Part 3

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

(Page 3 of 5)

Only two months later, on June 5, I was home watching the returns from the Democratic primary election in California when Bobby Kennedy was shot. In what seemed like an instant replay of the shock and horror of the King assassination, America had witnessed another political murder and lost another leader. Without wasting time to call in, I ran through Rittenhouse Square to the newsroom, trying to absorb the impact of this shattering murder. The country seemed to be spinning out of control, and I was torn between my own reactions of grief and what seemed an inappropriately ghoulish desire to be part of the action, looking for a local angle to add to the national story. Finding none, I repressed my personal feelings of horror and pitched in as the newsroom scrambled to cover the story. I was learning a basic lesson of journalism: how to keep my own emotions in check when reporting on a tragic event. That year, we had too much practice.

For comic relief, there was plenty of colorful local politics to keep us busy in those years. Even before Watergate made investigative reporting fashionable, a young journalist could make her name covering corruption in Philadelphia. There was certainly enough of it. District Attorney Specter, today the state's senior senator but at the time the city's only Republican-elected office holder, was always investigating somebody. There were special grand juries, lots of indictments, and enough delays so that no one noticed the lack of convictions. Most of the Democratic politicians could have stepped out of the pages of a Damon Runyon story. There were men like the rotund leader of the city's congressional delegation, William Barrett, who wore spats, had a Tang-colored toupee, and returned from Washington each night to hold court in his row house neighborhood, passing out patronage.

When Barrett died only two weeks before the April primary in 1976, party bosses dictated that he be renominated from the grave. Scrambling to explain why on our morning newscast, I reached the local political boss, state senator Buddy Cianfrani. Cianfrani, who was later convicted of bribery and jailed at the federal penitentiary in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, explained the scheme: they were telling people to vote for the dead congressman so the party could handpick his successor. Their choice to replace him would be a little-known state legislator named Ozzie Myers. Later, as a member of Congress, Ozzie achieved notoriety on an FBI video for intoning, to explain his demand of a bribe during the FBI's undercover Abscam sting, the immortal words: "Money talks in this business and bullshit walks." The investigation led to the conviction of six House members and one senator, Harrison Williams of New Jersey.

By then an NBC correspondent, I got the network to chopper me to the parking lot of Philadelphia's sports stadium, knowing it was only blocks from Ozzie's home in South Philadelphia. We got there so fast I was able to talk him and his wife into an exclusive interview before he lawyered up. In October 1980, Myers became the first House member to be expelled from Congress since 1861, when three representatives were ousted for supporting the Confederacy during the Civil War.

But of all these colorful characters, none dominated the city's politics like the police commissioner and future mayor, Frank Rizzo. Larger than life, he was known to his fans and foes alike as the Big Bambino. Alternately, some people called him the Cisco Kid, because he wore pearl-handled revolvers, one on each hip. The barrel-chested police chief was the former head of the vice squad, notorious in those days for his celebrated busts and his busty girlfriend, stripper Blaze Starr. (She had earlier had a featured role in the private lives of Louisiana governor Earl Long and President Kennedy.) Loyal to his friends, Rizzo ran roughshod over his enemies. As police commissioner, he had become famous for outrages like ordering a group of Black Panthers to line up, face a wall, and drop their pants so he could bring in the news photographers to shoot their humiliation.

For stunts like that, he was idolized in many of the city's white wards and feared by minorities. The city was divided along a simple fault line: either you loved Frank Rizzo, or you hated him. In a city of neighborhoods segregated by race, his combustible personality only deepened the divide.

Rizzo had always enjoyed a fawning press corps, which made me very uncomfortable. As captain and then commissioner, he had fed the newspapers his version of reality, and the leaks greased his climb to the top. His notion of how to handle the few women reporters he encountered was fairly primitive. At first, he tried to charm us. If that didn't work, he tried intimidation. My verbal duels with him were legendary. At one point, during an antiwar rally, he even had one of his top lieutenants warn me that the civil disobedience unit was doing surveillance on one of my relatives, then a student on the Penn campus. The not-very-subtle message was that I should back off in my coverage of the police. It was frightening, but probably also stiffened my resolve.

By the time Rizzo ran for mayor in 1971, I was covering politics for KYW, having graduated from the police and schools beats. Rizzo's Republican opponent was Thacher Longstreth, the tall, courtly head of the chamber of commerce and former city council member. A Princeton graduate who favored bow ties, Longstreth was a perfect foil for Rizzo the antithesis of the tough cop and urban legend he was opposing. The Republican civic leader might have carried the Main Line in suburban Philadelphia, but in a racially divided city, Rizzo embodied working class voters' resentments and aspirations. Although black Democratic voters defected, correctly reading Rizzo's law- and-order appeal as a coded racial message, the tough cop won with more than 53 percent of the vote.

The morning after he was elected, I interviewed the mayor-elect about his transition and, among other questions, asked whom he'd appoint to be his fire commissioner. To the shock of everyone listening, he laughed and said, "How about my brother?" He was serious, ignoring rules against nepotism to jump his kid brother several ranks and put him in the newly formed cabinet. It was a good hint of the way he planned to govern: headstrong, oblivious to ethical norms, and in a style entirely his own.

As a woman reporter among men, I knew that figuring out how to cover Rizzo as mayor was a special challenge. He was always ready with a cutting comment putting down women, but, par-adoxically, that may have helped me to be a better journalist. His barbs only inspired me to ask tougher questions. Not that Rizzo was unique in his patronizing attitude toward women.

James Tate, the man Rizzo was succeeding, was just as bad. At a farewell news conference with Tate, I asked about a major controversy, the city's failure to win international approval for an international bicentennial exposition. Tate said, "The one thing about not being mayor is I don't have to answer your questions any longer, little girl." He might as well have slapped my face. I was the top broadcast political reporter in town, and in an instant I felt like a ten-year-old who had just been dressed down by the teacher.

Rizzo took office and started remaking city government in his own image. KYW carried his news conferences live, and they soon became celebrated confrontations between the bullying mayor and the handful of reporters willing to take him on. On one occasion, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the police had shot an unarmed teenager in the back in West Philadelphia. The community was outraged. I called the mayor to see if he would agree to investigate the police. No, he said. "My men are right when they're right, and they're right when they're wrong and they're trying to be right."

The mayor called back a few minutes later to complain that his previous comments were off the record. No deals, I said, not after the fact. He was furious, and I was in trouble. After that, he was determined to make my life miserable.

Only years later did I learn from one of my early mentors, KYW's news director Fred Walters, that Rizzo had called at least once a week to try to get me fired. The complaints even went all the way up to the chairman of Westinghouse Broadcasting, Donald H. McGannon. Fred would tell the mayor to prove that I had been either inaccurate or unfair, and he would take action. Rizzo never produced the evidence and Fred never told me, he said, to avoid any "chilling effect" on my reporting.

I often wonder why I was either naïve or gutsy enough to confront Rizzo as I did. Six feet two inches tall and 250 pounds, he was tough, profane, powerful, and very intimidating. I found myself standing up to him almost as a matter of instinct, only afterward realizing that I was courting danger. At the same time, he charmed a lot of reporters, hiring some of the city's most experienced newsmen to become members of his cabinet. At one point he even suggested that I could be deputy managing director for housing. At fifty thousand dollars a year, it was a fortune compared to my starting salary of fifty dollars a week. But I knew my job was to be his adversary. It never occurred to me to accept.

The reporters who covered Rizzo worked in room 212, directly across from the mayor's office in City Hall, a baroque building that fills a large square around a central courtyard at the conjunction of Broad and Market streets, only blocks from the modest brick buildings where the Continental Congress wrote the Constitution. What would the Founders have thought of the way Frank Rizzo ran Philadelphia!

Our press room was filled with old desks and filing cabinets and reeked of cigar smoke, wafting from a side room that featured a nonstop pinochle game. Sometimes, they let me sit in and play a hand. I shared a corner of the room with a radio reporter from a competing station who kept a gun in his top drawer and occasionally brandished it to make a point. In this mix of men, some of whom actually wore porkpie hats, I was treated like a kid sister. It was an extended family, of sorts except when I politely declined the case of booze delivered to each reporter from the city council president on Christmas Eve. Journalistic ethics, I murmured self-consciously, trying not to be so much of a bluestocking that I would stand out among my more easygoing colleagues.

© 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.