With the end of the most recent presidential administration comes an examination of the fallout, and the results do not inspire optimism: American institutions are weaker than ever. Norms are in tatters. Trust in the media and government is at an all-time low. The State Department has been hollowed out. Not even the census can meet its deadline.
But in a well-lit corner of Washington, at least one bedrock has survived the tumult intact. Her name is Andrea Mitchell.
Mitchell, 74, has been a correspondent with NBC News since 1978, when she joined the network after stints with KYW radio and KYW-TV in Philadelphia. At the time Joe Biden had just won his second term to the United States Senate, a woman had never been appointed to the Supreme Court, and Mitchell could count the other female journalists in broadcasting on one hand. Their bosses pitched them as rivals, but some became her closest friends. (She and current PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff have shared breakfast on Christmas morning since at least 1985. There are presents, surprises, and affectionate pranks. When Mitchell’s husband, Alan Greenspan, was knighted in 2002, Woodruff and her husband, Al Hunt, had a literal suit of armor delivered. In 2020 the breakfast tradition was of course kept alive over Zoom.)
Soon after Mitchell started at NBC, news broke that a partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor had caused what became known as the Three Mile Island accident. That kind of incident was her beat, and she demanded to report from the scene. Instead her boss had dispatched a series of men. He told her he was sparing her. Who knew what the effects of lingering radiation might be, and she was still in her 30s. What if she wanted children? Mitchell fumed. In an interview with Politico in 2019, she said she had her retort. Didn’t he know that “men’s balls are as vulnerable as women’s ovaries”? She was sent within 24 hours.
Mitchell—whom friends confirm pulls as few punches now as she did then—has been a cornerstone of broadcast news for over four decades, anchoring her own show, Andrea Mitchell Reports, since 2008 and serving as the chief foreign affairs correspondent for NBC News since 1994. Some of us have taken up bread baking during the pandemic; Mitchell secured another job title. Last month she was named the network’s chief Washington correspondent. Her work has made her a fixture at press conferences and parties and near espresso machines the world over. It means she’s on the road for sometimes weeks at a time, trailing the State Department around the globe. It’s the kind of run that could have made another reporter jaded or even a little complacent. But Mitchell has known since she was an upstart journalist questioning power in Philadelphia what we all do now: Institutions do not run on autopilot.
When we sit down for this interview over Zoom, it’s been two weeks since insurrectionists stormed the Capitol, and Mitchell is still, as she puts it, “shattered.” The perils of a fragile democratic government, the weakness built into its foundations that bad actors can expose and exploit—that’s what she covers in other countries. It’s not that she thinks the United States is above reproach. It’s more that holding leaders to account has instilled real reverence in her for the responsibilities that government has. To see it desecrated? It shook her. “Congress is the third branch of government, and it’s just stunning that it was assaulted for the first time since 1814,” she says. “And it happened in front of our eyes. And it was completely preventable. And it was all based on a lie.
“We have had lies told from the briefing room podium in the White House, from the State Department, from other institutions,” she says. “There’s always been political spin but, in my experience going back 50 years of reporting and more than 40 years in Washington, officials in most cases don’t lie. They try to present the facts as favorably as they can for their principals, but they don’t lie flat out and just twist reality. And what has happened in the last four years has completely destroyed that. And it creeps on you little by little. People have been warning, but what we saw at the Capitol was the culmination of all of that. Now it can either shock the system and shock us all into awareness so that we can try to reorder it, or it can, as many people are now doing in the debate, drive people to keep arguing false realities.”
Mitchell understands the temptation—perhaps found in some parts of the Biden administration—to declare it a new morning in America and to put the ugliness of the recent past behind us, but journalists do not as a group tend to leave things be, Mitchell least of all.
Kristen Welker—who was named the chief White House correspondent for NBC News at the same time Mitchell was awarded her new title—remembers how Mitchell “helped me find my sea legs” in Washington when she arrived, without ever lowering the bar of her own expectations. When the two both covered the 2016 presidential election, Welker would hear whispers ripple through the press corps when Mitchell attended an event. It was not so much awe as a little competitive frustration. Mitchell was known to race to the candidate as soon as their remarks ended to squeeze a question in, leaving the others behind. “She is someone who is so passionate, and she perseveres, and she doesn’t back down. She is still the one to beat,” Welker says. “The other reporters would be like, ‘Oh, God, Andrea’s here, I have got to get to the rope line.’”
But like a true endurance athlete, Mitchell is most focused on beating her own best time. In 2012, George Clooney was about to be arrested at a protest. Mitchell and her staff were glued to their monitors. “She looks at me and goes, ‘That’s 10 minutes down the road. I can make it,’” Andrea Mitchell Reports executive producer Michelle Perry recalls. “I said, ‘It’s happening too fast.’ And she is like, ‘Wanna bet?’ We’re all still watching on TV and at the exact moment Clooney is cuffed, we see this blonde head poke out of the bushes. There is a crush of people and somehow she presses up against them and gets the interview. She’s a warrior; I don’t know how else to put it.”
When Welker was tasked with moderating the second 2020 presidential debate (after Chris Wallace had been steamrolled in the same chair during the first one), it was Mitchell she called for advice. “In the weekend leading up to the debate, we were doing video prep sessions until 11 p.m. She Zoomed in for mock sessions, she gave me feedback, she gave me suggestions, she helped workshop questions,” Welker says. When the debate wrapped and Welker—the first Black woman to moderate a presidential debate since 1992—was praised for her expert handling of what could have been another off-the-rails event, Mitchell was one of the first people she spoke to. It wasn’t a restrained chat or a professional check-in. The women got on the phone and screamed together with relief.
Welker stresses that the biggest lesson she’s learned from Mitchell isn’t about how to craft an interview or work a difficult source; it’s “the importance of leaning on the people that we love.” Welker and Mitchell FaceTime to catch up. Sometimes their husbands join. She is more than a mentor; Welker calls Mitchell her “D.C. mom.”
“As hard a worker as she is and as much of a perfectionist as she is, she works just as hard for the people she loves who need her. No obstacles will stop her,” Perry says. She will bob and weave in a crowd to get to an official she wants to question; she will tear through bureaucratic red tape to help someone who needs care or counsel. Mitchell attended Perry’s wedding, and her favorite photo of the event is one in which she’s walking down the aisle and in the corner of the frame a flash of a pink Oscar de la Renta gown is visible. It’s Mitchell, diving over a row of people to get the best shot. “She’s your biggest fan,” Perry says. “She’s got to be in it with you.”
When asked how Mitchell still has not just the enthusiasm but the energetic reserves to do as much as she does, Perry pauses. As has been true throughout their entire professional relationship, Mitchell is awake when Perry goes to sleep and awake when she gets up. Mitchell defies circadian logic. Perry has developed a working theory: “I think someone just plugs her in and charges her.”
Not quite, although Mitchell claims her New Year’s resolution for 2021 is to get more sleep, and her staff has purchased two FitBits for her (in what seems to be a fruitless attempt) to convince her to rest more. She does hope she has “the wisdom to know” when it’s time for her to step aside—a moment which viewers will have to assume is at some distant point in the future. Just this week she landed the first television interview with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and used the sit-down to press him on election interference and the crackdown on protestors in Russia.
“I love journalism on the highest level of working to communicate big ideas and explain to people how their government is functioning or not functioning, but also just chasing a lead, a little fact, a nugget to fill out a piece, add some color, find the human interest angle,” Mitchell says. “It’s just all fascinating.”
The fact that it has become harder than it used to be does not dissuade her. “What I keep doing is drawing on the experience I have that goes back to Philadelphia in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s what hardened me as a reporter and made me want to sort of stand up to authorities,” she says. “Not to be confrontational, but to be challenging. I think to be adversarial is a good thing. That’s what our job is.”
Some of her relentlessness is selfish. Mitchell wants to stick around to see what happens—in the world and in the news business. “When I first started, it was all white men,” she says. Women could not get hired. The job Mitchell ended up snagging had her on the 12 a.m. to 8 a.m. shift so that no one would see a girl in the newsroom. Woodruff remembers that once Mitchell landed in Washington, she and Woodruff and a few other women would pool information to compensate for the lack of institutional support: “It made all the difference in the world.”
Mitchell has seen the beginnings of transformation—too slow, but undeniable. NBC News has had to grapple with some of the same issues it reports on. Accusations of sexual harassment and misconduct led to the notable dismissal of former Today cohost Matt Lauer. (He denied some of the claims.) A shakeup at the top meant that Cesar Conde took over NBCUniversal News Group in August 2020. Broadcaster Rashida Jones was named the new president of MSNBC in December 2020; she is the first Black woman to lead a cable news network.
Mitchell is still a reporter to her core. She wants to know what comes next. “I think of all the children who’ve looked at Barack Obama and Michelle Obama and now are seeing Kamala Harris as vice president of the United States, who tune in and see Kristen Welker and Geoff Bennett reporting from the White House for NBC News, and other correspondents at other networks,” Mitchell says. “I mean, it’s just thrilling.”
She tries to internalize both realities—the grim state of our political polarization and the incredible fissures in our national discourse that the Biden administration will now have to address, and the remarkable progress that she has seen and contributed to. But then again, she doesn’t spend a lot of time ruminating. She brightens up, thinking about all the work she has to do under a new president. “So much has been off-limits because people knew the former president didn’t want to go there. I think that there’s a lot that we have to look at.”
Mattie Kahn is the culture director of Glamour.
