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Molly Ball, national political correspondent for TIME and the author of Pelosi (Henry Holt and Co., 2020) , kicks off the new year with a look at the new divided Congress and what the Republican majority in the House will do in the first weeks of January.
Correction: Barbara Walters' question, "What tree are you?" was actually for actress Katherine Hepburn.
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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Well, the holiday season is really over now, and it was long. With the Monday holidays, it was like two Christmases in a row and two New Year's days in a row, Sunday, Monday, Sunday, Monday. If you settled into deep, days-off mode, it can be understood. Sorry to say it's over.
Sorry to see your real life return or for many others of you, maybe it's more like, "Whoa, we finally got through all that," depending on your lifestyle and family situation.
Yes, the kids are finally back in school today, or the in-laws or your own parents have finally gone home. If you flew on Southwest Airlines, well, we could do a whole post-mortem call-in on your Southwest Airlines horror stories. Maybe we will. Senator Blumenthal from Connecticut, if you haven't heard us proposing an airline passenger's Bill of Rights to require free rebooking on other airlines in situations like those and some other rights, some people apparently had to pay a second time to get on their rebooked flights. There was that.
I won't even go into the NFL horror story from last night right now. We'll see how the poor guy, 24-year-old DeMar Hamlin is over the next day and we'll probably do a dedicated segment tomorrow, no matter how he is. Call me a snowflake if you want to.
Even as someone who does watch football sometimes, call me a snowflake, but maybe we have to ask why a game that has so many injuries and is built on tackling people to the ground is even necessary to have as a commercial spectator sport. Yes, it's America's most popular sport to watch. Maybe that says something about something, we'll take this on more directly on tomorrow show.
A special shout out to those of you who work the holidays. We know that one very well in the broadcasting and journalism world. Somebody has to be on the air, on the radio station. Someone has to be reporting the Southwest Airlines meltdown. Someone has to be serving you in the restaurant on New Year's Eve. Cops and firefighters and sanitation workers and hospital workers got to be there. Somebody is receiving your angry gift exchanges at customer service in the stores on the day after Christmas.
Somebody is cleaning up your hotel room mess, so you can come back later that night and mess it up again. We can at least say to those folks, thank you, and we see you, here on January 3rd, finally, not the holidays anymore. Maybe your vacation season starts now. Congratulations on making it through to the other side. For those of you for whom the last 10 days were lovely, sorry, it's back to the so-called normal.
Later in the show today, we're going to start an oral history call-in series on the most defining news event of your lifetime, local or national. We're going to take this decade by decade. Today, if you are over 90 years old, 90 or above, this call-in will be only for you today on the most defining news event of your lifetime.
For some extra fun, we'll invite you to name the most memorable concert you ever saw, if you have one today for people, 90 or above. We go as far back in time as we can for this Oral History Series then tomorrow, we'll take people in your 80s and on down through the decades as the series goes on if you're in your twenties or below, it'll be Thursday of next week, put it in your calendars.
If you're 90 or above, give it a little thought and get ready to call in around 11:30 this morning with the most defining news event of your lifetime as we begin a news through the decades, Oral History Series. Yes, the holidays are over and you made it through to the other side, you know who may not make it through today in the way he would like.
Kevin McCarthy. Will he become Speaker of the House with the new Republican majority, or has he alienated too many reality-based Republicans in his conference by embracing Donald Trump's lies too much or alienated too many people on his right by not being Trumpy enough?
We will start there today with Time Magazine National Political Correspondent Molly Ball, who also wrote a bestselling biography of the outgoing Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Of course, it is simply called Pelosi. Molly, happy to have you. Happy New Year. I hope you didn't have to fly Southwest over the holidays and welcome back to WNYC.
Molly Ball: Thank you so much for having me. I got to spend Christmas all alone. Thanks to a combination of COVID and airlines, but I'm back at it today and happy to be here.
Brian Lehrer: Well, you sound good. I hope you're all recovered.
Molly Ball: Yes.
Brian Lehrer: Give us a civics lesson to start out. Is the election of a Speaker of the House, the very first order of business and the House can't do anything else until they have a Speaker?
Molly Ball: That's right. I think the important thing to remember here is Congress makes its own rules, but they can't make any rules. The House can't make any rules until there is a Speaker. In fact, the members can't even be sworn in until there is a Speaker. This is really just governed by tradition, precedent and a very small amount of text in the Constitution, this process.
It has been exactly 100 years since the Speaker vote went to a second ballot, but most people are expecting that that may be the situation today. As we speak, the House Republican Conference is meeting as Kevin McCarthy, from what I understand is making a presentation to the members to try to convince those holdouts to get on board and back him. It's a very high bar.
It's very difficult. Republicans have a very small majority. He needs a majority of whoever's voting. If all 434 members of the House are in attendance today, that would mean he would need 218 votes, can change depending on present votes and people not voting. That could get a little complicated in terms of the threshold.
For all the-- Can I say crap on public radio? For all the crap McCarthy's getting today and mostly deserves, I think it is important to remember that he has to get more than 95% of his members to vote for him in order to succeed at being Speaker and that would be hard for anyone.
Brian Lehrer: I'm enough of a snowflake to consider NFL abolition, but not enough to say, you can't say crap on public radio. This, and we'll get into the politics like who, if not Kevin McCarthy? I want to ask this first, and this might be an ignorant question, but what is really the job of Speaker?
Sure, you have a majority party and a minority party, and the math dictates what bills they pass or what investigations they can vote to launch or whatever, but what's the role of the individual? You wrote a whole book about a Speaker of the house, what's the role of the individual, whoever it is, as Speaker of the house?
Molly Ball: Yes, I've obviously thought a lot about this question. I'm glad you bring it up, and it is a good big-picture thing to think about as we go through all of this ground-level drama and procedural nitpicking. The Speaker is the leader of the entire House, if not the entire Congress.
It's the only leadership position that is in the Constitution and it is elected by the whole house. That's why the Speaker needs 218 votes, not just a majority of his or her individual party conference. Kevin McCarthy did get the vast majority of the Republican Conference to support his nomination for Speaker, but the entire house votes on the Speaker. That person, again, is then the leader of the entire house.
Setting the rules, setting the agenda, deciding how the house is going to work, deciding what committees it's going to have, Nancy Pelosi unilaterally decided that there would be a committee to investigate the January 6th insurrection. Nancy Pelosi also created a special climate committee in the House, because that was an issue that was important to her.
Some of the demands that McCarthy is facing or promises that he's made, for if he becomes Speaker, are for things like that special committees that might be created, investigative committees in particular.
I always, when I talked about Nancy Pelosi when she was Speaker, a lot of people focused on the parts of her job that weren't really the job. The political side of the job, the public perception side of the job, what people thought of her, whether she was polarizing or toxic politically, but the Speaker is first the leader of their party caucus. One of the things that Nancy Pelosi did particularly well, in fact better than any Speaker in history was to keep Democrats together.
Critics could say that this increased the level of partisanship in the house, but she enforced and led a higher level of party unity than any Speaker before or after her. That's the herding Kat's part of the job. The Speaker is working with the other party in the house. The Speaker is working with the Senate. The Speaker is working with the White House, doing all those negotiations on things like budgets, keeping the lights on, keeping the debt limit raised so that the United States doesn't default on its obligations.
Negotiating with the other party, keeping your own party together, and constructing, passing big pieces of policy, if you feel like doing that in the minority, not necessarily the highest probability, with the divided Congress. As you mentioned, this House also has a lot of investigations that they want to do in the name of holding the White House and Democrats accountable.
Brian Lehrer: Right. If anything were to happen to both the President and the Vice President, God forbid, the Speaker of the House is the next in line for the Presidency. That, of course, is a big potential thing. It's never happened, but you got to have somebody who at least theoretically could run the country in their run of the executive branch. You tell a story in the book, to digress a little more before we come back to Kevin McCarthy's election or not today.
I'm doing this from memory, so correct me if I'm remembering it wrong. I think you tell a story in your Pelosi book of when President Obama was trying to get Obamacare, aka the Affordable Care Act through the house and it was close. Pelosi admonished him for trying too hard to get a bipartisan version that would get some Republican votes. Am I remembering that right?
Molly Ball: In general, this was her major tension with the Obama White House was that on Obamacare, and that was mainly in the Senate. The White House and the Senate dithered and dithered on trying to get Republicans on board and Pelosi believed from the beginning that they weren't going to get on board. This was also a big dynamic with the stimulus, which was really the first legislative drama of the Obama Presidency. He also spent months or at least weeks courting Republicans for that and failing.
Yes, you are correct that in general, Pelosi was less convinced that bipartisanship was a possibility and I think we can look back and say that she was right about that.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, our phones are open for any post-New Year's Tuesday Morning Politics. Yes, it's Tuesday not Monday, don't forget. Republicans listening now, should Kevin McCarthy be Speaker? 212-433-WNYC. If not him, then whom? If you voted for pants-on-fire Republican Congressman George Santos, who will presumably be sworn in today, do you still want him sworn in? Hello, Queens and Nassau Republicans who may have voted for Santos, this question is for you.
212-433-9692. Call with your Southwest Airlines horror stories, and if there should be a passenger's bill of rights policy response like Senator Blumenthal is proposing? Any Barbara Walters fans out there who want to say a word or two? We'll play a couple of clips of her from 1990 coming up in a little bit, or any questions relevant for Molly Ball, Time Magazine National Political Correspondent, and Pelosi author. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or maybe make your first tweets of the year. Tweet at @BrianLehrer.
All right. How does it go today in the speaker election? Is there open debate on the House floor? Are people going to say good things or bad things about Kevin McCarthy and open debate in front of C-SPAN and everyone? How does it go?
Molly Ball: Yes. Well, the house will gavel in at noon, and that is when the voting will begin. I believe there will be some speeches. What has been really interesting to me in following this process is how little of a plan that McCarthy and his allies seem to have. In fact, there seem to be more votes against him or skeptics of his ability to be Speaker within the republican conference today than there were after the election when the Republicans won the House, which is not what you would expect to see after nearly two months of him campaigning and interfacing with people and trying to get people on board.
There is a lot of skepticism about whether he is going to make it to that threshold today. As I mentioned, the Republicans are conferencing this morning and hoping to have the argument within the family there, but McCarthy's plan is just to stay on the floor and make them vote until they get to him. It's a brute-force argument rather than a clever plan that could work. We will see.
Brian Lehrer: From what I've read, assuming no Democrats vote for him, McCarthy can only lose four Republican votes, and five from the most right-wing faction have come out against him at least so far. Here's one of them. Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz.
Matt Gaetz: I'm not voting for Kevin McCarthy for Speaker because I think he's just a shill of the establishment. I think that Kevin McCarthy is little more than a vessel through which lobbyists and special interests operate. The reason most of my Republican colleagues are supporting him is because they benefit from the redistribution of lobbyists and special interest money through McCarthy to their campaign accounts.
Brian Lehrer: Asked later if he thinks McCarthy has a plan for the southern border, Gaetz started with the idea of impeaching President Biden's Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, but the question was, does McCarthy have a plan?
Matt Gaetz: Well, the plan ought to be to impeach Mayorkas. McCarthy was against that until he saw that he needed the votes of populous conservatives, and then all of a sudden he's changed his tune. I don't believe that's sincere. I know we have a crisis on the border. We're going to be at the point where we have tens of thousands of people coming over each and every day, and we need a Republican Party willing to stand up to that. Actually, Paul Ryan, like that wing of the Republican Party, they believe in unchecked immigration because it lowers wages, and it lowers labor costs for big business.
Brian Lehrer: That was Matt Gaetz from his own YouTube channel. That's where we got that clip. Our guest is Molly Ball from Time. Molly, one interesting thing to me about those clips is that if we didn't tell everyone, it was going to be Matt Gaetz. They might have thought it was a progressive democrat or a socialist because the main thing he was dinging McCarthy on was doing the bidding of big business, but of course, on any labor rights or minimum wage or any such issues, the GOP is always on management side and anti-union. How does that fit together with what Matt Gaetz was invoking there as reasons to oppose Kevin McCarthy for Speaker?
Molly Ball: Yes. Well, Gaetz is an interesting case. He's actually not a member of the Freedom Caucus. He sees himself as an independent, conservative populist. If I can toot my own horn a little bit back, back in, I believe, May I wrote a piece about Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene calling them the MAGA Squad and predicting that they could pose trouble for McCarthy when and if the Republicans won the house. Okay, it was in June.
The interesting thing there, of course, is that Gaetz and Greene are not aligned anymore. Greene has gone hard-core pro, I guess management, as you could say. She's on McCarthy's side and has been harshly critical of the Conservatives who are trying to dethrone McCarthy, while Gaetz has been a ringleader of the Never Kevin faction, saying that he will not vote for McCarthy under any circumstances.
It is interesting, but Gaetz himself in the name of this conservative populism has occasionally found common cause with progressives. Sometimes, I believe there was a bill on psychedelic legalization that he worked with AOC on. There's been less of that type of collaboration since January 6th, 2021. He's an interesting case, just because he is independent in his policy views and likes to take on Mayorkas.
Brian Lehrer: That's interesting. Though, I guess the main reason that Republicans want to crack down on the Southern border is because there are too many brown people coming in too quickly. Let's take a phone call. Here's Lee in Brooklyn, who has a question that at least three callers on our board are asking. Lee, you get to do the honors? You're on WNYC. Happy New Year.
Lee: Hi, there. Happy New Year. I'm just curious since the Republicans just have such a narrow majority, which I think is only about five seats. That sounds like a lot of them are going to be splitting their votes between McCarthy and somebody else. Could potentially the Democrats all vote for one person and get a Democrat nominated to be Speaker of the House?
Brian Lehrer: Still some Republican votes, but presumably they could help boost McCarthy rather than a more right-wing candidate or some scenario like that. Molly?
Molly Ball: Yes. McCarthy does not have a lot of friends on the Democratic side of the aisle. If he did, that would probably cause him more trouble with the Conservatives. He is caught in the middle in that sense. In terms of the math, the Democrats don't have a majority, so they would need more votes to get to a majority. As far as I know, all of the Democrats, or nearly all of them are planning to vote for Hakeem Jeffries to be their leader.
He was elected, I believe, by acclamation in the democratic conference to be their nominee for Speaker so he will be the Democratic nominee for speaker on the floor, and he will get probably all of the Democrats', what is it? 212 votes, but that is less than 218. Unless something changes with the math, unless there are fewer than 434 people on the floor, that would not be enough to get to a majority and the constitutional threshold is a majority.
Brian Lehrer: Well, I did hear one wild scenario a few weeks ago. I think it's a wild scenario because I haven't been hearing it this weekend. You can tell me if this just was somebody's pipe dream that McCarthy can't get a majority of Republicans, so someone slightly more moderate gets nominated. A lot of Democrats vote for that person plus enough Republicans and voila, we have a bipartisan coalition Speaker and bipartisan kind of center, right to center, left, House majority. Is that just somebody's kumbaya dream?
Molly Ball: Yes and no. I would say yes, it is a wild scenario but today is all about wild scenarios. The House Speaker vote has not gone to a second ballot since 1923, exactly, 100 years ago. All bets are off. Anything could happen. While I would consider that highly unlikely, there's a lot of highly unlikely things that might happen today just because it is such an unusual situation. Now, as far as I know there is not active plotting for that kind of "unity speaker" type of situation. Is there a few Republican moderates who have talked about potentially looking to even someone who is not currently in the house?
There's no requirement that the House Speaker actually be a member of the House of Representatives but again McCarthy is at the midpoint of the House Republican caucus. If they go any more moderate to liberal, they lose a lot of right-wing votes. If they go any more conservative, try to get like a Speaker Jim Jordan or even a Speaker Steve Scalise, could lose some of the moderate Republican votes on the other end. Whoever is in this situation that Kevin McCarthy's in, whoever is trying to be the Republican Speaker of the house, is in a tricky situation.
Brian Lehrer: How much does McCarthy also have doubters to his left, among maybe more centrist Republicans from swing districts who barely won their elections?
Molly Ball: At this point, the most liberal, I guess, members of the Republican Conference are quite loyal to McCarthy. People like the newly elected Mike Lawler from New York or Don Bacon from Nebraska, most of the moderates including the Republican Main Street Caucus, which is the centrist arm of the Republican conference, they all signed a letter supporting McCarthy very strongly. Most of the moderates are on McCarthy's side but they're on McCarthy's side because they don't wanna see someone more conservative, I think lead the caucus for the most part.
Brian Lehrer: A few people are calling in with George Santos's questions. Here's Dana in Queens with one. Hi Dana, you're on WNYC.
Dana: Hi. I have a simple question. Is George Santos a citizen? We know he's wanted in Brazil. He's a felon basically. He's not convicted, but is he a citizen? Has anybody ascertained that? Because he has no boundaries. There's nothing that's out of the park for him. I don't think he's a citizen. Do you?
Brian Lehrer: That's interesting. He's an alleged felon until he is convicted of anything and unless he is, but, I haven't heard that one that he might have been born in Brazil and never naturalized. Like Dana says anything is possible with him because he is made up so much stuff. What are you hearing about George Santos?
Molly Ball: That is a good question to which I do not know the answer, but obviously, I think anything George Santos has ever said about himself and where he comes from and his background is open to question at this point since he seems to have fabricated pretty much his entire existence. As we know now he is under investigation by authorities in two separate countries. Going to be interesting times for George Santos ahead.
Brian Lehrer: By the way, you said, Marjorie Taylor Greene is supporting Kevin McCarthy even though some of the other most far-right republicans in Congress are not. Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene supporting him, and for that matter, Donald Trump is supporting him too?
Molly Ball: It's a really interesting split among the conserve the more pro-Trump members of the house. Greene has not only voiced support for McCarthy, she's been campaigning for him very hard and even been, as I said, very harshly critical of people like Gates, people like Lauren Boebert who've taken different positions from her but Greene has been working for the last couple of years to cultivate Kevin McCarthy.
She has cozied up to him after being harshly critical for him in the beginning. She has gotten him to do her bidding on a number of things, and he has promised to restore her committees, for example, since the Democrats kicked her off of her house committees. He's made various other, promises to her. She has said it's not a situation where she presented him a list of demands. But because she's been such a good ally to him, she expects to have a lot of clout and have a lot of leverage in the next Congress.
It's just a different strategy for how to use power. Someone like Matt Gaetz is much more about trying to leverage outside power against leadership. Marjorie Taylor Greene has calculated that the best way to get what she wants accomplished is to become part of the power structure and be as close to the Speaker as possible. If McCarthy becomes speaker, I think we can expect to see her have a lot of influence.
Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Molly Ball from Time here on day one of the new Congress. We'll take more of your calls. We'll also play a clip, really two clips of the late Barbara Walters, who you probably heard died just the other day, that goes back to 1990 that I think you'll be interested to hear even as it makes you cringe. Stay with us.
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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. What's the cutoff? Some people say Happy New Year all the way up through January 31st. I don't know what the cutoff is for us but it's only January 3rd. Happy New Year everybody.
We continue with Time magazine, National Political Correspondent, Molly Ball on this day of the new Speaker of the House election. Molly, also the author of the book, Pelosi, about the outgoing Speaker and with you, 212-433 WNYC, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Molly, as you know, Barbara Walters died at age 93 the other day, pioneering woman in broadcast news, just as Nancy Pelosi was in political leadership, breaking barriers, host of the Today Show, founder of The View.
Here's Walters interviewing a certain New Yorker who became President of the United States more than 25 years later. This is from 1990 and you'll hear her tough interviewing style and the interviewee doing the kind of evasion the rest of us have come to know.
Barbara Walters: Well, the new book is entitled, Surviving At The Top. There are many people who would say, failing at the top.
Donald Trump: I hope the general public understands how inherently dishonest the press in this country is.
Barbara Walters: As a member of the press, let me try to clear up some of the things which you say are untrue. You write in your book, "My bankers and I worked out a terrific deal that allows me to come out stronger than ever. I see the deal as a great victory and eventually, the rest of the world will too." Being on the verge of bankruptcy, being bailed out by the banks-
Donald Trump: Well, you don't have to say [inaudible 00:27:31] -[crosstalk]
Barbara Walters: -skating on thin ice and almost drowning, that's a businessman to be admired?
Donald Trump: You say on the verge of bankruptcy, Barbara, and you talk on the verge and you listen to what people are saying.
Barbara Walters: I talked to your bankers.
Donald Trump: That's fine. What do they say? Depending on which banker you're talking to, what did they say? I'm the only one people write about. They don't write about other people.
Brian Lehrer: Then shortly thereafter.
Barbara Walters: In the current issue of Vanity Fair, the author Marie Brennan says that you read from Hitler's collected speeches, My New Order and that these are speeches that you seem to admire. What's your reaction? Do you have this book?
Donald Trump: A friend of mine sent me a book. A man who I think is Jewish, although I don't know.
Brian Lehrer: Barbara Walters and Donald Trump on ABC in 1990. Obviously, we hear Trump all the way back then already saying the press is dishonest. We hear Trump all the way back then not denying that he was enjoying a Hitler book, just saying a friend who might have been Jewish sent it to him. Molly, what do we hear about Barbara Walters in those interview bites?
Molly Ball: It's a great interview, and I saw that clip going around over the last few days and obviously, relished the way she had his number even back then. The other-- I think the most interesting thing Trump says, and I obviously, admired Barbara Walters greatly, although I grew up without a television, so don't have any personal experience of her.
Brian Lehrer: Wait, I have to jump in on that. You grew up without a television?
Molly Ball: Yes, basically feral. My parents are our college professors, we didn't have a TV at home.
Brian Lehrer: Wait, obviously there's a lot of other kinds of journalism, but how'd you get interested in the news business?
Molly Ball: I was a bookworm and listened to a lot of radio.
Brian Lehrer: I'll take it.
Molly Ball: [laughs] I would just say, what the thing that Trump says that struck me the most in that clip was that he's the one they write about. There's a similar comment that he made, I believe in Maggie Haberman's book, that was always what was most important to him was, am I being talked about? Do people know who I am? Much more important than whatever financial situation was or was not bedeviling him at the time.
Barbara Walters had his number. She knew that he was not the businessman he claimed to be but even at the time he was communicating that that wasn't what he really cared about.
Brian Lehrer: Here is a Barbara Walters call. David in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, David.
David: Hi. My family was all together this weekend, and it was just interesting to see the different dynamic play out. My parents are boomers, my sister and I are both millennials. My cousin was there who's Gen-Z. There have been different clips going around. One of them was Dolly Parton's interview with Barbara Walters from 1977. I don't know if you guys are planning any of that, but it was incredible.
My parents sort of see her, this trailblazing feminist, Barbara Walters, that is. From this clip to us, she seemed like she was putting down Dolly Parton very exploitative, very provocative, and Dolly Parton came across as this third-wave feminist that resonates today, as opposed to Barbara Walters who seems to us played out and kind of backward-looking.
Brian Lehrer: Yes, maybe there's a generational take, or maybe time passed her by. The times passed her by, I actually don't know that clip or that interview. Obviously, somebody who was a pioneer just passed and we want to remember what was pioneering about them, but maybe there were other elements, maybe she went too much into entertainment journalism for some people.
People have different views of The View whether it was a serious-minded thing targeted at the stay-at-home women in the middle of the day when there wasn't much news talk that did appeal to them, was/is a very serious-minded show in its way and shouldn't be looked down upon. Or maybe she went too much into entertainment TV, and treaded that line of infotainment, and fell off the rock? I don't know.
Molly Ball: Yes, I am not familiar with that particular clip. I will say just as a general defense of the press, it's easy to pick on people for the questions that they asked, but the point is to be provocative. Sometimes that means that you're going to confront people, even beloved people, like Dolly Parton with ideas that might seem offensive or cruel. The whole point is to allow people to react to those perceptions and to allow someone like Dolly Parton to defend herself in terms that might be more appealing to the audience, as it seems it was to this particular caller.
Brian Lehrer: Yes. There could be internalized misogyny and other kinds of even unintentional judgments of women who do something like that, in the context of having to find new ways to play in the male-dominated television world in order to get a foothold and make a mark. She obviously was doing mainstream harder stuff, like we heard in that Trump interview, in addition to whatever else was in her range.
Here's another Barbara Walters call. Laurie in Brooklyn. Laurie, you're on WNYC. Hi.
Laurie Garrett: Hi, Brian. This is Laurie Garrett. A couple of years before I joined the staff of NPR when I was a kid freelancing, I was at the--
Brian Lehrer: Laurie, I didn't realize it was you. Let me just tell people, Laurie Garrett, the groundbreaking public health reporter, among other things, wrote a book about pandemics long before Covid and kind of predicted it and was one of the first guests who we turn to when Covid started in 2020, and she was great Newsday reporter. Anyway, Laurie, thanks for calling in. Go ahead.
Laurie Garrett: Well, I wasn't fishing for all of that. I just wanted to say that in 1979, the SALT II talks, crucial nuclear disarmament negotiations between Brezhnev and Carter were taking place in Vienna and I was covering it as a freelance kid. Barbara Walters was by then, already rising up to the point where she was going against Frank Reynolds as her co-anchor on ABC News and was trying to really be taken seriously, having major interviews with non-celebrity figures.
She had taken the top suite of the Hilton Hotel in Vienna, much to the jealous consternation of most of the other reporters. In those days, we didn't have computers, we had giant ballrooms turned into row after row after row of banging machine gun typewriters. The negotiations had gotten very tense. There was a lot of concern that the Carter administration was going to "play the China card," meaning leverage China against Russia in the nuclear negotiations. All of a sudden, we were told there is an agreement, they are going to sign tomorrow, and we were issued the agreement, which was so huge that people were having a hard time devouring it.
All of a sudden, this entourage appears and they cleared out the front row of this massive ballroom of madly typing reporters, all trying to make deadlines and brought in a Barbara Walters double, who sat at a desk pretending to type. They staged the cameras and everything, and then in came Barbara Walters, and nobody had ever seen anything like this before in journalism. Never.
We had never seen our press room used as a set. She came in, and some of the other reporters, the men started throwing spit wads at her and lifting their middle finger to disrupt the camera shot, but she was setting up that she got the exclusive interview with Cyrus Vance. She was the only reporter of thousands in Vienna that day, who knew exactly what was in the agreement, knew exactly what Brezhnev had conceded, and knew that we were going to be in a safer world after the agreement was signed.
Brian Lehrer: What a great story, Laurie, thank you very much. Fabulous contribution. I guess really, who in network television with all its attempt to be very commercially appealing to people, even as it's covering the news wouldn't have used the press room as a set if they had the story and they had the idea, right?
Laurie Garrett: Well, back then nobody did that. It was seen by the print reporters, as the beginning of the end by TV journalism. Remember that movie Broadcast News came out a little while later, which depicted the whole idea of a celebrity anchor, as opposed to a hardcore journalist.
Brian Lehrer: Played by William Hurt, the celebrity anchor.
Laurie Garrett: Yes, but she got the goods. She got the story, and she was right. In contrast, almost all the other female broadcast journalists, I remember Lesley Stahl, for example, were assigned classic color stories where they had to say, "What kind of chair was Brezhnev sitting in? What kind of chair was Carter sitting in? Did they smile at each other? That kind of stuff. Barbara went right to the content. Are we going to be in a safer world tomorrow after this is signed than we are in today?
Brian Lehrer: *Even she got dinged for asking Jimmy Carter just after he was elected President, if I'm remembering this, what I read about this correctly, asking like, what kind of tree would you be if you were a tree and things like that. She got dinged by some people as too soft, but I believe in that exchange, she was responding to something Carter said about identifying with being a tree. Laurie, thank you very much.
*[correction: That question went to actress Katherine Hepburn.]
Molly, before we went out of time, I want to acknowledge going back to the Speaker of the House selection today, that we're getting a number of people calling in and tweeting in with the same exact question. It may seem far-fetched, but I'll give you this, from a tweet.
Listener writes, "This guy knows that he heard Liz Cheney has a shot for Speaker of the House. I know you don't have to be a member of the House for that. That's true, but I think George Santos has a better shot at being Speaker." This particular listener is cynical about it, but there's this idea is the Democrats might vote for Liz Cheney for Speaker of the House. Some Republicans who want to stand up for at least truth in elections might vote for Liz Cheney for Speaker of the House, but that's crazy, right?
Molly Ball: Yes, I'll go back to what I said before. It's crazy, but something crazy could happen today, just because we don't know how this is going to end and all bets are off. Again, I would say that it's especially crazy just because I don't think anyone is working on it. A far-fetched plan like that usually takes some planning, takes some preparation, takes the person in question wanting it, and working to arrange it. I don't know of any plot like that that's underway. Possibly it has been and we just don't know about it, but I think a plan that unlikely becomes more unlikely when nobody is pushing for it actively that I know of.
Brian Lehrer: Well. It's going around. We have people on the phones. We have people on Twitter, who have gotten this scenario in their heads enough to be asking about it, but we will leave it there. Great way to start the year, I think, with Molly Ball, National Political Correspondent from TIME magazine, also the author of the best-selling book about the outgoing Speaker of the House called Pelosi. Molly, Happy New Year. Thank you so much for joining us.
Molly Ball: Happy New Year. Thanks, Brian.
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