AILSA CHANG, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Ailsa Chang.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
And I'm Scott Detrow.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
And I'm Juana Summers. It has been 26 years since NPR listeners first heard this voice bringing them the news.
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MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
David Shayler was arrested the moment he stepped onto British soil.
SUMMERS: Wow. OK, you might not recognize the voice, but you definitely know the reporter.
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KELLY: For NPR News, this is Mary Louise Kelly in London.
CHANG: That's right. That is our co-host, Mary Louise, and we are bidding her, today, farewell. She's stepping away from ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, but do not worry because she's still going to be contributing to NPR's airwaves. We just wanted to take some time today to say goodbye and to celebrate her tremendous run in the host chair.
DETROW: Her journey with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED began in 2001 when she walked into the office of longtime host Robert Siegel for an interview to become the editor of ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
ROBERT SIEGEL, BYLINE: And I was so impressed with her that when she walked out of my office, I called the executive producer before she got there and said, you hire this woman. Just hire her. She's terrific.
DETROW: They did hire her. Mary Louise edited the show for three years before transitioning back to reporting. She launched NPR's intelligence beat.
SUMMERS: One of her editors, Bruce Auster, says her determination and precision stood out, as did her approach to journalism.
BRUCE AUSTER, BYLINE: Mary Louise believed that her role is essentially to sort of bear witness, to be able to go places and see what the audience needs to know.
SUMMERS: Take her trip around Afghanistan with then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
AUSTER: The challenge is, is that you're in the bubble, you're trapped, and you can only see what you can see. But you're also constrained in terms of your ability to file because you're spending half the day on a helicopter.
SUMMERS: They had to have a story ready that same day for ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
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KELLY: So we're down on an airstrip.
AUSTER: So the piece essentially becomes Mary Louise on a helicopter, sound of helicopter, getting off helicopter, describing what she sees on the ground...
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KELLY: Marines are swarming the roofs of the mud huts around us, machine guns in hand.
AUSTER: ...Getting back on helicopter...
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KELLY: All right, we got the all clear, so they're just loading us up in...
AUSTER: ...Going to the next stop.
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KELLY: We are off to Kabul and another round of meetings to plan the way forward in this war.
AUSTER: It captured the moment. It bore witness to what was happening, and it told the story in an entertaining way.
CHANG: Well, Mary Louise brought that same ethos to her job as a host. She's taken listeners to the offices of independent election monitors in Russia...
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KELLY: Oh, my God, they've just opened the ballot box.
ROMAN UDOT: They took it from under their clothes. They stuff it, stuff it, stuff it.
CHANG: ...To a military parade in North Korea...
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KELLY: Kim Jong Un has just arrived in the square.
CHANG: ...To the streets of Tehran.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: We are happy that we can stand, and we can punch the America.
KELLY: Punch America.
CHANG: For Mary Louise, building an understanding of the world is also about asking questions of those in power, even the people in charge at NPR.
DETROW: In 2017, amid a newsroom sexual harassment scandal, Mary Louise interviewed then-CEO Jarl Mohn. She was guest hosting at the time, not yet a permanent host of the show, which made what happened next even more remarkable.
SIEGEL: This is someone with whom you have a professional relationship, the boss of your boss' boss, someone whose opinion of you might count for a lot in your future. And also people will be listening, and they'll be thinking, is this host going really easy on this guy because he's her boss?
RENITA JABLONSKI: I remember Mary Louise was the same as she is every single day, calm and focused.
DETROW: Renita Jablonski was the ALL THINGS CONSIDERED editor on that interview.
JABLONSKI: We go into the studio, and I stop in my tracks. There are these windows into the studio. And on the other side of those viewing windows were faces of women from every single department at NPR, waiting for the CEO to answer some questions, waiting for Mary Louise to do what she does best.
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KELLY: There have been a lot of questions about the timeline of when NPR knew what. So what I'd love to do is start there and just...
JARL MOHN: Sure.
KELLY: ...Tick through my understanding of events as they unfolded, and please, jump...
JABLONSKI: She's going to be persistent.
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KELLY: Doesn't square with...
JABLONSKI: She, you know, is always looking to get the facts straight. And she never shies away from the tough questions.
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KELLY: You said you can't act on rumors and gossip, but were you concerned that these accusations were creating a toxic environment in the newsroom?
MOHN: Absolutely, of course. As bad as, you know...
KELLY: Should that not prompt action, then?
JABLONSKI: I knew I would never forget that day in the newsroom. But it's not the anger that rushes back and the shock. It is being in absolute awe and still so inspired by Mary Louise.
SUMMERS: The most famous interview of Mary Louise's tenure has got 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 U.S. ambassador to Ukraine had just testified in the Trump impeachment hearings that she was the victim of a smear campaign.
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MIKE POMPEO: The team that works here...
KELLY: Sir, respectfully...
POMPEO: ...Is doing amazing work around the world.
KELLY: ...Where have you defended Marie Yovanovitch?
POMPEO: I've defended every single person on this team. I've done what's right for every single person on this team.
KELLY: Can you point me toward your remarks where you have defended Marie Yovanovitch?
POMPEO: Mary, I've said all I'm going to say today. Thank you.
SUMMERS: Eventually, a state department staffer stepped in and ended the interview.
CHANG: It aired unedited in its entirety on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED later that day. And then Mary Louise explained on air what had happened after the recording stopped in Pompeo's office.
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KELLY: He asked, do you think Americans care about Ukraine? He used the F-word in that sentence and many others. He asked if I could find Ukraine on a map. I said, yes. He called out for his aides to bring him a map of the world with no writing, no countries marked. I pointed to Ukraine. He put the map away. He said, people will hear about this.
DETROW: Pompeo's office later put out a statement claiming that the post-interview conversation was off the record and implying that Mary Louise had pointed to 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. Her answer could be a mission statement for the work that we do.
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TERRY GROSS: After the Secretary of State lies about you, how do you trust anything that he says after that?
KELLY: You know, I don't know that that's the way I ever frame it. I'm not basing my reporting and coverage on trust. I'm basing it on, what do I know? Have I been able to verify this from other sources? What evidence can they put forward to marshal support for their position?
So it's not a matter of whether I trust this person or not. The journalism is more about, let me do the reporting and lay out for you what I have found. And tomorrow, I'm going to go back and try to find a little bit more and let you chew on that, and then we keep going. That's how I build a story.
CHANG: There aren't enough words, Mary Louise. It is so, so hard to see you go.
KELLY: Thank you. Come here.
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KELLY: My goodness, y'all are making this hard. I'm in here with Ailsa's arms around me. Scott and Juana, we feel you with us. Robert Siegel and Ari Shapiro have been spotted here. They've come back to clap me out of the studio tonight.
To all of you out there listening, thank you. I'm going to try to hold it together long enough to say one last time, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. Thank you for listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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