The only two NBC reporters permitted to have fun on New Year’s Eve were Fred Francis and me. Fred had sweet-talked the producers into assigning him to Las Vegas, one of his favorite haunts. And after doing live reports all morning for the Today show from Washington’s Mall, I had been given the night off to attend the president’s black-tie White House Millennium Dinner.
At the White House that New Year’s Eve, as one century was ending and another beginning, the Clintons had assembled stars from every profession, along with a large contingent of campaign contributors. Democratic chairman Terry McAuliffe bragged that they raised $16 million that night. The lure was the venue and a spectacular and eclectic guest list: among others, Bono, Sid Caesar, Muhammad Ali, Robert De Niro, Mary Tyler Moore, Jack Nicholson, Will Smith, and Elizabeth Taylor, who arrived last, wearing enormous diamonds, and walking—with difficulty and two escorts—to her seat. For the first time in my memory, the unusually large guest list of 360 was seated in two rooms, the East Room and the State Dining Room, both festooned with white orchids and roses topping silver velvet tablecloths. The president alternated between the rooms as the chefs served beluga caviar, lobster, foie gras, rack of lamb, and a dessert of chocolate and champagne. Addressing the assemblage, including artists, musicians, actors, and political contributors, Bill Clinton raised his glass and said, “I cannot help but think how different America is, how different history is, and how much better, because those of you in this room and those you represent were able to imagine, to invent, to inspire.”
Guests were told they could bring their children, who ate in a tent in the Rose Garden. Then they were able to join six hundred others for fireworks and a performance in front of the Lincoln Memorial on the Mall, produced by George Stevens, Jr. Die-hard partygoers were invited back to the White House for breakfast and dancing till dawn. There were so many celebrities, the stars themselves were craning their necks to see which pop icons might be seated at the next table. As a lapsed violinist, I was especially delighted to find myself sitting with Pinchas Zukerman.
While we were partying, national security officials were congratulating themselves on having thwarted a deadly plot. Two weeks before, they had arrested an Algerian man, Ahmed Ressam, completely by chance. An alert customs inspector had stopped him at Port Angeles, Washington, north of Seattle, after he arrived on a ferry from Canada with more than 130 pounds of bomb-making chemicals and four homemade detonators hidden in the trunk of his car. He admitted being part of a conspiracy to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. Officials soon learned that the millennium plot was indeed part of a much larger operation. The United States announced it had broken up terror cells in eight countries, with the help of Jordanian intelligence, almost certainly preventing numerous attacks.
In a foreshadowing of changes that have now become routine, U.S. airports tightened security after Ressam’s arrest, a dramatic response to what officials called a “heightened terror threat.” But while we were eating foie gras at the White House, Tawfiq bin Attash, aka Khallad, one of the planners of the embassy bombings and a key operative in the group already plotting 9/11, flew from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Bangkok, Thailand and on to Hong Kong. According to intelligence sources and the 9/11 Commission Report, he carried a box cutter in his toilet kit to test airport security. At the Bangkok airport, screeners opened the kit but let him continue. Along with Khallad and others, on January 5,2000, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar arrived in Kuala Lumpur for an al Qaeda summit. They were already discussing a bold plan to hijack airliners and crash them into American targets. Two years later, they flew American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon.
The CIA knew about the Kuala Lumpur meeting, but not its significance. Intelligence was scanty, and follow-up minimal. The news media were similarly unfocused. After all the warnings about millennium terror proved unfounded, there was a sense that the intelligence community had been crying wolf. Like most Washington reporters, my attention was rapidly shifting to the upcoming election. I was also handed an entirely new professional challenge. NBC wanted me to anchor a nightly broadcast on our cable station, MSNBC, a show they wanted to advertise as NBC’s “political newscast of record” for the campaign year. It was a great opportunity, but I worried about losing my traction on the foreign policy beat, and disappearing from Nightly News. The cable show would air every night at six p.m. Nightly News went on at six-thirty p.m. I would be facing almost simultaneous deadlines on broadcast and cable, often on entirely different stories.
Facing a career crossroads, I sought out Tom Brokaw. His advice was to seize the opportunity. He assured me that he and the producers would help me overcome the logistics, and that the chance to do a political show was worth it. As it turned out, he, and David Doss, our executive producer at the time, kept that commitment. Although in the past there had been a caste system at the network, with Nightly News obligations taking precedence over everything else, everyone on Tom’s team, especially our foreign editor, ML Flynn, jumped through hoops to help me make my cable deadlines. It made me realize that the fledgling cable news operation was becoming a critical part of our company’s long-term strategy. The challenges of functioning in two worlds simultaneously remained daunting.
At the time, though, I never even considered whether adding a second full-time job on top of covering foreign policy and politics for Nightly News could overload my personal system. Alan and I saw it as an opportunity and a challenge, not a burden. We didn’t discuss how it might affect our free time because it never occurred to either of us that there was a choice. When offered a chance to do something new, the only conceivable answer was yes. Once again, as I had my entire working life, I leaped off a cliff. But despite the best of intentions, the cable network had no one to catch me.
The show was initially called Decision 2000, but within a few weeks became The Mitchell Report. It had no format, no executive producer, a tiny budget, and a remote control room in New Jersey. In some ways, nothing had changed since Summer Sunday, sixteen years earlier, when NBC let Linda Ellerbee and me play at doing television. Initially, the idea was to feature NBC political correspondents and our colleagues from Newsweek and The Washington Post in a reporter’s roundtable. Quickly, the show morphed into an interview program, with top-flight political guests.
On the first broadcast, we covered a debate between Al Gore and Bill Bradley, debriefed reporters Claire Shipman, Jonathan Alter, and Dan Balz, interviewed Andrew Cuomo about a potential New York Senate race between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, and did a cross talk with Tim Russert. We had so many people appearing in boxes, it looked like Hollywood Squares.
We did improve, and became a cable destination for political junkies. NBC let us take the show on the road to all the primary states and the debates. In New Hampshire, we latched on to John McCain’s “Straight Talk Express,” which had captured the imagination of the political press corps. And I caught up with George W. Bush, whom I hadn’t covered since his days as campaign “enforcer,” when he was riding herd on his father’s more laid-back campaign managers.
Doing the show was fun, but best of all was being back in New Hampshire, where politics is the home-team sport. One morning, I chased down Al and Tipper Gore in a doughnut shop so we could open our show with an exclusive interview. Running around to all of these events drove my producers crazy. They were just trying to put on a talk show. But I wanted to get out in the field and break some news. No matter how unbalanced the early primaries and caucuses are, with states like Iowa and New Hampshire carrying so much weight, that kind of “retail,” front-porch politics where candidates have to sell themselves door-to-door is as good as it gets for political reporters. It’s the only time of the campaign year when candidates mix with small groups of people, and advertisements are less important than first impressions, face-to-face. In a presidential campaign year, nothing beats New Hampshire in January.
We also had a few “firsts.” In July, the biggest unknowns were each candidate
’s running mates. NBC had a proud tradition of breaking vice presidential running mate stories: in 1980, Chris Wallace was the first to report that Ronald Reagan had chosen George Herbert Walker Bush. In 1988, I had broken the Quayle story. Now Claire Shipman broke the news that Joe Lieberman would run with Al Gore. And on July 21, while we were also busy covering the president’s Camp David summit with Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat, we got the first word from Lisa Myers that Dick Cheney would be on the ticket with George W. Bush.
Lisa’s scoop is a tale of smart reporting, as well as missed opportunities. In March of 2000, Bush had asked Cheney, who was vetting possible running mates for Bush, whether he would put himself on the list. Cheney, who had become the chief executive of Halliburton, the energy services giant, declined, saying he was enjoying the private sector after all those years in government. But on July 3, over the holiday weekend, Cheney visited Bush at his ranch in Crawford, and Bush asked again. This time, Cheney said he’d think about it.
The next night, the Cheneys were back in Washington and came to a Fourth of July party Alan and I give each year for Federal Reserve families and our other friends. It’s a Fed tradition established by Alan’s predecessor, Paul Volcker. Staff and other friends bring their children for a picnic supper, and after dinner we have the greatest entertainment possible, courtesy of the city—fireworks, directly across the Mall from the Fed’s rooftop balcony.
That year, the Fed’s dining room was buzzing with speculation about the campaign and the vice presidential contenders. The rumor mill had speculation about Governors Tom Ridge, George Pataki, and Frank Keating; Senators John McCain and Chuck Hagel; even former senator John Danforth. Cheney, the only person with real information, was like catnip for a room full of reporters. I didn’t want to impose on our friendship to ask any “work” questions, but I noticed that just about every other reporter was sidling up to him.
The next day, Republican pollster Bob Teeter, an old friend and coleader of NBC’s polling team, was on my show to talk about vice presidential choices. Chatting afterward, we talked about how Cheney was better qualified than any of the others on the list. Teeter, who had been friends with Cheney since the Ford White House, may have been sending me a signal, but I didn’t pick up on it.
The following week, on July 18, our Senate producer Roberta Hornig was told that Cheney was going to be Bush’s running mate. She passed the information on to Lisa Myers, who started digging for confirmation from the Bush camp. It took three days, but the tip-off was when Lisa reached the Teton County clerk in Jackson, Wyoming, and discovered that Cheney, then a resident of Dallas, where Halliburton was headquartered, switched his registration to vote in Wyoming. The only possible motive would be to avoid constitutional problems that would arise if both the presidential and vice presidential candidates came from the same state of Texas.
As soon as Lisa got word of Cheney’s change in registration, she came on my show to break the story. The newspapers picked it up the next day, putting Cheney at the top of the list of contenders, but there were still boomlets for McCain, Danforth, and others. The weekend talk shows were filled with false leads. For instance, on Monday, Dan Rather reported on CBS Radio that the president and his father were in heavy negotiations with Colin Powell to take the job. None of the rumors was true. On Tuesday morning, Bush called Cheney and made the offer, which was instantly accepted.
Most of the pundits praised Bush’s choice. Cheney was considered a seasoned statesman, with foreign policy experience, and it was thought that George W. could use a little seasoning.
A week later, we took the show to the Republican convention in Philadelphia. I anchored The Mitchell Report on MSNBC and worked as a floor correspondent, doing interviews during our prime-time coverage on NBC. Over the years, as the political parties changed their primary and caucus schedules to pick their nominees by late winter or early spring, modern conventions lost their nominating function. They have become extended televised advertisements for the political parties, uninterrupted by any controversy, even a contentious platform issue. Occasionally, though, developments do take us by surprise, such as Pat Buchanan’s red-meat speech in 1992 that divided the Republicans and sharpened the divisions between the two parties, or John Kerry’s decision in 2004 to silence all attacks against George Bush and focus almost entirely on his Vietnam record. But for the most part, conventions have become entirely predictable. Floor fights over party rules or policies are history. The diminished network coverage reflects that new reality.
With the networks now devoting only one hour a night to broadcast coverage, there is much less airtime to report from the floor. That greatly increases the pressure to compete for A-list guests. Booking “gets,” to use the slang of our profession, is my least favorite thing about modern convention coverage. None of us likes it, because often you plead with a cabinet secretary or governor to appear at a precise time, then search for that politician among thousands of people milling about on the convention floor, only to discover that the producers have changed their plans for that segment. When you’re standing next to a governor whom you’ve begged for a live interview and the live shot is canceled, it is painful.
On the second night, the convention paid tribute to Gerald Ford. Having just visited the Fords that June in Colorado, I was able to get an exclusive interview with the former president. But as soon as we went on the air, it was apparent that something was wrong. His speech was slurred, and he explained that he’d been suffering from a sinus infection and was taking antibiotics. I was concerned enough to call Alan from my cell phone as soon as the interview was over. He was also worried, having noticed the same problem with the former president’s speech.
Still, the eighty-seven-year-old former president stayed in his VIP box until eleven that night, when the session ended. I waved goodbye as he and Mrs. Ford walked out slowly together, declining a staff offer of a golf cart to ease their way. When I got back to my hotel at one a.m., I heard a radio bulletin that Jerry Ford had been taken to the emergency room of a local hospital. Despite my concerns for him, I felt I had to do my job. Calling in to MSNBC, I did a phone report about my impressions of his health earlier that evening. Then I ran to the hospital.
By the time I got there, Ford had already been treated and released. As he headed back to his hotel, he pointed to his head to indicate that he thought it was a minor problem. The doctor had given him medicine to clear his ears so he could fly back to Colorado later in the day.
The next morning I had to report President Ford’s condition for the Today program, appearing from a camera location outside his hotel on Rittenhouse Square. It was the same park I’d walked through thirty-two years earlier as a kid reporter covering the night beat for KYW. Suddenly, there was a commotion behind me. The former president was heading back to the hospital. This time, they got the diagnosis right. He had suffered two small strokes.
He was all right, but Betty was understandably distressed. She agreed to do an interview with me to talk about her husband’s condition and to reassure people that he was going to recover fully. He had, up until that point, been in remarkably good health, with the exception of two knee replacements. I’d watched his daily routine of swimming laps at their home in Beaver Creek. He also still played nine holes of golf on Colorado’s steep courses. And both Fords strongly resisted suggestions that Colorado’s thinly oxygenated mountain air put them at risk. But they also knew that the effort of getting to Philadelphia had been too much for them, and that after a lifetime in politics, this would be their last Republican convention.
During the convention, other advisors who later became major players in George Bush’s administration had big parts to play. I interviewed Condoleezza Rice, who was tutoring Bush on foreign policy. She stressed the “compassionate” side of his conservatism, and promised that, if elected, he would make sure the administration was more representative of America. In contrast to Rice, Colin Powell delivered a provocative speech, which included an endorsem
ent of affirmative action, a hot-button issue. He scolded the delegates, saying, “We must understand the cynicism that exists in the black community, the kind of cynicism that is created when, for example, some in our party miss no opportunity to roundly and loudly condemn affirmative action that helped a few thousand black kids get an education, but you hardly hear a whimper when it’s affirmative action for lobbyists who load our federal tax code with preferences for special interests. It doesn’t work! It doesn’t work. You can’t make that case.”
As Powell spoke, I could hear a rumble from the delegates. They were actually jeering him—he, a war hero, and easily the most popular Republican in America. This was a man who was too liberal for his national party. It was an early sign of how out of sync the new secretary of state would later be with the neoconservatives in the White House and Pentagon. Powell has always defined himself as a Republican because of the party’s tougher stance on all things military. He is much more comfortable with the Republican vision of how a superpower behaves in the world than with a Democratic foreign policy. That led to difficult moments during the Clinton years, when Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At times, the general openly criticized some cabinet officials—particularly Madeleine Albright—who he thought were naïve on defense issues. But while Powell thought of himself as a Republican, he identified more with the moderate, internationalist policies of the first President Bush than with the tougher, more confrontational philosophy of the second Bush administration.
Powell was clearly the cabinet’s best-known figure and I anticipated that if Bush was elected, the new secretary of state would dominate the foreign policy team. That would mean that a Bush White House would, like Powell, be reluctant to use military force unless it was absolutely necessary, and then only with a broad coalition of allies. But most of us hadn’t paid enough attention to what Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and their circle of advisors had been saying during the years they were out of office about the importance of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Nor did we imagine that when policy disputes arose, Powell, although secretary of state, would be the odd man out.
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