Part 5

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

(Page 5 of 5)

By then a national correspondent in Washington for NBC, I was driving back from an assignment when we got the first word. The office asked me to confirm the loss. It was one of many times in my career when I found myself torn between personal emotion and professional obligation. I drove to Teresa's home in Georgetown, expressed my sorrow, and, despite feelings of conflict over my dual role, returned to the bureau to write Jack's obituary for Nightly News.

That night, a visibly shaken Tom Brokaw, who had been friends with Jack, said the senator was "a man who had it all, but he never took it for granted." Struggling for the right words to convey Jack's special qualities, now forever lost, I described a man who could have lived a life of great leisure, but instead gave himself to public service, a man who still had much to give, and died too young.

Teresa was shattered. Encircled by family and friends, she retreated into her grief, briefly considering, and refusing, the ritual party offer to accept appointment to her husband's Senate seat and later run to fill out his term. Instead, she answered a different call, taking over the family's immensely complex charities. Gradually, she transformed herself into an effective CEO, without losing the values or the soft, even quirky, qualities that made her uniquely "Teresa." A year after Jack's death, she had so much emotional clout in Pennsylvania politics that a single campaign advertisement endorsing his Republican colleague, Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter, was enough to reelect him in a close race. It was not surprising that this woman who disdained politics might learn to love it, and eventually find a new life with another tall, athletic senator educated at Yale, a man Jack Heinz had first introduced her to on Earth Day in 1990 John Kerry of Massachusetts.

As much as I loved my life in Philadelphia, if you want to cover national politics, there is only one place to go Washington. Even though I was at home with the rhythms and neighborhoods of Philadelphia, and knew the city's deepest political secrets, it was in some ways too comfortable. I knew it was time to move on.

The CBS affiliate in Washington, WTOP, needed someone to cover the corruption trial of the governor of Maryland, Marvin Mandel, who had been indicted on more than twenty separate counts of fraud and racketeering. It seemed tailor-made for someone who had cut her teeth covering Frank Rizzo. The news director at the Washington station was a broadcast legend, James Snyder, a CBS veteran who had already trained a long list of future star correspondents. And the owner, Katharine Graham of The Washington Post, was known to run one of the best broadcasting companies in the business. To my surprise, the mayor gave me a farewell dinner and presented me with a gold-rimmed City of Philadelphia "Liberty" bowl.

The station lived up to Mrs. Graham's high journalistic standards, in contrast to the "if it bleeds, it leads" motto of many local stations. Snyder had figured out that the Washington audience of federal workers and political junkies wanted to see news of their government. As a result, unlike at most local stations, we were often assigned to what were actually national news stories. I covered congressional hearings, Carter White House stories, and several Supreme Court arguments, including the landmark Bakke reverse discrimination case. At a time when the Equal Rights Amendment was big news, Jim sent me to Houston to cover the first National Women's Conference.

For all our focus on national news, one of my most memorable stories involved me facing down a redneck tow truck operator in rural Maryland suspected of running a stolen-car ring. It became known as "Andrea versus the junkyard dog." I'd gotten a tip that the ring was cannibalizing stolen cars that were too hot to fence and selling off their spare parts. My cameraman, Kline Mengle, and I drove out to the junkyard to interview the guy. Furious, the man charged into poor Kline. The resulting videotaped confrontation was such an uneven matchup that it's hilarious. All of five feet three inches, I jumped in between the two men, trying to protect my cameraman. The suspect then shouted that he was going to get his shotgun. On the tape, you can see me following the guy into his run-down trailer, pleading, "Please, sir, we just want to talk to you." Sir, no less! When he came out waving his gun, we finally retreated. I did return a few more times, but with the police who arrested the ring on charges of auto theft.

But most notably, I specialized in covering a different kind of scoundrel, the political variety. My news director felt all those years tracking Philadelphia's Democratic political machine qualified me to tackle the colorful characters of Maryland's crony politics, made nationally famous during the bribery investigation of the state's former governor, then vice president Spiro Agnew.

There was Irv Kovens, the godfather of Mandel's crowd, who financed all his campaigns, and Bootsie, the governor's estranged wife, who locked him out of the Governor's Mansion in Annapolis when she discovered he was having an affair with a beautiful blonde whom he later married. In the course of the bribery trial, the governor broke down while discussing his divorce settlement, for which he had borrowed forty-two thousand dollars from an order of Roman Catholic missionaries for back alimony payments. Who could make this up?

The federal trial was in Baltimore, forty-five miles from my home in Washington. I'd speed up I-95 to get to court in time each morning. During a rare July 4 court session in 1977, I got two speeding tickets, five miles apart. Meeting me in Baltimore each day was a courtroom artist, Roxie Munro, a freelancer who later left Washington to become a highly successful graphic artist, with many New Yorker covers to her credit. During the course of the lengthy trial, in the late seventies, profound technological changes were transforming our business, the first of many tectonic shifts that expanded our reach as broadcasters. When the trial began, we were commuting to and from Baltimore. By the time it was over, we were reporting live, by satellite, a new technology that revolutionized our profession.

At first, I could cover only the morning and early afternoon testimony, ordering artwork to illustrate key witnesses, before having to race back to Washington in time to go live on the six o'clock news. Roxie would finish painting the illustrations in the backseat of my mustard brown Toyota, waving the poster-sized sketches out the car window to dry them in the breeze. I would drive down I-95 and outline my script at the same time, but without the benefit of a cell phone or any other means to communicate my progress to the editors. We'd run into the newsroom and give the sequence of sketches to the director. Then, at the very last minute, I'd put the illustrations, some barely dry, on easels in the studio. The control room would switch back and forth among the illustrations, as the stage manager flipped the cards by hand and I narrated my text, sitting next to Gordon Peterson, the anchorman.

Rarely did we have time to tape anything in advance. Gordon, a veteran newsman who has anchored local news in Washington for decades, has the rare gift of making people who appear with him sound smarter than they usually are. Mentoring us all was Jim Snyder, who built a news organization that dominated the Washington market for years. He was demanding, somewhat taciturn, and alternately fatherly and tough. Above all else, he loved the Mandel saga and wanted to give it as much play on the air as possible. Between Jim and Gordon, I had a road map to the rich political history of Maryland politics. Now I needed to immerse myself in the gritty details of the political drama unfolding in Baltimore.

In today's age of computer graphics, our techniques for covering the trial seem primitive. But by the time the jury was considering its verdict, we had our first satellite truck and were able to feed the artwork back to our studios in Washington as I stood in front of the federal courthouse in Baltimore and narrated my script. It wasn't a live feed from Kabul, but it seemed very cutting-edge at the time. Fighting off feelings of inadequacy after being on top in Philadelphia, I plunged in and tackled what was, for me, alien terrain. At the time, I had no idea my enthusiasm for the story would lead to another turning point in my career the job at NBC.

The Mandel trial story was so compelling, and the demands of the daily narrative so relentless, that it became a crash course in the basics of television reporting. In addition, the technology was changing rapidly; we were all but inventing it as we went along. NBC executives were watching. Often in my career, big changes took place more by accident than design. I would have stayed at the CBS affiliate in Washington happily, surrounded by as talented a group of local reporters as was ever assembled on one team. But in 1978, Mrs. Graham, advised that the U.S. Supreme Court would likely decide against cross-ownership that permitted newspapers to own tele-vision stations in the same market, sold the Post's D.C. station. We were being traded to new owners, The Detroit News, because of a rule since rescinded that greatly hurt the quality of local television news by divorcing stations from their newspaper owners. When a call came from NBC, some good-hearted executives at Post-Newsweek persuaded the new station owners to let me out of my contract. On August 1, 1978, I started work less than a mile away, at the NBC News Washington bureau on Nebraska Avenue, where I have worked ever since.

I lived only a mile from the office. For a city girl, I had, with the help of my indefatigable mother, found a very different kind of nest: a Victorian cottage facing a national park on a winding country road, only five miles from downtown. It was just four rooms, too small for my furniture, but a perfect retreat from the craziness of the news business.

I had come a long way from Philadelphia, but I had not yet closed the book on my coverage of Frank Rizzo. Only a few short years later I went back, but this time as a network correspondent to cover one of the mayor's patented power grabs. He was trying to change the city's charter so that he could run for a third consecutive term. Not surprisingly, he had become a national story with his outrageous suggestion that supporters "vote white." At the same time, he blithely called suggestions that he was racist "hogwash."

After he lost his attempt to change the charter, I returned to do a story for NBC on what everyone thought would be the end of the Rizzo era. He wouldn't grant an interview, so I went to his house, hoping I could talk him into it. On the day his successor was being sworn in, Rizzo came out of his house to joust with me, wearing a tan lumber jacket, feisty as ever. I saw him once more, in 1991, when he tried for a third time to recapture his old job. He had a new career as a radio talk show host, and had not mellowed a bit. During a televised confrontation, the seventy-year-old politician practically decked a local reporter, shouting, "I want to fight you," and even called the newsman a "crumb, creep, lush coward." Vintage Rizzo.

He was also still a dirty campaigner. In that final election, having by then become a Republican, Rizzo accused his opponent, the city's district attorney, of being drunk because he staggered even though the man walked with a limp because he'd lost a leg in Vietnam and used crutches. When reporters pressed Rizzo on how he knew his opponent was drunk, the former mayor answered, "You can be on crutches and still be under the influence."

At our final meeting, Rizzo, a little grayer and some pounds heavier, welcomed me into his office and reminisced about his earlier days in politics. Why did he give up a big-bucks radio show to go back into politics? "I love the challenge," he said, adding, "You know the best part? Dealing with the press. I love to go head-to-head with some of them suckers. I really do." We made our peace.

Only a few months later, I was watching a budget debate from NBC's Senate broadcast booth when the phone rang. It was a Philadelphia reporter asking me to comment on the death of Frank Rizzo. He had died of a massive heart attack in the middle of his comeback campaign. Once asked what he wanted on his gravestone, Rizzo had joked, "He's really dead."

When it was finally true, I cried.

© 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.