Part 4

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

(Page 4 of 5)

In addition to the mayor's offices and city council chambers, City Hall housed the court of common pleas, the local criminal court. The corridors were lined with defendants awaiting trial, bail bondsmen, witnesses, lawyers, and other hustlers. The building was a quadrangle, with four wings each extending a city block long, the central core topped by the totemic statue of William Penn. The walls were a grimy tan. Restrooms could be found in each corner. Ratio of men's rooms to women's facilities: three to one. When Rizzo, known for his well-creased pants and spit-polished shoes, took over, walls were soon repainted white, with blue and gold trim. The woodwork in his formal reception room was oiled and buffed. Carpets were replaced. He even consulted me about the color scheme, perhaps the best indication of what he thought was the appropriate role for a woman reporter.

But clearly, the take-charge new mayor meant business. Unfortunately for the city's taxpayers, that often meant business for his cronies. Reporters started investigating juicy contracts, like the ones awarded for airport construction and the new sports stadium to companies with suspicious City Hall connections. The state launched an inquiry into police corruption. And the head of the Democratic Party, Peter J. Camiel, accused Rizzo of offering him a political bribe, a trade of city contracts for the right to name the next candidate for district attorney in the bathroom of the Bellevue Stratford Hotel, the same hotel where I later covered the first outbreak of Legionnaires' disease.

At the suggestion of an enterprising reporter, Zachary Stalberg of the Philadelphia Daily News, an afternoon tabloid, the two men agreed to take lie detector tests. As the city's former top law enforcement official was being strapped in, in full view of the press, he said, "I have great confidence in the polygraph. If this machine says a man lied, he lied."

The next day, the Daily News gleefully bannered the test results across its front page: rizzo lied, tests show. In fact, he had lied on six out of ten questions. The story was colorful enough to get picked up by The New York Times.

Rizzo was already known nationally as the hard-line former cop who was the only big-city Democratic mayor to support Richard Nixon for reelection. Locally, he was the politician who would tell a news conference, without blushing, "Andy Mitchell, I'm so tough I'm gonna make Attila the Hun look like a faggot." Calling me by my nickname was a liberty he took deliberately. Being familiar was a way of belittling and co-opting us at the same time. Rizzo's heroes were Nixon, Moshe Dayan, Frank Sinatra, and J. Edgar Hoover all tough guys. He held court at night in Palumbo's, a South Philadelphia Italian restaurant, but as soon as he was in office, he started building a stone family mansion in the tony WASP neighborhood of Chestnut Hill. Since there was no way that Rizzo could have afforded it on his public salary, the Daily News investigated and discovered that the mayor had accepted favors from contractors. Somehow, he got away with it.

On Wednesday, March 13, 1974, three years into his first term, what was left of his relationship with the press blew up when the mayor stormed out of a news conference that was being carried live on television and radio. According to an editorial in the Daily News, that day "Andrea Mitchell, KYW's soft-voiced but hard-nosed City Hall reporter, one of the best in the business, leads off the questioning. She asks the mayor about the issue that has the whole city talking, the police corruption report. Frank Rizzo, the man who pledged to run his administration in a fishbowl, passes. He'll only answer questions on parking at the airport, he tells reporters." It had been Rizzo's first news conference in four months, and it lasted all of five minutes.

There was another side of Rizzo, the one that made him such a successful politician. He had flair, an unstoppable ego, and a ribald sense of humor. When he rushed to the scene of a crime from a black-tie dinner one night, news photographers captured him in evening clothes, a nightstick stuck in his cummerbund. He had a police chief's desire to always be in the middle of the action, even if it meant tripping over a fire hose at a refinery fire and breaking his hip. This was the Rizzo who leveraged his endorsement of President Nixon's reelection into unusual access, for a Democrat, to Washington's Republican corridors of power. He was a huge political asset, the archetype of the "hard hat" Democrats Nixon hoped to convert into permanent Republicans. Rizzo was popular, even with the reporters who were most skeptical about his behavior. And he went to extraordinary lengths to try to co-opt his adversaries, especially in the press corps.

On January 24, 1972, Rizzo brought us along as he headed to Washington to see Richard Nixon. He bragged that he had so much clout he could get all of us into the Oval Office with him. When we arrived at the White House, we were ushered into the press briefing room, in those days crowded with cuspidors and overstuffed brown leather armchairs. While the mayor met with the president, we waited, clearly sticking out as a collection of local yokels in that assemblage of older, national correspondents. That is, until White House deputy press secretary Gerald Warren appeared in the doorway to the lower press office to ask if the Philadelphia press corps would come forward to be escorted to the Oval Office.

In a White House photo of that day, I'm the one hanging back, watching Rizzo introduce my newspaper colleagues to the president. All I remember is being so overwhelmed at finding myself in the Oval Office that I forgot to take notes. But Nixon's secret Oval Office taping system captured the moment: there, you can hear Rizzo introduce me to the president saying, "Oh, and Andrea Mitchell there is the political lady for KYW."

The tapes also reveal that during their private talks before we were brought in, Rizzo tried to ingratiate himself with Nixon, telling the president he didn't support Democratic leaders like Hubert Humphrey or Edmund Muskie. "Their philosophy is completely, it's not my thinking. I guess I must say I'm for President Nixon."

The two men also discussed what they called "the extreme left" and confided their sensitivities about race relations. Nixon said to Rizzo: "I know they say that we're a bunch of racists."

Rizzo replied reassuringly, "Let me tell you this, Mr. President, in my opinion, you have the blacks like I have the blacks."

The official tape log reveals that Nixon aide John Ehrlichman also attended the meeting, and that the men discussed whether Rizzo, as a Democrat, would campaign for Nixon. Later, we all had lunch with the mayor at Paul Young's, a lobbyists' hangout and the mayor's favorite Washington restaurant. He bragged: "I told you I'd get you in to see the president. I told you he was a good friend of mine." He was so proud of his accomplishment that I bet him fifty bucks he couldn't get us into his next meeting, with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

When we arrived at FBI headquarters after lunch, the same scenario unfolded. The grizzled veterans of the press room scoffed at our expectation that we would see Hoover, who had not been seen by any press in months. Before long, we were again ushered in for handshakes. Hoover's desk was on an elevated platform, and I was so nervous about meeting him, I tripped as we arrayed ourselves around him for a photo session. I recall Hoover's face appearing ashen and waxy: was this the real FBI director, or had we wandered into Washington's version of Madame Tussaud's? Rizzo had once again demonstrated his clout, and I was out fifty dollars.

This was my first taste of Washington, but my appetite had already been whetted for national politics. In 1968, I'd aggressively driven my KYW Newsradio mobile unit right into Hubert Hum-phrey's motorcade along Chestnut Street, wedging my way into line in front of the press bus while I broadcast on the two-way radio. A not-very-friendly Secret Service agent yanked open the car door as I drove, ordering me out of the motorcade and abruptly interrupting my report.

By 1972, I was assigned to cover both parties' national conventions in Miami Beach. On the floor of the Democratic convention, Pennsylvania governor Milton Shapp called me over to meet one of his colleagues. "Andrea," he said, "this is the governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter. He's going to be our party's next candidate for president."

I remember sizing up Carter an obscure politician of average appearance and no national reputation and thinking that Shapp had lost his mind. Few people had ever heard of the Georgia governor, and at the time the party was about to nominate a far more liberal standard-bearer, George McGovern. The moment stuck in my mind. He was the first of many little-known political figures whom I would meet at political conventions, long before they became major players.

The Democratic convention was tame, despite the brouhaha over McGovern's initial choice for running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton, because of the Missouri senator's past electric shock therapy treatments. It was a different story a month later at the Republican convention, held in the middle of violent antiwar protests. I was assigned to "dress down" and cover the students rioting outside. My bureau chief apparently thought that I looked young enough to fit right in. As a result, the night Richard Nixon was renominated, I was trapped outside with a crowd of demonstrators being pepper-gassed in Flamingo Park. Temporarily blinded, I ran into an apartment building on Collins Avenue and banged on the nearest door. A kindly elderly couple cracked the door, listened to my pleas for help, and helped wash my burning eyes.

Four years later, I'd gone a long way toward establishing my reputation as an experienced political reporter, at least at the local level. I'd covered Minnesota senator Walter Mondale's abortive run for president in 1974 and Washington senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson's defeat in the 1976 Pennsylvania primary. Once again, in 1976 KYW radio sent me to cover both national conventions the Republicans in Kansas City and the Democrats at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

It was a great introduction to national politics. In those years, I worked alongside my television colleague from KYW, Jessica Savitch. Jessica, who later came to NBC, died in 1983 in a car accident when she was only thirty-five. I tracked the critical role Pennsylvania's delegation played in the hard-fought battle for the nomination between Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford. When Ford debated Carter at the Walnut Street Theatre in the fall campaign, I helped anchor Westinghouse's radio coverage. Chasing the candidates and their strategists was the culmination of all the political conversations I'd loved since childhood, at our family dinner table. I knew I'd chosen the right career.

The morning after that debate, the president campaigned in South Philadelphia's Italian Market for a young congressman running for the Senate, John Heinz. I had covered Heinz's congressional campaigns, but had never before met his wife, Teresa, a doctor's daughter from Mozambique. On that day, completely overlooked in the crowd around the president and her husband, she seemed overwhelmed by the crush of people. I suggested we duck into a greengrocer on the corner, assuring her she'd never be missed. It was the start of a relationship that continued through the election and Senate service of her husband, who distinguished himself working on environmental issues and helping to preserve the fiscal solvency of Social Security.

Jack Heinz could have stepped out of a Fitzgerald novel, except that, unlike Gatsby, Heinz's air of quiet confidence was not faked. His wife, Teresa, was a reluctant recruit into the world of politics, although already passionate about her causes. But, the young Teresa was primarily a mother and homemaker who tended to defer to her husband on most subjects. She and Jack were a couple so blessed with brains, good looks, and great fortune that his death in a freak plane accident seemed all the more shocking.

On April 4, 1991, Jack Heinz was flying to a district committee hearing in Pennsylvania for his subcommittee on aging, part of his ongoing investigation into Medicare fraud. Instruments on his private plane indicated that the landing gear had jammed. A passing helicopter volunteered to fly by and do a visual check to see if the gear had descended. It flew too close and its rotor blade sliced the senator's plane, which exploded. Both aircraft landed in a suburban schoolyard, killing seven people, including the senator and two children on the ground.

© 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.