Transcription
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
According to NPR News, it’s ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. My name is Ailsa Chang.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
And my name is Scott Detrow.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
And my name is Juana Summers. It’s been 26 years since NPR listeners first heard that voice breaking the news.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
David Shayler was arrested as he entered British soil.
SUMMERS: Wow. OK, you may not recognize the voice, but you definitely know the reporter.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
KELLY: For NPR News, this is Mary Louise Kelly in London.
CHANG: That’s right. This is our co-host, Mary Louise, and we bid her farewell today. She’s stepping away from ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, but don’t worry because she’ll still be contributing to the NPR airwaves. We just wanted to take some time today to say goodbye and celebrate his amazing journey into the hosting chair.
DETROW: Her journey with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED began in 2001 when she walked into longtime host Robert Siegel’s office for an interview to become editor-in-chief of ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
ROBERT SIEGEL, BYLINE: And I was so impressed with her that when she came out of my office, I called the executive producer before she arrived and said, you hire this woman. Just hire her. She’s awesome.
DETROW: They hired her. Mary Louise edited the show for three years before returning to reporting. She launched NPR’s intelligence service.
SUMMERS: One of his editors, Bruce Auster, says his determination and precision stood out, as did his approach to journalism.
BRUCE AUSTER, BYLINE: Mary Louise thought her role was essentially to be a witness, to be able to go around and see what the public needed to know.
SUMMERS: Take his trip to Afghanistan with then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
AUSTER: The challenge is you’re in the bubble, you’re trapped and you can only see what you can see. But you’re also limited in terms of filing capacity because you spend half the day on a helicopter.
SUMMERS: They had to have a story ready the same day for ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
KELLY: So we’re on a landing strip.
AUSTER: So the piece essentially becomes Mary Louise on a helicopter, helicopter noise, helicopter descent, describing what she sees on the ground…
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
KELLY: Marines are swarming the roofs of the mud huts around us, machine guns at the ready.
AUSTER: …Go back by helicopter…
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
KELLY: All right, we have the green light, so they’re just charging us with…
AUSTER: …I’m going to the next stop.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
KELLY: We’re off to Kabul and another round of meetings to plan the way forward in this war.
AUSTER: He captured the moment. He bore witness to what was happening and told the story in an entertaining way.
CHANG: Well, Mary Louise brought the same philosophy to her work as a host. She took her listeners to the offices of independent election observers in Russia…
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
KELLY: Oh, my God, they just opened the polls.
ROMAN UDOT: They took it under their clothes. They stuff it, stuff it, stuff it.
CHANG: …at a military parade in North Korea…
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
KELLY: Kim Jong Un has just arrived at the square.
CHANG: …In the streets of Tehran.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: We’re happy that we can stand and we can hit America.
KELLY: Strike America.
CHANG: For Mary Louise, building an understanding of the world also means asking questions of those in power, even the heads of NPR.
DETROW: In 2017, in the midst of an editorial sexual harassment scandal, Mary Louise interviewed then-CEO Jarl Mohn. At the time, she was a guest, but not yet a permanent host on the show, which made what happened next even more remarkable.
SIEGEL: This is someone with whom you have a professional relationship, your boss’s boss’s boss, someone whose opinion of you could mean a lot to your future. And also people will listen, and they’ll wonder: Is this host really going easy on this guy because he’s his boss?
RENITA JABLONSKI: I remember Mary Louise being the same as she is every day, calm and focused.
DETROW: Renita Jablonski was the editor-in-chief of ALL THINGS CONSIDERED for this interview.
JABLONSKI: We walk into the studio and I stop in my tracks. There are these windows in the studio. And on the other side of those windows were the faces of women from every department at NPR, waiting for the CEO to answer a few questions, waiting for Mary Louise to do what she does best.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
KELLY: There have been a lot of questions about the timeline of when NPR knew what. So what I’d like to do is start there and just…
JARL MOHN: Of course.
KELLY: …Walk through my understanding of the events as they unfolded, and please skip…
JABLONSKI: She’s going to be persistent.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
KELLY: That doesn’t match…
JABLONSKI: She, you know, always seeks to clarify the facts. And she never backs away from difficult questions.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
KELLY: You said you couldn’t act on rumors and gossip, but were you concerned that these accusations would create a toxic environment in the newsroom?
MOHN: Absolutely, of course. As bad as you know…
KELLY: Shouldn’t that prompt action, then?
JABLONSKI: I knew I would never forget that day in the newsroom. But it’s not the anger that returns and the shock. It is to be absolutely impressed and still so inspired by Mary Louise.
SUMMERS: The most famous interview of Mary Louise’s tenure has to be with then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2020. For several minutes, she went back and forth with Pompeo, pressing him about Marie Yovanovitch. The recently ousted US ambassador to Ukraine had just testified at Trump’s impeachment hearings that she had been the victim of a smear campaign.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
MIKE POMPEO: The team that works here…
KELLY: Sir, respectfully…
POMPEO: …doing incredible work around the world.
KELLY: …Where did you defend Marie Yovanovitch?
POMPEO: I defended every single person on this team. I did what was right for each person on this team.
KELLY: Can you point me to your remarks in which you defended Marie Yovanovitch?
POMPEO: Mary, I’ve said everything I wanted to say today. THANKS.
SUMMERS: Eventually, someone from the State Department intervened and ended the interview.
CHANG: It aired in full in its entirety on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED later today. And then Mary Louise explained on the air what happened after the recording stopped in Pompeo’s office.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
KELLY: He asked: Do you think Americans care about Ukraine? He used the F-word in this sentence and many others. He asked me if I could find Ukraine on a map. I said yes. He asked his collaborators to bring him a map of the world without writing, without countries marked. I highlighted Ukraine. He put the map away. He said people would hear about it.
DETROW: Pompeo’s office later released a statement saying the post-interview conversation was off the record and implying that Mary Louise had pointed the finger at Bangladesh, 3,000 miles from Ukraine in South Asia.
SUMMERS: Mary Louise talked about that moment years later in an interview with Terry Gross on WHYY’s Fresh Air. Their answer could be a mission statement for the work we do.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
TERRY GROSS: After the secretary of state lied about you, how do you trust what he says after that?
KELLY: You know, I don’t know if that’s how I put it. I do not base my reporting and coverage on trust. I base this on this, what do I know? Was I able to verify this from other sources? What evidence can they provide to garner support for their position?
So it’s not about whether I trust this person or not. Journalism is more about, let me do the reporting and present to you what I found. And tomorrow I’m going to go back and try to find a little more and let you think about that, and then we’ll move on. This is how I build a story.
CHANG: There aren’t enough words, Mary Louise. It’s so hard to see you go.
KELLY: Thank you. Come here.
(SOUNDBITE OF PEGGY LEE SONG, “WE WILL MEET”)
KELLY: My God, you’re making this difficult. I’m here with Ailsa’s arms around me. Scott and Juana, we feel you with us. Robert Siegel and Ari Shapiro have been seen here. They came back to take me out of the studio this evening.
To all of you listening, thank you. I’m going to try to hold on long enough to say one last time, my name is Mary Louise Kelly. Thanks for listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
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