A couple of years back, a friend of Hillary Clinton’s told me the candidate-to-be was “disappointed” that the first woman to edit The New York Times — veteran investigative reporter Jill Abramson — wasn’t more sympathetic to her plight as a feminist pioneer in politics.

In fact, both the candidate and her more volatile spouse went a lot further, venting to people around them that they saw the country’s most powerful paper as a kind of special prosecutor in a blue plastic bag, whose top editors were bent on scouring them with an alacrity not directed at other politicians (“They are out to get us,” the former president told a friend more recently).


No way, says Abramson, whose personal association with the Clintons goes back nearly 40 years. (Little-known fact: The woman who led coverage of the Clintons at the Times for a decade — first as Washington bureau chief, then as executive editor — briefly worked as a consultant on one of Bill Clinton’s campaigns in Arkansas.) But Abramson lingers on the larger point of media fairness to Hillary Clinton and gingerly concedes something few editors would ever admit.

“She does get more scrutiny” than other candidates — especially male candidates, Abramson told me last week during a 50-minute interview for Politico’s “Off Message” podcast. When I asked her whether Clinton’s arch-defender, David Brock, had a point when he lashed the Times for giving the Clintons an unfair “level of scrutiny,” she interrupted — to agree.

“Yeah, I do,” said Abramson, who was ousted in 2014 after reportedly complaining that her compensation package was inferior to that of her male predecessor, Bill Keller.

“[W]e, for some reason, expect total purity from a woman candidate,” added Abramson, who rose to the Times’ top job in 2011. “I did not feel, during my regime, that we were giving her way more scrutiny than anyone else.” But, she said, “Where I think Hillary Clinton faces, you know, certainly more of a burden is that the controversies she’s been in are immediately labeled, you know, ‘travelgate or ‘emailgate.’ … If you actually asked people what about any of these controversies bothers them, they don’t know anything specific about any of them.”

Abramson now pens a reporter’s notebook column on the 2016 campaign – heavy on voter interviews, light on Beltway punditry — for The Guardian. Not surprisingly, her Clinton columns are her most incisive. For all of Donald Trump’s hourly oratorical outrages, his ersatz beef-and-wine inventory and the activities of his thin-lipped mashers at rallies, she’s just as focused on Clinton’s likely role as the first woman to win the nomination of a major American political party.

And Abramson isn’t overly impressed by the Clinton story line getting the most attention: the lingering probe into the former secretary of state’s “homebrew” email server during her Foggy Bottom tenure. Like Whitewater, the controversy was uncovered by a New York Times reporter; like Whitewater, it is regarded as a deus ex machina by Republicans facing political gloom; and like Whitewater, it will likely turn out to be more froth than flood, in Abramson’s view. “I won’t say nothing — but very little,” she said, referring to the sum significance of the Hillary Clinton “scandals.”

When I asked whether the Times email stories (executed after her departure, in 2015) were “a big deal,” Abramson — who has taken pains not to criticize her former paper or its current editors — paused.

“It depends on, you know, what your definition of ‘big deal’ is, but I’m not going to play Bill Clinton for you here,” she said, referring to the former president’s infamous what-the-meaning-of-is-is monologue during his Monica Lewinsky deposition. “The issue, to me, that’s at the crux is that everything that we know that was classified was classified after the fact, after the emails were sent. And so, why is that a big deal? And the fact that she had this private email is something that, you know, I’ve read widely, a lot of people in the government — Colin Powell, let’s face it, got much bigger speaking fees than Hillary did.”

The 62-year-old Manhattan native, who splits the week between teaching at Harvard (her alma mater), covering the campaign and writing back home in Manhattan, still carries with her the glass-office gravitas of an industry titan. She has a propensity for ignoring attention-deficit questioners (like me) when trying to answer in reasoned verbal paragraphs.

She’s also engaging and elfin, and just a little bit hip. After we had spoken for about an hour in the conference room of a Times Square hotel, I looked down at her stylish slip-on sneakers to ask, matter-of-factly, whether they were Vans. She quickly reached down, plucked the left one off, held it high to the light and declared it a “Keds!”

But there’s also a caustic self-corrective streak in Abramson born of painful experience. It can be awkward to witness, but also refreshing in contrast to the unreflective stoicism of many men in the profession. She takes much to heart (too much, according to one of her close friends) the criticism that she was too dismissive of some subordinates and dominated newsroom conversation, which critics at the paper duly leaked to reporters before her abrupt departure in May 2014.

“I think you’re getting full Jill right here, and that’s the only way I know how to operate, though,” she said when I asked her about those last, drama-filled days at the paper. “You know … if I had to do it all over again, I would, you know, maybe sandpaper off, you know, some of the habits that I had. You know, I would — I feel like I’m talking too much on this podcast —”

I protested — she really wasn’t — but she continued: “I would, you know, raise the amount of time I spent listening and not talking.”

That’s not the only thing that makes Abramson unusual in the news business. She has had an uncharacteristically peripatetic career with little overseas experience, in contrast to many of the journalists who have risen to the top after decades-long slogs at various stations of the Times cross. She’s had stints in alternative newsweeklies, TV and Democratic politics — starting in 1977, with a press-shop job for “Howlin’” Henry Howell, an anti-segregationist and proto-Bernie Sanders economic populist who came up short in a few Virginia gubernatorial races.

Thus began Abramson’s lifelong fascination with Southern politics, one stoked by a stint as a college stringer for Time magazine assigned to George Wallace’s dead-end presidential bid in 1976. A year after Howell’s defeat, she found herself in Little Rock working as a freelance writer for a failed congressional candidate then running for governor. The candidate’s wife, who was going by the name Hillary Rodham instead of taking her husband’s name, didn’t seem entirely committed to the enterprise.

“My first impression was that she was incredibly smart,” recalls Abramson. “But she didn’t strike me as being particularly thrilled that he was running. I think maybe, you know, his congressional campaign [in 1974] that he lost had left a little bit of a bitter taste. … I mean, she was into it in terms of her smart thinking, but emotionally she didn’t seem bubbly.”

Thirty years later, during the 2008 campaign, Clinton would come to the Times, often to editorial board meetings, to complain about the paper’s reporting on her and (alleged) underreporting of Barack Obama’s shortcomings. On more than one occasion, she’d end up locking eyes with her one-time Arkansas co-worker in frustration.

“She would look at me and sometimes even say my name,” Abramson recalled. “It was almost like, ‘I know you and I know that you know what I’m saying is true.’”

Abramson hasn’t had nearly as much interaction with Trump over the years, and she feels generally unenlightened by the overall coverage of his rise. If she could still assign stories (and she clearly wants to), Abramson would focus on a more nuanced and detailed portrait of the candidate’s character — especially when it comes to the GOP front-runner’s relationship with his overbearing developer father, Fred.

She doesn’t much buy into the prevailing criticism, though, that the news media have “enabled” Trump by giving him an unmediated bullhorn — he was a “ratings bonanza” that cable TV couldn’t afford to miss — although she thinks the networks should stop allowing him to do “pajama” interviews over the phone instead of insisting that he show up in-studio.

A more damaging media malpractice, she says, was underestimating the breadth and durability of his appeal — the result of too many “legacy media” newsrooms being stocked with too many Fieldston-to-Harvard Jill Abramsons and not enough working-class reporters who would better understand Trump’s appeal.

“I don’t think that the press has either made Donald Trump or ignored him,” she says. “But I think that the criticisms of the press — that it’s become too much of the elite — there’s some truth to that. Because so many newsrooms are filled with, you know, Ivy Leaguers like me, but a younger version, who haven’t, you know, had the time to go live in the South.”

But invariably, Abramson returns to the topic of the Democratic front-runner and says she’s become more sympathetic to Clinton’s circumstances since she exited, uncomfortably, a newspaper that still has too few women in positions of real authority, in her view.

“There is a double standard, and, you know, there have been many studies that, you know, as women rise to especially the top job, their likeability quotient goes down,” she added, blurring the lines between her life and Clinton’s. “[W]ith men it doesn’t work that way. The things that are criticized or seen as unlikable in women, you know, that assertiveness … those are seen as leaderly qualities in men.”

When I ask her what she thinks, after all these years, about the core criticism of Clinton — that she is untrustworthy and lies more than other politicians — the typically blunt Abramson demurs:

“I guess I’m still thinking that through.”