As Maureen Dowd of The New York Times reported, the two leaders, whose combined weight was around five hundred pounds, each ate cold and hot antipasti; fried calamari; and ravioli stuffed with veal, cheese, and spinach, and topped with marinara sauce. In addition the president had a Tuscan soup with white beans, tomato, and spinach. They washed down the repast with a full-bodied Brunello di Montalcino, and followed with a dessert of zabaglione and berries. An aide was seen taking a chocolate cake back to the White House—perhaps for an afternoon snack?
In contrast, Secretary of State Christopher was rail thin, a man of intense discipline and no obvious bad habits. The State Department was not going to be nearly as colorful, or as much fun, as the beat I was leaving. It was more buttoned down than the scrappier White House, and much more careful about responding to questions. At the same time, the people at State were thoughtful, and, mercifully, the assignment kept me off the firing line of reporting on the president’s sexual adventures when the Monica Lewinsky story broke a few years later.
During the Clinton years, my own personal life took a dramatic turn. Alan and I had been dating since 1984, and by the mid-1990s we were committed to each other. Most of our friends were wondering why we didn’t take the legal step to “sanctify” our relationship. It just was so much easier to keep things unofficial, given the challenges of marriage between a correspondent and a public official.
We’d known each other and dated before he was in government, so I felt our relationship was outside the boundaries of our new roles, as long as we kept our professional lives separate. Obviously there were times when they overlapped. I once bumped into Lloyd Bentsen, then the treasury secretary, outside the Oval Office, on a morning after he’d been at our house for dinner. Some of the other reporters were a little startled when he said, “Oh, Andrea, I was going to write you a note; we had such a good time last night.” Clearly it was an awkward moment for the other reporters as well as for me.
Alan and I both traveled a lot, but given our respective schedules, rarely together. I did begin attending the annual Federal Reserve conferences in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, each summer. People were becoming accustomed to us being together, but I’m sure it was off-putting in some circles that we weren’t a legal couple.
In October of 1996, Alan gave me a surprise birthday party at one of our favorite Italian restaurants and made a lovely, affectionate toast. Few of our Washington friends had ever heard him speak so emotionally or sentimentally. Our close friends Elaine Wolfensohn and Jim Lehrer, who were seated next to each other, thought that he was about to propose in front of everyone. Elaine still says it was Alan’s basic proposal; it was just that none of us, including me, recognized it at the time. We were heading toward marriage, but I’m not sure I realized it, even then. My birthday gift? A diamond ring, though not in a traditional engagement setting. I still didn’t get it.
That Christmas Day, we joined Judy Woodruff and Al Hunt and their children for breakfast and to open gifts, as we always do. Later, back home, we were sitting in the den when Alan asked whether I wanted a big wedding or a small one. Finally, even I understood what was up. That was as close to a proposal as he came. I guess you could call it an evasive proposal, as ambiguous as some of his testimony before government committees. As he once told Congress, if you think you have understood me, you must be mistaken. He thought it was more fun to propose in Greenspeak, as I call his testimony. He swears that he had asked me to marry him three previous times, and that I hadn’t understood what he’d been saying.
By then, Judy and Al and the children had already left for Vail, as they do every year on Christmas Day. We reached them there that night to share our news, but didn’t tell anyone else except family. We had invited friends for dinner later in the week—Kay Graham, Sally Quinn, and Ben Bradlee, among others—on the twelfth anniversary of our first date. With everybody sitting in the dining room, we told our friends we were engaged. Kate Lehrer was at home sick, but Jim was there, and he jumped up and ran to the telephone to tell her. Kay Graham shrieked. No one had imagined that we’d ever become respectable.
The next challenge was finding time in our schedules to get married. Should it be before or after Alan’s semiannual testimony to Congress? And how to plan a wedding, when the State Department gave reporters so little advance notice of foreign trips? At Alan’s suggestion, we decided to get married in April at the most romantic place we knew, the Inn at Little Washington, in Virginia. We had a wedding lunch, on a Sunday afternoon. It was small by design, because we knew that between NBC and the Federal Reserve, we had too many friends from work to accommodate everyone. The occasion was very celebratory, with just our closest friends and family. My sister, Susan Greenstein, was my matron of honor and my goddaughter Lauren Hunt, was our flower girl. She was terrified. Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed to perform the ceremony, making it that much more meaningful. Our friend Oscar de la Renta designed my dress.
We wanted to get married outside, in the Inn’s garden, but when the day dawned, bright and sunny, the forecast was still for rain. We had ordered a tent, and reluctantly agreed that it should be set up. I made one last call to our local NBC weatherman, Bob Ryan, who confirmed that it would, in fact, rain. But I was so eager for a garden wedding that at the last minute, I called ahead and told the Inn to take the tent down. As Alan and I drove out through the Virginia countryside, it started to sprinkle. As he nervously rehearsed our vows, he looked up impishly when he got to “in sickness and in health,” and said, “in rain and in shine.” The weather held for another hour, but just as we were being declared husband and wife, it started to pour. I’m told it’s good luck.
We weren’t planning to go on a honeymoon, because we both had too much work to do. But the festivities continued the following evening, when our friends Elaine and Jim Wolfensohn gave us a beautiful wedding reception at their Washington home so we could include many friends who’d not been to the ceremony. The next night, we went to a state dinner, our first as a married couple. I wore a black lace gown, also designed by Oscar, and although the dinner was in honor of the prime minister of Canada, it felt as though we were still celebrating our marriage.
I was seated at the president’s table, next to Dan Aykroyd, and across from Marylouise Oates, a writer and political activist who had been in the antiwar movement with the Clintons in the 1960s. At some point, Aykroyd, the president, and Marylouise all started singing the Beatles song, “I Saw Her Standing There.” Looking around, I tried to reconcile the cultural dissonance of a group of baby boomers—including the president of the United States—singing anthems of our youth, beneath the solemn portrait of Abraham Lincoln in the State Dining Room.
At the dinner, Marylouise and her husband, political consultant Bob Shrum, were shocked that Alan and I had not taken time off to go on a honeymoon. “You should go to Venice,” they suggested.
So we did. Typically, we did it a little differently: instead of taking a leisurely trip, we tacked our honeymoon onto a previously scheduled monetary conference in Switzerland where Alan was speaking. How many brides get to listen to German chancellor Helmut Kohl give a luncheon speech on their honeymoon? And how many travel with a security detail?
We spent our honeymoon weekend at the luxurious Cipriani Hotel in Venice where I had covered Ronald Reagan at the 1987 economic summit, exactly ten years earlier. Alan’s security agents from the Federal Reserve tried to give us as much privacy as they could, but it was impossible to be anonymous. We even saw Shrum and Marylouise, along with her sister and nephew. By the end of the weekend, our little traveling party had expanded to include the Shrums, their family, Alan’s agents, and assorted other friends. It was a wonderful trip, possibly because we did it in such a casual way.
Except for our stays at a tennis retreat in California each summer, we don’t often plan vacations. One of the things I regret most is that we haven’t seen much of the world together. Because we each travel so much for work, when we have time with each oth
er, we really don’t want to be on the road. Instead, we’d rather be at home doing easy things, like reading, watching baseball on television, or listening to music. Not surprisingly, we’re both news junkies.
Once I married Alan, it was hard for me to know if people viewed me differently. There is a glamorous side to our life together, but it often conflicts with the demands of my job.
For instance, on New Year’s Eve in 1999, we were invited to the Millennium Dinner in the Clinton White House, but I couldn’t primp because I’d been at work since five o’clock that morning covering events on the Mall. Still, how many people who love music are fortunate enough to spend New Year’s Eve at the White House with musicians like Pinchas Zukerman? On another occasion, Yo-Yo Ma even offered to come to Washington and play chamber music with us if Alan and I would once again practice our instruments. Alan had occasionally picked up his clarinet, but after so many years away from the violin, I’m afraid even to play for myself, much less perform with the world’s greatest cellist. I often tell myself that someday, if I ever stop chasing news stories long enough to take lessons, I’ll see if I can still play.
Of course, after so many years covering the White House, it’s a completely different experience to go to events as a guest with my husband. But as grand as White House social occasions are, even they pale in comparison to a truly royal event, when Alan received a knighthood from Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth. The private ceremony took place at Balmoral Castle, the royal family’s summer residence in Scotland. The schedule was typical Greenspan. Alan and I flew to London overnight, where he gave five separate speeches in one day. After a night’s sleep, we flew to Scotland, drove to the castle, had the knighting ceremony, lunched with the queen, drove back to the airport, flew to Heathrow, and switched planes back to Washington. All in forty-eight hours.
The Palace had briefed me on what to wear. A suit would be appropriate. I had fussed over every detail, and learned the required protocol. Not surprisingly, the most important caution was to avoid discussing anything political. When we arrived, the welcome was much warmer and less formal than I’d anticipated. The queen was dressed comfortably, in a kilt and cashmere sweater set. We played with her Welsh corgis, met her special breed of “dorgis” (a dachshundcorgi mix), and were invited to lunch with her, Prince Philip, a favorite cousin, and a few other guests from the Foreign Ministry and British Treasury. Also interesting was the castle itself, one of the queen’s personal residences that had been built as a retreat for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
The rules were very clear about not talking to the press afterward. But CNBC had sent a camera crew from London to try to get Alan to comment outside the Balmoral grounds. Much to my discomfort, given that I work for the same network, we had to drive by without stopping. I later learned they’d been waiting since before dawn. In fact, during lunch, the queen complained that her ride around the estate that morning had been ruined when lights from a television crew frightened her horse. I was mortified.
The queen’s estate was certainly a great distance from the Jewish neighborhood in East London where my father’s family had lived in the nineteenth century. But while my life is sometimes a bit of a fairy tale, there are downsides to being married to a public figure. A week after our wedding, on a Sunday morning, Alan was playing golf and I was straightening the house when I heard a huge ruckus outside. We live on a narrow, winding road, but when I looked through the front window, there were five buses out front, and hundreds of people jamming onto our walkway and front porch.
They were community activists from Chicago, in town for a convention, targeting Alan—unfairly—for his community investment policies, which they misunderstood. They papered our quiet little neighborhood with fliers featuring a photocopied picture of Alan in white tie and tails. The caption? “Alan, while you’re on your honeymoon, we’re being screwed.”
I was vaguely amused, until they tramped through my flower garden. Alarmed, the neighbors called to see if I needed help. Their kids had run inside to say, “Guess what, the Greenspans are having a party.” Some party.
Aside from occasional protestors on the front porch, marriage means having a best friend, a partner in times of celebration as well as when times are tough. No matter how unpredictable my schedule because of breaking news, Alan has never complained—to me—about my last-minute schedule changes, or midnight arrivals from the office. His mantra is, “Your work comes first.” Sometimes I wish he were more demanding—it might inspire me, occasionally, to turn down an assignment!
My one regret is that I can’t share enough of what Alan does because he can’t discuss his work. There are long stretches when I have no idea what he’s even thinking about. When he was fresh to this job, I found it difficult, not being able to ask him about his work at the end of the day, especially since I’m a reporter, and by nature nosy. But I make it a practice never to put him on guard or make him uncomfortable. I know he will explain what he’s been doing, once it becomes public.
Then, of course, we have to deal with the challenge of media coverage. For a while, CNBC would track Alan’s arrivals at the Fed on days when the Federal Open Market Committee was meeting to set interest rates. The business network had what they called their “briefcase index,” predicting either a rate hike or a cut depending on the size of the briefcase he was carrying that day. A thin briefcase meant lower rates. A fat briefcase meant a rate increase. It was very funny, but clearly they didn’t know the score. I had bought him two briefcases for Christmas, and if he was carrying a lot of books, he took one, and not the other. It had absolutely nothing to do with monetary policy.
It was all done in good fun, but Alan became more and more of an icon, especially after Bob Woodward’s book about economic policy making in the Clinton White House, Maestro. Woodward’s book characterized Alan as a central character in Clinton’s decision making, which probably assigned Alan too much credit and, perhaps, set him up for those who then wanted to bring him down a peg or two. Woodward’s book certainly made Alan even more widely known—and frankly, that makes him slightly uncomfortable.
The real secret about Alan is that he does not take himself, or anyone else, very seriously. When I’m a guest on Imus in the Morning, Don often refers to Alan as Crazy Al. Somehow, it seems to fit.
The dialogue goes: “Where is Crazy Al?”
Because it is usually seven in the morning, or even earlier, the true answer is, “He’s in the bathtub,” because it is Alan’s habit to soak in the tub in the morning, which helps him to concentrate on his reading. It started out when he had back trouble years ago, and it’s been his daily habit ever since.
Don then says, “Well, put him on; let me talk to him.”
All of us know that if I put Don Imus and Alan Greenspan on live radio together, it would be a disaster—economically, maritally, and professionally. This is a man who has not given an interview since 1987 to anyone, on either radio or television. If he were to go on Imus in the Morning, Lord knows what the impact would be on the financial markets.
For reasons of loyalty and friendship, he did give one interview immediately after getting the Fed job, to David Brinkley for his Sunday morning program. It did not go very well. I think Alan hadn’t yet adjusted to the difference between being a frequent guest and commentator, as he had been for years on these talk shows, and being Fed chairman. The markets interpreted his comments in one fashion, and the newspapers another. After that, he decided that the simplest thing was not to do any interviews, a rule he has maintained.
For people who think I have some inside track to Fed decisions, my most embarrassing rejoinder is what happened in December 1996. Alan was giving a speech and told me it would be a retrospective on the history of the Federal Reserve, but that I might find it interesting. Of course, it turned out to be the famous speech by which he was attempting to puncture, in part, the stock market bubble by speaking of “irrational exuberance.” To my chagrin, when he returned to the table from the pod
ium and asked me what was the most important thing he’d said, I had completely missed the lead. It’s a good thing he doesn’t rely on me for fiscal or monetary advice.
Few people know how funny and sweet my husband can be. Except for our close friends and family, people might think him aloof. In fact, he is constitutionally shy. But he is constantly amusing, invariably curious, and always emotionally and intellectually supportive. All of which was important when I left the confines of the Clinton White House and embarked on a series of adventures as a foreign correspondent.
CHAPTER 7
Foreign Correspondent
Of all the tough leaders I’ve encountered, Hafez al Assad is the only one who managed to shut me up, much to the amusement of the president of the United States. Bill Clinton flew to Damascus in October of 1994 because of signals from Syria that Assad, Israel’s implacable enemy, was finally rethinking his refusal to consider peace. The president’s first meeting with Assad, nine months earlier, had created an opening for serious contacts. Separately, peace talks between Syria and Israel at a lower level were followed by secret negotiations. Now Assad’s former patrons in the Soviet Union were gone. The United States, with a coalition that included Syrian troops, had defeated Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War. Israel and Jordan had just signed a peace accord, and, for the first time, the Syrian dictator seemed willing to consider an opening to the West.
I landed in Damascus on Air Force One, accompanying Clinton as the pool reporter for the American networks. The rest of the press corps, on a larger charter plane, would not arrive for hours. Being the sole broadcaster covering the president in a country like Syria requires you to be more uncompromising than you might otherwise be: you have to insist on access to all public events, despite obstacles.
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