< 50 Years Of NPR's Political Coverage

August 23, 2024

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(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA'S "TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)")

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

Hey there. It's the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House.

AYESHA RASCOE, BYLINE: And I'm Ayesha Rascoe. I also cover the White House.

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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: Allow us to introduce ourselves.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: This is NPR, National Public Radio.

DETROW: For 50 years now, NPR has been covering politics.

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ROBERT CONLEY: From National Public Radio in Washington, I'm Robert Conley with All Things Considered.

DETROW: Everything from campaigns to presidential scandals to everything in between.

(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: First reports that President Nixon would resign.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #4: The space shuttle Challenger lifted off.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #5: As of today, the wall that bisects Berlin...

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #6: The extent of the epidemic of Kaposi's sarcoma...

DETROW: Our sound has changed a lot.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

SAM SANDERS: Going to this state and going to that state. And then you're like, fist bumps. It goes, yah (ph).

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #7: Yeah.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

SANDERS: All right. Welcome to the first episode of the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.

RASCOE: But as Mara Liasson says, in the end, we've really been doing the same thing all this time - talking to people, then telling you what they said and what it all means. As NPR celebrates its 50th anniversary, we're doing a special episode looking back at some of the big political moments and the women who shaped how NPR covered them.

DETROW: And it makes sense to start out with Linda Wertheimer, somebody who defined and shaped NPR's political coverage from the first days the network was on the air.

Hey, Linda.

LINDA WERTHEIMER, BYLINE: Hi.

RASCOE: So I know, Linda, that you've talked before about how you had no idea what you were doing when you were building NPR, but you did build NPR. Was there a moment when you realized you could do this?

WERTHEIMER: When I first - the very first thing that I ever did on the air on NPR wasn't me on the air. It was me directing All Things Considered. And it was a scary moment because we didn't know what was on the show. And no one could tell us because they didn't know, either. And things would come in, and people would throw the big reels across the room, and the engineer would catch them. It was completely terrifying. And when I got out of there, all I could do was cry. I cried for a while. And - but I was - but then they had the program on, and we were hearing the rerun of it. And I thought, this is good. This is amazing.

DETROW: We did that.

WERTHEIMER: I was panicked out of my mind. But this was good, and I - and so it went on.

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CONLEY: Next on All Things Considered, we thought we'd go a bit more into the fallout, as it were, from the demonstrations in Washington again.

DETROW: And, Linda, when you went from directing behind the mic to in front of the mic, you know, one of the first major stories you covered was Watergate, the scandal that started as a break-in of the Democratic headquarters but quickly snowballed into this massive, massive investigation and scandal that ultimately brought down the Nixon administration. What was that like?

WERTHEIMER: Well, you know, these days we've had several impeachments. But this was the first one in a very long time, the first one since very nearly the civil war period. It was just - and I have to say that I think we did understand what a very, very big deal it was.

DETROW: Yeah.

WERTHEIMER: So I was terrified. And I think a lot of Americans were really afraid that this could just bust up the whole thing, that this would be the end of democracy as we know it, that it would be so shocking and tragic for so many people that they would decide that they had to reorganize and redo the government and we would not be what we had been before.

It was - I thought it was so incredibly serious, and so did, I think, most of the people that had anything to do with it. I mean, I was wandering around through the halls of Congress, waiting for this House Judiciary Committee, which was my particular job. The House Judiciary Committee was going to draft and then pass articles of impeachment. And then they would go to the House, and the House would vote on them. And if the House passed the articles of impeachment, then there would be a trial in the Senate. So we were, at that point, just before the House began its consideration. That was the moment that I remember as being incredibly frightening.

DETROW: You're mentioning how seriously everyone took this. And you mentioned right at the top that we have now had two back-to-back years in which there were impeachments, and it's just a different feeling. And I - you know, I didn't live through it, but I've read so much of that coverage, and I've consumed so much about it. And one of the things that I felt, you know, covering in the hallways of Congress, the last few rounds of scandals and impeachments that we've had is that there was a feeling of cynicism and that everything was baked in and the outcome was already determined.

And it feels to me like it was just a totally different feeling of - whether you were Republican or Democrat, people took this seriously, whether you supported or opposed the impeachment process. Everyone was serious about their jobs. And it feels to me that that is a different universe than the Capitol that Ayesha and I cover.

WERTHEIMER: It feels that way to me, too. For example, Peter Rodino, who was chairman of the Judiciary Committee - when he called for the vote on the articles of impeachment, there were tears running down his face.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Mr. Rodino.

PETER RODINO: Hi.

WERTHEIMER: He was - you know, he was incredibly moved by the importance of what he was doing. That is the thing that is different from, you know, now. They had a responsibility. They had to live up to it, and - even if it messed up their lives big time. These guys that we've got now (laughter) don't see things that way.

DETROW: What's the - in your mind, the best change over the years of how the organization has changed, how the way we cover the news has changed, how the way we've covered politics has changed?

WERTHEIMER: What was the best changes? Is that question?

DETROW: Yeah, or maybe the worst too, if you want to - you know, we can...

(LAUGHTER)

DETROW: Let's trash talk NPR a little bit.

WERTHEIMER: I think that NPR has - one of the best things is that, you know, we continue to bring people in who are - who understand what it is that NPR was trying to do and have tried to do something - you know, something very similar, letting people talk about what they think and trying to be as clear and as serious as we can be about the issues and explain them. When you think of - Nina Totenberg basically invented a way of covering the Supreme Court and explains it all to us, and all of us understand. It was a - I mean, that was part of what we were supposed to do, and we still do that.

RASCOE: Well, thank you so much for joining us, Linda. And cheers to 50 years - not that you were here all 50 years, but cheers...

(LAUGHTER)

RASCOE: ...To 50 years for NPR.

WERTHEIMER: I was here all 50 years.

RASCOE: You were here all 50 years.

WERTHEIMER: Are you kidding?

RASCOE: Yeah (laughter).

DETROW: All right. We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we are going to talk to Nina Totenberg about exactly that - how she invented an entirely new way of covering the Supreme Court.

And we're back. And Nina Totenberg, another of NPR's founding mothers, is here with us. Hey, Nina.

NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Oh, I'm a founding sister.

(LAUGHTER)

TOTENBERG: I don't want to be a mother.

DETROW: You know, it's your term, so whatever term you want. Let's start with that, though, because, you know, it's - we've been celebrating NPR's 50th anniversary. There's been a lot of conversation about just the way that this outlet started and the role that so many women played in really establishing it. But I think some podcast listeners don't quite know that full story. What was it like in the early days of NPR, and what should they know about the work that, you know, Susan Stamberg and Cokie Roberts and Linda Wertheimer and you did in those early days?

TOTENBERG: Well, Linda was the first. Susan Stamberg was the second. I came a couple of years later. And then we recruited Cokie, or maybe I should say she recruited us. Her husband called me and said, I hear that there are a lot of women working at NPR, and there might be a spot there. And I said - they were just back from Greece, where he'd been assigned for The New York Times at the time. And I said, come over with a resume right away. And I brought it in to the news director, and I said, you have to consider this person. You need to consider this person. And pretty soon Cokie was working for us.

RASCOE: And so, Nina, how did you end up covering the Supreme Court? How did that come together?

TOTENBERG: Well, I covered everything. What I covered for the first certainly two to three decades of NPR but certainly at the very beginning - here was my beat - the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, the Supreme Court, the Justice Department and, oh, by the way, every special prosecutor's investigation, every scandal and the intelligence community. So I had a rather broad mandate, and I also covered some politics. I went out on the road covering politics.

DETROW: So - but the Supreme Court is where you have left your mark and become, like, the Supreme Court reporter on so many different fronts. And there was obviously the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas reporting you did. There is an HBO movie about that, among other things. I wanted to talk in this conversation about another moment where your reporting really stood out and kind of shaped the course of history, and that was the Douglas Ginsburg nomination. Can you tell us what happened and what you uncovered shortly after he was nominated?

TOTENBERG: Well, this was after the nomination of Robert Bork was rejected by the Senate rather decisively, including, I think, six or seven Republican votes. And then President Reagan nominated Douglas Ginsburg, a judge on the D.C. Court of Appeals who was pretty young at the time, to take the seat that had - was vacant. And this lasted a very short time. I went up to Boston to do a profile of him and to investigate some leads I had and soon stumbled over the fact - and this seems rather like a kind of quaint scandal at the moment - that he had not only smoked marijuana, but he had done it in front of the children of some of the faculty members, which really upset mothers, and furthermore, that at the time, the Reagan administration had a policy that you couldn't have a job in the administration, even as a lowly assistant United States attorney, if you had smoked marijuana or taken any other kind of a drug after being admitted to the bar. And he certainly had been admitted to the bar.

Well, this is all kind of insane in the modern world as we talk about it, but it was a big deal. And when I got to NPR - I got off the plane, got to NPR. And my boss said to me, you need to do this story tonight because it's starting to leak out. And so I went on the air live, and I did the story.

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TOTENBERG: At least a half dozen witnesses at Harvard Law School told NPR that they had seen Ginsburg smoking marijuana during the mid- and late-1970s and perhaps into the early '80s. He was described by these witnesses as a social user who, on occasion, brought the marijuana that was used by himself and others. This evening...

Within, I would say almost hours, the Ginsburg nomination was withdrawn because of lack of Republican support. It was Republicans who went completely crazy. Well, within, you know, a matter of - I don't know how long, you know, in - a few years later, anybody who was nominated to anything who had ever smoked marijuana said so at the outset to the FBI and sometimes made a public statement so that it couldn't be shown as something that had been hidden and not disclosed. And it was a nothingburger, including Clarence Thomas did that.

DETROW: I mean, we talk so much about the way that the women who became the high-profile reporters at first shaped the network, but, I mean, that's something I feel like we say around the building. What are some examples of how that really played out, how that made a difference in the organization that NPR became over the years?

TOTENBERG: Well, basically, in the beginning and even as the years wore on, just about every beat and every major area of interest was covered by women. And the reason was in the beginning that no man would work for what they paid us. So the network was dominated by women, and we were enormously supportive of each other. I know that's hard for people - some people to believe. I've read in some stories about NPR's 50th anniversary some suggestion - oh, there must've been enormous catfights. Actually, there weren't. When you talked to Mara, ask her how she got her job as White House correspondent. It involved a call that I made to her in Europe. And I said, Mara, they've posted the job. Get your resume in right away, and send me a copy too, and I'll make sure it gets in so that it can't be lost in translation.

RASCOE: So did she fax it to you? I would imagine it was, like, a fax or a mail (laughter).

TOTENBERG: There weren't - (laughter) you couldn't scan it and attach it to an email.

DETROW: I love this story because, you know, around the 50th anniversary mark, a lot of people are sharing kind of moments like this of NPR colleagues helping each other out one way or another (ph). And I have this specific memory when I was not at NPR yet. I was a station reporter, and I was having this huge problem I didn't know what to deal with. And I had kind of emailed back and forth to Tamara Keith a little bit, and I sent her this note and said, help; I'm stuck. I don't know what to do. And she was in Russia covering the Olympics, and she was like, I'm at the figure skating finals, but I'll call you in a minute from the press box, and spent, like, a half hour on the phone helping me sort out that issue. So I think kind of, you know, similar things with similar people over the years just being helpful, good colleagues in a way that you don't see in a lot of other big places.

RASCOE: Yes. And I can say that, as someone who has come into NPR relatively new, it is a nice, collegial environment. Now, no place is perfect, but it is very - it's a nice...

DETROW: We've got some drama here and there.

RASCOE: You've got some drama, but it's collegial.

TOTENBERG: (Laughter).

RASCOE: It is collegial. That's - I can say that.

DETROW: Yeah.

RASCOE: So the court has changed, but over time, how do you feel about the way you do your job, the way you report not just technology-wise - obviously, that's changed. but do you - is there any change in the way that you approach subjects or the way you approach reporting now compared to the way you did, you know, years back?

TOTENBERG: Even I would say 10 years ago, I didn't cover every hiccup of any significance at the court because I had other things to do, and I - and a broader beat even then. But now with all of these platforms, if it won't make it on to All Things Considered that night or if it happens at 11:30 at night, which sometimes it does, we have digital we have to worry about. And so there - here I am up in my garret, you know, typing away at 1:30 in the morning because the Supreme Court decided to issue a new order about voting somewhere or COVID and religion somewhere. And my husband is gnashing his teeth when the phone rings, and it's - and the voice says, hi, this is Ashley at the court. He knows that means I'm out of bed and upstairs.

RASCOE: And Ashley at the court - is she, like, the press person or - who's Ashley at the court?

TOTENBERG: Well, actually, darling Ashley has just left as one of the assistant press people. But they have a whole cadre of people, and they pass around the duty of working late at night.

RASCOE: Oh, OK. And they call you at home, and then they wake you up. And then it's time to go to work.

TOTENBERG: They call you at home, and they say, the court's just issued an order. Well, that means, you know, I go upstairs and open my laptop and look, and there it is. And I have to figure out what this means and tell the world.

DETROW: Ayesha, we need to get the White House to give us personal calls like that (laughter).

RASCOE: I know. I don't get no call. They do not be calling me.

DETROW: We just check Twitter.

(LAUGHTER)

TOTENBERG: It pays to have a press corps that's only probably about 20 or 25 people. Yeah, yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

RASCOE: Yeah, it's too many of these White House reporters. We're like a dime a dozen.

DETROW: Nina, thanks for spending some time with us, talking about the court and NPR.

TOTENBERG: I always enjoy it. Thanks so much for having me.

DETROW: And we're going to take a quick break and come back and talk to Mara Liasson about how covering the White House has changed over the years and also a big, dramatic moment she found herself right in the middle of during Bill Clinton's presidency.

We are back, and we've got Mara Liasson here with us.

Hey, Mara.

MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, Scott.

DETROW: So I want to talk about one moment from your career that every time I hear you tell people about it, I just love hearing about the story. It's so interesting. It's such a fluke of fate and timing and so many things. And that is the fact that you and Robert Siegel had an interview with Bill Clinton in the Oval Office that was prescheduled, but it just happened to come right at the exact instant that the Monica Lewinsky story first broke. And you and Robert Siegel are talking to Bill Clinton on live radio about this very confusing story that would have enormous repercussions. What do you remember about that moment, that interview?

LIASSON: Yeah, this was really an extraordinary thing. The reason we got an interview with him, along with two other news outlets - one was PBS and one, I think, was the Hill, its previous iteration - was that he was giving the State of the Union Address either the next day or the day after that. And presidents usually give a couple interviews before the State of the Union, so we got one of them. And I even had a little scoop that I was going to ask him about, which was what he was going to say about Social Security and protecting it. But - so we had the scheduled interview. We woke up on the day of the interview, and we see that The Post has broken this story about Monica Lewinsky. And Robert and I are sitting in his office, and we look at each other. And we go, oh, my God, we're going to have to ask him about this.

RASCOE: (Laughter).

LIASSON: This is gross, you know? This is like - we have to - how do we do this?

DETROW: Was it tense? Was the White House saying, you can't ask about this, or was there any sort of like - like what...

LIASSON: No, no. No, there wasn't that. But what - there wasn't that. But what there was was a tremendous delay. We were supposed to talk to him at 2 p.m., I think. Well, it kept on getting pushed back and pushed back because - and then, of course, we were wondering, are they - is he going to cancel the whole thing?

RASCOE: Is it going to happen? Yeah.

LIASSON: No, but Bill Clinton would never cancel. He is Mr. High Wire Act.

RASCOE: And to be clear, the story that had broken that morning was that he had had the affair with Monica Lewinsky, and he was, like, trying to cover it up.

LIASSON: That he had been questioned about it in the Paula Jones depositions - and I, in my own decorous way, asked him, gee, Mr. President, was there any kind of relationship with Miss Lewinsky that could have been misconstrued?

(LAUGHTER)

LIASSON: When I think about it, it was just so ridiculous. But we didn't know anything then but what we had read in The Post.

DETROW: Let's listen to that moment and then talk about it.

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LIASSON: Mr. President, where do you think this comes from? Did you have any kind of relationship with her that could have been misconstrued?

BILL CLINTON: Mara, I'm going to do my best to cooperate with the investigation. I want to know what they want to know from me. I think it's more important for me to tell the American people that there wasn't improper relations. I didn't ask anybody to lie, and I intend to cooperate. And I think that's all I should say right now so I can get back to the work of the country.

LIASSON: But you're not able to say whether you had any conversations with her about her testimony, any conversations at all?

CLINTON: I think it would be - I think given the state of this investigation, it would be inappropriate for me to say more. I've said everything, I think, that I need to say now. I'm going to be cooperative, and we'll work through it.

LIASSON: There's another incredible moment where he said, I don't know anything more about this than you do, Mara.

RASCOE: Well, (laughter)...

DETROW: And he must have knew a lot about it. That wasn't true.

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CLINTON: And I don't think any American questions the fact that I've worked very hard at this job. And anything that's a distraction, I dislike. And...

LIASSON: Do you see this as a partisan attack? Is that what...

CLINTON: I didn't say that. I don't know what the facts are. I don't know enough to say any more about this. I don't want to get into that. I want - you know at least as much about it as I do.

LIASSON: That was an outright lie. Now, I will say this in terms of how his demeanor - I have at that point - by that point, I had had many conversations with Bill Clinton, some of them with other reporters, some of them not. Bill Clinton is an incredibly articulate, fluent - I mean, he is a master communicator. And two things really struck me about that interview. One is he has an extremely large jaw. He has a big head.

RASCOE: (Laughter).

LIASSON: And I noticed that his jaw muscle was pulsing. It was like - it was almost like he had a big wad of tobacco in the back of his jaw, and he was chewing on it, and it was just pulsing with tension. That was one thing that really stuck with me. And the other thing was that when we were discussing other issues - we at some point moved on from Monica Lewinsky. He lost his train of thought at one point. That was shocking to me. Bill Clinton never loses his train of thought. He was clearly distracted. He was clearly tense because of the pulsing jaw muscle. And, you know, this was Bill Clinton on the high wire for sure.

RASCOE: Did you sense then because of that that he wasn't - like, in that moment, did you think, oh, he's lying?

LIASSON: Yeah, sure. I didn't know what the whole story was, but to have someone say, I don't know anything more about this than you do, Mara, about someone he was - supposedly had an affair with. And the rest of the time he's saying, I don't really think I should say this because the investigation is ongoing, or I shouldn't talk about it - no, it was clearly - I mean, how can I explain this? I didn't know what the truth was, but my impression was that this guy is not telling the truth to me.

DETROW: You know, we're on the other side of the Trump era now. You know, politics have gotten so personal, so core, so - everything is in bounds. I mean, at this particular moment, it wasn't quite there yet. Like, how has what's in bounds in politics - how have scandals and how they affect D.C. changed over the years, from your perspective?

LIASSON: Well, they've changed by curvature of the Earth.

DETROW: Yeah.

LIASSON: I mean, it's almost quaint to think the biggest problem facing the country was whether the president of the United States had an affair with an intern and lied about it. I mean, those were the good old days. Now we have one party that doesn't believe in accepting the results of an election if they're not the winners. I mean, we're in a whole - and we had 9/11 in between. So we are in a whole new kind of era in terms of threats to the country, threats to our democracy, behavior of presidents and what's accepted. You know, many people say Bill Clinton lowered the bar and made Trump possible. But in terms of a political story, those were the good old days when the worst thing facing the country was the moral turpitude of the president. You know, now we have democratic institutions that are being attacked and undermined every single day.

DETROW: So I want to ask about one last thing. The interview ends with Robert saying something that just made me laugh listening to it now.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

ROBERT SIEGEL: Mr. President, thank you very much for talking with us.

CLINTON: Thank you.

SIEGEL: I'd like to tell our listeners that the entire transcript, as well as audio of this interview, will be available later this evening on our website, which is www.npr.org. And once again, thank you very much.

CLINTON: Thank you.

DETROW: So clearly it sounds like the internet's still kind of a new thing in coverage here.

(LAUGHTER)

RASCOE: You can go to that dial-up thing and type in www.npr.org.

DETROW: So...

RASCOE: And there will be stuff there (laughter) later - and it took hours, right?

DETROW: So, you know, that's the days where you had to make sure your mom didn't pick up the phone to mess up that dial-up internet connection.

RASCOE: That dial-up (laughter).

DETROW: But here we are podcasting. Mara, you are one of our listeners' favorite people on the podcast. And I'm just wondering, like, how has the world of podcasts and Twitter and all the other stuff we do now for that npr.org website changed the way you cover or think about politics?

LIASSON: Well, actually, in a way, it hasn't changed at all. I consider myself to be a lowly content provider, and I don't really care what platform my content is on. I just keep on talking...

(LAUGHTER)

LIASSON: ...And telling you what I talked about with other people.

DETROW: (Laughter).

LIASSON: So in that way, it hasn't changed. But I don't want to sound - you know, sound like I'm oblivious to modern technology. Modern technology has allowed me to do this from anywhere I am. I can - you know, just being a mother of two children, I can - that has made my life immeasurably better. We have apps. You know, you can do it anywhere. You don't just have to do it in a studio. You don't have to unscrew the handset of a telephone and put alligator clips on it so you can file from New Hampshire.

RASCOE: What?

LIASSON: You know, so - yes, I - remember; I started when I was 10.

(LAUGHTER)

LIASSON: So, you know, things have - so technology has been incredible. It's been able to - it means that I can get my content and NPR's content to listeners much faster. That's huge. It's changed the whole way political - politicians communicate, the whole way political communication is conducted, so it's been a complete sea change. But in terms of the core of what I do, I'm doing the same thing.

DETROW: Nobody's got to run the tape down the hall.

LIASSON: Nobody has to run the tape down the hall. But otherwise, we're talking to people, trying to figure out what it means, trying to tell our listeners what we think it means. That hasn't changed - at least at NPR, that hasn't changed.

DETROW: That's a good place to end this - this 50th anniversary special, celebrating 50 years of talking to people and telling you what we talked about with those people and what it means. Hopefully, we'll do that for another 50 years. And as Robert Siegel said, you can catch all of this at npr.org (laughter).

I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House.

RASCOE: I'm Ayesha Rascoe. I also cover the White House.

LIASSON: And I'm Mara Liasson, national political correspondent.

DETROW: Thank you for listening to this podcast for almost six years and for listening to NPR for 50 years.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA'S "TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)")

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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