Part 2

Talking Back: ...to Presidents, Dictators, and Assorted Scoundrels
by Andrea Mitchell

(Page 2 of 5)

Soon I had my own program, an hour of chamber music airing every Tuesday night at eight. Pretentiously, I called it "Musica da Camera." The theme was the third movement of Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances for the Lute. I programmed my choices, back-timing each selection, and read introductions to fill the hour.

In those years, the station was entirely student operated, and we took ourselves very seriously. Nominally, we reported to the dean of students, but we were told the responsibility for protecting the FCC license that had been awarded to the university was entirely ours. The station had a four-person management team, by tradition and practice all male. Gradually I took on more and more responsibilities and by my second year became the first woman to break into their ranks by being selected to be program manager of the station. This could not have happened at the other Ivy League schools, even Cornell, which was coed; there was gender discrimination at Penn, but it was well known to have the fewest restrictions on women.

It was also a presidential election year, and as a member of a consortium of Ivy League radio stations, we participated in "network" coverage of election night. I had interviewed Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee, when he came to campus to give a campaign speech. He was patient and responsive, much to my surprise, given my youth and inexperience. Heady stuff. As a result, I was a logical choice to go to Rockefeller Center in New York City and take part in election-night coverage for the Ivy stations and their radio audiences from Dartmouth to Columbia. The only problem was that when I checked in at the old Roosevelt Hotel near Grand Central Terminal, I was preregistered as "Andrew" Mitchell and assigned a roommate: a guy from Yale. It took me a while to get my own room.

Once again, no one in charge had given any thought to the possibility that a woman would be involved. I have no idea how we organized the coverage, except that I was assigned to broadcast results of the Senate races. All they expected me to do was rip and read the wire "leads," without doing any original reporting. It was pretty basic, but gave me a taste of how to combine my love of politics and broadcasting. By the summer of my senior year, I'd found a part-time job at KYW, one of Philadelphia's top radio stations and one of the first in the country to broadcast "all news, all the time." It wasn't to report the news. I only got in the door because my mother had forced her daughters to learn typing and shorthand as fallback insurance against life's surprises, and the station needed a summer-relief secretary.

Owned by Westinghouse Broadcasting, KYW Newsradio dominated the market and had a sister television station that was an NBC affiliate. As graduation neared, I decided to apply to the management-training program Westinghouse ran for young college graduates. Getting accepted was the easy part the real challenge was persuading them to let me into the all-male newsroom. Instead, they tried to steer me toward jobs more traditionally held by women, in public relations or advertising, which didn't interest me at all. Finally, I told them I'd drop out of the management program if they'd give me an entry-level job in the newsroom for union wages, about fifty dollars a week.

With my Ivy League degree, I had talked my way into a job as a copyboy, which is what desk assistants were universally called in those days. I had to rip reams of wire reports spitting out from the old, clattering Teletype machines, then hang one copy on a nail in the wire room and distribute the others to the anchormen of each hour's newscast. It helped if you remembered which anchormen liked their coffee black and which took sugar and cream. Most of the men helped me learn the ropes. But some delighted in hazing me as the only woman in the newsroom. As best I could, I tried to deflect or ignore it.

To get interviews for their newscasts, I'd work the phones, calling locations to find someone I could interview when a story broke. In between, I'd edit and transcribe the "actualities" that's what we called sound bites from the interviews, and log incoming audio feeds from London and other Westinghouse bureaus.

They put me on the shift where they thought I could do the least harm, midnight to eight in the morning. Most of my friends were in graduate school, with more flexible hours. I felt isolated, especially because I had to try to sleep during the day. My social life was nonexistent. Working nights meant walking through the center of the city, crossing Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square, to get to my graveyard shift. More than once the police stopped me, until I explained that I was a night worker, not a lady of the night. Although the hours were lousy, they were perfect for an apprentice reporter. The city reflected the national turmoil over race and the Vietnam War, often exploding on my watch.

Socially, Philadelphia was still a fairly provincial city, its business community governed by the mores of the Main Line. Politically, it was a cauldron of ethnic rivalries, dominated by competing Irish and Italian constituencies. When it came to political power, blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights, and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist.

Sometimes, the opportunities were local crime stories, the bloodier the better for our audience. In 1967, the ambitious young district attorney, Republican Arlen Specter, who had developed the single-bullet theory of John F. Kennedy's assassination for the Warren Commission, was running for mayor. Specter was challenging the incumbent Democrat, James H. J. Tate. On the Saturday before the election, I was covering a Specter campaign rally on South Broad Street when the head of the homicide division, an aggressive prosecutor named Richard Sprague, wheeled up, jumped out of his car, and announced that a fugitive named Steven Weinstein had just been caught in Times Square.

Twenty-eight-year-old "Stevie" Weinstein, as the tabloid press called him, had run a tobacco shop near the Penn campus that had become a hangout for the college boys. The only problem was that one of the students had disappeared and later turned up in a trunk, floating in the Delaware River. A thirteen-state alarm was issued for the missing tobacconist. The lurid murder had become a campaign issue for the Democratic incumbent who accused his DA challenger of ignoring warnings about Weinstein's suspicious behavior. Now the murder suspect had been caught in Times Square, but much to the chagrin of the politically ambitious prosecutor, Weinstein was in the hands of the NYPD, beyond photo opportunity range for Specter until an extradition could be arranged from New York.

Without even finishing his speech, Specter jumped into a car with his aides and headed up the New Jersey Turnpike to handle the arraignment himself. I called my desk and was ordered to follow in hot pursuit. That's how I ended up in New York City, with barely a dime for a phone call, covering the booking of a murder suspect and trying to explain to nationally known correspondents like Homer Bigart of The New York Times why a simple arraignment was being argued by the district attorney of the City of Philadelphia. Adding to the "color" of the story, Weinstein rode back to Philadelphia in Specter's car in handcuffs, with a pipe clenched between his teeth.

For all of his grandstanding, Specter lost that election, although by only ten thousand votes. For me, it was a lively introduction to local politics. A year later, national politics were turned upside down by a dramatic announcement from the Oval Office. On Sunday evening, March 31, 1968, I was absentmindedly selecting tape cuts for upcoming newscasts as Lyndon Johnson addressed the nation in the aftermath of North Vietnam's Tet Offensive. Suddenly, the president shocked the world by saying that with America's future challenged at home and abroad, "I will not seek nor will I accept" the party's nomination for a second term. It was an abdication of power that few people even in Washington had anticipated. Suddenly, adrenaline flowing, I was running tape and copy into the studio for the anchorman who, with no advance notice, had to deliver an entire newscast on the surprise development. It was only the beginning of what became a crash course in covering breaking news.

Later that same week, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. I'd kept a tape of his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech on a shelf and scrambled to put together an obituary. Anticipating riots, Philadelphia's police commissioner, Frank Rizzo, declared a limited state of emergency and started shutting down the city's bars. The news director needed someone to cover what was happening in the streets, and I quickly volunteered. Grabbing a tape recorder, which in those days was an Ampex machine that weighed at least fifty pounds, I jumped into one of our "news wagons." It was painted red, white, and blue, with the logo all news, all the time bannered on both sides.

Feeling a little bit nervous, but not really scared, I drove to North Philadelphia, parked, and got out to interview people congregating on stoops and street corners. For the most part, they had poured from their walk-up apartments and the housing projects to share feelings of grief and outrage. Perhaps it was because of the partial curfew or the heavy police presence, but aside from some shattered storefronts, Philadelphia escaped the widespread violence that erupted in other American cities that night. Another factor that may have helped was the city's strong network of African-American civic leaders and ministers who worked hard to preserve the peace. Still, KYW repainted its mobile units soon afterward so that we could move around the neighborhoods more unobtrusively.

© 2005 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Andrea Mitchell has been chief foreign correspondent for NBC since 1994, reporting for broadcasts such as NBC Nightly News, Today, and Meet the Press. Previously she was NBC's chief White House correspondent and has reported on presidential politics since 1972.