The Dishcast · Andrew Sullivan

Mark Halperin On Covering Presidents

November 21, 2025·38 min·3 clips

Halperin's childhood home phone was wiretapped for 21 months while Kissinger hunted a Pentagon Papers leak.

First comes the hill. Sullivan starts in Mount Pleasant, on an electric bike, laughing at the small insult of needing technology because age has entered the chat. He keeps the opening close to home. The ride around the monuments puts the listener in Washington before Washington becomes the topic. No ads, no sponsors, not much editing, and the subscriber pitch all make the show feel like someone has pulled up a chair before the interview starts again. Then the city gets bigger. Halperin describes Washington as a place packed with people from elsewhere, from across America and beyond it. Sullivan takes that into the late twentieth-century world of third-culture figures, people from different countries and cultures who came to become Americans and to join the game. In that telling, America sounds unusually open. Sullivan says few immigrants could have found chances so dramatic, so young, anywhere else. But that openness came with a price. Inside the political world, Sullivan remembers a clubbiness that got worse as the century turned. Journalism becomes the pressure point. He argues that Watergate and TV fame taught reporters to think too much of themselves. Halperin mostly goes with him, then reaches back to ABC News and Roone Arledge, whom he calls underappreciated in the making of television news. The result is a Washington story about welcome, ambition, access, and the weird self-importance that comes with being near power. Even the closing subscriber note fits: Sullivan sends listeners back into the Dish conversation, where readers argue, push back, and sometimes put him on the spot.

As heard by us

A reflective Washington conversation about media prestige, outsider ambition, and the clubby habits behind covering power.

Mark Halperin's Dishcast appearance is less a campaign chronicle than a Washington conversation about the culture that grew around covering power.

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Why you'd press play

A front-row look at Washington's open-door promise and its clubby media world.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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