Andrea Mitchell Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

[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.

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

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.

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.