The Women of Washington Roundtable Interview
Kate Betts
ELECTIONS. SARAH PALIN. BREAST PUMPS. THE SUPREME COURT. Those were just a few of the lively topics to emerge during a roundtable interview Watch! magazine held with Norah O’Donnell, Nancy Cordes, Jan Crawford and Sharyl Attkisson. Over lunch at Washington’s historic hotel The Jefferson, the CBS News correspondents covering the nation’s capital talked to editor and writer Kate Betts about the upcoming elections, the pressures of balancing career and home life, and how they’ve broken through in a male-dominated profession, among other topics.
Watch!: What was the hardest interview in your career to get?
Nancy Cordes: During the whole healthcare debate, when all of these negotiations were going on behind closed doors, nobody wanted to talk to us in public about where things were going. The same thing happened with the impending government shutdown. They were down to the final hour, you had leaders like Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell crafting deals behind closed doors, and then when they would come out, they would just say, “We’re making progress.”
Kate Betts
Jan Crawford: The hardest interviews that I’ve done were for my book [Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court] when I was trying to get people inside the Bush White House to talk about why they nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. The hardest interview for me to get on camera was probably Justice [Clarence] Thomas.
Norah O’Donnell: After his second election, George W. Bush had this huge repair job; his inaugural address was sort of trying to make up after the Iraq War. I pitched an interview with Laura Bush, but a more policy-centered piece. I’d interviewed her before, but it was usually the Christmas•type interviews that she gave to most of the networks for the morning shows. I traveled with her to Germany, to Wiesbaden, and visited soldiers. Interviews with first ladies tend to be a little bit lighter focused, but this was one of the hardest ones to get because I wanted her to talk more about policy. And it was around the same time [presidential historian] Doug Wead had come out with a book alleging that Bush had smoked pot. I had to ask her at the end whether he’d smoked pot. Her press secretary, was like, “Cut this interview.” It wasn’t live, it was taped.
Sharyl Attkisson: I feel like 70 percent of my interviews are hard to get because no one wants to interview with me. They think I’m going to do something [critical]—and sometimes that’s fair. Recently, the ones that come to mind are whistleblowers. My gun-walker story [about federal agents transporting guns across the border and arming Mexican drug cartels] really broke for me when there was a whistleblower that I knew about who was unnamed. I was trying to find him and get him on camera.
I got an anonymous call one day from a woman saying, “I have someone that may want to talk to you on this story,” and I said, “Is it one of these agents?” that I was looking for, and she said yes. I said, “Well, please tell him to call me.” I wrote down the phone number that it came in on, because she didn’t tell me her name. A couple days went by, and he never called back.
So, on a Sunday night, I was at home thinking about this story, and I dialed that phone number. I thought, “She’s either going to freak out that I wrote down the number or it’s going to be OK.” When she answered I said, “You called me a couple days ago, and I really need this guy to talk to me. I know he’s afraid, and I know he’s hesitant.” He got on the phone with me but still didn’t tell me who he was. I did a lot of hard work to get that guy to go on national television.
Watch!: What are you most excited about in the upcoming election coverage?
Crawford: What’s so interesting about the way this campaign is going to unfold is that you have—at least on the Republican side, which is what I’m covering—so many people who are so engaged in this election in ways that we have not seen in some time. People care right now, and they really believe that this election is going to be a referendum on the direction of America.
Cordes: What I love is the surprise. You look at the polls, and you kind of know how it’s all going to end up, but there’s always something that happens out on the campaign trail that completely changes the game.
Four years ago, Fred Thompson was the big hope for the Republicans, and there was all this anticipation. So I went to Iowa when he announced his campaign, and there were tons of reporters there. He gave his speech and everyone was like, “Oh. This is not going to work. He doesn’t have the fire in the belly.” It just went downhill from there, and he got out pretty quickly.
Then a few months later, I was at the Republican Convention, and this governor from Alaska that no one had ever heard of, Sarah Palin, had been chosen as John McCain’s running mate. She comes out on stage and knocks it out of the park, and suddenly the campaign is going, “Oh, my God, we’re going to need a bigger plane for her, because there are so many reporters who want to cover her.”
Watch!: How do you think people like Palin and Michele Bachmann have changed the way campaigns are covered, if at all?
Norah O’Donnell: I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by saying the way Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin are covered—not necessarily network coverage, but other forms of media—says a lot about how people still view women in power and judge them.
I can remember being at the Republican Convention and talking to so many Republicans about Palin, and they’re like, “She is hot, and she hunts, and she has five kids.”
And I said, “Are you serious?” and they’re like, “Yeah. She’s hot.”
Crawford: The flip side of that is, the level of vitriol directed at Palin is breathtaking. Whether you agree with her or not, it is shocking when yo u listen to some of those attacks that she’s endured.
O’Donnell: I would say the women seem to draw more. Everybody has got their enemies and friends, but with women it’s just the most vitriolic and personal and hateful stuff.
Crawford: And I think conservative women in particular are singled out for much harsher treatment, and I don’t know why that is.
O’Donnell: I kept thinking that there was going to be a Clinton/Palin effect, that there were going to be all these women who wanted to run for office—you know, people who had seen Hillary and the 18 million cracks in the glass on the Democratic side and thought, “Oh, I’m inspired by her,” and the same thing with Palin. I thought there was going to be this huge turnout.
Then in 2010, the number of women in Congress dropped for the first time in a generation, and in state houses it dropped by a full percentage point.
Watch!: Why is that?
Cordes: Women like getting things done. We can talk about all the reasons why government isn’t as effective at getting things done as it used to be. You need to raise so much money just to run and to win, and because so many districts have been gerrymandered, you have a lot of very far right Republicans, far left Democrats getting into office. And of course they don’t see eye to eye. I think women may have looked at the setup, whether it’s at the national level or the state level, and said, “I think I can do more outside of elective office.”
Watch!: When you hear people like Barbara Walters or Diane Sawyer talk about navigating the male-dominated broadcast world that they started off in, what has changed?
Crawford: Women of our generation owe an enormous debt to the women who came before us. I owe my career to people like that, and sometimes my concern is that the younger generation of women might take it for granted—it just doesn’t occur to them that women once were kept in second-rate jobs. Women who used to work at newspapers had to cover Pet of the Week or society news.
Cordes: In my previous job, there would be nights where we would look at the 12 pieces that were vying to get into the evening broadcast that night. I would say to my producer, “Oh, we’re definitely getting on, because I’m the only woman who has a piece tonight, and they’ve got to put one woman in the show.”
Attkisson: When I first started out, I knew a lot of over•40 women who had made this business their career. They didn’t have children and usually weren’t married and would talk to me about how they had let life pass them by. I always tell kids now that your career should be a priority and you have plenty of time for family, but if along the way you meet the right person, don’t let life pass you by just for the job.
Watch!: How do you juggle it all?
Attkisson: We make choices. I’m happy I have one child. But I probably would have had more kids if I didn’t love my career so much.
Cordes: It’s hard. My kids are 1 and 2. I get home every night around 7. After the evening news, I jump on the Metro, but they go to bed at 7:15 or 7:30. So I am racing home just to get those last 15 minutes before they go to bed.
O’Donnell: I went to the Democratic Convention, and I left a 7-week-old baby at home. I know you guys are going to think I’m horrible for doing that, but I didn’t want to miss the convention. I was at NBC, so we started at 9 a.m. and finished at 11 p.m. I was pumping [breast milk for the baby] and bringing it back to the hotel. They have these pages that are assigned to you—mine was an 18-year-old girl—who drive you around in golf carts and bring you coffee. On the last day she said, “Is there anything else I can do for you?” I said, “You can figure out how to ship my breast milk home.” I was so embarrassed to ask her this, and she did not bat an eye.
Cordes: My producer calls it “taking a meeting.”
Attkisson: That’s a good producer.
Get your FREE DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTION today!
Follow CBS Watch! Magazine on Facebook and Twitter