Re-Re-Re-Reintroducing Hillary Clinton
A few minutes before my meeting with Hillary Clinton on the Fourth of July, during my drive to the Mount Washington hotel in Bretton Woods, N.H., where she was staying, I passed a moose near the side of the road. At first I thought it was fake, one of those life-size cutouts that you sometimes see of big land mammals or, on occasion, famous politicians. But the specimen proved to be real and spectacular, antlers and all. I had never seen a moose before. It was thrilling, and I felt compelled to tell Clinton about it within seconds of my arrival. ‘‘Oh, really? Wow,’’ Clinton exclaimed with a big smile as she poured herself a cup of coffee. She might have been humoring me, but still seemed genuinely excited by my sighting and seized on it as a point of connection.
We were meeting in an old conference room of the grand hotel, which is perhaps best known to history as the site of the Bretton Woods Conference, a gathering of delegates from 44 countries to regulate the international financial system after World War II. Clinton and I sat at the same table where the agreement that established the International Monetary Fund was signed in 1944. As a former first lady, senator and secretary of state, Clinton was of course no stranger to such heady sites of statecraft. But what we started talking about was the moose. She had seen a few in her day, she told me. ‘‘I’ve eaten moose, too,’’ she said. ‘‘I’ve had moose stew.’’
Clinton explained that during college she worked one summer in Alaska, washing dishes at a resort. She was 21, and her energy and freedom felt limitless; she took long hikes in the midnight sun. ‘‘The guides told us the most dangerous animals in the park — more than the grizzlies, because the grizzlies will basically ignore you — were the moose,’’ she said. Natives knew to keep their distance. But the moose were all over, impossible to miss. ‘‘Oh, I mean like, between you and me,’’ Clinton said, and I thought for a second she was about to tell me something conspiratorial (‘‘between you and me’’), but in fact she was simply describing how close she had been to a moose, roughly the same distance as we were sitting from each other there at the birthplace of the I.M.F.
Hillary Clinton is private and guarded by nature, and three decades of being inspected like an exotic species has made her even more so. But right now, in the early days of what will be a 19-month campaign for the White House, she is trying to share and expound on her experiences, to project some greater measure of herself, big and small. Moose tales aside, this does not come easily. She has resided at the center of so many scandals, psychodramas and culture wars that it’s hard to even keep track of them all, let alone know what the person within that bubble of attention is actually like.
This is an excellent,long article about Hillary from the NYT magazine.Well worth the read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/magazine/re-re-re-reintroducing-hillary-clinton.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=photo-spot-region
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