Note: The following transcript is created by both humans and AI, so despite our best attempts may contain errors.
Bull: And today is Tuesday, February, 25 2025 at 12pm Pacific Standard Time. This is Brian Bull, lead interviewer and director of the Public Radio Oral History Project. Today, our guest is Linda Wertheimer, longtime congressional and political correspondent and anchor of NPR, flagship program, All Things Considered. In 1976, Wertheimer became the first woman to anchor network coverage of a presidential nomination convention and of election night, she was the first person to broadcast live from inside the United States Senate chamber and coverage of the Senate Panama Canal Treaty debates in the first 100 days of the 104th Congress, which saw the Republican takeover of it, earned her Alfred I. DuPont Columbia University awards, and in 1998 Wertheimer was also listed in Vanity Fair as one of the “200 Most Influential Women in America.”
And yeah, that's quite — that's quite a roll-in here. Linda, thank you so much for joining us. It's a real honor.
Wertheimer: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Bull: Some basic biographical information first, please, when and where were you born?
Wertheimer: I was born in Carlsbad, New Mexico, March, 1943. Charles, about 152 years old, and near the caverns, Carlsbad caverns.
Bull: You ever go down there?
Wertheimer: Yes, I had, my mother had a large family, and every time any of them showed up in our house, I got to take them to the to the caverns, not drive them over there, but take them on the tour because my mother said that she had been through the caverns so many times that she'd have to kill somebody if she was made to do it again. So I got to be the person who showed the caverns to the traveling people.
Bull: That’s great. Do you ever go back out to New Mexico?
Wertheimer: Well, we don't have any I don't have anybody left in Carlsbad who's related to me, although I have lots of friends from high school that are still there, and I have been back a number of times. And in fact, my friend Mary Gant, who lived across the street from me when we were children, Mary Gant, who is also -- lives here in Washington. We've discussed making a run for Carlsbad sometime in the near future, and I hope that we get to do it. It will be fun. We spent the summers at Mary's house, which was right beside the Pecos River. Swimming was great.
Bull: That sounds like a fantastic childhood.
Wertheimer: I think it was pretty fantastic. Yes.
Bull: So where did you go to college and what did you study?
Wertheimer: I went to Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and I studied English literature. I was the first person from my high school who will go to one of the Seven Sisters, although Mary Gant, who lived across the street, also went to Vassar the same year.
Bull: Wow.
Wertheimer: We had a wonderful experience. I think because it was, it was so very different. I mean, we never had things like snow in Carlsbad, in the wintertime. Very occasionally.We had all kinds of wonderful experiences. But ours was a very simple life, lots of good food, lots of adventures, hiking, running around in our, in my in our parents’ pickup trucks out on the prairie. But you know, it was about, I don't know how to you. How would I describe it? About a 3000% difference to all of a sudden find myself in the suburbs of Boston, at Wellesley,
Bull: I can only imagine. And so at what point did you get hooked into radio?
Wertheimer: I listened to radio all the time when I was a kid. We didn't have television in Carlsbad for a long time. So there was no there was no TV to watch. We had a local newspaper, the Carlsbad current argris, which we called “The Constant Anguish.” There was information to be had. I could listen to Edward R Murrow and the radio, and I guess I would say that's where my interest in radio started. Edward R. Murrow and the evening news. I listened every day. I think that probably got me started thinking about radio as a serious place to be.
Bull: And I was going to ask you to Linda, if you had a favorite program or news reporter or anchor. It sounds like Edward R. Murrow was definitely on that list.
Wertheimer: Well, he would be, would be number one on the list. But of course, there were others. Pauline Frederick, who, at that time, when I met her, she was, she was at NBC. She was covering the United Nations for NBC. And she was the first woman I had ever that I knew of who was, who was doing important national news. It was a real shock to my system. I was sitting in what we call the big room, the back room of our house, and my mother was ironing and I was watching the news, and all of a sudden, there was Pauline Frederick standing in front of the United me, this was, you know, after we finally did get television, Pauline Frederick was standing there in front of the United Nations building, delivering the news, talking about, it was…I'll remember in a second what she was Talking about. But the thing that was so wonderful about it was the big discovery that I made. I said to my mother, “That's a woman!” and my mother said, “Very good, Linda.”
And in fact, she was the first woman I had ever seen or even heard talking about news. And all of a sudden I thought, “Oh, my God.” I had been at that point thinking what I'd really like to do is do some -- I could become an assistant. I could be a secretary. I could be somebody who does things for these great people like Edward R. Murrow, and then I saw her, and I thought, “I don't have to be a secretary. I can be the one.”
Bull: That's wonderful. And there are so many people I've talked to, including, I believe, Susan Stamberg and Terry Gross, who kind of said similar things that growing up in the 50s and 60s, expectations of women were kind of set at a very low bar, (Wertheimer laughs) that you were to be a secretary or someone's assistant, but you and the other Founding Mothers of NPR kind of helped become trailblazers, I think, for a lot of female journalists out there in what was then a very male dominated field.
7:03Wertheimer: I know, and we all, all those of us who had that experience, have tried very hard to be proud that we had that experience and not rise up and hit the young person in the face for suggesting that we were probably the oldest person she'd ever met. (Bull laughs)
Bull: Now before NPR, Linda, you worked at the BBC, and I was curious if there were things you took from that experience that really benefited you at NPR?
Wertheimer: Well, one part of it was just simply practical. You know, you to learn how to record, to learn how to do, how to how to bring out a program, how to get some sense of how to write for radio. It was, it was basically a very -- it was a terrific opportunity for me. I didn't, I didn't have to go back to the United States and sign up for a journalism course. I already had one.
Wellesley did not offer journalism courses, I might add. But the thing that I remember the most about it was were the people that worked there. They were really -- we had some really, very fine journalists at the at the part of the BBC where I was. Many of them were international folks who were broadcasting in all in all sorts of languages. This was a BBC World Service. And it was, you know, it was just, I can't tell you how fascinating it was, how interesting it was to be there and to and to and to sort of put all that stuff together.
I think that I would have probably gotten where I was going without doing that. But it was just such a big difference to have a to have the folks who were putting the news on the air from all over the world. Some of it we got on, we generated, of course, at one in London,
and then other parts of it were sent in to us from places all over the world. And it was amazing and very interesting, and my experience at the BBC, I think was enormous help to me when I when I started, you know, working at NPR, but in between, I worked at WC, at WCBS News Radio 88 which also was a wonderful experience.
And there I had Charlie Osgood and Lou Adler, who were my buddies on that gig. And it was, it was wonderful. I mean, I've had a lot of very good experiences. And then going to NPR, one of the things that I did was stay for a very long time, which I think probably doesn't happen too often at other broadcast journalism but did with NPR.
Bull: Which segues very nicely into this other question here. Now you were the broadcast director of a then little-known program called All Things Considered in 1971, NPR was still in its infancy on May 3, 1971 when the program was first broadcast, do you remember what it was like to be in the studio ready to roll out this ambitious new show?
Wertheimer: Well, one of the things that was horrifying to me was that I was one of the few people who was working for them at the time who'd ever done anything like that. You know when, when I went to work for WCBS in New York City, it was the first -- not the first, it was the second program that did all news all the time in New York. And I learned a lot from them. And what NPR was doing was not exactly the same thing, but doing this long news magazine was very much, ah…it was different, but it was also the same. I mean, I had a lot of experience at WCBS and at the beat, which helped me then with what I was doing at NPR. So I started out doing very technical stuff. I mean, I, I was directing the program.
It was a very interesting thing to do, and I felt that the experience that I had the other organizations helped me a lot.
One of the things that just not maybe six months ago, a friend of mine who was who was worked at NPR for a long time, Noah Adams, said to me, “Were you the person who wrote all the diagrams of the program in that beautiful handwriting?” And I said, “Yeah, my fine Spencerian hand you must mean.” He said, “But you just, you just laid it all out there. It was, who was in the pieces, how much time, and then a line drawn under that, and then the next time, and then below it,” you know, I made a diagram of the program the first and those programs, those little diagrams of All Things Considered from very beginning, are still there, somewhere.
Bull: Wow. And I understand too, it was very difficult at times to be the director of broadcasting of that program, because sometimes you just had to really shoehorn or axe a lot of pieces that were filed and maybe were too long or maybe just needed some extensive editing. I mean, that has to be a tough position.
Wertheimer: Yes, and we were not, we didn't have enough staff. We didn't have enough people to do that kind of editing. So every once in a while, I'd have the total heart attack of having a piece arrive in the studio late, and then realize that it was not only late, but it was long and that I couldn't possibly get it into the program. It's not going to happen. I mean, we had a lot of that kind of stuff. But, you know, Bill Siemering, who was running the place, hired a lot of people who are very good at what they wanted to do, including Susan Stamberg, for example.And we all worked out how to make this thing work. It was, it was a little bit tough there at the beginning, but it was also a lot of fun.
Bull: Many people today think of NPR as this incredibly polished and smart organization that has covered so many stories, both here and abroad, as well as having a strong cultural presence with productions like the Tiny Desk Concert and a podcast unit now, but back in 1971 I understand that meetings were done in sparsely furnished rooms, sometimes even missing chairs or tables. What was it really like to be working at NPR back in 1971?
Wertheimer: It was just…it was primitive, is what it was. But it was also very interesting. And I think we didn't have, you know, we didn't, there were a lot of things we didn't have. Chairs, was one of the ones of the things we didn't have, I remember Susan Stamberg and I occasionally would have to go through the office, retrieving our chairs that had been nipped by somebody who was working on the weekend. (Bull laughs) But it was, it was it was exciting. It was very interesting. And the people I was working with were very interesting. So the book that I wrote a book about the first 25 years in the life of a nation, as heard on NPR. The book is called “Listening to America” and I put a lot of pieces. I mean, that's basically what it is. Lots of different pieces that were on NPR. And when I read them, I read a lot of them. This morning, I was thinking, “This was good. I can't believe this was good.” I mean, we were, we were halfway hysterical to try to get it on the air. And, oooh! It was good.
Bull: It was. It was NPR, and All Things Considered is well past the half-century mark and still bringing in respectfully sized audiences. You know, we just heard a little bit about what NPR itself was like in 1971 who was Linda Wertheimer back in ’71? Do you see yourself as the same person today?
Wertheimer: I think I do consider myself the same person, but it took me a while to get to this person. I had a lot of opportunities, you know, I went to, I had a good education. I came from way out west, which meant that, as far as I'm concerned, it meant that I had different experiences than many of my colleagues did, and that's always useful. I was very interested in politics from the beginning, and I had a wonderful time covering politics some years at NPR. And to spend some time covering presidential campaigns and so on. And that was really fascinating. And I started being interested in that when I was a kid, and I continued to be interested in it, and I still am.
But I think that that the I think that the part of NPR that made a difference for me was that everything we did, we did so much. We did so many different kinds of things. We looked into so many different kinds of problems.
Bull: I do remember reading somewhere that you had said that after talking to so many people during election years, you are often pretty good at predicting who would win, just by all these conversations you had with voters. Is that true?
Wertheimer: Well, I…that is true. I mean, it is. I was never wrong. Very it's very easy to to make those kinds of predictions. If you talk to a lot of people, of course, we what we did and what most what was not exactly scientific in this other way that pollsters do it. But still, there was a lot of it was, it was a very interesting thing to dispense about China, as we did in as many places as we were, talking to all kinds of people who did all kinds of things.
You'll see, if you if you look back at some of the scripts from the olden days, you'll see that these very smart people who were farmers in Kansas, for example, or school teachers in some little tiny town somewhere, that these are people who were very thoughtful and who paid a lot of attention and who were wonderful for us to talk to, and wonderful for me to think that, “You know, this is, this is the country that I was born in. This is, these are the people that I grew up among. These are wonderful people.”
And I'm hoping that, you know, we'll find out that they're all still out there.
Bull: It is interesting political times we live in now, and the divisiveness and the polarization just seems to be at an all-time high. But yeah, I was also intrigued to know that you had worked at All Things Considered for 13 years and helped as a host, grow its audience from 6 million listeners in 1989 to nearly 10 million listeners by 2001 which made it one of the top five shows in U.S. radio. How does one grow an audience like that without social media or heavy internet presence?
Wertheimer: (Laughs) Well, I don't know. I think that what we did was try to, you know, we tried to ask the questions people wanted to know the answers to. We tried to spend time with people that other people would be interested in. I think, I think that what we did is kind of encapsulated in the sound of National Public Radio. And I think if you spend any time listening to NPR in the olden days or even in an NPR now, you'll hear that sound that that constant, “We are interested. We are curious. We want to know what you think. We really want to know who you are.” I think that made a big difference.
Bull: Engaging with the community at large.
Wertheimer: You bet.
Bull: It sounds like you bet you're also one of the so-called Founding Mothers of NPR, alongside Nina Totenberg, Susan Stamberg and the late Cokie Roberts. What does that title, founding mother mean to you, personally?
Wertheimer: Well, in my case, I am the Founding Mother. I was the first one hired. I was the first person hired at NPR who ended up on the air. There were some the techies were the first person or the first people hired because, you know, they had to build the thing and get it all ready for us to move into. But for the talking people, I was the first.
And it was just amazing to be able to get a job, especially as you pointed out earlier, women weren't really there weren't a lot of women on the radio or on television in those days, and it was very Interesting to live through that change as women came into their own in broadcasting and newspapers and television.
Now, of course, there are so many women working and so many really wonderful women working that it's a, you know, it's a whole different thing. And I, I love every minute of I must say.
Bull: Are there any female newscasters or anchors out there that you think are doing a really great job?
Wertheimer: You mean, on NPR?
Bull: On NPR or anywhere else for that matter.
Wertheimer: Of course I would immediately think of the people that I grew up with. Susan Stamberg, who was, who really started off the style of hosting all things considered, which is, then you, which was translated into everything else that we did.
Nina Totenberg was and is one of the most, one of the very best reporters on the corpse, and of course, Cokie and I shared a beat on politics, which was, in addition to being, I think, interesting and important. It was so much fun. I was so much fun to work with. To work with Cokie. We called each other every night and talked about what we were going to do on the morning on Morning Edition, we spent a lot of time trading back and forth with people that we you know that we trading back. We spent a lot of time trading information on
what is happening. “What do we need to know?” It was just, it was a wonderful, wonderful experience for me.
I was very sorry when Cokie left NPR, and I accept that after she did, I did something that I had always wanted to do, and then I had managed finally to do, is to send it to the host those job on all things considered. And of course, that was a wonderful job too. Safe to say that I had two of the best jobs in the world.
And of course, they were perfect jobs for me because of what I knew and what interested me and what I wanted to think about and talk about. But basically, it was just, it was a wonderful opportunity that I had and that we all had working at NPR. Having all of the possibility of opening up our minds and other people's minds to what was going on.
Bull: And you got to work with some really incredible reporters and colleagues, co-hosts,
Wertheimer: No question about it, some of the most, some of the most talented people in the world. I mean, I've always thought that that Robert Siegel. I know that Robert Siegel was one of the smartest people I've ever met, and to spend all that time working with him was just a huge, huge honor, as well as a lot of fun and very interesting.
Ah, Bob Edwards. We all loved Bob Edwards. His wonderful, incredibly deep voice, and he was the only one who really kind of sounded like people sounded when I was a little girl listening to the radio, but despite the fact that I was always very glad that NPR did not feel like hanging on to only the beautiful, deep voices. Otherwise I would never been able to work there. I still loved Bob Edwards and the way he sounded.
We still have some very, very wonderful, talented people. And mostly, what we, what I think is important, is very, very smart people. You can't really get it done without, you know, without the brain.
Bull: I think that's very true. And yeah, Bob Edwards, he certainly had that great kind of oaken timbre to his voice. There's just a depth to but also a very assuring tone too. It was just one of those who had that great set of pipes that projected very well.
Wertheimer: He was also a very smart man, and he had a very I think he worked very hard at what we were all trying to do together. And I admired that very much.
Bull: Also very passionate about good editorial standards, because I remember he took a bunch of us aside. We were the overnight crew for Morning Edition was probably 1998-99 and he just kind of went through, what was that book? I think it was Bliss' “Writing News for Broadcast” or something, and he just preached it very much like, like the gospel. He just really wanted to drill in some points that he thought were important for us to know about writing for broadcast and good, strong editorial standards. So you were working with some extremely smart, passionate people.
Wertheimer: You're absolutely right.
Bull: I was talking to Jay Kernis, who said that back when Morning Edition launched in 1979, there was actually some holding back from other NPR staffers because the show was young and resources at NPR were still pretty strained and meager. And he said it actually took a while for you and the other founding mothers to warm up to Morning Edition and help get its audience and sound. Do you remember any reluctance on your part to help this new program called Morning Edition get launched?
Wertheimer: Well, one of the problems that NPR always have is money so that you know you they were going to start this new program, which was going to be quite a bit. It was basically another big, long program, and it was going to have the kind of responsibility that a morning news program has, and I think it was a mainly financial problem. We all thought that all things considered, was barely making it because, you know, we were clawing our way up the ladder, trying to trying to get enough money together to go to a to go to a campaign event. I think it was kind of a financial thing. We all thought that we were barely making and we weren't able to go cover events in other parts of the world or other parts of the country, as we really should have, as we really wanted to and needed to. So we figured that morning edition was just going to split what money there was, and that would be hard.
However, Morning Edition came flying through with – Jay Kernis was a brilliant producer. And although he was only about 12 years old, I think when he went to work for us, he did wonderful work. And I think we all and of course, they spent some time trying, flailing around, trying to figure out who would be the host. And they finally captured, they used Bob Edwards, which was a which was the right move.It was tough. It was mainly because there just wasn't enough money, and I of course thought that we should go to every political convention, and we should be on hand for every for every event that Congress had that was newsworthy, and we just couldn't manage to do it all with the cash we had.
Bull: Speaking of financial issues, I know that in 1983 there was a massive financial deficit in the arts budget, roughly $9 million I believe, and that had to have caused a lot of upheaval and concern for NPR future back then. Do you recall any of that? Again, the big financial deficit in 1983?
Wertheimer: I did. I do recall it, but I couldn't, I don't think that I could repeat any of the things that I that we went through, because I tried to forget about it. I think we I think we were very lucky to have survived, and very fortunate that we had the kind of leadership that we did that helped us to survive.
Bull: At what moments, Linda, were you proudest to be working on public radio?
Wertheimer: Well, goodness, there were so many of them,
I think one of them, some of some of the things that I loved were not the things that everybody loved.Like I was very interested in congressional debates since, and, when we finally were able to record debate since in the in the Senate, I was thrilled with that.
I thought we had a we had an awful lot of very good opportunities to talk with voters. And that, again, was a tremendous that was a tremendous thing to do for me.
I loved it when I could go and talk, you know, like we I always used to say that if you need a bunch of people to talk to out in the middle of the country. I can tell you where to go and where I always went was one of those little restaurants that where there were a lot of little old men.I once asked that to one of them. “Why would I can come to one of these places to talk to people. I find interesting people. But why is it always men?” And the guy said, “Well, it's because our wives throw us out of the house in the morning.” (Bull laughs)
But, you know, it was a it was such a nice it was an interesting thing to do to gather groups of people together and talk about politics. And as I always say, I talked to so many people during the course of a campaign that I never had any doubt about who was going to be President of the United States, and I was never wrong about who was going to be president United States. I guess I should have put some money on it.
Bull: That's remarkable. I would have been, I think, enthralled to hear speakers or people talking about the most recent presidential election shared, or maybe even overlooked by some of the other media institutes about what was weighing on people's minds at the time. I mean, this is a little bit of a diversion from the topic, but Linda, do you recall what you saw or heard that told you that President Trump was going to win a second term?
Wertheimer: (Laughs) No, I don't. I mean, I didn't. I was, I was no longer part of that, part of that, you know, I wasn't. I wasn't listening to those folks by that time.
Bull: That's right, because last year, in February, almost a year ago, it was officially announced that you were retiring. So what drew you to that decision after being involved with NPR for so many years?
Wertheimer: Age, I think basically (laughs) There were a lot of things that I that I had done that I would have liked to do again, but I couldn't really imagine how, how I could do them again. I mean, we had the and then NPR had, of course, some very fine young reporters that were working and they didn't need me.
I loved it. I absolutely loved it. But you know that there comes a time when you have to stop. And I did.
Bull: Was it a difficult transition going into retirement, or did you welcome it?
Wertheimer: I've had a very good time in retirement, spending more time with my husband. We live in Washington. So it's not as if I'm unaware of what's going on in the great political world. It's right outside my door. But it's, it's really nice to be casual about it, and to know that I don't have to live and die by what I think.
I loved doing it. I would, I think that I've been enormously lucky to have had the possibility and opportunity to do it for as long as I did. But you know, the dear Lord doesn't let you do everything forever.
Bull: What have you been doing with your retirement?
Wertheimer: Well, I retreated to some of the things that I used to do, and used to be very good at and I'm very good at it again. I'm a mighty fine cook. For example, my husband enjoys the very nice dinners that I make for him, and I enjoy making them. We’ve still a lot of friends here in Washington and lots of possibilities for going out, looking around. I think that the worst thing that has happened to me since I retired was COVID. COVID really brought the country to a halt. It was awful. And even we were pretty much stalled for a while. So it's taken me a while to get back up to speed.
Bull: I'm just curious too. You say that you're a great cook, what is a Linda Wertheimer specialty? What's your best entree?
Wertheimer: (Laughs) Well, I would say that I don't have a specialty, but I don't put any bad food on the table either. My mother taught me to cook. She was a very good cook. My father owned a grocery store, so we always had all of the raw material. I've always loved cooking, but I don't, I wouldn't say that I have a specialty de la casa.
Bull: If your husband has a special request, what does he ask you to make?
Wertheimer: Well, no, we discuss it. We have, you know, are we going to steak, or are we going to do salmon?
Bull: It's a committee.
Wertheimer: It is a committee. And that works. And of course, there are lots of people that I you know, that I know that I've known for many years who are right around here too. So lots of friends, lots of places to go, restaurants, lots of museums this week, this weekend, and at the end of the month, Mary Gant, who is my who lived across the street from me in Carlsbad, 152 years ago, we are receiving our friends Gene and Bizzy who we haven't seen. Neither one of us has seen them in a long time, but anyway, they're coming to Washington, so we're going to have a celebration.
Bull: Excellent. NPR is in the crosshairs of high-profile politicians yet again, with Elon Musk echoing some critics calls to defund it, what do you think is going to happen with NPR in the next year or two from now? Do you think it's going to continue to survive?
Wertheimer: I don't know. This sounds it sounds very dire to me, but I haven't spent any time talking to the folks at NPR about what they think is going on. The thing about NPR that is always saved it in the past has been that all of our radio stations have many friends, and those many friends have kept us alive and have also kept themselves alive by supporting NPR. So, you know, NPR is a very good value, I think, and I hope that it will continue to be very good value.
Bull: Lots of communities out there that don't have other access to any other types of communication or information, rural areas, Indian reservations and so forth. I mean, they really do depend --
Wertheimer: People who are driving from A to B want a very long drive.
Bull: That's a great community service.
Wertheimer: I was, yeah, I think we're, I think we do good service to a lot of people.,
Bull: Any final thoughts or comments about your career or the state of the public radio industry today, Linda?
Wertheimer: I don't think I know enough about the public radio interest industry today to make any comment about it. I will say that it was a wonderful experience to work at NPR. I had, I feel strongly that NPR made a huge contribution to the lives of people it served. It certainly made a huge contribution to me. It would have been nice if I we'd been able to pay people better than we did. I had a I had a wonderful time doing it. I would do it again in a heartbeat if I could.
Bull: Well, this concludes my interview with Linda Wertheimer, February, 25 2025 Linda, thank you so much for making the time to talk to me, about your time, and a career at NPR, you've done some required many other journalists to follow in your footsteps and I just really wish you good times and happiness in your retirement and again thank you so much for being part of this project.
Wertheimer: Thank you, I appreciate this.
