Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  Vance strongly opposed a military mission to rescue the hostages, arguing it was better to rely on diplomacy, so Brzezinski waited until the secretary of state was in Florida for the weekend before taking final military plans to the president. Vance learned about it in time and protested, but Carter rejected his arguments. The secretary of state handed the president his letter of resignation, the only contemporary example of a cabinet secretary resigning on principle.

  The night of the rescue mission, code-named Eagle Claw, our White House correspondent John Palmer got a tip that the lights were on unusually late at the White House. He rushed downtown and pieced together enough information to determine that a military operation was in play. Calling Jody Powell, Carter’s press secretary, John talked him into promising an exclusive account of the operation from the president himself once the rescue mission was out of Iranian airspace, as long as NBC reported nothing that night. It was in fact a bluff: John did not have enough information to report the story, and never would have done so in the middle of a rescue attempt.

  Nonetheless, after midnight on April 25, John was called into the Oval Office. Jimmy Carter told him that the mission to rescue the hostages had not succeeded because of what he called “equipment failure.” It turned out to have been a series of calamitous events. First, three of eight helicopters on the mission developed a hydraulic problem, forcing Carter to call off the operation. During the withdrawal, a sandstorm caused one of the helicopters to crash into a refueling plane at a spot in the Iranian desert called Desert One. Eight crew members were killed and five others injured. Palmer broke the story minutes before one a.m. on the East Coast, just before the end of network programming for the night. On the West Coast, it was still prime time, and a huge exclusive story.

  The collapse of the rescue mission doomed Carter’s reelection chances, although he still held out hope for a breakthrough. Warren Christopher, then deputy secretary of state, had been dispatched to try to negotiate the release of the hostages. Two days before the election, Christopher awakened the president at three forty-five on a Sunday morning with word that the mullahs might be ready to make a deal. Carter, in Chicago for a campaign stop, rushed back to Washington so quickly he left most of the press corps behind. Judy Woodruff was one of the few who made the motorcade’s departure, but only because she ran for the cars without pausing even to take out her hair curlers. Some reporters never were able to retrieve the underwear they’d left behind with the hotel laundry. I was called to race to the White House in time for the president’s return. Vice President Mondale took over the rest of Carter’s campaign schedule, and the first lady filled in for Mondale.

  It turned out to be false hope, based on an overly optimistic reading of the signals from Tehran. Carter wrote later that during the last thirty-six hours of the campaign, the news media were “saturated” with vivid reports about the hostages, making it impossible for the voters to hear anything else. Carter had won renomination, despite a stiff challenge from Ted Kennedy, on a wave of anger and national pride after the hostages were seized. Now he faced defeat because the country had lost patience with his failure to bring the hostages home. Reagan took 51 percent of the vote and forty-four states, while helping his party to win twelve new Senate seats and control of the Senate for the first time in twenty-six years. Once defeated by Ronald Reagan, Carter spent his last days before the inaugural clinging to the chance that he still might be able to make a transatlantic dash to escort the hostages personally from an American military base in Germany, which would be their first stop on the way home. But in a poignant footnote to Carter’s presidency, the complex deal was finally struck with Tehran only twenty-four hours before the defeated president was to leave office. Weary and emotionally drained, Carter came into the White House press room at 4:55 a.m. on January 19 to announce the agreement. The Iranians still dragged out the handover, denying Carter even the consolation of making the trip before he left office.

  In fact, Iran didn’t release the captive Americans until noon on January 20, just as the new president was being sworn in. They had been held 444 days. The timing of their release was not an accident. The Iranians wanted to further humiliate Carter by holding the fifty-two remaining Americans just long enough so that he would no longer be president to welcome them home. For Carter, it was a final blow.

  That only increased the drama, adding a bittersweet note to the transition when Ronald Reagan took office. The ceremonies heralded the return of pomp and circumstance to the capital after four Spartan years in the “plain” style of Plains. But for me, it was a marathon day, and hardly glamorous. At dawn, I was on Pennsylvania Avenue covering the inaugural for the Today program. Heavily bundled in gear designed for snowmobile drivers because of predictions of freezing weather, we were pleasantly surprised by warm, bright sunshine for Reagan’s first inaugural. Later, I covered the parade, alongside our irrepressible weatherman, Willard Scott. Then, still dressed in my outdoor garb, I spent the evening in the NBC bureau, voicing over pictures being fed in from the inaugural balls in reports for our local stations around the country. It never occurred to me that viewers might think I was actually attending the galas, rather than watching a video monitor, a practice that has since become commonplace on all manner of stories as networks trim their staffs.

  Later, just before midnight that same day, I was sent to Andrews Air Force Base to watch Carter administration officials leave to join now former President Jimmy Carter in Plains, from where they would depart for Germany to pick up the newly released hostages. Carter would be bringing them home on the same 707 aircraft he used to fly as Air Force One. Now the plane was on loan. And without a president on board, it was known simply by the military designation on its tail, 27000. I spent the night stretched out on a table in a corner of the press center at the air force base, catching a brief nap in case I needed to file an update on the hostage release for the next morning’s Today show.

  The hostages returned to Washington a week later, after a few days in seclusion at West Point. They traveled with their families in sixteen buses as a quarter of a million people, waving flags and yellow ribbons, cheered their progress through the streets of the capital, taking the same route as that of the inaugural to a triumphant and emotional reception at the White House. In a speech on the South Lawn, Ronald Reagan swore “swift and effective retribution” to terrorists. It was a muscular new policy designed to help restore American stature. The combination of those two events, the inauguration of a new president and the release of the hostages, seemed to rekindle a sense of national pride and hope.

  The way Ronald Reagan took office—riding a wave of patriotism that crested with the return of the hostages—was, I think, ultimately damaging to the new administration. Reagan had watched Jimmy Carter become increasingly paralyzed by the crisis that eventually defeated him. The experience helped shape the new president’s overemotional response to his own hostage crisis when Americans were taken captive in Lebanon four years later. We didn’t realize it at the time, but the modern Age of Terror, with its origins in the sacking of the American embassy in Tehran, would within a few short years explode again with the 1983 attacks on our embassy and marine barracks in Beirut.

  Reagan’s hostage crisis, involving seventeen Americans held in Lebanon, became the driving force behind the greatest scandal of his presidency: Iran-Contra. After forcefully declaring that the U.S. would never negotiate with terrorists, once the crisis became personalized, Reagan couldn’t resist. At the start of every day, he would ask his national security advisors about any news of the hostages. Inevitably, his obsession with their welfare created an expectation for action, and an opening for a brash colonel in the National Security Council, Oliver North. In ways that would recur through successive administrations of both parties, presidents or cabinet secretaries fail to realize the power of their own suggestions, even of their offhand remarks. I observed many times while covering the White House that overeager aides will do whatever it t
akes “to make the old man happy.” In administrations that lack discipline, or are led by chiefs of staff short on character or judgment—as with Bob Haldeman in the Nixon White House, and Don Regan under Ronald Reagan—underlings desperate to please the boss start breaking rules.

  But none of this occurred to me as I witnessed that most noble of American rituals, the peaceful transfer of political power. My first two years at the network had been more searing than anything I could have imagined. From the rain forests of Guyana to the looming twin cooling towers that shadowed the grassy riverbanks at Three Mile Island, I’d experienced things that changed my life, in ways both subtle and dramatic. Covering politics was often high comedy, even farce. Now, without even realizing it, I had developed a new specialty—disasters.

  CHAPTER 3

  Designated Shouter

  I learned everything I ever needed to know about questioning artful dodgers by covering the most artful of them all, Ronald Reagan. For Reagan, performance was as much a part of governing as understanding the details of the federal budget. He was an actor who had become a politician; by combining his skills, he became a better politician than he’d been an actor. I came to the White House not knowing much about the man behind the public face. Eight years later, I could anticipate his decisions, second-guess his reactions, mimic his gestures, and recite his speeches by heart. But the essential Reagan was more elusive. He so inhabited his role that to almost everyone but his wife the man himself was still a mystery.

  If Jimmy Carter was ridiculed for focusing too much on details, Ronald Reagan was thought to have the opposite problem: he was adept at the quick aside and the instant quip, often to avoid having to give a substantial, thoughtful answer. Once, during his 1984 campaign against Walter Mondale, the president was beating a hasty retreat from a Rose Garden ceremony to avoid any contact with the press. I shouted, “What about Mondale’s charges?”

  Without missing a beat, Reagan responded, “I think he ought to pay them.”

  While Ronald Reagan was clever at parrying impromptu questions with a quip, he wasn’t at his best in formal news conferences. He was clearly far more effective performing as part of a set piece: a stage, a speech, a TelePrompTer; and at campaign events with plenty of balloons and a cheering audience—nothing unexpected, like a gotcha question from a journalist.

  I had not covered Reagan’s campaign, or the White House for the first few months of his presidency. When Reagan replaced Jimmy Carter, I was still covering energy. Then, in March 1981, our entire Washington bureau mobilized in response to John Hinckley’s attempt to assassinate the president. When the nation’s leader is struggling for his life, reporters are no different from other citizens; they feel shock and worry, but know they cannot give in to these emotions, because they have a story to cover. I was sent to the traffic island outside George Washington University Hospital, where the injured president had been taken. It was a twenty-four-hour vigil.

  No one had seen John Hinckley, who had been tackled and arrested immediately at the scene of the shooting. So it was a big deal when we learned that he would be transferred one morning by helicopter, landing across from the Tidal Basin so that he could be driven to the courthouse for his preliminary hearing. With military precision, the assignment editors plotted how to get a picture of the suspect, live, during the Today show. The camera crew would set up across the water from the landing pad at Hains Point for just a picture; but at the last moment, the bureau chief sent me along. When I arrived it was clear that there was no way to see Hinckley getting off the helicopter other than through a telescopic lens. The cameraman could see Hinckley, but I couldn’t. I was hooked up so that I could hear the Today show, but was told once again that since I couldn’t add anything to the coverage, they wanted only the picture—no correspondent required.

  Yet as Hinckley emerged from the chopper, one of the producers must have told the anchors, Tom Brokaw and Jane Pauley, that I was at the scene, because they asked me on the air to describe what I could see. In fact I couldn’t see a thing—only the cameraman could. Completely unprepared, and not having the wit to ad-lib, I froze, saying nothing! Finally I stammered, “Hinckley, I hope you can see, is the man between two security men being brought in to the limousine,” except that I had no idea what I was describing. Mercifully, they cut it short.

  Bill Small, then president of NBC News and previously a veteran newsman at CBS, said it was the worst performance he’d ever seen. He and Steve Friedman, the executive producer of the Today show, banished me from television—unbeknownst to me. Bad as my performance had been, even I did not realize how poorly it had been received in the front office. The first hint that I was in big trouble came a week or so later, when I noticed that my name did not appear on the Washington bureau’s daily assignment sheet. Brady Daniels, the business manager, said, “Didn’t anyone tell you? They’ve switched your contract from TV to radio.” It was an execution, apparently without a trial. My career seemed to be over, yet again.

  I turned to Chris Wallace, with whom I shared an office at our bureau. Chris was a second-generation broadcaster, having been raised in the business by his stepfather, CBS News president Bill Leonard, and his father, Mike Wallace, of 60 Minutes fame. He consoled me, counseling that, “If there’s anything my father has told me, it’s that this is a profession for long-distance runners. This is not the end of you. Just pick yourself up.” Good advice. The bureau found a place to hide me, far from live television, until my contract ran out: NBC Radio at the White House.

  Fortunately for me, John Palmer and Judy Woodruff, the White House correspondents, were taking turns doing weekend duty and wanted more time off. So the bosses figured out that I could go to the White House to file for NBC Radio during the week, and give John and Judy a break by doing television on weekends. I was in effect being banished from weekday Nightly News, the flagship broadcast. Wasn’t it a big step backward?

  Nightly News anchorman Roger Mudd advised me, “Get your foot in the door there. You’ll make something of it.”

  So that’s how I got to the White House—in disgrace, after I’d almost lost my job for blowing the Hinckley coverage, and through the back door of NBC Radio. After having been one of the most visible correspondents a year earlier, covering Three Mile Island and my energy beat, I was starting over. And not having covered Ronald Reagan’s rise to power, I didn’t have any sources inside the White House. Once again, I had to work my way up.

  Luckily, I had landed in the right place, working under two senior correspondents who, to this day, defy every stereotype about our cutthroat business. Judy Woodruff and John Palmer were two of a kind. Perhaps their characters were shaped by their similar backgrounds, both having come from small Southern towns. Judy grew up on army bases and in Augusta, Georgia; John in Kingsport, Tennessee. They were smart, successful, and famous. But they were also unspoiled by their status and willing to share the beat with a newcomer. They both became mentors and willing guides to the arcane practices of the White House beat. I was rescued, and my badly shattered confidence was gradually restored.

  In the fall of 1981, Judy Woodruff achieved a journalistic and personal milestone. On September 16, she worked a full day, filing a report for Nightly News. At 2:57 the next morning, she delivered Jeffrey Woodruff Hunt, the first child for her and her husband, then Wall Street Journal Washington bureau chief Al Hunt. Chris Wallace announced Jeffrey’s birthday a few hours later on the Today program, and John Chancellor showed video of the happy mother and child on that evening’s Nightly News. Judy had appeared on both broadcasts and given birth, all in fewer than twenty-four hours. Born with a spinal cord defect known as spina bifida, Jeffrey quickly became very important to me, as have his parents. Five years later, Jeffrey was joined by Benjamin, and then by the “baby” of the family, Lauren, my godchild, who came from Korea. In many ways, they and my nieces and nephew have become surrogates for the children I never had.

  At Lauren’s christening, her father joked
that every baby should have a Jewish godmother. I had no idea what my responsibilities were in terms of religious instruction, but somehow I felt I’d figure them out. The Woodruff-Hunt family welcomed me and my husband, Alan Greenspan, to celebrate with them every Christmas morning, creating new traditions that bind our families together through both wonderful times and tragedies. I’ve learned a lot about love and determination from all the Hunts as they’ve rallied around Jeffrey, who is in many ways the most courageous person I’ve ever known. At sixteen, a bright and physically active teenager, he suffered a terrible medical accident during what should have been routine surgery. With remarkable persistence and determination, he has struggled to rebuild his life.

  Judy and Al, and John Palmer’s wife, Nancy, along with their three girls, made covering Ronald Reagan a family affair. On extended presidential vacations, married correspondents often brought along the kids, and saved on hotel bills by renting houses in Santa Barbara ( Jeffrey’s debut on the White House beat was a trip to Barbados in 1982, where he distinguished himself as a teething seven-month-old by eating his press pass).

  But the other effect of Jeffrey’s birth, and Judy’s maternity leave, was that I got to go to my first presidential news conference. Early in his administration, Ronald Reagan held his news conferences in the afternoon, when his staff thought he could do the least harm because television audiences were small. But the strategy backfired. When he made mistakes, there was no time to correct them: the reports on the network evening newscasts, which in the days before cable dominated the political agenda, could be devastating.