Early Education

Our friend Heidi was a high-level environmental policy adviser to a progressive  governor out West. Well-educated, well-informed, committed and successful,  Heidi has an impressive resume, and is a formidable strategist and policy pro.  She’s run a congressional campaign, staffed a think tank, and held down several other notable paid and unpaid political organizing positions over the years.  Exquisitely articulate, yet fast on her feet, Heidi is a natural  for a press op.

Just after fellow office staffers  pushed Heidi in front of the cameras on short notice, they voiced amazed satisfaction at her quick, poised, successful performance. Yet whom did Heidi credit? Her training? No.  Her experience?  No. Her savvy? No.   Nope, nope, nope.  Her first credit was to–shades of the Oscars — her upbringing!!!!  Heidi’s retort: “I grew up in a family of journalists and lawyers.  Every night at the dinner table was like a press op!”

Now, Heidi left home at the age of 17.  She has not warmed a regular seat at her mother’s table in more than three decades. Yet in Heidi’s telling, those early years were so influential and so formative that she continues to chalk up her TV smarts to the grilling from dad and three older brothers  oh-those-many-years ago. On the up side, this is a marvelous testament to the importance of the dinnertime tutorial more common in the bygone era of the evening family meal.  On the down side, Heidi seemed too quick to minimize the role of  her subsequent excellent education, experience, and training, and thus discredit her own hard-won political and public speaking skills.  I’m all for the warm embrace of childhood, especially the parts that build character.  We all tag  declarations with the qualifier that “I grew up ” . .  ., e.g.,  eating white bread, walking to school, singing hymns, camping out, what have you.  But let’s also hear it for the wit and  wisdom we accumulate once we’ve left the nest.

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Tantrum

Was anyone else as annoyed as I was by Howard Kurtz’s tantrum
in today’s Washington Post? Waah, waaah, waah, someone forgot to kiss up to the press! Oh, puhleeze. Why can’t the press, oh, say, do its job and report the campaign?

In the News . . .

I just love seeing my college classmates (Mount Holoyoke 1979) in the New York Times. Today it was Priscilla Painton (MHC ‘80, because she took off a year in France), who was in my German conversation class freshman year. Priscilla, who recently left Time Magazine, was heralded on p.C3 of the Times  as a newly named  editor-in-chief of a section of Simon & Schuster. Although the division’s name, “adult trade” sounds vaguely pornographic, Painton has made a wonderful career move.  Just think, getting paid to promote all those books!

Priscilla’s good friend and Mount Holyoke ‘79 classmate Elizabeth Taylor made a similar leap from Time’s Chicago bureau a few years back, joining the Chicago Tribune as its Literary Editor. Although the Tribune moved the Sunday book section to the Saturday paper about a year ago, Taylor is still listed as “Magazine Editor and Literary Editor” in the Tribune’s staff e-mail directory.  Just think, getting paid to read, think about, and write about all those books!

The “old girl network” pipeline from MHC to Time worked pretty well back in the day. Ellie McGrath, ‘74, was a Time reporter who mentored Liz and other cub Time reporters, and Headley Donovan, Editor-in-Chief, was a trustee of Mount Holyoke. (If memory serves, his daughter attended Mount Holyoke, although don’t hold me to it.)

Smart Girls

Glenn Greenwald made this observation today in his roundup of press reports of and blogger reactions to an otherwise minor Iowa campaign trail snippet:

Just contrast the frosty, petulant reception they gave Hillary when she entered their bus with the way White House press reporters at the President’s news conferences, for years, cackle at his every attempt at humor and light up with glee when he deigns to engage them in his insulting frat-boy repartee. But in contrast to George the Popular Jock to whom they’re grateful for any attention, Hillary is the overly competitive, know-it-all girl at the front of the class with all the answers, and so instead of acting like professionals and just treating like her like a candidate running for President, and taking the opportunity to ask questions when she entered the bus, they instead band together like they’re in eighth grade and give the mean, unpopular girl the cold shoulder.

Is it any wonder that Hillary never boards the press bus? Personally, I’d rather be in Siberia than be in Iowa around all of that.

Hoo, boy, does that trigger rotten memories of my Ozarks grade school, junior high, and high school years in the 60s and 70sl! Like Glenn, I don’t have to support Hillary to be pained and disgusted by the story. (We know-it-all Seven Sister grads still need to stick together!) I’m disgusted to see that pack anti-intellectualism still reigns supreme, and pained to be reminded of behaviors I’d hoped to escape when I left Missouri more than 30 years ago.

Unlike Glenn, I don’t conflate “mean” with “smart.” A brainy girl who knows the answers was bound to be unpopular in 1960, but not necessarily because she was “mean.” I still recall, vividly, the hatred directed across the classroom toward my eagerly waving hand. The meanness came at me, not from me. Our freshman civics teacher, Coach Roweton, chided three of my female classmates who equaled or out-scored me on pop quizzes: “Donna, Peggy, you’re hiding your intelligence,” he’d say. Donna and Peggy were no dummies. Coach was right about that. Each shrewdly kept her light under a bushel, knowing full well the key to popularity was an apparently empty head. I can’t speak to classroom dynamics in Park Ridge, Illinois, but I have to imagine that it wasn’t far ahead of Parkview High School a decade later. Like Hillary, I fled the hostile middle west for an all-women’s college out East where achievement from young women was expected, not resented.

And, like Hillary, I’ve had to learn the hard way that, no matter how far we flee, lots of folks still dislike gals who know stuff. Having been chided at Washington dinner parties for my command of “facts,” I know all too well the malice aimed toward the female, gifted, and smart. “Walking dictionary” is still an epithet, not an accolade.

There was an internet joke circulating a few years back, calculating the comparative dollars/per/second earned by Michael Jordan versus Bill Gates. “Nerds rule!” they chortled. But smart, confident girls? Rule? Remains to be seen.

Watch those Wives

The other day I attended an afternoon tea sponsored by the Women’s Bar Association. (No fancy hats or white gloves–it’s winter!) The guest speaker was New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse, Supreme Court correspondent for more than 25 years. I took the opportunity to ask her what she thought of the recent practice of the press to give extensive news feature coverage to spouses of Supreme Court nominees, and whether she thought this was a change from her earlier years covering the Court, in the ’70s. I named the particular focus on Jane Sullivan Roberts, an attorney, and  Martha-Ann Bomgardner Alito, a law librarian-turned-at-home-mom. Ms. Greenhouse’s initial, somewhat dismissive response was that “well, back in the old days, the wives weren’t lawyers. And besides, it’s interesting!”

Knowing how carefully the Bush Administration stage-managed the nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito, I doubt the Times or other papers had to do much digging to reach friends and family members who were quoted extensively in the many stories leading up to the nomination hearings. Astonishingly detailed profiles emerged in each case. Seemingly everything was offered for scrutiny, from Ms. Sullivan Roberts’ quirky choice of car to her working class roots in the Outer Boroughs. Times pundits opined that Ms. Sullivan Roberts’ activities in Feminists for Life (or a similarly named group–forgive my memory) were being offered as a wink and nudge to the pro-life lobby. Mrs. Alito’s career arc merited a bit less ink, but her devotion to her children’s sports activities and her active, supporting role as a substitute staffer in their schools were duly noted and analyzed.

So the reading public was treated to this coverage of the ladies solely because it’s “interesting?” Greenhouse was a bit too coy, and her first response was more telling. The wives of yore didn’t merit the same coverage, because they “weren’t lawyers.” Oh, really? If the mere fact of being a lawyer-spouse was the reason for the coverage, then one might expect the analysts to focus on areas of potential case conflicts or sources of recusals. Anyone who covers the law as closely as Greenhouse must know of  attorney’s and judge’s ironclad oaths of confidentiality. Presumably Chief Justice and Mrs. Roberts were scrupulous to honor their oaths during their years of law practice at separate firms, and presumably would remain as scrupulous during Justice Roberts’ tenure on the bench. But, as I recall, aside from brief descriptions of Ms. Sullivan Roberts’s communications law practice and her somewhat reduced work schedule following the adoption of their two children, the tenor of the stories followed the usual tone adopted by any standard personality profile.

What I hoped for from Greenhouse was the acknowledgment that, while the press feeds the reading public’s insatiable appetite for gossipy profiles of wife and family, those features weren’t particularly relevant to substantive, important issue at hand, whether Judges Roberts and Alito were the right picks for the U.S. Supreme Court. And, if there is an argument to be made that the work, courtship, and family history of a potential Justice’s wife is relevant, then we need to know why. In that case, the Times and its fellow newspapers of record dropped the ball.

My next post will examine a recent instance where the Bush administration allegedly slapped down a potential appointee because of spousal politics. Sometimes it matters, but for the absolutely wrong reasons.