The Reporter

Breaking news for over four decades, ANDREA MITCHELL keeps hitting the accelerator.

- Faye Penn

A few minutes past 1 p.m., Andrea Mitchell enters an NBC green room fresh off a show that spanned the Iran nuclear deal, the royal newlyweds, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and the will-they-won’t-they meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un before cutting away to a White House press conference.

“We covered a lot, didn’t we?” Mitchell says, as though it’s the third or fourth time she’s done this and not the umpteen thousandth. Immediately, you detect a trait possessed by all great journalists: hunger.

What you may not have witnessed is her singular endurance. Mitchell, who’s about to celebrate 40 years at NBC, remains one of Washington’s most dogged reporters, literally outrunning—and scooping—colleagues, many of whom are decades her junior. At 71, she has covered seven presidents, the nuclear arms race, and such events as the Jonestown massacre and the Three Mile Island accident, and she’s as busy as ever now as the chief foreign affairs correspondent for NBC News and the host of MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports.

“She’s like the LeBron James of foreign correspondents,” says NBC News political director and Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd. “It’s the same awe that I have watching him play after all these years. Why are you still this good? Aren’t you tired?”