Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

At NBC, the floor correspondents continued a long tradition of celebrated broadcasters from the 1960s and 1970s, most notably John Chancellor, who was carried out of the Republican convention in San Francisco in 1964 by party goons trying to restrict the movement of reporters. Chancellor’s memorable sign-off was “This is John Chancellor, somewhere in custody.” In Chicago, at the Democratic convention in 1968, Dan Rather of CBS was knocked down while covering the ejection of a Georgia delegate. Anchorman Walter Cronkite announced angrily, “I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs down there.” Careers were made—and broken—on convention performances. At the podium, positioned to grab the best “gets”—the big speakers—was a single “super” correspondent from each network, usually an anchor of a Sunday talk show or prime-time magazine. For us that year it was Connie Chung, glamorous and outgoing, the only woman known to wear stiletto heels on the convention floor, putting the rest of us, dressed for comfort in sneakers, to shame. In the booths, converted skyboxes high above the mayhem on the floor, sat the ultimate network stars: the anchors themselves.

  I was the most junior of the lot, still not a full-fledged floor reporter, assigned to the perimeter of the convention to float and “run and gun” wherever I was needed. But I was determined to crack this thing, and started dialing everyone I knew—repeatedly. I’d been calling people on the list of possible candidates, to see if they had received the call from Vice President Bush. Once we knew that Bush had notified the winner, and that the designated person was en route to New Orleans to be unveiled, I could eliminate those who hadn’t heard from him.

  One by one, I called those who hadn’t made the cut. By process of elimination, I was closing the circle when I finally reached someone who told me that the nominee was Quayle—the least likely, all of us had assumed, of any of the potential choices. I called the control room and got Tom Brokaw on the phone.

  I said, “It’s Quayle; it’s Quayle.”

  He replied, “Are you sure?”

  Because Tom would be putting his credibility on the line, and I had only a single source, rather than two, I offered to confide the identity of my source. The minute he heard who it was, Brokaw knew my information was gold-plated. He went on the air and announced that I had learned that George Bush had selected Dan Quayle to be his running mate.

  Quayle was little known to most of the country, and his introduction a few hours later was a disaster. On live television, the Republican ticket appeared at a riverside dock, before thousands of people. As Bob Woodward and David Broder of The Washington Post have reported, Quayle had been campaigning secretly for six months to be chosen. But when it happened, he was completely unprepared. Grabbing Bush, Quayle flapped his arms and shouted to the crowd, “Let’s go get ’em. All right? You got it?” The impression he created was of someone both overeager and not prepared for the national spotlight.

  Quayle’s lack of experience, and the controversy over how his family had helped him get into the National Guard, became the dominant story of the convention and the following weeks. During live interviews with each of the network anchormen the night after he was introduced, Quayle stumbled so badly about how he’d gotten into the National Guard during Vietnam that Baker woke him up at three a.m. to be grilled by Dick Darman and other White House aides. We all stayed up all night, calling Baker’s aides, trying to find out if Quayle was going to be yanked off the ticket. He toughed it out, but Baker assigned his most trusted political advisor, Stu Spencer, and other campaign veterans, to take charge of every move Quayle made for the duration of the campaign.

  Although Quayle had only himself to blame, he and his wife, Marilyn, never forgave Baker for the damaging way Quayle was introduced to the nation. It is true that Baker could barely conceal his lack of enthusiasm for Bush’s choice of running mate. At one point, he told reporters, “The issue is not who might have been the very best qualified to be president. The issue is getting someone who is extremely well qualified to be president and who might have some other attributes as well.” But the Quayles could hardly blame Baker for the young senator’s series of malaprops, or for walking into his opponent Lloyd Bentsen’s trap (“I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”) during their debate.

  My role in breaking the Quayle story helped people within the network realize I could be a player. The lesson was that, in a world where glamour counted for a lot, shoe leather and good reporting skills still mattered, too. Tom was very generous about making sure people knew that I should get the credit for the scoop. NBC even took out a print advertisement that mentioned me, headlined, NBC NEWS CLOBBERED ITS COMPETITORS, a quote lifted from a story written by Tom Shales of The Washington Post. Suddenly I was better known in campaign circles and was chosen to participate in the second, and what was to be the last, of the Bush-Dukakis debates.

  The debates did not lend themselves to intensive questioning. Over the years, they’d devolved into set pieces, formatted by negotiators for the candidates, especially in the case of an incumbent president. Jim Baker had played this role so successfully that although Michael Dukakis wanted four debates, the Republicans would only agree to two, and only accepted the second debate a few days before it was to take place. Because of Baker’s delaying tactics, the second, and final Bush-Dukakis debate was held only 26 days before the election, on October 13. Neither the members of the press nor the Democratic challenger had much time to prepare, which is exactly what the White House strategists wanted.

  We flew to California the day before the debate, which was to take place on the UCLA campus. The panel consisted of Ann Compton of ABC, Margaret Warner, then of Newsweek, and me, with CNN’s Bernard Shaw as moderator. Once in L.A., I huddled with Bill Wheatley, then the executive producer of Nightly News, and Tim Russert to brainstorm about possible questions. Tim had not yet moved to Washington to take over the NBC bureau or his position as moderator of Meet the Press, but was an NBC executive, and from his years working for Mario Cuomo and Pat Moynihan, had a keen sense of how to frame questions that left politicians no wiggle room.

  We knew that under the limited format negotiated by Jim Baker, each panelist would get only six questions and a few follow-ups. I wanted to probe their knowledge of the budget deficit and explore their priorities for strategic defenses: very high-minded, but, Tim warned, not at all sexy. I should have listened to Tim.

  The morning of the debate, we panelists met at the hotel for breakfast. The rules were so restrictive that, as moderator, Bernie Shaw was only going to be able to ask one question of each candidate. He was determined to have an impact. To avoid duplication under pressure, we compared notes. Ann wanted to ask Bush about White House ethics scandals and Dukakis about entitlement cuts. Margaret wanted to question Bush about abortion. I was still focused on war and peace, and deficits.

  What was Bernie, the sole man in the group, planning? He had decided to ask Michael Dukakis whether, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, he would favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer, changing his long-held opposition to capital punishment. Ann, Margaret, and I were horrified. Politely we tried to suggest that such an emotionally laden question was a bit too tabloid, or unfair, or worse. But Bernie was adamant.

  That night, in the glare of the Hollywood lights, the candidates arrived on the red-carpeted stage. Sitting in a row behind a desk, the rest of us watched tensely as Bernie opened the debate by dropping his bomb of a question on Dukakis. In the control room, the director and producers looked for a flash of spontaneity in the candidate’s eyes, but found none. Without flinching, the Democratic candidate for president repeated his stock answer on the death penalty, that “there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime,” expressing no emotion or outrage at the suggestion of his own wife as victim in Bernie’s hypothetical scenario.

  The election was over. Perhaps imitating the preternaturally calm behavior of the candidate, those of us on the stage behaved as though nothing had happened, and
continued with our prepared questions. Ann Compton tried to shake the candidates out of their memorized answers by asking whether, in the midst of this brutally negative campaign, there was anything nice they could say about each other. She got an anodyne response about how they each came from good families. I asked the vice president to name three new weapons systems that he would cut from the budget. He said, “If I knew of three new weapons systems that I thought were purely waste, and weren’t protected by the Congress, they wouldn’t be in the budget.” But he did suggest one—an $850 million heavy truck. Then, turning to Dukakis, I asked him to assume, for the sake of argument, that the economists who criticized his deficit reduction plan were correct. If so, and he had to increase taxes, which would be the least onerous?

  Dukakis asked, “May I disagree with the premise of your question?”

  Without flinching, I said, “For the sake of argument, no.”

  My friend Connie Chung later sent me a framed picture of myself asking the question with that caption. Afterward, in the spin room, I looked for anyone who could give me an objective assessment of what had transpired. No one was talking about anything except Bernie’s question and Dukakis’s answer. The next day, I flew home and was listening to David Letterman while getting ready for bed. In what can only be described as an out-of-body experience, I heard him ask the audience whether anyone had noticed that in the presidential debate, Andrea Mitchell had become a blond. (A visual illusion because of very bright lights hitting me from directly overhead, but a precursor of hair color changes to come.) Such was the impression I had created—instead of becoming known as a fearless interrogator of presidential candidates, I was a throwaway line on late-night TV.

  David Letterman and my debate performance notwithstanding, the campaign had given me more national visibility. I gained valuable experience on the road with Dukakis, as part of the entourage on the plane we nicknamed Sky Pig because of its miserable accommodations and messy network camera crews. The Quayle scoop didn’t hurt, and during other long stretches, while Chris Wallace was off on campaign duty, I was the lead White House correspondent covering Reagan. With Chris about to leave the network, I assumed I’d be promoted to the number one White House correspondent’s job for the incoming administration. The strongest signal was that the network had me covering the transition, trying to ferret out who would serve in the new cabinet. But for the first time in years, I planned to spend Thanksgiving with my own family rather than in a Santa Barbara hotel room monitoring Ronald Reagan’s celebration from afar.

  That was my expectation, until I was assigned to follow the president-elect to Kennebunkport for the Thanksgiving weekend. I complained that I’d more than earned a holiday of my own, but to no avail. The bureau chief at the time told me it was expected of me since I would soon be covering George Bush full-time. In other words, there was no choice in the matter.

  We arrived in Maine on a Wednesday afternoon, barely in time to file for Nightly News. We did a “soft” feature on how Kennebunkport was about to suffer what Plains, Georgia, and Santa Barbara, California, had experienced: the invasion of the White House press corps. The seaside Maine community was hardly prepared for the onslaught. Harbormaster Ross Anderson suggested that the Secret Service would soon prevent fishermen from working near the Bush home. The lobstermen were up in arms, ready to form a naval protest. The president-elect addressed a hastily convened town gathering, trying to reassure people that the life of their small village would not change.

  Neither the Bush team nor the reporters knew what to expect of each other in the early days of the new administration. The Bushes thought they could retain their privacy. The news media were determined to get advance notice of any presidential movement, as we had for decades. The first excursion was a disaster. The president-elect, doing his best imitation of “Harry Homemaker,” decided to go to the hardware store, unencumbered by anyone except the normal complement of Secret Service agents. Having been rebuffed when we tried to negotiate a pool arrangement whereby a small group of reporters would accompany Mr. Bush at all times, we all jumped into our cars in hot pursuit.

  The only problem was that Kennebunkport has one main road and many tourists; because we hadn’t had any warning of the hardware store excursion, we had to scramble to catch up. Inevitably, the town’s lone sheriff was going to find a miscreant breaking the speed limit and pulled me over for a full license check—only to discover that I was one of those dreaded reporters, speeding to catch up with the town’s most famous citizen.

  Clearly Barbara Bush was not happy about our invasion of her family’s idyllic vacation retreat along the Maine coast. But with typical graciousness, she opened the Bush home to the newly arrived press tribe for wine and cheese (purchased by the president-elect earlier that day at the Tipsy Mouse wine and cheese shop) and a tour of the house. At the president-elect’s insistence, the itinerary included a must-see stop in a restroom upstairs, from which we could view the ocean from the window above the “throne.” Still smarting from the reporters who had turned a simple trip to the hardware store into a New York–style traffic jam, George Bush nonetheless surrendered to the inevitable loss of privacy that comes with high office. Grudgingly, he accepted a designated pool arrangement and promised not to sneak out without us.

  The day after Thanksgiving, the incoming president faced a different kind of initiation: the quadrennial firestorm over Medicare cuts. Every chief executive confronts the same issue, and inevitably backs down. Once again, a leak about possible budget cuts in the sacrosanct entitlement program for the elderly forced a new White House into denial and full retreat. It was our lead story on Nightly News. As I went over my script, Bill Wheatley sent a computer message from headquarters in New York to call after I’d finished writing and recording my report for that evening’s broadcast. He wanted to discuss my new assignment. New assignment?

  I called immediately, of course, to ask what he meant. There was a long pause. Hadn’t anyone told me I was being sent to Capitol Hill? Once again, I’d been passed over for the top White House job. I was devastated, trembling with a mixture of disappointment and anger. I’d gone to Kennebunkport on false hopes, and now would be humiliated in front of my colleagues and the new administration. Why had I invested so much time getting to know the new players? Wheatley suggested I try to reach NBC News president Michael Gartner at his home in Iowa, where he had been a celebrated newspaper editor and still maintained his chief residence, for an official explanation.

  Somehow, I got through Nightly News before calling my good friend Al Hunt, who had covered the Senate before becoming Washington bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. Sobbing on the phone, I told Al and his wife, Judy Woodruff, that I was being transferred to the Hill. Al tried to sound sympathetic, but couldn’t help laughing at my naïveté. Congress, he said, would turn out to be the best place I’d ever work as a journalist. Patiently, he pointed out how isolated and controlled the White House environment had become for a serious reporter. Later, Tom Pettit, the wry, veteran NBC correspondent, also shared his advice after years of covering the Senate.

  “Sis,” he said, “you’ve died and gone to reporters’ heaven.”

  In Congress, he explained, I would find 535 politicians and countless aides, all eager to get on television. In those days, reporters had the freedom to roam the corridors, with few if any security restrictions. And we could cover anything we wanted: foreign policy debates, budget hearings, disputes over energy policy—the kind of substantive reporting I loved. All this without being interrupted by all those silly photo opportunities that made White House reporting so dependent on imagery and public relations. Still, that holiday weekend in Kennebunkport, I was miserable. A friend from The Washington Post coaxed me out to a lobster dinner. Tourists at the restaurant stopped at the table to ask for autographs. I kept bursting into tears.

  Why didn’t I get the job? At the time, it didn’t strike me that gender was an issue, because Lesley Stahl had covered the
White House during the Reagan years. But in fact, except for Judy Woodruff’s tenure during Jimmy Carter’s term, NBC had never had a successful run with a woman as a chief White House correspondent. And Judy had shared the beat with John Palmer. I’m not sure that the men running the networks thought that a woman could do the job by herself.

  It was considered the most authoritative beat among the correspondent jobs, and there was still a reluctance to assume that women could handle it. Frankly, I don’t think anyone questioned my reporting skills, but I think there could have been concerns about the image of a woman standing on the White House lawn, giving the nation the view from the Oval Office. And the beat was often used as a testing ground for future anchors, a different career track from mine. Except for a few women far more glamorous than I, the big anchor jobs have always been reserved for men. In any case, the assignment went instead to one of my pals, John Cochran, who had come back from being a foreign correspondent for NBC to cover the State Department. He was moved over to the White House beat and distinguished himself there over the next four years. We worked as a team on a wide range of stories, cementing our friendship. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t miserable during that Thanksgiving weekend in Kennebunkport—on my way to what I thought was a dead end on the Hill.

  It turned out to be the best decision that anyone had ever made for me. The years I spent on Capitol Hill were some of the most interesting and fulfilling of my career. Congress was a political circus, reality television with drama, scandal, and political reshuffling and realignment, much of which reverberates to this day. The savings and loan debacle, the Thomas-Hill hearings, the fall of Jim Wright and John Tower, the pillorying of Judge Robert Bork—all led directly to the rise of figures such as Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney, and the Republican Revolution.

  The first controversy erupted when the newly elected president nominated John Tower, the former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, to be secretary of defense. With his network of connections in the Senate, Tower seemed to me like a shoo-in for the post. I thought even the Democrats among his former colleagues would be compliant. After all, he had ruled his committee with an iron fist, instilling fear of God and pork, alternately, in all of them.