For Gillibrand, politics part of family legacy Raised among Albany power brokers, she rose from attorney to Congress to presidential candidate

For Gillibrand, politics part of family legacy Raised among Albany power brokers, she rose from attorney to Congress to presidential candidate

Thursday, Feb. 28, 2019

ALBANY — U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand recalled being about 8 years old and sitting at a long table in the city's Democratic campaign headquarters, stuffing envelopes with women who were loyal to their organizer, Gillibrand's grandmother, Dorothea "Polly" Noonan.

"I'm very much taking a page out of her playbook in my own life," Gillibrand said.

It was among the childhood memories that would help shape Gillibrand, who grew up in the midst of a Capital Region political dynasty.

Noonan, a famously foulmouthed daughter of working-class Irish immigrants, was the closest confidante and companion of longtime Albany Mayor Erastus Corning II. She wielded power throughout the 1970s and 1980s as part of the arguably corrupt city and county Democratic machine.

Gillibrand, a U.S. senator since 2009, credits Noonan with inspiring her entrance into politics — dedicating her 2014 autobiography "Off the Sidelines" to "Grandma."

First of two parts Kirsten Gillibrand is the Capital Region's first major-party presidential candidate in more than a century. This is a look at her political roots. Read the next installment — a look at the Albany native's rise in politics — here.

Decades after Noonan's heyday, Gillibrand vaulted into a political realm far beyond the local one her grandmother was part of: on Jan. 15, she entered the crowded Democratic field for president. Now a homeowner in Brunswick, Gillibrand is likely the first presidential aspirant with Capital Region roots since Chester A. Arthur, president from 1881 to 1885, who lived in Schenectady as a child and went on to graduate from Union College.

Gillibrand moved from New York City corporate attorney to upset winner of a U.S. House seat in a Republican-dominated district in 2006. Less than three years later, she was the surprise choice over more-experienced candidates by Gov. David Paterson to fill Hillary Clinton's U.S. Senate seat after the former first lady's appointment as secretary of state.

The senator's ascension has not come without turbulence. She has faced criticism for abandoning conservative views after joining the Senate, and has been accused of turning on fellow Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton and U.S. Sen. Al Franken, in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

"She will not back down if she sees wrongdoing," said Gillibrand's mother (and Polly Noonan's daughter), Polly Rutnik, who like her daughter, is an attorney. "She steps up — she doesn't flinch."

Life on Noonan Lane

Shortly after winning her congressional seat in 2006, Gillibrand said of her grandmother, "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree."

That tree, according to many who knew Noonan, was ambitious and loyal — but also feisty and profane. Gillibrand said in her book that her grandmother could put expletives together "as long as a string of Christmas tree lights." Noonan was also accused in 1982 of punching another woman in the ribs outside a Democratic meeting.

In 1980, then Times Union reporter Alan C. Miller was at Albany Democratic headquarters on the night of the Democratic presidential primary between President Jimmy Carter, who was backed by the local machine, and U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Kennedy beat Carter by 18 percentage points, and Miller heard Noonan say multiple times why she thought Kennedy succeeded: "It was all those Jews," she said — a line that appeared in the second sentence of Miller's report the next day.

"That was the last time Erastus Corning ever spoke to me," Miller, later a Pulitzer Prize winner and founder of the News Literacy Project, said in a recent interview. Sources within the machine told Miller that Noonan had induced the mayor to stop talking to the reporter.

When asked last week about Noonan's comment, Gillibrand said she had never heard it before, and found it offensive. "My perspective of her is very different than anybody who was a peer of her at the time because I was just a young girl looking up at somebody who was doing something really great in my mind," Gillibrand said.

Dick Barrett, a former Corning employee and Democratic committeeman, said Polly Noonan "had a way of saying things that could be offensive. I don't know if she was bigoted or not," he added, but "was a product of her generation — whatever that means."

Noonan first met then-state Sen. Corning when she was a 22-year-old secretary for the Scenic Hudson Commission. The two — both married — had what even Gillibrand acknowledged in her autobiography was an "unconventional" relationship. They attended events together, and Corning was often at Noonan's house on Noonan Lane at night drinking a scotch, or there in the morning to take Gillibrand's mother and her siblings to school. (The relationship inspired last year's well-received Off-Broadway play "The True," in which Edie Falco played the role of Noonan as the brash guide to Michael McKean's Corning.)

Corning died in 1983. His insurance firm, Albany Associates, had a legal clause that allowed the business to be transferred to the Noonans over his own family.

Another beneficiary of the Albany machine was Gillibrand's father, Douglas Rutnik, who at one time both served as Albany County public defender and ran a private law firm representing clients with business before the city. Upon Rutnik's appointment in the county public defender's office in 1966 at age 26 —the year Gillibrand was born — a Knickerbocker News editorial noted Rutnik had also worked for a state Assemblyman.

"The plums are being kept in the political family," the editorial said. "Them that has, gets."

Gillibrand's mother was also a partner in the couple's law firm, Rutnik & Rutnik, and at one time served as an attorney for the city. The senator has also credited her mother with influencing her work ethic, noting that Polly Rutnik had a toddler and was pregnant with her when she took parts of the bar exam.

The Times Union wrote about the Rutnik law firm's questionable deals, including allegations in 1991 that the Rutniks profited by low-balling clients in a Pine Bush land sale that eventually netted a close associate more than $4 million.

Polly Rutnik told the Times Union it was her ex-husband who dealt with real estate and development in their firm.

"We never represented the same person; it didn't involve me at all," she said.

Douglas Rutnik could not be reached for comment.

"It was a little more genteel when people didn't go after wives and mothers and grandmothers, you know," Polly Rutnik said. "At some point it's just a little too much."

Defending corporations

Jennifer Whalen, a Republican member of the Colonie Town Board, is a close friend of Gillibrand's from their high school days at the prestigious Emma Willard School. Whalen shared a New York City apartment with Gillibrand one summer while they were both attending law school.

Jennifer Whalen

Gillibrand was earning her law degree from UCLA in the early 1990s, and was interning at the high-powered Davis Polk & Wardwell New York City law firm where she would later work. Whalen said Gillibrand would leave for work by 7 a.m. and not come home until after 11 p.m. "She's always been good at burning the midnight oil," Whalen said.

When she was a full-time associate at Davis Polk, Gillibrand defended Philip Morris against civil lawsuits and a probe by the FBI — at one point flying to a laboratory in Germany where the company was allegedly keeping its health studies a secret.

Dennis Glazer, the former head of litigation at Davis Polk and the husband of state's chief judge, Janet DiFiore, said there were dozens of attorneys working on the Philip Morris cases in those years. "All she was doing was the best job she could," he said.

Gillibrand now says her work at the "big fancy law firm," made her "deeply unhappy."

"I wasn't making the difference I was supposed to make," she said. "It's why I searched so long to get into public service."

While working in New York, Gillibrand met her future husband, Jonathan, a British national who was studying at Columbia University. They married in 2001. Unlike his wife, Jonathan Gillibrand's career has been more low-key. He has worked in various jobs since she first won office in 2006 — for venture capital firms, a company that builds outpatient surgery facilities, and a limited liability company that tried to bring Formula One racing to New Jersey.

In a recent interview with The Associated Press, Gillibrand said her husband is taking time off from working to be at home more during her presidential run. Their elder son, 15-year-old Theo, attends boarding school and her younger son, 10-year-old Henry, attends school in Washington, D.C.

Move to politics

Despite growing up in a rabidly Democratic household, Republicans have played critical roles in Gillibrand's career.

During her undergraduate years at Dartmouth College, Gillibrand interned one summer with Republican U.S. Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, a good friend of her father. Early in her legal career, she clerked for conservative federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Roger Miner.

But it was Hillary Clinton who Gillibrand said kickstarted her political ambitions in the mid-1990s. In her autobiography, Gillibrand said she started attending small fundraisers in New York City with the hope of getting even a minute to talk with Clinton.

After years of attending Democratic fundraisers, and frustrated at not getting bites to work for U.S. attorneys' offices, Gillibrand, in her book, wrote that she approached then U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew M. Cuomo around 2000 about getting a job.

Gillibrand's grandmother had raised campaign funds for Cuomo's father, the late Gov. Mario Cuomo; he rewarded her and Erastus Corning's support by appointing Noonan vice chairwoman of the state Democratic Party in 1982. She held that post for about two years.

Cuomo hired Gillibrand as a special counsel at HUD and she briefly moved to Washington, D.C. At the 2000 Democratic National Convention, Gillibrand's job was to shuttle Cuomo's then-wife, Kerry Kennedy, around Los Angeles. But the HUD job ended soon after the election of President George W. Bush.

Gillibrand, who then got a job at a different corporate New York City law firm, began to construct her path to an elected office when she moved from New York City back to the Albany area shortly before her older son was born in 2003. She chose the 20th District because of her interest in targeting U.S. Rep. John E. Sweeney, a six-year Republican incumbent whose often erratic private behavior — later revealed as the result of his struggles with alcoholism — had begun to bleed into his public life. She and her husband bought a house for $895,000 in the 20th district in Greenport, Columbia County.

According to her autobiography, Clinton talked to Gillibrand briefly on the phone in 2004 about running for Congress, but suggested Gillibrand wait two years to challenge Sweeney.

But Gillibrand had another ally — an unlikely one — in Republican Gov. George Pataki's office. Douglas Rutnik — who by then had separated from Gillibrand's mother — was dating Zenia Mucha, a top gubernatorial aide.

Following the 9/11 attacks, Sweeney — who was a member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee — developed a formula to ensure that New York City and then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg received a proportionate share of the aid. The move allegedly infuriated Pataki, according to sources working in state politics at the time.

By early 2006, people connected to Pataki and Mucha were aiding Gillibrand, including introducing her to big political donors in Albany. That year, Gillibrand and her father sat in Pataki’s reserved area when he delivered his State of the State address.

About two weeks before the election, a political operative leaked a confidential copy of a State Police report that documented what the Times Union had learned months earlier: a 911 call Sweeney's wife had made in 2005. The congressman's now ex-wife, Gaia, told a dispatcher her husband had knocked her around. Sweeney, who denied harming her, claimed at the time the report was fabricated, but later conceded it was authentic. The ensuing news coverage unraveled what was left of his campaign.

"I don't know how it was released," Gillibrand said, referring to the confidential report.

The race until that point had already been one of the most heated in Congress, as the DNC worked to take over congressional seats nationwide by going against the Iraq War and President Bush.

Republicans took their own shots, alleging in a television ad that Gillibrand was a "war profiteer" because her husband held stock in the British defense contractor BAE Systems. Jonathan Gillibrand's father, Sydney, was once a vice chairman at BAE. The couple sold their stock in BAE for between $50,000 and $100,000 shortly after the 2006 election, according to campaign finance records.

In the end, Gillibrand pulled off what was considered a stunning upset in a district where Republicans had a 2-1 enrollment edge. She also became the first woman to represent the district, which then stretched from Poughkeepsie to Lake Placid, and the first Democrat to hold the seat since 1978.

During her acceptance speech the night of Nov. 7, 2006, she thanked her grandmother, saying Noonan "inspired me at such a young age."

"She is up in heaven watching us now," Gillibrand said.

Polly Noonan in 1978. (Times Union archive) Polly Noonan in 1978. (Times Union archive) Image 1 of / 51 Caption Close For Gillibrand, politics part of family legacy 1 / 51 Back to Gallery

Includes reporting by Staff Writers Rachel Silberstein and Brendan J. Lyons.

Web presentation by Joyce Bassett.