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Rand‒influenced policies while running the Federal Reserve were not looking good now.His image had been “tarnished,” said the
Wall Street Journal
. Not only that, but some of those uptight media-ethics types, at places like the
Columbia Journalism Review
, were “raising fundamental questions” about how Mitchell could possibly cover the major story of the day for NBC without running up against questions of Greenspan’s culpability and legacy.
    Mitchell says she has always been a stickler for avoiding conflicts of interest. But in Alan and Andrea’s rarefied and interconnected realm, that was like an owl trying to avoid trees. She was a model citizen of This Town. A Club officer. The administrations and campaigns that Mitchell covered overlapped considerably with her social and personal habitat. In her 2005 memoir, Andrea described her 1997 wedding to Alan, officiated by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Inn at Little Washington. “Our friend Oscar de la Renta designed my dress,” Andrea said. There was no honeymoon because she and Alan both had to work, and besides, they had a state dinner to attend two nights later, “our first as a married couple,” Andrea pointed out. “Although the dinner was in honor of the prime minister of Canada, it felt as though we were still celebrating our marriage.”
    Once, as part of the White House press pool, Mitchell encountered Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, Lloyd Bentsen, outside the Oval Office—and was embarrassed when Bentsen thanked her and Alan for hosting him and his wife for dinner the night before (“Oh, Andrea, I was gonna write you a note, we had such a good time last night,” Bentsen said). There were weekend getaways to the home of George Shultz, others with Gerald and Betty Ford, and another to visit Liz and Pat Moynihan. There was the memorable dinner in Virginia with Al and Tipper Gore, back when they were still married, and that great surprise fiftieth-birthday bash for Condi Rice at the home of the British ambassador.
    Mitchell’s main coverage area has been national security and foreign affairs. This generally kept her clear from the monetary and economic policies over which her husband held enormous sway for decades. But not always, and of course, the politics and politicians of Washington are never so neatly compartmentalized. Mitchell also hosted a midday show on MSNBC, which focused broadly on the politics and, obviously, the captivating campaign in progress. Citizens of This Town—including many inside NBC—had wondered for years how Mitchell could possibly navigate the big Washington gray areas between the demands of friendship and journalism, and what constituted a social and professional setting. “She knows where to draw the line,” NBC News head Steve Capus told the
New York Times
in response to “questions being raised.”
    Still, the financial crisis was a special case. It would belike Laura Bush covering the federal government’s reaction to Katrina, the
Columbia Journalism Review
wrote. “There is an excessively large elephant in the [NBC] control room,” the magazine added. “Its name is Alan Greenspan.”
    Speaking of elephants, the Andrea–Alan union called to mind a dictum coined by former
New York Times
editor A. M. Rosenthal: “I don’t care if you fuck an elephant,” he said, “just so long as you don’t cover the circus.”
    No one covered the circus like Andrea, a fierce, smart, and tenacious journalist and pioneer among women broadcasters in a male-dominated realm. She was also a real-deal reporter in a sector—TV news—that had been increasingly given over to bimbos and blowhards. Girls tell her they want to grow up to be “news anchors,” not “journalists.” Andrea is a journalist, and no one works harder.
    But given the calamity at hand, and the campaign,special accommodations were in order. Mitchell would not be allowed to talk on-air about the causes of the crisis. Only the politics of it. “We