Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  Soon after arriving in Washington, I’d begun to meet people outside politics. A Philadelphia friend introduced me to a Washington writer named Judith Huxley, whose living room was often the setting for an informal literary salon. Judy collected people the way other people enjoy good bottles of wine. She drank us all in, and loved nothing more than introducing her special friends to one another. An extraordinary cook, she also wrote a food column for The Washington Post, a biweekly essay with superb recipes that even I could follow as a guidebook for creating a perfect meal for friends. I spent so many evenings and holidays with her and her husband, Matthew, that Judy became my Washington family. It was through her that I met a whole group of other writers and artists, Washington intellectuals and public servants who crossed several generations.

  Judy once wrote a column for the Post called “The Blow-Dried Duck Technique,” about an indulgent birthday dinner she cooked for me, which started with fish pâté and included roast duck with ginger-lemon sauce. The highlight was supposed to be a fabulous birthday cake, a meringue torte. To her horror, a greedy raccoon came in through an open window and ate the cake she’d set out to cool the night before. Making a virtue of necessity, Judy created an instant dessert out of things she had in the freezer, whipping up an ice cream bombe in the shape of a cake in no time flat.

  Judy never showed the world her private struggle: for thirteen years my friend valiantly fought breast cancer, but finally it spread to her spine and lungs. Doctors at the National Institutes of Health tried all kinds of new protocols, but when she finally succumbed, it was at home, surrounded by family and friends. She was only fifty-six years old. Again, I was torn in different directions. She died on the same day in 1983 that snipers attacked U.S. marines in Lebanon, and I had to go to work. (Only a week later, a suicide bomber blew up the marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241.) I think of Judy all the time, even to this day. I wish she had lived long enough to see her grandchildren and know the man I have married.

  But she lives on through her legacy of friendship. Through Judy, I met other women, including Elaine Kurtz, a painter whose husband had been the IRS commissioner under Jimmy Carter; Sheela Lampietti, a landscape gardener; and Maria Schoolman, a sculptor. We all came together around Judy’s illness. For years afterward, we celebrated holidays, cooked Judy’s recipes, and heard her voice in our ears.

  Inevitably there were awkward moments when my private and public life collided in almost comic ways. As a White House correspondent, I spent years covering presidents and their guests as they partied and vacationed. Long before I met Katharine Graham, who became a friend, I was assigned, along with Sam Donaldson, to stake out her house on R Street in a snowstorm because Ronald Reagan was having dinner there. My bureau chief, Sid Davis, said, “I don’t care if he’s covered by the White House pool camera in the motorcade. I want a White House correspondent there in case he chokes on a chicken bone.”

  So Sam and I stood outside, watching the limousines pull into the driveway. Despite what many people may think, it’s hardly a glamorous life. As coverage has become more relaxed, White House correspondents don’t have to do this any longer, although producers often do. But in those days, especially after the assassination attempt in 1981, we covered Ronald Reagan around the clock. If he went to his friend Charles Wick’s on Christmas Eve to sing carols, we were there, too, standing outside. In a strange way, it was a virtual life. We experienced holidays as bystanders and observers, far from our own families. Many of us tried to turn the press corps into our extended families, creating a nest wherever we found ourselves. The holiday rituals of White House press corps road warriors replaced those of our childhoods.

  In fact, the White House assignment had its own seasonal rhythms. We had all been lulled into a comfortable routine. Summers and most holidays we were in Santa Barbara, headquarters for the western White House, even though the president was safely ensconced at his mountaintop ranch, at least thirty miles away. The only glimpse we got of him was when he rode horseback, a figure dancing in and out of focus in the heat waves, seen only through enormously long camera lenses originally designed to track space launches. You could hardly tell it was Reagan, who, with his trademark puckishness, liked to tease that he could really get the press corps going if he clutched his chest on one of his morning rides, pretending to have a heart attack, just to watch us scramble.

  On New Year’s we were scarcely any closer—outside the walls of the hundred-acre Palm Springs estate of former ambassador to the Court of St. James’s Walter Annenberg and his wife, Leonore, who was Reagan’s chief of protocol. When the Reagans gathered at the Annenbergs’ for a yearly reunion with their California friends, we would take turns standing outside at the intersection of Frank Sinatra Drive and Bob Hope Boulevard. In between, there were trips to Europe and Japan for summits with the allies—foreign capitals experienced almost entirely from inside a hotel ballroom, where the White House would brief the press.

  Though most of our contact with Ronald Reagan was at carefully staged photo opportunities, the subjects we covered—the arms race, budget debates, the midterm recession, and the president’s campaign for reelection—were fascinating to me, and I worked hard to develop sources that would help inform my reporting. That meant staying late, working weekends, calling outside experts, and reading, reading, reading.

  Even today, I get e-mails and calls from young women asking for advice about how to get into television. Almost always, their goal is to be a “television anchor.” Rarely do they say they want to be journalists. Few understand that the best anchors, only the credible, successful ones, are, first, good reporters. Not many of these eager aspirants are prepared to be desk assistants, researchers, and associate producers, in small television markets if necessary, before getting that first job in front of the camera.

  Years after those trips to Palm Springs, I went with my husband, Alan Greenspan, and former secretary of state George Shultz and his wife to visit Lee Annenberg, who had become a friend as a fellow trustee of the University of Pennsylvania. We were on our way to California, where Alan was to speak at Stanford. Lee said, “Come spend the weekend here.” Walking into her house, I was immediately struck by the beauty of the setting, including a nine-hole golf course carved out of the desert. But perhaps because I had spent so many years outside, with my nose pressed against the window glass, watching the “grown-ups” go in to play, it still seemed a bit of a fantasy, not quite real. I tried to imagine what it must have been like when the Reagans were there, celebrating New Year’s Eve.

  The first time I actually attended a Washington official function as a guest, rather than a reporter, was with Alan. It was the winter of 1985, at a black-tie dinner in honor of the Reagans on Embassy Row, at what used to be the Fairfax Hotel—in fact, the same hotel where Al Gore, he of the rural Tennessee roots, had grown up as the son of a leading senator. Even in Washington, growing up in a hotel suite was unusual. Gore’s parents never had a home in the capital.

  At that first Reagan dinner, I was seated next to Bill Casey, Reagan’s 1980 campaign manager and CIA director. Casey was one of the most secretive men in Washington. He couldn’t have been thrilled to be seated next to a reporter, even an off-duty one. I wish I’d been able to take notes, especially after discovering a year later that at the time Casey was already running the illegal Iran-Contra operation.

  I’d known of Alan Greenspan since 1983, when he was head of the President’s National Commission on Social Security Reform. Among other assignments at the time, I was covering White House budgets, which included trying to fact-check the fiscal wizardry of Budget Director David Stockman and explain Reagan’s trickle-down economics. On a regular basis I’d question David Gergen, then assistant to the president in the Office of Communications, about the latest budget numbers.

  During 1983 and 1984, I hammered Gergen with questions about whether the White House budget assumptions were credible. Finally he said, “Why don’t you ask an outside economist
? Learn economics the way you learned about arms control—it’s the next step for you.”

  It was smart advice. He suggested I consult Alan, who at the time ran an economic consulting firm in New York.

  When I called Alan, with no introduction, he was very helpful. Soon, we were talking fairly regularly, and at some point I asked him to one of those correspondents’ dinners to which reporters invite their sources. As it turned out, Barbara Walters had already invited him, but he said that if I ever got to New York, I should call him for lunch. There was something in the way he said it that prompted me to call Gergen and ask, “Is this guy single?”

  To which he replied, “Don’t you know? He’s a really eligible bachelor,” confirming my growing suspicion that Alan was interested in more than the budget.

  Still we didn’t get together. Both of us were busy, and we lived in different cities. Finally, in December of 1984, I was in New York to do a year-end report for the Today show, and Alan invited me to dinner. It was December 28, that lovely time between Christmas and New Year’s when the tree is still up in Rockefeller Center, the holiday store windows are festive, and New Yorkers are no longer rushing past each other to finish their shopping. I envisioned doing the Today show live and then taking the rest of the day off to primp for dinner.

  But a story broke that day in The Washington Post that Nightly News wanted me to cover. Instead of preparing for my date, I scrambled to pull together a segment for the evening news. Barely an hour before I was to meet Alan, I raced back to the hotel to change clothes and grab a cab to the restaurant. By then it was snowing. It was also rush hour at Christmastime, and there were no cabs to be had. So I trudged across town to the restaurant, tired, wet, and not very glamorous by the time I arrived at Alan’s favorite restaurant, Le Périgord.

  He was already waiting at the table, a pattern that has in fact been repeated in all the years since—Alan waiting patiently, while I finish reporting an unanticipated story. But the moment I sat down with him, the evening was transformed. We connected, talking about music and baseball and our childhoods. I found this shy man known for convoluted explanations on economic trends to be funny and sweet and very endearing. We had such a good time, he suggested extending the evening by going for a drive through Central Park in the snow. That was our first date.

  We saw each other after that, but not seriously. I was always traveling with Reagan, and he was seeing other people in New York. Then, in February 1985, David Stockman and his wife, Jennifer, came to dinner at my house. On that day, I’d interviewed Margaret Thatcher for the Today program, always a challenge, and then reported a separate story for Nightly News. Now, feeling a little like Superwoman, I was giving a dinner. Fortunately, I had a lot of help from my longtime housekeeper Emilia Almeida, who for years has made sure I eat, can somehow find things in my overstuffed closets, and occasionally throws out the accumulating stacks of newspapers. Alan was coming down from New York to attend. Other guests included Judy Woodruff and her husband, Al Hunt, as well as Vice President George Bush’s chief of staff, Craig Fuller, and White House assistant Karen Hart.

  At the time, Stockman’s wife was seven months’ pregnant, and he himself was worn out, having spent the day testifying in front of a hostile congressional committee. During his first year on the job, in 1981, Stockman—who was the youngest budget director in history—barely survived several controversies, including proposing that ketchup be reclassified as a vegetable in order to save money on school lunches for poor kids. He was also taken to the White House “woodshed” for confiding doubts about the president’s trickle-down economics to The Atlantic magazine. Now, four years later, David was close to quitting and had become even more outspoken about pork barrel spending. After hectoring from several congressional committee members, he’d even lost his temper and said that military pensions were too fat, and that many farmers had only themselves to blame for their economic problems and did not deserve government bailouts. His own mother, who raised corn and soybeans on the family’s farm in Michigan, told an Iowa radio station her son’s comments “don’t set too well with me.”

  At dinner that night, David was so exhausted, he leaned back in his chair and passed out. The chair fell backward, and his head snapped back so hard, the impact punched a hole in the plaster of my dining room wall.

  Chaos. Once I realized David was breathing, my first worry was Jennifer, almost at her due date and now terrified that her husband was having a heart attack. When the emergency rescue people came to take him to nearby Georgetown University Hospital, all of us, still worried, trooped off behind them. What we didn’t know was that the Associated Press was monitoring police and fire department emergency radio communications. Word got out that it was Stockman in the emergency room, and a reporter showed up at the hospital. That’s how my relationship with Alan Greenspan became public.

  Early on, I decided to play by a very strict set of rules at social occasions: everything said was off the record. As I began to socialize more frequently with Alan among the people I covered in the administration, it was the only way anyone could feel comfortable being around me. If someone said something of particular interest, I would call the next day and ask whether we could revisit the subject, and discuss it on the record or, if not, at least “on background”—meaning it could be reported, but without attribution.

  Alan took me to my first White House state dinner, for Jose Napoleon Duarte, president of El Salvador, in the fall of 1987. Having covered many such dinners as a reporter, I felt strange being inside, looking out. Although wearing an Oscar de la Renta gown that almost broke the bank, I went through the receiving line still feeling as though I didn’t really belong. Nancy Reagan made it a practice to invite at least one press couple to each of these affairs, but I wasn’t senior enough to get on that invitation list. In fact, Alan had been invited to come alone. Normally Mrs. Reagan, a stickler for etiquette, did not permit unmarried couples at White House social functions. But Alan made a special request to be able to bring me along as his date. By this time, he had moved to Washington to accept the job at the Federal Reserve. We were dating regularly, but still sorting through our feelings about each other. Neither of us was ready to make a commitment, and there wasn’t much time for socializing. Alan was focusing most of his energy on learning the intricacies of his new job. (Which was a good thing: only five days later, the stock market crashed and Alan’s efforts were critical in limiting the long-term damage.)

  State dinners are carefully choreographed to create an atmosphere of elegance. They are as close as we come in this country to a kind of royal experience, stiff occasions that are hardly what you’d call kick-up-your-heels kind of fun. The table settings are exquisite, with beautifully arranged, abundant flowers. The menus, engraved by calligraphers at each place setting, are treasured mementos. And for each dinner, the White House pastry chef strains to surpass himself with an elaborate dessert confection. Into this mix add the power of the assembled guests, carefully chosen from the domains of politics, business, Hollywood, and the arts, and you have the ingredients for a sparkling evening—especially in Nancy Reagan’s White House.

  Mrs. Reagan brought a distinctive style to the White House. She set out to restore a sense of formality, even pomp and circumstance, in contrast to Jimmy Carter’s more down-home administration. You didn’t see Ronald Reagan carrying his suit bag off Air Force One, as Carter did to create the image of a common man. Certainly, you never saw an eleven-year-old child seated among the guests, reading her homework, as Amy Carter had at a state dinner. With Reagan, more likely, you’d hear a fanfare and “Ruffles and Flourishes.” Those of us who wore blue jeans during the Carter years, largely because the president himself did, rarely dared even wear slacks when Reagan was president.

  A certain dress code was understood. Those were the days of Adolfo designer suits and bouffant hairdos, what Alan teasingly called my “Republican” helmet hair. Looking back at pictures from the Reagan years, I’m someti
mes amused, if not horrified, at my appearance, with big jewelry (in my case, fake) and big hair. It was a time of conspicuous excess, both on Wall Street and the Washington social circuit. But, early in the administration, all this extravagance struck a discordant note as the economy slumped and more and more people lost their jobs.

  As the gap widened between rich and poor, Nancy Reagan was sharply criticized for acquiring new china, even though it was donated; for accepting designer gowns and not paying for them; for borrowing jewelry to wear to Princess Diana’s wedding. She took an unholy beating in the press, including cruel articles caricaturing her appearance. Nonetheless, her power was near complete. It didn’t matter whether you were the chief of staff or a member of the press corps. If you got on her bad side, you were in trouble.

  But for all the caricatures, Nancy Reagan played a unique and critical role in the administration. She was always her husband’s best political advisor, even helping engineer a crucial switch in campaign managers that helped him win in 1980. Once her husband was elected, Mrs. Reagan obsessed over every slight in the news columns. In the spring of 1982, she began reconstructing her own image with a brilliantly self-deprecating performance at the annual press Gridiron dinner. Dressing as a charwoman in the style of one of Carol Burnett’s most memorable characters, the first lady sang a parody about “Second Hand Clothes,” a takeoff on the Streisand song. Landon Parvin, a brilliant satirist who has crafted humorous after-dinner speeches for two generations of politicians, mostly Republicans, wrote the skit. Over the years, as Nancy grew more confident, she became more philosophical about criticism of herself; but she never let down her guard when it came to her husband’s critics.

  Perhaps Mrs. Reagan’s most important contribution to her husband’s presidency was getting him to rethink his attitude toward the “Evil Empire.” In the fifth year of his administration, Ronald Reagan still had not met a Soviet leader. When pressed about why he hadn’t negotiated with the Russians, Reagan would say, “Well, they keep dying on me.” After Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982, there were two successors—Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko—in the course of just three years. Both died in office.