Andrea Mitchell Quotations

Someday perhaps I'll have to get a grownup job... but for now I'm having too much fun being a reporter.

I was stricken. I think that was his honest response, unfiltered by the conventions of Washington and the corridors of the Senate.

I feel terribly guilty. I'm not used to taking off time at all.

Frankly, I don't think it was luck. I must have made 100 phone calls.

He spent his entire adult life trying to understand how the economy is organized, and he's not going to stop now.

He likes to be challenged by intelligent people.

It hurts all the time, as anyone with a torn rotator cuff knows.

Jesse Helms looked at me, smiled and said, 'That's good,'

You know, he's not going to have a car. He hasn't driven for 18 years.

When it came to political power, blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights, and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist.

Socially, Philadelphia was still a fairly provincial city, its business community governed by the mores of the Main Line. Politically, it was a cauldron of ethnic rivalries, dominated by competing Irish and Italian constituencies.

Philadelphia reflected the national turmoil over race and the Vietnam War, often exploding on my watch.

They put me on the shift where they thought I could do the least harm, midnight to eight in the morning. Although the hours were lousy, they were perfect for an apprentice reporter.

When I entered college, it was to study liberal arts. At the University of Pennsylvania, I studied English literature, but I fell in love with broadcasting, with telling stories about other people's exploits.

Haiti is the kind of place that grabs your heart, and never lets go ... When you arrive in Port-au-Prince, the first thing that strikes you is how vibrant the colors are. Buses, buildings, fences, clothing, everything is brightly painted in primary hues. On closer inspection, you see the reality behind this brightly colored landscape: a dark, grinding poverty, the worst in the Western hemisphere.

journalism was for me more than a business or a profession. It was a way of living, of experiencing the world even as I instantly distanced myself from it, in order to recreate what I'd witnessed for the public.

... there was a part of me that wanted to be liked, and despite all my years of reporting, I never quite adjusted to the role of skunk at the garden party.

Washington was not just a city of marble buildings and smoke-filled rooms and power brokers, but also a town full of people who do care about each other, in good times and bad.

[On reporters trying to cajole a smile from her husband, Alan Greenspan:] For a Federal Reserve chairman, that was a smile.

... I still have sympathy for some of the people who've fallen from grace in Washington. The feeding frenzy can be so unforgiving, especially in this day of nonstop cable news.

[On women in previously all-male fields:] I think it will change in a lot of workplaces. I'm not so sure it will ever change on Capitol Hill until more women are in powerful positions. Because this is the last plantation for men.

If you think you can do two full-time jobs, people will expect you to do three.

I learned everything I ever need to know about questioning artful dodgers by covering the most artful of them all, Ronald Reagan. For Reagan, performance was as much a part of governing as understanding the details of the federal budget.

Two guys came up behind me, grabbed me, and pulled me out, ... I was in a lot of pain. It was really humiliating to be dragged out of an event in a president's office.

Finally, I told them I'd drop out of the management program if they'd give me an entry-level job in the newsroom for union wages, about fifty dollars a week.

This was tough. The Kerry people were determined not to have a leak.

To get interviews for their newscasts, I'd work the phones, calling locations to find someone I could interview when a story broke.

As kids, we traded 'I like Ike' and 'All the way with Adlai' buttons in elementary school.

It's really exciting, isn't it? We came home and he said, 'Do you want a big wedding or a small wedding?' Here I am a hard-boiled reporter and I have got butterflies.

It was a presidential election year, and as a member of a consortium of Ivy League radio stations, we participated in 'network' coverage of election night.

Once again, no one in charge had given any thought to the possibility that a woman would be involved.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I was a 12,

Instead, they tried to steer me toward jobs more traditionally held by women, in public relations or advertising, which didn't interest me at all.

He thought the whole thing was so funny.

All they expected me to do was rip and read the wire 'leads,' without doing any original reporting. It was pretty basic, but gave me a taste of how to combine my love of politics and broadcasting.