Settle for More

by Megyn Kelly

  In TV, we learn by doing (Meredith was right), and I would try to tape the hours I thought I’d be on so I could go back and review my work. As always, I was my own worst critic. It was hard to see myself on camera in the beginning—you notice only your flaws. But it helped. I would see ways I could improve, tonally or in my delivery or in my general messaging or approach. I also started reading every piece of news I could get my hands on. I wasn’t yet steeped in the news, and I soon realized this is a critical job requirement not just for doing a solid report on one topic, but for putting any topic in context and bringing perspective to it. I asked for a lot of advice at this time and wasn’t afraid to show my ignorance. Not that hiding it was a viable option.

  In those days, I enthusiastically took every shift they gave me. Christmas? No problem. Friday and Saturday night? Absolutely. Work a double? Yes. I’d advise anyone in a new job to do the same thing: say yes to everything. Everything within reason. Until you don’t have to. Do it happily and without complaint. These days, I’m more judicious in my choices—I have to be, given the time constraints I’m under. But I’m still a hard worker.

  Little by little, I started to get better shifts, and eventually, better stories. Occasionally, I’d get to go on Shepard Smith’s The Fox Report at 7:00 p.m., which I really enjoyed. He’s still my favorite news anchor. And my favorite show to appear on was always Special Report with Brit Hume. It was the best journalistic training ground a young reporter could ask for. When our packages would air, we’d watch the so-called Brit cam, a camera on Brit’s face that we could see on our internal feed. If he grimaced, you were on the shit list. If he yelled, you were dead. If he smiled? Well, that was too good to hope for. One night I got a grimace. Damn.

  After the show ended, Kim Hume pulled me aside. A sound bite that should have been cut had been in the segment.

  “Why was that in there?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I told them—”

  “What could you have done differently to prevent it?”

  “I don’t know. I told the editor not to include it, and he didn’t listen.”

  “Not him,” she said. “You. What could you have done differently?”

  This was an important moment for me. She was telling me something bigger than how to make sure a package gets cut right. It was about taking ownership of my own work product. Not blaming someone else. If I had budgeted my time better, I could have been in the edit bay as the piece was being cut. I could have watched it start to finish before it aired. But I hadn’t, and a mistake had been made. It felt liberating to realize this, to understand that I was in charge. I still carry this philosophy with me and ask my team to do the same. It mirrors one of Brit’s favorite adages: “Winners take responsibility. Losers blame others.” It’s not just about saying the words. It’s about actually doing it.

  Kim was an incredible mentor to me—almost as much as Brit, who has had the greatest professional influence on my journalism career.

  One thing I love about news is that every day is different, and you learn new things all the time. Not long into my tenure in the DC bureau, what I learned was that then Republican senator Arlen Specter, who at the time was the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, wanted to befriend me. He called me up and invited me to have lunch with him in the Senate’s private dining room.

  I thought this was a great chance, since I covered the Supreme Court and knew Senator Specter might help me break news on that front down the road. However, it did strike me as odd that someone with that much power was volunteering to give me an hour of his time.

  I asked Major if this was unusual. He raised his eyebrows. “Seventeen years I covered Capitol Hill at U.S. News,” he said. “Another three here at Fox. Never once has anyone asked me to have lunch in the private Senate dining room.”

  I went to lunch. We were seated at a table for two, and while I didn’t know the men and women around us by face, it was clear they were mostly senators and other Important DC Types (cynics call them Washingphonians). Senator Specter was obviously well known and well liked, and introduced me to many of his colleagues in the dining room. I found him to be funny, smart, and full of insight.

  Senator Specter told me about his time as a young prosecutor in Pennsylvania, and how he was appointed to the Warren Commission. He walked me through what he called their “single bullet conclusion”—not “theory”—behind JFK’s assassination. After lunch he asked me if I wanted to see his office. I had never seen the office of a US senator before, so I accepted. We swung by his official digs, filled with staffers and paperwork and lots of mahogany and leather furniture. Then he took me to his other office, his “hideaway.”

  This is a real thing on Capitol Hill. A hideaway office is a rarity among lawmakers, a status symbol, and Specter’s was bright and gorgeous, with nearly floor-to-ceiling windows. The white walls were covered with vanity shots of Specter alongside just about every world leader you could think of: Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, forty years’ worth of presidents and Supreme Court justices . . . He had a copy of the Bill Clinton impeachment papers signed by Bill Clinton.

  He walked me down memory lane. Every story was more fascinating than the one before. I think he enjoyed regaling a young woman with the impressive things he had achieved, and I felt like a sponge, soaking up new details and facts about Washington. Eventually he had to leave to vote. He asked me to stick around. I started thinking: Why does he want me to wait? Does he have a great news story for me that he’s been saving for hour three? More likely than not, I figured, he was just enjoying the afternoon and didn’t want it to end.

  While I was waiting for Specter to return, I e-mailed Major: I’m in something called his “hideaway”—what is this about? He asked me to stay here while he goes to vote.

  Almost immediately, I received Major’s response: GET OUT NOW! CODE RED! GET OUT! Hideaways are for towel-snapping rights!

  I swallowed hard. Was I compromising myself? Had I made a mistake coming in here? What would people think? Wait, towel-snapping?

  Within moments, Specter was back. I was already on my feet, saying I had to go immediately. He wondered why I was “off so soon.” I said I had work I needed to do and left with many thanks. When I got back to the office, I told Brit about it, and he smiled.

  “Welcome to Washington, kid,” he said.

  For the record, the senator never tried anything inappropriate with me, and he did turn out to be a good source. But those first few months, I was on a steep learning curve.

  That same year, George W. Bush won reelection, and I was still relatively new to Fox News. I was sent to cover one of the inaugural balls. Reporters were told to dress in the appropriate attire, so I wore a full-length red satin ballgown. I thought it was a beautiful gown, but—how do I put this? It was very cold in the ballroom, and the material was rather thin.

  One of the crew gently let me know what they were seeing on the monitor—“Um, they’re asking if you can . . . um . . . cover up.”

  I about died. I went into the bathroom and put tissues down the front of my dress, which solved the problem, but not before a screen grab of a visibly cold yours truly was all over the Internet. I was humiliated and more than a little disturbed by what people were saying online.

  I told Brit about it later, and he said, “Look. Lesson learned. But Megyn, this is a tough business. You’re going to need to get a thicker skin.”

  “Or a thicker dress,” I said.

  Sean Hannity was great about incoming negativity. I talked to him early on about how dark a place the Internet was, how much awfulness awaited there, and he said, “Google ‘Sean Hannity.’ Go to the first website that pops up. It will be IHateSeanHannity.com, and the worst lies and hate will be sitting right there. I never pay that stuff any mind.”

  “How can you be so calm about it?” I asked.

  “It’s an acquired skill,” he said. “I tell my friends, if someone offered to pay you a million dollars a year if
you would allow the most hateful, vile things to be said about you online, would you take it? And they all say yes. Wouldn’t you?”

  Of course, I was not making a million dollars a year—not anywhere close. But I got the message. Do you love this job, or don’t you? Is it worth some unwanted attention, or isn’t it?

  I’m more like Sean now. I know one of the key lessons of the Internet: a lot of bus exhaust comes with doing what we do. Haters come with the territory, and they will always be louder than the lovers. But in news, there’s another rule: ratings reign supreme. If they’re ripping you, that’s fine, because it means they’re watching. There’s a saying in television: “It’s when they’re not talking about you that you need to worry.”

  11

  So Long, Little Miss Perfect

  The most transformational period of my adult life began early in 2005. I was six months into full-time broadcasting and quickly moving up the ranks. All of the emotional energy I had devoted to the law was now freed up. I was full of ambition and enthusiasm for my new career. Having come from the legal world, I was stunned by how, even as I was working hard by news standards, my new hours were so reasonable.

  News was shift work. Eight hours on, and then you go home. If you didn’t have a hit in your last hour or two, sometimes you could even leave early. That stack of papers on your desk? Throw it in the garbage; it is now literally yesterday’s news. What a difference from law, where the paperwork lived forever, and even seemed to breed like rabbits when (if) you slept.

  Suddenly I had something quite foreign to me—time. That new gift allowed me to think hard about what I wanted in all areas of my life, and I realized I still had much work to do—on my new career, my friendships, my marriage, and myself.

  It all began in January, when Brit pulled me aside and said I “had captured the attention of Mr. Ailes.” He said I was “being fast-tracked.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it sounded promising. He also said that he’d told Roger I shouldn’t be brought along too quickly—that I should pay my dues in Washington. Brit wanted me to work as a reporter and spend time learning our trade. I was excited for any and all of it.

  That summer, around my one-year anniversary at Fox, Roger called me up to New York and told me something: I had an authenticity problem. Roger had literally written the book on how to read people—it’s called You Are the Message. “Viewers can spot a phony from a mile away,” Roger said. He encouraged me not to be so reluctant to show the viewers who I really am. To take more risks. To not try so hard to be perfect. To not fear mistakes. I wasn’t 100 percent sure I knew what he meant, but I promised to try.

  Sometimes the universe has a way of enforcing a message. Soon after that meeting, I had a nasty encounter with a woman in the DC bureau who clearly did not like me and suggested others felt the same. Brit saw the exchange and pulled me into his office. He could see I was upset.

  “Do you know what your problem is?” he asked me. “You’re just as vulnerable as anyone else, but you project zero vulnerability.”

  He meant it kindly, but it was shocking. I began to take an honest look at myself. Why can’t I make friends more easily? Why don’t more women want to be around me? I had been so busy for so many years building up a protective veneer that it didn’t dawn on me that I might be alienating others—from viewers to potential friends.

  It occurred to me that what I thought I knew, I might not know. What I thought I had, I might not have. I was in a state of flux, of self-examination. I felt both fearful and hopeful that I could improve things, but I needed someone to help me figure out how.

  My therapist’s name was Amy, and I called her, affectionately, “M’Lady Amy.” I met her in late 2005, and she helped me in ways I still cannot fully measure. We didn’t spend a lot of time on childhood drama. She just gave me new ways of thinking about things, and I was ready to hear it. When I think of her now, I think of that line from Titanic: “He saved me in every way a person can be saved.” She did that for me, and gave me a new way of approaching all of my relationships—with women, men, and myself.

  With women, she asked me not to assume they did not like me. She suggested that my own preconceived notions about how women were reacting to me were in fact influencing how they did react. That I was in control of the responses I was getting. Think about things differently, she said, and you might get different results.

  She encouraged me to attend a women’s group she ran. At first I was reluctant.

  “Am I that screwed up?” I asked Amy. “You want me to go to two therapy sessions?”

  “It’s not about being screwed up,” she said. “It’s about growing.”

  And so I walked into a room with six other women who were seeing Amy. I stayed quiet during the first meeting, and the next time I saw Amy, she asked me for my first impressions.

  “This one is clearly getting a divorce,” I said. “That one needs to get the husband out of the basement . . .” I continued to fire off my judgments.

  It was only then that Amy shared with me one of the rules of group—you have to tell the other members your first impressions of them. Really?

  Sure enough, once we were all back together, Amy turned to me and said, “Megyn, would you care to share your impressions with everyone?”

  “Okay . . . ,” I said. I did it. I said what I thought in each case. I held nothing back.

  And then the most extraordinary thing happened.

  Each woman filled in her story. “This is something you don’t know about me,” said the woman who I had insisted needed to dump her husband immediately. “We don’t have enough money to maintain two places. We’re barely able to pay our bills now, much less apart . . .”

  One by one, they told me more of their situations, and I realized how arrogant and wrong I’d been on almost every score.

  Then they turned the tables and told me their first impressions of me: I was tough, a hot shot, a go-getter. They didn’t see any tenderness. Because, of course, I showed none. It wasn’t how I saw myself at all. It began to dawn on me—the image I am putting out there bears little resemblance to who I really am.

  The universe wasn’t done with me yet.

  One night, a number of my female Fox colleagues went out for happy hour, and I wasn’t invited. I could see them gathering outside my office, but nobody came in and asked me to come along. I had been there for about two years, and I thought we liked each other.

  I told my women’s group about it. I was expecting sympathy. I got something even better: honesty.

  “I wouldn’t have invited you either,” one of the women said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because you seem like you have it all going on. You seem so sure of yourself; you are attractive. I’d feel like all the attention would flow to you and none to me. I’ve never heard you talk about having a bad hair day, or feeling fat. There’s nothing in you that I can relate to. I wouldn’t want to share the table with you.”

  I started crying.

  “Nothing could be further from the truth,” I said. “I constantly feel like I need to lose weight. I don’t feel attractive at all without my hair and makeup done. I have the same self-doubts as anyone. But I am an expert at hiding them all.”

  There it was. In my personal and professional lives, the feedback was the same. I needed to get more honest about who I was—with my friends, my colleagues, my viewers and myself. The Little Miss Perfect act—the very one that law firm had seen and rejected years earlier—was starting to crumble. I found myself reevaluating the choices I had made, for so many years, about my approach to life.

  As I thought about these remarkably similar pieces of feedback, I suddenly found myself thinking back across the years, coming up with stories like these. Examples from my past when I failed to connect with people. As a young adult, I struggled with what I now see was my threatening personality. At one of my first professional jobs, a couple of women on my floor would eat together every day. When it was beautif
ul, people would go eat outside on these benches, and I noticed them always choosing benches as far away from me as possible.

  Another time when I was living in New York, I met a woman in a bar, and we hit it off. She asked me to join her and a friend of hers for dinner. I sat across from them, thinking, This feels like an interview for friendship. I must get this job. And so I felt the need to project all good things. I would never have chosen to show any weakness. The next morning, I sent the woman an e-mail saying, Thanks so much for inviting me out!

  I never heard from her again.

  Women, in my experience, don’t want to surround themselves with other women who project only strength and no humanity. I believe men are socialized differently and don’t tend to have as much of a problem with this. A tough veneer is considered a life skill for a man, so men do not tend to find the tough-gal routine as off-putting. But women, at least those I have known, tend to demand more emotional honesty in a relationship.

  And as I thought back, I ended up where it all began: seventh grade. For years, I didn’t think about how that year of bullying had affected me. I figured it was just something I’d weathered; it was terrible, but it was over. But the truth is, it had changed me.

  There was one benefit—I’ll start with that. I developed empathy in a way I otherwise never could. It affects the stories I choose on my show to this day. I look for stories about survival, about triumph.

  That’s the upside. But there was a more profound, lasting downside to that middle-school torment. I never dealt with people the same again. When you’re traumatized as a kid, it’s almost like squeezing a liquid gel over yourself that becomes a hardened shell. It protects you—but it also keeps you at arm’s length from other people. I would see that manifest more than once in my life. I wanted to be invulnerable, which I thought meant projecting perfection, strength. I was sabotaging my own ability to form intimate friendships.