"uh, what's a meltdown?"

During more than three decades in journalism, Kathy Kiely has covered presidents and would-be presidents, and interviewed the famous and infamous.

She has known the thrill of eyewitnessing history, and the tedium of cataloguing Monica Lewinsky's makeovers. She has experienced the joys of trotting the globe on someone else's expense account -- and the ignominy of standing on the unemployment line.

A 1977 graduate of Princeton University, Kiely began her career as a general assignment reporter for the Pittsburgh Press in her hometown. Among her big stories: interviewing Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in a cemetery and covering The Great Tomato Festival.

She was sent to cover the state legislature in Harrisburg, Pa. and was there when the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor blew.

It was in the midst of that tension and uncertainty that Kiely first began to display the virtue so essential to all good reporters: the courage to ask a really dumb question.

"Uh, what's a meltdown?" is one she remembers posing an expert on nuclear power plants.

In 1981, Kiely became the Pittsburgh Press Washington correspondent. Three years later, she moved to the bureau of the Houston Post. Kiely spent the next 11 years -- with a brief intermission to become a Knight Fellow at Stanford University -- chronicling current events from a Texas perspective.

Her most memorable assignment: covering the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her most outlandish: traveling through Pakistan to the border of Afghanistan with Congressman Charles Wilson, a Democrat intent on "killing Communists -- as painfully as possible," and his then-girlfriend, a former Miss World-USA. Kiely recounted her improbable travels with Charlie in a USA TODAY story when the movie "Charlie's War" premiered.

Alas, all good things must come to an end, and in 1995, the Houston Post folded. Kiely spent the following two years as Washington bureau chief for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, covering Bill Clinton's last campaign for his hometown paper.

She worked one year as White House correspondent for the New York Daily News before joining USA TODAY in 1997. Kiely covers Congress and national politics for the nation's largest circulation daily. She has covered every presidential campaign since 1980.

Kiely is former member of the congressional Standing Committee of Correspondents, which handles press credentialing and logistics for reporters covering Capitol Hill, the presidential nominating conventions and the presidential inaugurals.

As a member of the Gridiron Club, an organization of reporters that hosts an annual dinner theater spoof of Washington politicians, her chief claim to fame is having cast columnist Robert Novak as Kermit the Frog.

She chaired the scholarship committee of the National Press Club for a decade, before stepping down in the fall of 2006 to embark on a 20-month course of study at American University to obtain a master's degree in multi-media journalism. She expects to graduate in the spring of 2008.