Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  There were numerous instances where his staff felt he had stumbled in the give-and-take with reporters. The anchors would go on the air at six-thirty with headlines that for all intents and purposes said, “The president held a news conference today. Here are three reports on his six most alarming mistakes.” The Associated Press started running fact checks on his errors. He found the fuss extremely annoying, occasionally calling reporters himself to defend his accuracy. Once, he called Betty Cuniberti of the Los AngelesTimes to complain about reports that he had made six errors in a news conference in January of 1982, on topics ranging from the “marriage penalty” in the tax code to a social program in Arizona.

  “The truth was, I was right on five of six,” Reagan told Cuniberti on the phone. “And the one was a technicality.”

  He wasn’t right, but had persuaded himself he was.

  That fall, there was a long list of questions to ask the president, and few opportunities to ask them. Since his news conferences were rare, my job as the junior varsity NBC person assigned to cover the White House was to yell above the sound of the helicopter as the president arrived and departed. I was the “designated shouter.” That’s how Ronald Reagan had come to know me. Since he rarely met reporters in formal sessions, I had to entice him into responding to questions on the run.

  The day before the news conference, Sid Davis told me that there was an additional NBC seat, but it was in the rear row, wedged up against the camera tripods. It would be impossible to establish eye contact with the president, so to have any chance of being called on I’d have to do something to get his attention. Sid’s advice was to wear red; in a sea of gray-flannel-suited men, I’d stand out. I dressed in a blazing red jacket, and studied hard.

  Under the bright lights of the East Room, I watched from the cheap seats in the rear and sat as tall as I could so as to be visible to Reagan as he followed the time-honored protocol of calling first on Helen Thomas of UPI, followed by her counterpart from the Associated Press. Then, before singling out any of the television or print superstars in the front-row seats, he tilted his head to the side in his trademark fashion and said, “Now, Andrea, what is it you’ve been trying so hard to ask me?”

  Had I been jumping up and down or shouting from the rear of the room? my mother asked later. What could the president possibly have meant? The explanation says a lot about Reagan’s basic kindness. He was, above all else, a gentleman, and as he got on or off his helicopter heading to or returning from Camp David, he’d been walking by me as I shouted questions. He knew his handlers didn’t want him to stop, but at his core, ignoring me conflicted with his code of behavior. It was bad manners. Even though all of us were shouting, he felt he was being rude. So two days before the news conference, when the staff began drilling him with test questions and answers, he had told them he wanted to call on “that nice woman who kept trying to ask a question.”

  Reagan used to practice in the White House amphitheater for these sessions, rare as they were. Aides would sit in, sometimes with name tags identifying them as Sam Donaldson, Judy Woodruff, John Palmer, or Lesley Stahl, the lead network correspondents of the day. He was told that the tougher questioners would be on one side, the easier on another. If he got into trouble, he was to call on one of the more oddball members of the press corps, such as Sarah Mc-Clendon, a colorful former member of the Women’s Army Corps during World War II, who represented her own news service and berated successive presidents for being unfair to the farmers of her native west Texas and to veterans in general. Or Lester Kinsolving, an ordained minister and iconoclastic radio personality who could be counted on to ask something so outrageous it would embarrass the members of the press corps more than the president. In any case, the harassing questions would make viewers feel sympathetic to the chief executive and he’d be off the hook. The news conferences were in fact highly choreographed. The press secretary and his staff assigned seats by rank and, sometimes, by whether or not a correspondent was in good standing with the West Wing.

  On this occasion, in the pre–news conference drill, the staff showed him a picture book with a lot of “nice women” correspondents: Ann Compton of ABC; Ann Devroy, then of Gannett and later a star at The Washington Post until her death from cancer in 1997. No, he kept saying, until he spotted my press pass photo and said, “That’s the one I want to call on.”

  “No, you don’t,” Mike Deaver, White House chief of staff, responded, according to another Reagan aide. Even at that early stage, my reputation as an aggressive questioner was well established with the staff.

  Fortunately, at that first news conference, I was prepared to ask the president about a new missile system under study at the Pentagon. He deferred to his defense secretary. It was an important lesson: White House correspondents always had to be ready. If I’d thought about it, questioning the president of the United States might have been intimidating. But I had developed a healthy skepticism about what any politician claimed to be the truth. Was that the result of going to school in the sixties, being an outsider in a man’s profession, or just being feisty by nature? Or did it grow out of a sense of mission, sincere if sometimes misplaced, that made me one of the more annoying characters to those in charge of the unruly White House press room?

  Looking back, I see that my pushiness may also have been tied to the fact that after being ousted from Nightly News, I was fighting my way back to network respectability. Ever the best of colleagues, Judy Woodruff and John Palmer conspired to find opportunities for me to show my stuff. Most memorably, they came up with the idea of shooting a story on how White House advance men and the Secret Service would all but invade a small Caribbean island—Barbados—to prepare for a presidential vacation trip.

  It was Easter 1982, and the Reagans had decided to visit one of their glamorous Hollywood friends, Claudette Colbert, at her Barbados retreat. Judy or John suggested that I go several days earlier with one of the network’s best cameramen, to portray the backstory behind the visit. To the surprise of all of us, the New York producers bought the proposal. From a creative perspective, nothing could have been further from the simple one-minute radio spots I was cranking out each day than producing three and a half minutes on how a sleepy island reacts when suddenly subjected to all the security requirements of the modern presidency. The story had to be very visual, and somewhat humorous. My cameraman and I started looking for telling moments as soon as we arrived.

  On the second day, good fortune struck. We heard that the giant military cargo jets were about to arrive at the airport, ferrying in equipment for the visit. Scrambling to find a vantage point, we positioned ourselves on a hillside with a wide-eyed group of local children sitting on overturned buckets in the foreground, looking down on the runway—just as two enormous cargo jets thundered to a stop and lowered their ramplike doors, disgorging the president’s armored limousine, gold seal glittering in the tropical sun, accompanied on either side by a phalanx of dark-suited Secret Service agents marching down the ramp. We had our opening scene.

  What followed was even better: a trial run of the motorcade through the town’s fishing village, with people wildly cheering the limo and its follow cars, not realizing it was a rehearsal rather than the real thing. Those wonderful pictures helped tell a story: streets being washed, traffic lines being painted, all in preparation for a head of state who would then spend the rest of the holiday weekend in complete seclusion at Claudette Colbert’s seaside retreat—and all at considerable local expense.

  Barbados was dressing up because company was coming. We spent days editing the piece, marrying the cameraman’s beautifully evocative pictures to my narrative. With the luxury of time, and more than a little rum, we turned out a piece with just the right slightly ironic tone to close the broadcast the night Reagan finally arrived.

  What made the Barbados trip unusual for a White House correspondent was that it was a rare opportunity to get into the field and shoot a “picture” story, independent of the team of prod
ucers—from both the network and the White House—who accompany every trip. Usually every backdrop, every movement, was carefully controlled, stage-managed like a Hollywood movie set. As Reagan, just before leaving office, told David Brinkley, when David asked if anything he’d learned as an actor had been of use to him in the presidency, “There have been times in this office when I’ve wondered how you could do the job if you hadn’t been an actor.”

  For a time, the skill of the Reagan team at producing his events helped limit the political damage of the age factor. What those of us covering Reagan often couldn’t determine was whether the White House put so much effort into orchestrating his events in order to mask the fact that he was losing his grasp. He had never been a detail man, but occasionally, he seemed to be utterly disengaged, at times not even recognizing his own aides.

  Questions about his age and mental ability continued to dog Ronald Regan. Was it an early stage of Alzheimer’s? His doctors insist not. I’ve talked to former aides, friends, and family, and no one believes he had a medical problem in his first term. A few aides do acknowledge that they had suspicions about his alertness toward the end of his presidency. In any case, the staff knew better than to suggest an age problem. The first lady would have pounced on any hint that her husband was frail or deteriorating.

  The staff’s nervousness about any mention of Reagan’s age in news stories only increased after a disastrous 1982 trip to Europe, where the president fell asleep during an audience with the Pope. Nancy had warned about overscheduling her husband, and she’d been right. During that first European trip, he went from Versailles to Rome to Windsor Castle in one frantic day. Is it any wonder he was photographed dozing off with the Holy Father?

  So I was treading on very dangerous turf when, less than a month later, I tackled the age question head-on. On the Fourth of July in 1982, we were in California for the landing of one of the space shuttle missions. The White House had planned a grand, red-white-and-blue patriotic arrival ceremony at Edwards Air Force Base to give Republicans a boost in the hard-fought midterm elections. But a NASA whistle-blower told me that the shuttle was going to orbit the earth one additional time just so that the president could get an extra hour’s sleep. Given the fact that this was early in the space shuttle missions, when safe landings were not routine and at a time when the president was being scrutinized to determine whether he was really up to the job, it was clearly an explosive detail.

  The shuttle was to land on a Sunday during the holiday weekend. The entire press corps was moved from Santa Barbara to Edwards Air Force Base, accompanying the president. Bands played, balloons went up, and the space-craft glided to a perfect three-point landing. It was, for all intents and purposes, a campaign rally celebrating American technology, with five hundred thousand people watching the reentry. The last thing the White House wanted to see on that evening’s news was any reminder of the president’s age or, worse, any suggestion that they were putting the astronauts at risk to give Reagan extra nap time.

  I reported it on Nightly News. The White House never challenged the accuracy of the report, and it added to the lore about his age being a problem.

  Most important, from my perspective, Mike Deaver was furious with me because of the shuttle story. I was told that I was persona non grata at the White House. I had touched on one of the most sensitive issues for the president’s aides. It was a recurring question, one that became more exacerbated over time. Two years later, in his reelection bid, Reagan’s rambling and confused responses during the first televised encounter with Walter Mondale occasioned a great deal of commentary. The Wall Street Journal’s lead story the next day had the headline: Fitness Issue: Is Oldest U.S. President Now Showing His Age? Reagan Debate Performance Invites Open Speculation on His Ability to Serve. Later, after the second debate, the press corps jokingly referred to it as the president’s “going down the Pacific Coast Highway.” He had clearly lost his train of thought, although he scored points by quipping that he was not going to exploit his opponent’s “youth and inexperience.”

  At the time, Nancy blamed Deaver for failing to prepare the president properly for the debate. In truth, it probably was a combination of age and hearing loss, but since he was a relatively old candidate for reelection, the president’s every word and gesture were scrutinized intensely. Reagan’s staff spent a great deal of time trying to “manage” stories about the age issue by having the president appear only in the most controlled settings—hence Mike Deaver’s sensitivity to what I had reported about the shuttle rescheduling.

  At a recent gathering of former Reagan aides, I was reminiscing with one of his top White House advisors. Without prompting, he said, “Don’t forget how much trouble you got into for that story about the shuttle landing.” Twenty-two years later, I learned that it was even worse than I’d known at the time: the staff had been ordered not to give me access. No wonder my calls went unreturned, at least for a while. It just made me work even harder, trying to cultivate new sources to get around the problem.

  In the fall of 1982, decisions far beyond our NBC White House booth changed my world. We were on a campaign trip to New Jersey, where Reagan spoke at a rally for Congresswoman Millicent Fenwick (an elegant, outspoken septuagenarian and the role model for Lacey in “Doonesbury”). Halfway through the event, Judy Woodruff got a message to call the bureau chief right away. She was going to become a national correspondent for the Today program, and John would be the Today show’s news anchor in New York. Chris Wallace, my office mate at the bureau and a rising star at the network, would be replacing them as NBC’s new chief White House correspondent immediately. I would be his backup, doing the morning show and late-night duty.

  That night, we rode back to Washington on the press charter, trying to figure out how our lives would change. I struggled not to cry, realizing that I was losing my two closest NBC colleagues to other assignments. They had befriended me, mentored me, and protected me when I was at my lowest point at the network. And I didn’t know what to expect from Chris Wallace.

  Chris was charming and, at first, eager to let me help him figure out the rhythms of the place. The journalism he got right away: he was very smart and experienced at covering politics. What I failed to realize was my “proper” place as his subordinate. At times our personalities clashed, and neither of us knew how to smooth over the rough spots as we traveled around the world, often jet-lagged and for long stretches spending more time with each other than with our own families back home. On one particularly silly occasion, we got into a fierce argument over who would use the one NBC telephone in Guam to check in with the desk, much to the amusement of the rest of the press corps. Even thinking about it today embarrasses me. Eventually, we developed a healthy respect for each other’s talents, and I think Chris knew that I would never fail to help outrun or outgun the competition on his behalf. But by then, he was ready to move on to a bigger job at ABC, and ultimately to his own Sunday morning show on Fox News. I’m sorry we wasted a few years tripping over each other before we figured out that we could be friends.

  In the Reagan White House almost nothing was left to chance. A routine campaign event was artfully constructed to project a comforting image of an America that existed only in a Norman Rockwell painting. It was morning again in America, as the Reagan reelection slogan claimed, or at least it would be made to look that way. The deficit could be skyrocketing, the Cold War threatening, but Father Reagan was in the White House and all was right with the world. The stage-management of presidential events was most elaborate on trips abroad. The scenes come to mind as brightly imagined as a recolorized film: Reagan at the Great Wall of China; Reagan in Ballyporeen, Ireland, his family’s ancestral home, in early summer 1984; perhaps, most emblematically, Reagan—the last American leader of the Cold War—at the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea.

  I was the pool reporter representing the networks that day in November 1983. The White House was embroiled in a fight over the d
efense budget. Even Republicans like Senators Bob Dole and Pete Domenici, both deficit hawks, thought Reagan was spending too much. What better way to convey the need for a stronger defense against Communism than to stage an elaborate photo opportunity in Communism’s front yard, at the DMZ? We were brought to Guard Post Collier, a watch station overlooking the vast expanse of no-man’s-land that separates North from South. The only interruption on the horizon was a small enclave the U.S. called Propaganda Village, a completely fake town with giant loudspeakers blaring nonstop messages to harangue our soldiers.

  Since I was the only network correspondent, my crew and I were brought in to the watch station before the president in order to shoot his arrival. The advance men had thought of everything; unable to wire the remote location for camera lights, they had measured the angle of the sun the day before so as to mark the exact spot where the president’s face would best be illuminated in natural light. Reagan arrived dressed for the part in an olive green army jacket, the better to convey military strength. He climbed onto the parapet, pausing to look out at the frontier of North Korea, one of the last bastions of Communism, a country still technically at war with the United States despite an armistice. The only problem was that the president didn’t stand on his mark.

  Considering his previous profession, that was surprising. To save the moment from missing pure White House perfection, Dave Fischer, Reagan’s “body” man, or personal assistant and closest aide (the part of Charlie Young on The West Wing), crawled on his hands and knees, below the angle of the cameras, tugged on the president’s jacket, and stage-whispered, “Sir, you’re not on your mark.” Without missing a beat, Reagan moved over, raised his field glasses, and looked out at Propaganda Village.

  Someone in the press corps gathered below, probably Sam Donaldson, shouted, “Mr. President, what do you see?”