What Do Women Want? Read Free Page A

women—or so I originally argued before I myself had been handled by Hillary and her handlers. But given my later run-ins with this unholy alliance, I began to think that HRC’s bum rap had a lot to do with her own flair for shooting herself in the foot.
    Not that I expected access to be easy. Even when I started researching Hillary Clinton, I knew that both Clintons were press-shy after the beatings they had endured at the hands of various members of the press. But since I was determined to defend HRC against her detractors, I began to approach various friends of both Clintons with an eye to getting an audience with Hillary herself—a full-scale semiprivate interview—with only the requisite spin doctors in attendance. Armed with testimonials to my bona fides from such Clinton pals as Judy Collins and Letty Pogrebin, I wrote to HRC’s press people and top personal assistant, enclosing the sympathetic essay I’d already written and mentioning the publication assignment. There followed a merry chase in which I was tested for my sincerity and tenacity, interrogated by telephone by a series of inquisitors—from Lisa Caputo, Hillary’s then-press liaison, to Melanne Verveer, her personal factotum, to various young staffers in charge of scheduling. I was asked everything from “What do you plan to write?” to “How much time do you need with the first lady?” to “How do you propose to tell the truth in that paper?” (The London Sunday Times, I should have known, was one of the first to blow the whistle on Bill Clinton’s panty raids.) My assignment caused no little consternation among Hillary’s handlers, who wanted to know early on how I could possibly write “an honest article” for that appalling outlet. 4 It was not exactly true that the U.S. media failed in their duty to question Clinton’s “character,” but the Sunday Times got there first. This hardly made my job easier. When I explained to Lisa Caputo that I had already thoroughly researched the first lady and only needed some time to talk to her woman-to-woman and get a feel for her personality, red flags went up all around. I had the sense I couldn’t have said anything worse.
    “I don’t usually do this,” I told Lisa Caputo. “I’m not a member of ‘the press,’ but a novelist and a poet.”
    “We know who you are,” said Caputo ominously.
    “Have you read my piece in the New York Observer ? I’m very sympathetic to the first lady. I think she’s taking the heat for all of us, for all strong women. . . . I want to show her as a worthy successor to Eleanor Roosevelt.” Something must have clicked in Caputo’s head with the magic words “Eleanor Roosevelt,” because it was then that I was scheduled for a brief “rope line” interview with the first lady.
    Even this mini-interview took more than a month of planning. Lisa Caputo and I spoke not less than five times to discuss whether I should see Hillary when she received an honorary degree at a college in New Jersey or I should attend a Democratic fund-raiser in New York “with other prominent women.” After much discussion, it became clear that the latter was the preferred venue. So Caputo arranged for me to attend one of Hillary Clinton’s campaign appearances before the New York Women’s Democratic Leadership Conference.
    I arrived at Madison Square Garden early, was checked out by the gatekeepers, found to be kosher, and handed over to another Hillary handler. There ensued a half hour of confusion about where I should await the first lady and her minions, which elevator or stairs I should take upstairs, and who would escort me. I crossed and recrossed the arena at aerobic speed, dutifully following my bustling and officious guides. Finally I was hand delivered to an upstairs confab room, complete with central bar, to await, with those “other prominent women,” the arrival of the first and second ladies.
    Rumors of “the coming” floated across the foot-weary crowd. The