Andrea Mitchell

Early life

Mitchell grew up in New Rochelle, New York, in a Jewish household. Her parents were Sydney Mitchell, a businessman, and Cecile Mitchell. The family, originally named Metchik, has Russian-Jewish roots.

Her father served as CEO and part-owner of a Manhattan furniture company and led Beth El Synagogue in New Rochelle for four decades. Her mother worked as an administrator at the New York Institute of Technology. Mitchell attended New Rochelle High School, then earned a Bachelor of Arts in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967, where she was news director for the student radio station WXPN.

Career

After college, Mitchell remained in Philadelphia and began her career as a reporter for KYW radio. She gained attention as the station’s City Hall correspondent under Mayor Frank Rizzo and also worked for KYW-TV. In 1976, she moved to Washington, D.C., to join CBS affiliate WTOP. Mitchell started at NBC News in July 1978 as a general correspondent, and by 1979 she was covering the energy crisis and the Three Mile Island accident as the network’s energy correspondent.

She reported from the White House from 1981 to 1988, then became NBC’s chief Congressional correspondent. In 1984, she and Linda Ellerbee coanchored Summer Sunday USA, the first prime-time news series hosted by two women. Mitchell served as chief White House correspondent from 1992 to November 1994, and has been chief foreign affairs correspondent since 1994. She hosted Andrea Mitchell Reports on MSNBC from 2008 until February 7, 2025, and continues as NBC News’s chief Washington and foreign affairs correspondent.

Her 2005 memoir, Talking Back... to Presidents, Dictators, and Assorted Scoundrels, details her journalism career. A 2003 Washington Post report that Mitchell leaked Valerie Plame’s identity led to an FBI interview; she later said she didn’t know Plame’s covert role until Bob Novak’s column. In July 2005, Mitchell was forcibly removed from a Khartoum press conference after asking Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir about ongoing violence in Darfur and government support for the Janjaweed militias.

Personal life

Mitchell was married twice. Her first marriage, to Gil Jackson, ended in divorce during the mid-1970s. She later wed Alan Greenspan, then the Federal Reserve Chair, on April 6, 1997, after a long relationship.

In September 2011, she announced she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, which was found early and successfully treated. In 2017, she and Greenspan funded the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania. Greenspan passed away on June 22, 2026, at age 100 from complications of Parkinson’s disease.