Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only relative beginner on our team that day. To transform my overambitious script into a taped package for the broadcast, I was working with one of our less-experienced tape editors and a producer who had never before “cut” a spot for Nightly News. To make sure that everyone meets the evening news deadline, there is always another producer supervising all of the editing rooms. As luck would have it, on that night we had a rookie in that slot, too.
I started writing the script as the tape came in, but the video arrived late and the segment started falling further and further behind. Looking at the video before I wrote, I realized that there were too many interviews, and too much sound. We weren’t timing each segment properly, and as the pressure mounted, the editor and producer became even more flustered. My attempt to play Hollywood director was only contributing to the overall panic.
In television terms, we “missed air.” David Brinkley, then at NBC, read the lead-in, saying something along the lines of, “Andrea Mitchell has more on that.” But nothing happened. The tape was not ready to roll.
My team and I had committed just about every sin in the broadcast playbook. We didn’t time things properly and, even worse, we didn’t give the producers in charge a heads-up that we were going to miss the deadline. The senior person downstairs in EJ (“electronic journalism”) came into the edit room and said, “Okay, we’ve got to face the music,” and together we all walked to the control room, where Bob McFarland, then the senior producer for Nightly News, was screaming, “Is it ready? Is it ready?”
When he was told that the segment was finally ready, he discovered that it was forty-five seconds long. Not only had we missed our place in the rundown; in a business where being five seconds long is a lot, and ten seconds is unforgivable, being forty-five seconds long with an overdue piece that now had to be run further down in the show was practically a firing offense. McFarland began to shout, “What is this? Amateur night?”
I thought my career was over. It was a Friday, and I had a friend arriving for the weekend from Philadelphia. Instead of going out, I went home, crawled into bed, and pulled the covers over my head; I hoped somehow that by retreating I could make the specter of the missed spot disappear.
On Monday morning, Nightly News had its usual morning call at nine-thirty a.m. to plan that evening’s broadcast. At the end of the call, three days after my embarrassing failure, Paul Greenberg, then executive producer of Nightly News in New York, joked, “Oh, by the way, you can roll the Mitchell spot whenever it’s ready.” Apparently I was being given a second chance.
The whole incident was a searing experience, not because I’d gotten any facts wrong or had a technological breakdown, but because of a domino effect of human error. It was an early, if painful, lesson in the nature of teamwork in television. When it clicks, it can be brilliant. We make our little videos, trying to re-create reality for our viewers in a telescoped form—that’s the medium. But when it fails, the humiliation is very public. Fortunately, except for the evidence on videotape, we do rush on to our next challenges. To para-phase Scarlett O’Hara, tomorrow is another deadline.
I was still on the energy beat at 9:06 a.m. on March 28, 1979, when the Associated Press ran a brief bulletin that said, “Officials at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant have declared a ‘general emergency,’ a state police spokesman said today.” It was a place none of us had ever heard of. Suddenly it thrust the country into a situation for which no one was prepared. The actual incident had been triggered five hours earlier, when the main-feed water pumps at the nuclear reactor in the Pennsylvania farm community of Middletown, near Harrisburg, somehow failed, preventing the steam generators from removing heat. Control room operators didn’t spot the danger as first the turbine and then the reactor automatically shut down.
A relief valve, designed to prevent the pressure from becoming excessive, opened. Once the pressure decreased, the valve should have closed automatically, but it didn’t. Failing to see signals that the valve was still open, the control room was oblivious to a developing calamity: water was pouring out of the open valve, causing the reactor to overheat and approach meltdown. Rapidly, the situation spun out of control. Operators misread their instruments, and the instruments provided conflicting information. It was later determined that about half of the reactor core melted during those early stages of the accident. It was eerily similar to the plot of a film that had been released a month earlier, The China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas, and Jack Lemmon, about a faulty water pump that causes a nuclear plant to melt down.
Federal and state officials were caught flat-footed. Shortly after nine a.m., the call came to the White House. Jessica Tuchman Mathews, the National Security Council’s point person for nuclear energy, sent a short memo to her boss, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. By ten a.m., he was briefing the president in the Oval Office. At the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, twelve miles from the White House, Harold Denton, chief of reactor operations, recalled being confused by the conflicting information coming in from the field. Quickly, NRC officials headed north toward their regional office in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. No one knew how close the reactor was getting to meltdown. By that evening, the teams on the site thought the damage was slight, perhaps affecting 1 percent of the reactor core.
Three Mile Island was run by a local utility, Metropolitan Edison, for its parent company, General Public Utilities. The twin cooling towers dominated the rural landscape along the Susquehanna River. Until the accident, residents of this farm community only ten miles from the state’s capital in Harrisburg liked their relatively cheap energy and viewed the reactor as a benign presence. But on Friday, March 30, a larger amount of radiation was released from the plant’s auxiliary building to relieve pressure on the primary system.
The public began to panic. An even more alarming danger had emerged: a hydrogen bubble developed in the container that held the reactor core. No one knew whether the bubble would burn, or explode, possibly rupturing the concrete containment vessel that by then was the only barrier between the countryside and nuclear disaster. How close was the reactor to a nuclear meltdown? How much radiation had already escaped into the atmosphere? Pennsylvania’s governor, Richard Thornburgh, consulted federal officials about evacuating the area. Pregnant women and preschool children within a five-mile radius of the plant were told to leave.
When we first got word of the accident, I was immediately sent to the NRC’s suburban Maryland headquarters. Once it was clear that a meltdown of the reactor core had been averted—although it would be years before we knew how close they had come to a catastrophic event—the main concern was that dangerous levels of radiation had been released into the atmosphere. The bureau assigned a rotating group of correspondents to go in and out of Middletown, none spending more than twenty-four hours so as to avoid excessive exposure to radiation. By the end of the first week, I realized that the correspondents being sent to the scene had two things in common: none was NBC’s energy correspondent, and they were all men.
On Friday night, the evening of greatest fear about the hydrogen bubble, I marched with the only other woman in the bureau, Carole Simpson, into Sid Davis’s office to ask why we had not been sent to Three Mile Island. He said he wanted to protect women of childbearing age from the potential damage of radiation.
In many ways, Sid was a father figure for me, having recruited me to the network and guided my career since. We had also covered national campaigns together years earlier for Westinghouse Broadcasting. But even now, I can feel the sting of his paternalism, however kindly his intention. How could he unilaterally decide to keep me off the most sensational story my beat had ever produced? Without hesitating, I shot back that men’s testicles were as vulnerable to radiation as women’s ovaries. I was on a plane to Three Mile Island the next day.
Middletown, Pennsylvania, was as Middle American a place as you could find. It was a s
mall town along the banks of the Susquehanna where people were accustomed to feeling safe. The nuclear power plant was the largest local industry and a steady source of jobs. Residents didn’t question the safety of the twin nuclear cooling towers. Now, suddenly, people were terrified, and the source of the danger was invisible. How do you know if radiation is harming you? How do you protect yourself against it? You can’t.
When I first arrived, the officials at the local utility company were completely unprepared to handle the emergency, or the media invasion that accompanied it. Governor Thornburgh was doing his best to get information out to the public, but this close-to-the-ground farm community was understandably suspicious. A frenzy of reporters at the scene fed the growing panic.
There was no evacuation plan. Later, it became a requirement that any region with a nuclear power station, like Indian Point, north of New York City, had to have a specific way of moving large populations away from reactors in an emergency. Because the highway systems in most communities are already overburdened, few areas are able to comply.
Once I finally got to the scene, I was given a dosimeter to wear, to make sure the cumulative radiation I was absorbing from the atmosphere hadn’t reached dangerous levels. Since no one had tested the air immediately after the accident, no one would ever know how much radiation had escaped. When we weren’t waiting for briefings at the plant, we covered town meetings or drove the narrow country roads looking for people willing to talk about their reactions to the near-meltdown.
We returned to Pennsylvania a year later and reinterviewed the residents. Studies backed up our observation that there had not been long-term physical effects on the local population. Even years later, there was no noticeable increase in the incidence of diseases like thyroid cancer. But all this was unknown at the time of the incident.
Before Three Mile Island, America was oblivious to the dangers or benefits of nuclear energy. It just existed, with very little government oversight. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission had grown out of the old Atomic Energy Commission, which had been created to promote the viability of atomic or nuclear energy. Rather than regulating the industry, the commission was its advocate. All that changed with the meltdown. In the aftermath of the incident, President Carter appointed an independent commission, headed by a prominent mathematician, Dartmouth College president John Kemeny, to investigate what had gone wrong. It was the biggest story of the day, inspiring intense media scrutiny and heavy pressure to scoop the competition with the commission’s findings. More than anything, Sid Davis wanted me to beat CBS and its correspondent, Diane Sawyer.
An old-school Washington newsman, Sid ordered me to take the commission chairman to lunch. Following his instructions, I invited Dr. Kemeny, a gracious Hungarian immigrant, to Le Pavilion, then the most expensive French restaurant in Washington, and put it on my expense account. These days, we consider ourselves lucky to find time for a yogurt or salad at our desks in between cable news appearances and reporting for Nightly News. But in the years before cable and more complex preparations for the evening news, we often spent hours wooing sources over expense account meals.
But my culinary assault on the Three Mile Island investigator was for naught. We discussed everything from his start as a mathematician to his time at Dartmouth and our fathers’ adjacent childhood neighborhoods in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. By the end of lunch, Dr. Kemeny had revealed nothing about the cause of the reactor meltdown, only that he knew I would understand that he could not discuss anything about the secret findings of his commission.
Abandoning the French-cuisine approach, I tried old-fashioned shoe leather. Having cultivated another source connected to the commission, I waited in the stairwell of the office building where the panel was meeting, got a purloined copy of the report, and raced down several flights of steps to deliver the scoop Sid wanted. NBC was first to report that the commission had concluded that to avoid future accidents, fundamental changes needed to be made in the way nuclear reactors were built, run, and regulated. The panel recommended that the president abolish the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and establish a new agency to police the industry.
A year after Three Mile Island, I went to Rancho Seco, California, to visit a reactor of the same type and model as Three Mile Island in order to assess the mood of that community toward atomic power. It was a rural area of farms and cattle ranches. Instead of finding suspicion and fear because of the nuclear accident back east, I learned that most of the local residents were completely comfortable with their nuclear neighbor. As far as they were concerned, the reactor was providing cheap energy to power their ranches and farms, and they were perfectly happy living with the giant cooling towers.
In retrospect, what is most striking about America’s worst nuclear accident is how badly managed the facility at Three Mile Island was. Kemeny’s presidential fact-finding group found that the plant’s procedures were “inadequate” and “confusing.” This has since changed, under new ownership. But to make nuclear power viable and safe, utility companies have to be good corporate citizens and not cut corners on safety even during periods of lax regulation. The payoff, as France and other countries have learned, is less dependence on imported oil.
Although investigators did not recommend a moratorium on new nuclear power construction, after the accident, the marketplace dictated a freeze on any new plants. Insurance was now simply too expensive, and the licensing requirements too burdensome, to make nuclear energy economically viable during the years of relatively cheap oil. But with the rising cost of oil, that may now change. In 2003, I returned to Three Mile Island to find out what had happened in the twenty-five years since the accident. I concluded that the risk premium on oil as a reliable source of energy in this age of terror might lead us to better research, not only on hybrid cars, but also on safer ways to produce nuclear energy. But first Americans have to reexamine their fears about nuclear power. The legacy of Three Mile Island is still with us.
The oil shocks that had so paralyzed the Carter presidency were only a prelude to an even greater crisis—the taking of American hostages in Iran. We were all slow to recognize the seismic effect of the Iranian Revolution when it began in February of 1979. America’s ailing ally, the Shah of Iran, had left the country in January, claiming he was only taking a vacation abroad. In reality, he was getting out while he could. Within a month, an uprising of rebellious government troops and armed civilian followers of the radical cleric Ayatollah Khomeini seized power. Their spiritual and de facto political leader, Khomeini returned from exile in France as the CIA frantically began dismantling its listening posts along the Soviet-Iranian border. After nine months of near anarchy, five hundred Iranian students stormed the American embassy, taking ninety hostages, including sixty-six Americans, most of them diplomats working at the U.S. embassy.
What became the hostage crisis marked a new role for American television. Before the advent of cable news, our responsibilities were generally limited to scheduled newscasts in the morning and at the dinner hour. With the exception of our coverage of the assassinations during the sixties and Watergate in the seventies, there were few occasions requiring nonstop broadcasting. Suddenly, the Iranian hostage crisis changed what was expected of us. Instead of preparing scripted newscasts, we were now self-appointed monitors of national emergencies, on duty twenty-four hours a day. As one of the more junior correspondents, I worked the night shift, helping the Washington bureau maintain its vigil. My assignment was to be on call through the night, occasionally sleeping on a well-worn newsroom couch, so that we could go on with a bulletin at any moment.
Over the succeeding months, a team of reporters and producers assigned full-time to the story prepared detailed histories of each of the hostages. As they dug into the background of each captive, they discovered one of the great media conspiracies of the time: there were six more American diplomats still in Tehran who had not been taken captive when the embassy was overrun, and several media organiz
ations knew it. The Americans were hiding in the Canadian embassy in Tehran—something no one ever reported until they escaped three months later. They flew out of Tehran posing as Canadian diplomats and holding false Iranian visas.
The continuing crisis for those who remained quickly overwhelmed Carter’s presidency. Americans were not used to being held hostage. It created a feeling of vulnerability and impotence, undercutting expectations that an American president be strong and effective. Pictures of the angry mobs in Tehran dominated the evening news. Ted Koppel’s nightly reports on the hostages became a fixture of American television, eventually becoming the long-running program, Nightline.
After Ted Kennedy defeated Carter in the New York primary in March, political pressure intensified for the president to take military action and end the standoff. When we criticize the friction among George W. Bush’s first-term foreign policy advisors, it’s useful to remember the brutal policy disagreements between Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance. In 1979, when I was covering a commencement speech the president gave at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, I was able to easily spot which paragraphs had been written by Brzezinski, and which by the secretary of state. The two men held diametrically opposing views on most issues, and the president often couldn’t decide between them—so he chose something from each, like a Chinese menu of foreign policy.
Talking Back Page 11
