Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  Reagan replied, “It looks like a Hollywood back lot, only less important.” As he addressed the troops, a choir of Korean orphans sang “Jesus Loves Me” to complete the tableau.

  Sometimes the carefully produced White House mini-movies didn’t come off exactly as staged, such as the midterm election trip to a hog farm in Iowa on a sweltering August day, designed to distract angry farmers at the nadir of the 1982 recession. Waiting for the president, we watched his stage managers try to pre-position an 800-pound hog, attempting to drag the poor animal out of its shed into the midday sun as Marine One approached overhead. The pig knew better, and stayed inside. (Have you ever stood in the mud and muck of a pig farm as a helicopter blew in for a landing? I don’t recommend it.)

  Or the visit to a bird sanctuary on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, in July 1984, when Reagan was being excoriated for his controversial environmental policies. When asked questions about the appointment of Anne McGill Burford to an advisory panel about oceans and the atmosphere after she’d been forced to resign for mismanaging the Environmental Protection Agency the year before, and the president did one of his famous duck-and-cover numbers as White House press secretary Larry Speakes literally stepped in front of him to block our questions.

  Standing behind Speakes, Reagan said, “My guardian says I can’t talk,” as the White House turned off the camera lights, leaving our photographers shooting in the dark.

  Their efforts to block our lens only made the moment more memorable, overshadowing their carefully planned “environmental” event—this, after the president had spent most of the day watching bald eagles from a fifty-foot observation tower at the sanctuary and lunching with local crab fishermen to show his interest in the harvest.

  On one highly choreographed White House trip overseas, one of the most important of Reagan’s presidency, I almost upset months of planning and superpower diplomacy. We were traveling on a Pan Am press charter, accompanying Ronald Reagan on his first trip to Communist China. Reagan was taking what we referred to as the slow boat to China: Nancy was not going to let him be jet-lagged when he landed in Beijing, so we had spent a weekend in California, followed by two days in Hawaii and a stopover in Guam. Finally, once the president’s body clock was considered sufficiently adjusted, our entire entourage left for China.

  I had prepared endlessly for this part of the trip. The idea of Reagan, a fervent anti-Communist, negotiating with the leaders he still called the Red Chinese, fascinated me. I read books by all the old China hands and talked to State Department experts and intelligence officials. Reagan might not know what he was about to encounter, but I sure was ready. The flight would last about eight hours. Shortly after arriving, I was assigned a live Today show report, featuring an interview we would tape in Beijing with National Security Advisor Robert “Bud” McFarlane.

  That morning, as we left Guam on our Pan Am 747, the flight attendants handed us orange juice and began serving breakfast right after liftoff. It was a routine they had perfected: the same crew flew with us on all our trips, and had become pals and traveling companions. Suddenly, I became flushed, weak-kneed and light-headed, and began itching uncontrollably. I was also having trouble breathing. A navy nurse on board quickly diagnosed it as anaphylaxis, a severe allergy to something I’d had to eat or drink. Nothing like this had ever happened to me; I was losing control of my body. The flight crew stretched me out on a plastic trash bag on the floor in the rear of the plane, where the camera crews and extra Secret Service agents usually sat, and radioed the president’s doctor on Air Force One, flying just ahead of us, for instructions.

  Cockpit to cockpit came the medical advice: epinephrine, which is basically adrenaline, and an antihistamine, Benadryl. My dear friend Steve Weisman of The New York Times put cold compresses on my head and kept telling me I’d be all right. At one point, I drifted off; later, the nurse monitoring my vital signs told me she thought my heart had, for a brief moment, stopped. Gradually, I came to, but on Air Force One the president’s foreign policy advisors were debating whether after months of delicate diplomatic negotiations to resolve every last detail of the president’s arrival in Beijing, they could risk offending the Chinese by taking a detour to drop me at a U.S. military hospital in Okinawa. After a huddle the White House correspondents voted to fly to Okinawa, letting the small group of reporters on Air Force One proceed and cover the president’s historic arrival in Beijing.

  I was embarrassed and desperate to stay with the trip. Minute by minute, the nurse on the press charter was passing my blood pressure numbers to the pilot so he could radio them to the doctor on Air Force One. They decided that if I stabilized by the halfway point, they’d let me continue. Only years later did one of Reagan’s cabinet officers confide that at their rump National Security Council meeting on that flight, one of the president’s top advisors had suggested I’d gotten sick on purpose, just to ruin their beautifully planned arrival ceremony.

  When we finally did get to Beijing, they carried me off the plane to an ambulance waiting on the tarmac. The ambulance reeked of diesel fumes and was so old it could have been used on Mao’s Long March. Determined to stay out of a Chinese hospital, I told them to take me to the press hotel. Three hours later, eyes still puffy from my allergic reaction, hair matted down from the cold, wet compresses, I somehow got through my Today show report and went to bed.

  As I recovered, I found China fascinating. Beijing was in the early stages of its fitful opening to the West. The streets were still jammed with bicycles, not automobiles. There were open sewage ditches along the sides of the roads, and toddlers wearing split pants squatted at will in the streets. We were a motley crew after all our travels. Much to our amazement, the Chinese were so egalitarian that they invited the entire press corps to the state dinner they hosted for the president in the Great Hall of the People. They treated us like members of the official delegation, seating us in the enormous hall alongside the president’s official party, and feting us with multiple courses of Chinese delicacies. Of course, we still had to leave early to go file our stories.

  Outside the capital, we went to Xian to see the ancient life-sized terra-cotta horses and soldiers. Embedded in the press corps was an elderly, white-haired widow, Naomi Nover, who had inherited a news service from her late husband and insisted on keeping his White House press pass entitling her to travel on foreign trips. While we covered the president, she shopped. Occasionally, the fruits of her excursions created obstacles for the rest of us. We’d be lining up to race to an event. Her shopping bags would block us from making a quick exit from a bus or plane. Naomi cut quite a figure for foreigners not acquainted with her history, especially the Chinese soldiers guarding the terra-cotta warriors. She wanted to get closer to the statues. They tried to hold her back. Finally, Gary Schuster, the correspondent for The Detroit News, had an inspiration that quickly resolved the standoff. He pulled a dollar bill out of his wallet and showed the picture of George Washington to the Chinese guard. Washington’s portrait did, in fact, bear an uncanny resemblance to Naomi. Figuring that she must be very important indeed if her face was on America’s currency, the guards quickly cleared the way.

  China was also a revelation to Ronald Reagan. A lifetime anti-Communist, he was greatly charmed by the warmth of his welcome and the ingenuity of the Chinese. In the mainland’s very Westernized city, Shanghai, the president was so intrigued by the lively students at Fudan University, he began moderating his rigid views of the world’s most populous country.

  By the time we had stopped overnight in Alaska, he was calling the Chinese the “so-called Communists,” and marveling at their incipient capitalism. As he had famously said when breaking a no-tax pledge as governor of California: “The sound you hear is the concrete cracking around my feet.” At age seventy-three, Ronald Reagan was once again confounding his critics by showing that he could adjust to change.

  But while traveling the globe conducting this very public diplomacy, Reagan was conc
ealing the darker side of his foreign policy, the secret operations being run out of the National Security Council. Already, Oliver North was organizing CIA missions in Central America against the Nicaraguan government, in violation of congressional prohibitions. There were tentative overtures to Iran, in the hopes of getting the Iranians to influence the release of American hostages being held in Beirut, Lebanon. Only a few years later, the two operations would come together with tragic consequences for the president’s second term.

  The summer of 1984 marked the fortieth anniversary of the Normandy invasion and my first trip to cover the commemoration of D-day. With American and Allied veterans gathered on a promontory over Omaha Beach, Ronald Reagan delivered one of the most poetic and powerful speeches of his presidency, written by his elegiac speechwriter, Peggy Noonan. As Reagan described the daunting feat of the Army Rangers who had climbed the cliffs in a hail of gunfire, he gazed at the aging veterans assembled in front of him and said, “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc.” The words were largely Peggy’s, but in Reagan’s unique way, he gave them life. In that one speech, the president re-created the past, celebrated the present, and memorialized the achievements of the D-day veterans for all future time.

  Occasionally, if rarely, there are moments to pause and reflect on the experience during a White House trip. Later that day, walking in the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, I thought about Reagan’s unforgettable speech, in that historic setting, and the response of the D-day survivors. I realized anew that journalism was for me more than a business or a profession. It was a way of living, of experiencing the world even as I instantly distanced myself from it, in order to recreate what I’d witnessed for the public. Often, it required making a conscious effort to stand back a step or two for better perspective. To a degree, everything I experienced immediately became vicarious. But there were risks. After spending so many years standing apart from events, sometimes I found myself seeing real life as though through a camera lens. I would instinctively visualize how something would appear on television, rather than feeling it as it happened. By creating an emotional barrier, you are able to cover horrific stories like 9/11, or the earthquake and tsunami that devastated so much of South Asia on the day after Christmas 2004. But it eventually robs you of the ability to respond as a human being. Or delays the reaction, as I had learned after my experiences in Jonestown, Guyana.

  Normandy was different. There we were memorializing events that were uniquely courageous and inspiring. I permitted myself to respond more personally. Nothing our generation had done could match the heroics of those who landed on that beach and scaled those cliffs while under fire. Ten years later, when we returned to Normandy with a new president, Bill Clinton, for the fiftieth anniversary of the invasion, Tom Brokaw found the central metaphor for this experience and for what made the men of Pointe du Hoc and their brethren “the Greatest Generation.”

  If Normandy in 1984 reaffirmed my love for the business, what happened next was like a cold shower. From France, we went to London to cover Reagan at the economic summit. I’d planned to stay on in England and drive to the Lake District with my sister, but as was so often the case, a family outing was interrupted by the requirements of my job.

  The front office in New York called. The entertainment division of NBC was giving the separate news division airtime to run a prime-time show for thirteen weeks. The only problem: the hole in the programming schedule that needed to be filled was on Sunday night, opposite the ratings monster 60 Minutes. All of the male anchors at NBC had turned down the opportunity, thank you very much. So our bosses came up with a novel alternative format that they boiled down to “live television, with two chicks and a truck.” They wanted me to coanchor with Linda Ellerbee, crisscrossing the country on a new satellite truck. In fact, the truck was the real star. As my witty colleague Linda later put it: “We were supposed to do ‘Gidget Goes Network.’”

  If that sounds sketchy, it was. The idea was to try out the news division’s latest toy, a satellite truck that enabled us to broadcast live from remote locations. They wanted to test its training wheels on the road, live from a different city each week. The rationale for the program? We’d make it up as we went along. The producers? NBC all-stars, but borrowed while still carrying out full-time duties on other, ongoing shows. The cast? That’s where it got really creative. Take the best writer in television news, Linda Ellerbee, a somewhat bawdy Texan more at home in an Austin bar than the U.S. Capitol (think Debra Winger in Urban Cowboy), and add a hyperactive White House correspondent who, when asked by a reporter, “What do you do to get rid of stress?” replied, “Have another cup of coffee!” And we had only two weeks to get ready for our first show, which NBC called Summer Sunday, U.S.A.

  To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, like the dog that walks on its hind legs, the wonder of the thing was just proving that we could do it at all. Linda would spend the week lining up the show with the producers (her extraordinary talent later led her to create her own company, Lucky Duck Productions, which has won numerous Emmy Awards for, among other programs, breakthrough children’s television). My job was to cover the president of the United States five days a week, fly to meet Linda and the crew on Friday night, write the script Saturday, rehearse Sunday, do the broadcast, and take the red-eye back to Washington to start the whole sequence all over again.

  For our first broadcast, we went live on the Mall in Washington during the July Fourth holiday weekend, thinking it would be safer to kick off the show close to home base. The theme was the nation’s independence and the challenge of immigration policy. For one segment, the idea was to contrast the easy entry to America for celebrities with the hard choices facing undocumented workers. I was supposed to interview two immigrants: a celebrity teenage Chinese tennis player and an undocumented worker from Mexico. Hu Na, the tennis player, was on location, on tour in Detroit. The Mexican woman, whom we called Rosa Maria to protect her identity, was sitting next to me.

  When I started asking Hu Na questions about her passage to America, she could only answer, “Please.” Thinking she had trouble hearing, I raised my voice and repeated myself—still nothing. Finally, I was practically screaming at the poor kid, who still responded with a blank stare. As it turned out, no one had checked to see if she spoke English. In desperation, I turned to the Mexican woman to my left, only to discover that she had gotten cold feet during my misadventure with Hu Na and, fearing exposure, had covered her face with a giant straw hat. As Ellerbee described the moment in her memoir And So It Goes, “Andrea went ahead with the interview, never mentioning the hat, never seeming to notice she was interviewing a hubcap.” The show was crashing around me, but I was trapped in my preparation, unable to acknowledge the absurdity of the moment. As one of the kinder producers said, “At least it’s only television.”

  There were twelve more shows. We broadcast from Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, New York, to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of Woodstock (in a downpour, which was fitting, considering the weather at the original rain-soaked event). One memorable Sunday I was told to interview United Nations ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick about our military conflicts in Central America. First we played a report from Fred Francis, in Nicaragua, about the CIA’s illegal mining of the harbors to covertly undermine the communist Sandinista government. I asked Kirkpatrick to comment, but in what was becoming a bad habit for my guests, she said nothing. The only way I knew she hadn’t had a stroke was that she swiveled in her chair, occasionally staring at her nails.

  Finally, I said, “Madame Ambassador, can you respond?”

  Kirkpatrick answered tersely, “I never respond to lies.”

  I never regained control of the interview. Somehow, I had managed to appear both mean and ineffectual at the same time. Even worse, I never got the answers I was seeking, and Kirkpatrick felt sandbagged. Afterward, even my parents told me that it looked as though I’d set her up. The president of NBC News “suggested” I write to Kirkpatrick and apologize. />
  And how did the truck do? For thirteen weeks of live programming, we had audio and video, but rarely both at the same time. Nor did we ever recover from our first, truly dreadful, review, unfortunately written by the dean of television critics, Tom Shales of The Washington Post. After that first show with Hu Na, Shales wrote, “This colossally pointless NBC show comes equipped with its own truck for fast getaways…. On the premiere Mitchell was cold and wooden; Jack Webb as ‘The D.I.’ was a veritable Smurf by comparison.”

  I learned important lessons that summer: If you think you can do two full-time jobs, people will expect you to do three. Don’t get wedded to scripts and TelePrompTers. Instead, make sure you listen to what your guests are saying, and improvise. And when disaster strikes, when traveling with an entourage that occasionally resembles a rock group on tour, it isn’t a good idea to be the only sober person in the room.

  Being on the road all that summer was exciting, but also very, very tough. Increasingly, NBC was dominating my life, personally and professionally. How much was choice, how much necessity? After almost a decade in the nation’s capital, I still didn’t have an answer to that question.

  When I first moved to Washington from Philadelphia, I was a bit lost. I’d left behind rich associations built in college and afterward during my apprenticeship as a journalist during the difficult Rizzo years. Then came my move to the network, with the deeply disturbing first posting abroad to Jonestown, followed by other professional setbacks on the Nightly News. I had survived it all, and grown, yet I was still unsure that I was indeed a long-distance runner capable of sustaining this career. I’m not sure I could have stuck it out without the friendship and support of people who showed me that Washington was not just a city of marble buildings and smoke-filled rooms and power brokers, but also a town full of people who do care about each other, in good times and bad.