Edition: U.S. / Global

Cokie Roberts, Nina Totenberg and Linda Wertheimer

Published: January 2, 1994
(Page 3 of 3)

Q: I don't get it. CR: Well, that's the point. [ Laughs ] You're live on the air, and you've got the world's sports expert on with you. You're a girl, right? And he just segues from this gracious thing to asking you a totally impossible question, like, "What is 4,852 times 900,848 -- and tell me right now." LW: And I suppose he didn't think I had any idea who Winning Colors was. Well, I just started laughing. "I'm really rooting for the filly, Red," I said. "But I think we've had a lot of rain, and you know, Pimlico is really going to be muddy, no question about it." Heh, heh. I always read the racing news in The New Yorker. The bastard didn't get me!

Q: Well, Linda, perhaps the late Red Barber could have traded notes with Ross Perot on their dislike of you? CR: Linda spoke vicious truths to Ross Perot. LW: Yes, I asked him about some history and he got very upset. CR: He went nuts! I heard the broadcast while driving down Sunset Boulevard. I had been interviewing somebody and I was driving back to my hotel, and there on the radio was Ross Perot barking at Linda: "This is a classic setup. Is this a radio program? You're not just somebody calling in? Whoever you're trying to do a favor for, you've done it, and I'm sure you had a smirk on your mouth as you got me into this." It was a riot. I almost had a wreck! NT: Here's Linda's thoroughness again. Linda had covered the tax bill, in which Perot had succeeded in getting himself a multimillion dollar loophole of the kind that he was condemning all over the country. So she had him dead to rights because she'd been there when it happened. He went ballistic.

Q: Ross Perot didn't much care for you either, Cokie. NT: In the beginning he loved her. He wanted her to run for Vice President. CR: Oh, that was just a rumor. I had written an op-ed piece that talked about why he was having the effect he was having. And I had heard from people in his organization that this was the best description of the phenomenon they had seen. But then I had him on "Nightline" and he again talked about us not asking him questions that wanted to be asked. The whole interview became just unbelievably testy, and it just got ruder and tenser and awful. We just sat there thinking, "Is he gonna get up and leave? Is he gonna throw the chair? Is he going to strangle himself on his microphone?" The next week he gave his comment about not minding reporters, just female reporters: "They're all trying to prove their manhood."

Q: Actually, you three have been charged with proving your womanhood. The conventional wisdom has it that with the increasing number of women in the Washington press corps, you have changed the nature and content of political reporting. LW: Well, we were interested in the range of issues that have defined the role of women in politics. CR: This was more true in covering Congress than on the campaign trail, because you're covering issues on an ongoing basis. During the 1990 budget- agreement talks, when the budget negotiators from the Bush Administration and Congress were all holed up at Andrews Air Force Base, our male colleagues would ask them, "How many M.X.'s are there still left in the budget?" And I'd ask, "Are mammograms still covered?"

In the 1988 Presidential campaign I felt that had there not been so many women on the campaign bus, Gary Hart's womanizing wouldn't have been a story. Hart's behavior was something that a lot of us had talked about in the prior election. We'd wondered: At what point were Gary Hart's relationships with women a story? Then the 1988 race came around and it looked like he might become President. Because there were a lot of women talking about this as an issue, that might have had the effect of sending The Washington Post and Miami Herald out on that story.

Q: Do you ever wonder if it was a mistake to politicize the private lives of politicians? Bill Clinton was rumored to have a Gary Hart-ish sexual life, yet he's turned out to be quite supportive of women's rights. CR: So's Bob Packwood. Q: Has Bob Packwood's story long been known in Washington, as Gary Hart's was? NT: In a way. I've run into female staffers who ran Senatorial offices 10 years ago, who would, as a matter of course, instruct newcomers not to be in a room alone with him. If you were a woman on Capitol Hill, you knew who was a bottom pincher and who wasn't. If you were a female reporter you still had to interview everybody, but there were certain Senators you knew to sit far away from -- or dress like a nun with. CR: The point is that 10 years ago no one would have thought Packwood's behavior with women was a story. NT: Cokie and I did "Nightline" recently with Dianne Feinstein. Senator Feinstein was the only member of the Senate we asked who would go on the program about Packwood. And she felt very strongly, as she said on the air, that there was absolutely a direct connection between Anita Hill and Bob Packwood -- that the Packwood disciplinary proceeding would not have happened without the Thomas-Hill hearings.

Q: Your friendship sounds so idyllic. Do you ever get angry at one another? NT: Oh, we have been angry, but it never lasts long. LW: Whenever there have been stresses, it's been because somebody's had some kind of personal problem and we've had to adjust to provide the support. Mostly there's a lot of cooperation; there were plenty of times when one of us would have to go somewhere and the other one would cover. I'd go to a news conference and then come back and say, "Here's what happened, and the cut of tape you want is there." And we just had that kind of trust. And we also had the capacity to divide up the work without getting competitive.

Q: Not even a wee bit competitive? CR: Whatever competition there is . . . is pretty healthy. I mean, there have been lots of primary nights when we'd sit there at three o'clock in the morning exhausted, trying to outwrite each other. And if the other one had not been there, you wouldn't have done it, because at moments like that you're so tired that all you want to do is go to bed. NT: Our beats do overlap, but we manage it. Cokie and Linda both cover Congress and the political beat. And I certainly trample on their turf. If there's a big confirmation battle over a Supreme Court nominee, there's no question it's my story. And they've always deferred to me on that. Totally. And if I'm covering a political story, like a Presidential campaign, I have no expectation that I'll get first dibs.

Q: In closing, how do you feel when you meet younger women in journalism who haven't any idea how rough things used to be in the "bad old days"? NT: Murder comes to mind. LW: I think what happens now is that the young women get the first job, and the next job, and achieve some level of success. But at some point they hit a wall and they find out that until and unless a substantial number of mostly white men die, they may not be able to move up. It's a shock to their systems. CR: On one hand you always have to fight the feeling of saying, "Just you wait, my pretties. . . ." You don't want to be the Wicked Witch of the West, but you do know that they will run into sex discrimination as they proceed in their journalistic lives. Still, you're proud they don't have to fight as hard as we did. We opened things up -- for them.

Photos: Nina Totenberg, Linda Wertheimer and Cokie Roberts. (PHOTOGRAPH BY NEIL SELKIRK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. 15); A composed Cokie Roberts on "This Week"; Nina Totenberg at center stage on "Inside Washington"; Linda Wertheimer in her NPR office. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY WALTER CALAHAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. 16-17)