by Megyn Kelly
Seriously, few things are as irritating as being told to “calm down.” It’s paternalistic, like a pat on the head. In April 2016, the Reverend Al Sharpton tried telling me to “calm down.”
“Watch it,” I warned him, and when he pleaded ignorance as to why, I suggested he speak to O’Reilly.
16
Now Everyone’s Here
The first big election event Bret and I co-anchored together was the 2010 midterm elections. It was a big night, as Republicans seized control of the US House, two years into Barack Obama’s presidency. However, it was child’s play compared to two years later. From presidential debates to wall-to-wall convention coverage, Bret and I were in the middle of it all. By election night 2012, we were ready for anything. Thank God, because, boy, did we get it.
As the show was about to begin, the excitement in the studio built. Fox had rented a helicopter to shoot beauty shots of Times Square, and the Fox News logo lit up the buildings. The presidency would be decided tonight, and we knew we’d have well over ten million viewers watching. Bret and I stood before the cameras as the clock ticked down to the big show open. I looked at Bret and said, “This is quite a moment.” He gave me a fist bump, and we were off.
Despite weeks of people like Dick Morris and Karl Rove and some pollsters, like Scott Rasmussen, telling us Mitt Romney was likely to win, it soon became clear that he would not. And yet Rove, a Fox News contributor and former George W. Bush guru, sat next to me at the anchor desk, arguing that the numbers even that night were pointing toward a Romney win. Based on the returns we had at hand, Rove’s claim appeared, frankly, impossible.
I had seen Rove do this with the numbers in the past—it seemed he could take any poll and spin it however he liked. It was a skill, really, and he was quite good at it. This is the man who got George W. Bush elected twice to the presidency. Say what you will about him, there’s a reason they called him the Architect.
He started pulling that on our set, and I asked him flat-out, “Is this just math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better? Or is this real?” Stewart and others would make a lot out of that moment, as if I were taunting Rove, but I was genuinely trying to make sense of what he was saying. But the fun with Rove was not over yet.
The time came that evening when the Fox News decision desk was ready to call Ohio. For Barack Obama. Now the decision desk is a group of nerdy, lovable number crunchers who, whatever their personal political affiliation, have one mission and one mission only: to call the race correctly. Calling Ohio for President Obama meant one thing—the election was his, and Romney had lost.
The enormity of this moment was not lost on the decision desk. They told me later they went around the table, one by one, asking each man to raise his hand if he agreed with the call. It was unanimous: Ohio would be called, as would the presidency, and the 2012 race was over.
So imagine our surprise at the anchor desk when Karl Rove challenged the call, suggesting it was too early to call Ohio, based on the results he was seeing. Bret and I looked at Karl. We looked at each other.
“That’s awkward,” I said on the air, acknowledging the reality of the situation.
It was clear what needed to be done, and we did it. We pulled back the curtain, figuratively speaking, and I marched down to the decision desk and got some clarity. We let the whole thing play out live on the air, inviting the viewers in on the electric moment.
My walk out of the studio and down the hallway was seen by tens of millions of people around the globe. It was easily the most watched, most exciting TV moment of election night 2012, and we knew at the time that it was a big deal. I remember saying to two of the decision desk guys, Arnon Mishkin and Chris Stirewalt, “You realize, of course, this is going to be everywhere tomorrow.”
They knew. On camera, I questioned them both about the call, and of course they stood by their decision, providing the logic and reasoning behind it. Thrust from a post behind the scenes to a moment on camera before an audience of millions, the guys remained completely unflustered. They had confidence in their judgment: Barack Obama had won Ohio, and had been reelected president of the United States.
It was a big moment for Fox News, and it was heralded by some unusual fans in the press the next day. None other than the New York Times’s David Carr wrote about that moment in a story called, “For One Night at Fox, News Tops Agenda.”1 Having worked at Fox News for so many years, I was used to the veiled shots in any compliment from the mainstream press.
We received dozens of requests for interviews with me in the days that followed, almost all of which we turned down. I wondered at the time just how lasting a moment this would be in the national memory of election coverage. Stirewalt and I had a drink later with the rest of the gang at a bar near Fox, debriefing about the night.
“So . . . Obama wins,” I said to him.
“Journalism wins,” Stirewalt responded. We raised our glasses and drank.
Right after that election, I got pregnant with Thatcher. I remember talking about the possibility of having a third child with my dear friend Janice Dean. We both understood it would be tough to manage—three kids, a busy career, another pregnancy on-air. I thought, Maybe I shouldn’t. I am doing well here. Will this interfere? It didn’t matter. I knew I wanted another baby. I said to Janice—and to myself—“We cannot make decisions about our children based on what works for Fox. We have to do what works for us.” And what worked for me was to bring my third child into the world. I knew he was waiting for me and Doug to go get him. So we did.
I was newly pregnant when the terrible events of Newtown, Connecticut, happened. It was one of only two times I’ve ever had to visibly choke back tears on the air. I hadn’t revealed that I was pregnant, and that story—oh, that devastating story. It was more than any human being could take. Later that night at home, Doug and I were talking about it. Yates was only three, and I was so thankful I didn’t have to explain it to him—that he was too young to understand. Still, he overheard us talking in code. He looked at us, and heard a new word.
“What means hate?” he asked.
I will never forget that moment.
A year later, I would invite several of the Newtown family members onto the show to discuss smart gun and mental health policies. I gave them each a book Doug’s own family had read faithfully in the months after Doug’s father had passed—it’s called Healing after Loss, and its daily meditations and prayers can provide some comfort to those in deep mourning.
The months passed, my pregnancy progressed, and I got bigger, in more ways than one. My career was thriving. My kids were thriving too. I felt torn, of course, between my work and my kids, and knew I needed more time with both on any given day. What I definitely did not need was a lecture from three men on how my career was terrible for my kids.
Fox Business host Lou Dobbs had invited two guests—conservative commentator Erick Erickson and liberal pundit Juan Williams—onto his show to discuss a report from the Pew Research Center that said women have become the breadwinners in 40 percent of households with children.2 These guys were complaining publicly that this trend was one of the horsemen of the apocalypse. They really had been saying some crazy things on Fox Business about how damaging it was for children to have their mothers working, and how women were more the submissive type while men were really the dominant ones.
You can imagine how I felt watching this while at home with two young children and a third on the way. This is, as an aside, one of the beautiful things about diversity in the workforce—in this case, having a working mom as an anchor. The workforce is then not monolithic, and different viewpoints can be aired. I asked them both to come on my show and say that same stupid stuff. To their credit, they did.3
My first question, for Erick, was “What makes you dominant and me submissive, and who died and made you scientist-in-chief?” It’s good to kick things off with a bang.
Feminists were saying that men’s and women’s roles were intercha
ngeable, Erick said, and that “isn’t healthy for society.” He claimed he wasn’t judging anybody, but that science supported his view that men should be the breadwinners and women should raise the children.
I told him he clearly was judging people. I pointed out that his so-called science was wrong and his facts were wrong, and pulled out a raft of studies to prove it.
Lou spoke for a long time, agreeing with Erick that society’s ills had a lot to do with “women in the workforce.” I interrupted to ask him if he really meant that. He got irritated. “Let me finish what I’m saying, if I may, O Dominant One.”
“Excuse me?” I replied, with a raised eyebrow.
I wound up rattling off study after study showing that they were wrong about children of working mothers. I noted that this was the same thing they used to say about the children of interracial marriages to discourage people from marrying across racial lines—that mixing black and white would be detrimental to the child’s success. “Tell that to Barack Obama,” I said.
Erickson later said publicly that the exchange really made him think. He admitted that he had been wrong on this subject and believed he should be more careful in what he said, especially as the father of a young daughter. I give him a ton of credit for that—it’s hard for any of us to admit when we are wrong, never mind so publicly. He and I have remained friendly throughout the years.
That segment was also the beginning of my friendship with Sheryl Sandberg, who called me up after seeing it and said, “I love you!”
We had a long talk, the first of many, and she has become an inspiring force to me. I love how her brand of feminism highlights the things we can all agree on as women—empowerment, advancement, equality, sisterhood—and steers clear of the more divisive issues.
I told her I am not a feminist. Sheryl—one of the preeminent female role models in America—passed no judgment on my feelings about that term. An example for our younger generation, some of whom openly booed me on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show for saying I do not consider myself a feminist. I almost scolded the young women then and there. Is there no room for ambivalence about that term? We need more women in this sisterhood tent, not less. Who gives a damn what label we use, so long as we are living a life that supports other women?
My problem with the word feminist is that it’s exclusionary and alienating. I look at a lot of the self-titled feminists in this country and think, If that’s the club we’re talking about, I don’t want in. Feminism has become associated, de facto, with liberal politics. Call me crazy, but Gloria Steinem proudly wearing an “I Had an Abortion” T-shirt4 might be a little off-putting to some. This is not to take a position on abortion. It’s just to ask, why do we have to make the most divisive issues a key part of the feminist platform? Wouldn’t we do better to simply unite on female empowerment?
I also reject the feminist messaging that treats gender issues as a zero-sum game—that assumes that to empower women, we must castrate men. You see the beginnings of this even in the schoolyard, with affirmations like, “Girls rule and boys drool.” As the mother of two boys and the wife of a loving, supportive man, I object. I don’t want Yardley’s empowerment to come at the expense of my sons. Isn’t that what we’ve been complaining about men doing to us?
Sheryl and I talked about everything—our husbands, our careers, and our kids. We’d both taught aerobics in college, it turned out, both married strong, evolved men, and both had high-powered jobs in male-dominated industries. Yes, she went to the actual Harvard and I went to the Harvard of Albany, but why must every detail be parsed?
We of course had no idea that day that Sheryl’s husband Dave would die in a tragic accident just three years later. The event would change the lives of Sheryl and her two children forever, and would sadly give us yet another thing in common—the sudden, premature death of a beloved family member. A void that, no matter how much you achieve, how much you have, is always there. Always.
Thatcher came along twenty-seven months after Yardley. I call him my walking cupcake. Not like the cupcakes on our nation’s campuses who need safe spaces. Like a walking ball of sweetness. As Doug said when he was born: “Now everyone’s here who’s supposed to be here.”
We knew right away that we were done, that this was our family. Thatcher has been easy and lovely and happy from day one. All he does is bring joy into our lives. I used to laugh when he was a baby about his strategy: “Okay, I’m the third kid. I’ll just be as good as I can and hope someone pays attention to me.” Wow, has that worked.
Thatcher is smart as a whip, with a great sense of humor. He loves to smile and laugh with us all, and is already picking up his Nana Linda’s bluntness. Once, I was putting him to bed and singing him songs. He asked for “something special” so I tried a couple outside my comfort zone (Carly Simon was in there). Let’s just say, they weren’t exactly in my key. I quickly moved on to an old reliable (“Amazing Grace”). Much better. Thatcher and I shared a loving glance—or so I thought. Then he asked me: “Why were the first two songs not very good?”
He’s got the same loving nature as his big brother and sister—he’ll let me hold him for five minutes straight in a full-on embrace. He’ll bury his face in my chest and comes over often looking for a hug. He looks out for his siblings too. If Yates skins his knee, you’ll hear Thatcher say, “You’re okay, Yatesey. Do you need a cookie to make you feel better?” (It’s possible I am repeating my mother’s promotion of emotional eating.)
He’s got impressive confidence for someone so young. We had this exchange just the other day:
“Thatch, you were kind of whiny this morning. I know you can do better than that.”
“We’ll talk about that in one minute, Mom. First I would like you to read me this book.” He is two!
I’m still the number-one person Thatcher wants to be with at any point in the day, which makes me feel like I’ve won the lottery. We have a strong connection.
“Thatcher,” I asked him one day, “are you a boy or a girl?”
“I’m a boy,” he said.
“What about Yates?”
“Yatesey’s a boy,” he said.
“How about Yards?”
“Yardley’s a grill,” which is how he pronounces girl right now (love that).
“What about Mommy?” I asked him.
“Mommy’s a cowgirl!”
See? The kid gets me.
One quick note on my kids’ grown-up names, which people often comment on: Yates was named after his grandfathers, Edward Yates Brunt. My father’s given first name was Edward. Manly Yates Brunt was Doug’s father’s name. We loved Yates as a nickname.
Once you have a son named Yates and you get pregnant, where do you go from there? You can’t very well go from Yates to Ann. You have to find a strong name again. Now, I’ll confess to being a big fan of the 1945 Barbara Stanwyck film Christmas in Connecticut, a movie in which there’s a character named Alexander Yardley, played by Sydney Greenstreet. But this isn’t exactly the type of character after which you name a sweet baby girl. So I wasn’t actively calling upon those memories when I thought of her name. The truth is, it came to me in the middle of the night, late in my pregnancy. I woke Doug up and said, “Honey, I think I have it.”
By the time our third child was born, we were pretty attached to the last-name-as-first-name thing. Margaret Thatcher had recently died, so the name was in the air. But I get that plenty of people think my kids’ names are unusual.
Not long after Yates was born, this was driven home by an elderly woman who lived a floor below us. One day, as a new mom, I was in the elevator with Yates in the stroller when she got on.
“What’s his name?” she said.
“Yates.”
“Yates? Is that his first name or his last name?”
“It’s his middle name,” I said, “but that’s what we call him.”
She frowned. “It’s very confusing.”
Fast-forward a year. Now I’m in the elevator
with Yardley in the stroller and Yates in the Babybjörn.
“Is that a new baby?” the old woman says.
“Yes.”
“What’s her name?”
“Yardley.”
[Deep, aggrieved sigh.]
All I have to say is, thank God we were out of the building by the time Thatcher was born, or she might have called Social Services on me for name abuse.
17
Ready for Prime Time
When I announced that I was expecting another baby, hell if I didn’t get promoted again. Roger was offering me the 9:00 p.m. show. It was the first change to the channel’s evening lineup in seventeen years—what a chance they took on me. In July 2013, Thatcher was born. In October, so was The Kelly File. My executive producer Tom Lowell and I were ready for prime time.
It was the pinnacle of cable news: my own prime-time broadcast. We launched it the way all news programs should be launched: with an impromptu dance party to the INXS song “Don’t Change.” At first it was just me dancing around my staff about twenty minutes before airtime. Their faces reflected an internal monologue of Well . . . this is awkward. But then Abby and Tom got into it, and pretty soon everyone was on their feet. A few minutes later, I was sitting at the anchor desk interviewing Ted Cruz, asking him my very first question as host of The Kelly File: “What’s it like to be the most hated man in America?” I think as an anchor I have stayed true to that full playfulness spectrum—the 1980s-rock-to-Ted-Cruz scale.
When I got my own show, O’Reilly gave me advice. He warned me that prime-time cable news is a snake pit, and I would have to gird myself for acrimony. This was unfortunate news, since acrimony was one of the main things I hated about my law job. Of course I had already felt some of it while on America Live, but he seemed to be saying, Brace yourself. Once my show started, I kept doing The Factor, because I was loyal to Bill. It was tough, because Bill tapes his show early in the day, and mine is live at 9:00 p.m., so doing The Factor meant leaving my kids at the only time of day I could really see them. Still, I continued my weekly Factor appearances for two years after The Kelly File began.
