, right on my own front porch, desperate to discard anything that could remind me of the stench of death. Perhaps I was trying to get rid of an emotional burden I didn’t want to acknowledge. Whatever the reason, I threw out every vestige of clothing from the trip. To me, it smelled and always would.

  More than a decade later I ran into James Reston, Jr., for the first time since we were both in Guyana. He had written the definitive history of Jonestown, Our Father Who Art in Hell: The Life and Death of Jim Jones, based on more than eight hundred hours of tapes Jones had made to record the events leading up to the “white night” of the mass suicides. I hadn’t thought about Jonestown for years, at least not consciously. But talking with Reston’s wife, I admitted for the first time that Jonestown still haunted me. I was shocked when she told me that none of the newsmen who’d been there had shaken it off, either, and most had sought help. It had never occurred to me that my reactions weren’t unique.

  As a woman, I’d been so eager to cover up any sign of weakness that I’d never considered the most logical response—seeking professional help to recover from the aftereffects of covering a tragedy of such dimensions. Until then, most of what I covered, especially in local and national politics, could be reduced on some level to farce. Usually, we focused on some new evidence of hypocrisy and incompetence by government bureaucrats. Occasionally, misbehavior rose to the level of mendacity and criminal malfeasance. It was relatively easy to separate myself from the unfolding dramas we reported. All of that changed with Jonestown. I didn’t experience the same depth of despair again for another twenty-three years, until September 11, 2001.

  Before being sent to Guyana, the most exotic trips I’d taken for NBC were from our Washington bureau to Capitol Hill. When I arrived at the network, I was assigned to everything that came along, even though I had no knowledge of any beat in particular. Once again, I was learning from the bottom up. If the assignment desk needed someone to take notes at a congressional hearing, I was it. When President Carter went on vacation in Plains, Georgia, I went along.

  After Jonestown, this type of assignment was comic relief. It meant sitting outside the pond house of Jimmy Carter’s mother, Miss Lillian, at five-thirty a.m. Christmas morning while the Carter family opened gifts inside, and then following the president as he performed the same holiday ritual at the home of his mother-in-law, Miss Allie. If you weren’t accustomed to juggling a tape recorder, reporter’s notebook, and microphone while jumping out of a Secret Service van in time to catch a glimpse of the chief executive before he went inside, it could be humiliating.

  Running to the front of the motorcade on Christmas morning, 1978, I tripped over a microphone cord and fell, badly cutting my leg, outside the small ranch house of Rosalynn Carter’s mother. The White House doctor had to be called to patch me up. His main job that Christmas was to take care of a presidential ailment so embarrassing that the president wouldn’t disclose it. That is, until poor Carter learned over Christmas that his good friend, Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat, had appealed to his fellow Egyptians—Muslim and Christian—to pray for a cure for Jimmy Carter’s hemorrhoids.

  My job that day was to watch as Secret Service men assumed their posts on Miss Allie’s front lawn, facing outward toward the street. On the lawn behind them, eleven-year-old Amy Carter and her young cousins set off caps that sounded like gunfire, delighted when they managed to startle the long-suffering agents.

  That first Christmas in Plains at times had the surreal feeling of a Fellini movie. To attract attention from the assembled national news media accompanying the president, Native Americans gathered to protest against his policies toward their tribes. The protestors danced and chanted and banged ritual drums. At the same time, farmers rode their tractors into Plains to underscore their demands for higher price supports. On another corner, Taiwanese protested Carter’s decision to normalize diplomatic relations with mainland China, while a group of Klansmen marched against the president’s human rights policies.

  Our only diversion was to spend silly amounts of money on souvenirs in the one or two shops catering to tourists attracted by Plains’s newfound celebrity. A favorite was the rubberized Jimmy Carter bottle opener. We ate endless bags of peanuts. I went to the supermarket so that I could cook holiday meals for the camera crews in the microwave of the Winnebago that served as our office and editing room. Homesick, we organized Christmas Eve caroling.

  At the time, none of us realized how much the kitsch of the surroundings would end up trivializing the chief executive himself. What could have been charming local color soon became tiresome, and eventually fodder for late-night comedians, as the president shook up his cabinet and commentators diagnosed his political malady as a case of midterm malaise. A good runner, Carter couldn’t even get a break during a charity run at Camp David. Dehydrated, he stumbled, creating a picture that seemed to symbolize and reinforce his political frailty.

  Jimmy Carter was an outsider, not comfortable with Washington’s power brokers. His inexperience, and that of his top aides, often made them the subject of ridicule, especially on Capitol Hill. But from the moment he took office, Carter focused with a single-minded determination rarely seen in Washington on achieving peace in the Middle East.

  Barely two months after becoming president, Carter launched negotiations to get Israel to trade land for peace. The outline of the basic deal hasn’t changed in the decades since: Israel would withdraw from territory it occupied in 1967 in exchange for open borders and Arab recognition. It took more than a year of persuasion, but in September of 1978, Carter brought Israel’s prime minister Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat together for their historic summit at Camp David.

  When the summit began just after Labor Day in 1978, I had been at NBC for barely a month. Carter cleared
his schedule, canceling a political trip to San Antonio, so that he could try to broker peace between Begin and Sadat. Rosalynn Carter was sent to Texas in his place, and I was assigned to accompany her on Air Force Two. While the senior correspondents were dealing with issues of world peace, I would be covering the first lady. It was hardly a plum assignment, but it would be the first of countless trips I would take over the succeeding years on one of the iconic blue-and-white aircraft in the presidential fleet stationed at Andrews Air Force Base in the Maryland suburbs. I was thrilled.

  Instead of covering high-powered summitry, I went shopping for what I imagined were the appropriate clothes to cover a first lady: a long-sleeved silk shirtwaist and high heels. Perhaps it was suitable for church, but it was hardly the right garb for riding on a flatbed truck in a Labor Day parade in Garland, Texas, on an afternoon when the temperature reached ninety-eight degrees.

  The trip didn’t start well, either. I was to interview the first lady when we arrived in Texas Sunday night and put together a story for Monday morning’s Today show. With delicate negotiations about to >get under way at Camp David, the first lady was understandably silent on the only subject everyone cared about, Middle East peace.

  And, at the last minute, Mrs. Carter’s staff decided that the color of the sofa in the interview room at our hotel clashed with what she was wearing. It was either get her to change clothes, or find a new couch. We changed the couch. That delayed the interview so long, we had to race to the Alamo shortly before midnight to shoot my on-camera stand-up in front of the only recognizable building that would be well lit against the night sky. Just as I was getting ready, the lights at the Alamo were shut off for the night, leaving me standing in front of a black hole.

  The next day, drenched from the stifling humidity and almost suffocating in my silk dress, I gamely tried to keep my balance, teetering in high heels on the flatbed truck that followed Mrs. Carter in the parade. Our first-generation videotape recorder broke down in the high humidity, but it hardly mattered. Clearly, there was no news in this spousal campaign appearance, especially in contrast with the Middle East negotiations the president was organizing.

  But at the end of the parade, NBC’s Texas bureau chief Art Lord suddenly appeared to whisk me onto a helicopter to get to our Dallas affiliate. Nightly News wanted a report on Labor Day events around the country. Art had made his reputation during the Vietnam War as our Saigon bureau chief, and he still wore the khaki jacket of a war correspondent. How could I tell him about my fear of helicopters? Making it worse, Art put me in the copilot’s seat so that I could have an even better view through the 360-degree Plexiglas bubble. I was terrified, afraid to admit it, and had to write a script in less than a half hour. Fortunately, considering the state of the long-sleeved silk dress, there was no need to go on camera. Nonetheless, I had completed my first White House trip, survived, and somehow gotten on the Nightly News.

  While I was covering the East Wing, Jimmy Carter was making history. The talks almost failed several times. Sadat later acknowledged he had come close to walking out. But finally, on September 18, after thirteen days in the Western Maryland retreat, the president presented the results to a joint session of Congress. Despite all of the bloodshed since, the essential terms haven’t changed over the intervening decades. Palestinians would decide on a form of local government. New Israeli settlements on the West Bank would be frozen during the negotiations. There was no mention of the most difficult issues, like what to do with East Jerusalem, claimed by both sides. Not surprisingly, two days later, Begin told The Wall Street Journal that Israel and the U.S. had differing interpretations of how long he had promised to freeze the West Bank settlements.

  Presidents usually insist on guaranteed outcomes before they agree to spend political capital on high-risk diplomacy. Not so Jimmy Carter, and his gamble paid off. Prior to Camp David, only 39 percent of the people interviewed by the Gallup poll approved of his performance in office. Barely two weeks later, the president’s approval rating had jumped to 56 percent, the sharpest gain for a chief executive in four decades of Gallup surveys, at least until George W. Bush’s leap from 51 to 86 percent in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Unfortunately for Carter, that high did not last. His popularity dropped precipitously from March to June of 1979, reaching a new low in June of only 29 percent. Carter was in particular trouble with fellow Democrats, who told pollsters they did not like his domestic policies.

  The Camp David agreement was one of his widely applauded accomplishments, in contrast to the rest of Carter’s record in the spring of 1979. When it came time to sign the accords on the North Lawn of the White House, I was given a choice assignment, broadcasting alongside our anchorman and commentator John Chancellor. From our position on the roof of the Hay-Adams hotel across Lafayette Square, we had a panoramic view of the ceremony. Jimmy Carter read from the Bible and the Koran; Anwar Sadat proclaimed it one of the happiest moments of his life; Menachem Begin recalled the atrocities inflicted upon Jews during World War II. In the audience sat eighteen hundred invited dignitaries, while millions of viewers watched on live television.

  I provided “color,” or background, for John’s play-by-play analysis, adding details such as the curious fact that the document was signed on an oak table that had served the cabinet of Ulysses S. Grant in the 1870s. It was the first time I’d been included in the network’s coverage of an historic event, and on that sunlit day when the world imagined the creation of a lasting Middle East peace, anything seemed possible.

  I hungered for my own beat, but, as a new correspondent, for the most part, my job was to cover presidential movements to and from Camp David or church. At first, I spent every weekend taking notes on the president’s Sunday school lessons, often as a “pool” reporter sharing Carter’s biblical prescriptions with the other networks. It wasn’t great journalism, but for a Jewish kid from New York, it sure was an education in the New Testament.

  As a general-assignment correspondent, I spent a lot of time covering congressional hearings, cornering members of Congress when they took breaks, asking witnesses or their aides for more details as they arrived or left the room. Long before C-SPAN covered the Senate, we did our own legwork, watching the chambers from the press galleries and using courtroom artists to depict major debates. Not yet tethered to computers so that we could be in constant communication with our producers, we wandered the corridors, corralling sources.

  If you wanted to know what was happening with a piece of legislation, you’d go over and ask the sponsors, or the opponents. My favorite hangout was the Speaker’s Lobby. You could mill around among the House members and send in requests to call someone off the House floor to answer a question. It was a taste of what I’d experience a decade later, covering Congress full-time.

  In those early days, many of the hearings I went to were investigative inquiries by the House Commerce Committee or its sub-committees, whose members included John Dingell, later to become chairman, and Young Turks such as Democrats Al Gore and Ed Markey. Often the focus was energy policy, as America faced a growing oil crisis with OPEC. Unlike CBS, then our chief competitor, NBC did not have an energy correspondent. Spotting a vacuum, and a big story, I volunteered for the job.

  America’s struggle to wean itself from overdependence on foreign oil became the defining economic story of the Carter years. Carter was the nation’s “energy warden,” adopting the tone of a World War II neighborhood scold as he addressed the nation, affecting informality in his sweater, to tell us to turn down our thermostats.

  Television had a hard time telling the energy story. Looking for easy explanations, the networks found a convenient target in the oil industry. Carter’s Energy Department obliged, with a patchwork quilt of new regulations that almost guaranteed Big Oil would violate one rule or another. Nightly News had an insatiable appetite for stories about fines against anyone in the oil industry. Conspiracy theories abounded about offshore tankers secreting supplies to main
tain the shortages and keep prices high. It was difficult to explain the complex oil refining and distribution system in terms accessible for Nightly News.

  Then, and now, we have only a half hour—approximately twenty-two minutes when commercials are subtracted—to cover all the news of the day. It requires making difficult choices, and sometimes losing texture or minimizing complexity. All Nightly News anchors, correspondents, and producers hunger for a full hour’s newscast. During times of great moment or crisis, like 9/11 or Inauguration Day, the network has given us the extra time. But that does not happen often.

  My new energy beat put me up against an experienced CBS competitor, the late Nelson Benton. The secretary for the newly created Energy Department was James Schlesinger, who had previously served as defense secretary under Presidents Nixon and Ford, until Ford fired him for insubordination. Schlesinger didn’t suffer fools gladly, especially a novice to the beat.

  Dealing with Schlesinger was a challenge, but fun, intellectually. (Last year, I ran into him and mentioned that I would be going on a tour of the Energy Department’s weapons facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to see centrifuges for nuclear fuel production given up by Libya. As irascible as ever, Schlesinger snapped, “I hope you do your usual tough job and don’t let them get away with pretending this is a big deal, because it’s not.” He hasn’t changed a bit.)

  Back in 1978, U.S. energy policy was more focused on fossil fuel supplies than nonproliferation. My bureau chief, Sid Davis, wanted me to go to the Energy Department and treat it the way I used to work a police beat, developing sources and looking for leaks. I wasn’t quite sure how to go about it. Part of Sid’s prescription was to take people to lunch. With the U.S. desperate to find alternative energy sources, I started calling energy officials, congressional aides on the energy committees, and executives in the oil shale business. It began to pay off. We did stories on wind farms and natural gas, nuclear power and new oil drilling techniques. I had to learn everything from scratch. It was great fun, but I was not at all sure I could keep up. And while the beat was exciting, as well as productive, most of the stories were painfully boring visually. So one unforgettable night, I tried to bring some extra creativity to what should have been a simple report. We’d been assigned to do a story on gas lines, and I had the notion to make the segment as cinematic as possible. I asked the camera crews to capture the frustration of drivers waiting on long lines for gas, complete with natural sound of car horns and people complaining.