Editor's Personal Note
by
Frank Marafiote, Editor
For
more than two years the Hillary Clinton Quarterly provided a perspective on
Hillary Rodham Clinton not found anywhere else in the
national media. Writing for HCQ was spectacular fun! Along with our regular
harassment of the First Lady's press office, we did numerous interviews with journalists
and pundits who covered or wrote about the White House on a regular basis. Many --
including Frank Rich of the New York Times and of Suzanne Fields of the Washington
Times -- quoted HCQ in their own stories.
Some of our more memorable moments: a late evening phone call from
the White House pressuring us not to publish a story about the famous "lamp
tossing" incident (we ultimately decided to run the story), several phone calls
from the nefarious "Two Larrys" -- Larry Nickols (who has been mentored by the Wall
Street Journal) and Larry Case -- both of whom tried to entice us to publish slander
about the First Lady's "love affairs" in Little Rock (which we decided not to
publish), and an incredible interview after the 1994 elections with Hardball's
Chris Matthews, who said more to HCQ about Hillary and Bill Clinton than he ever
intended.
As media buffs, we also confess to other guilty pleasures in doing HCQ:
appearances on the Today show and a dozen other TV news programs, more than 150
radio interviews from New York to Tokyo, hundreds of news clips and feature stories. .
.and countless fascinating conversations with journalists and political junkies from D.C.
to Melbourne.
The downside of publishing HCQ was our on-going
"love-hate" relationship with the First Lady herself. Newsletter editors are
supposed to take a single point of view about their subject matter and stick to it. That
was impossible with Hillary Rodham Clinton. Sometimes she infuriated us with her partisan
stubbornness, other times she seemed righteously aligned with the angels. Editorially we
pulled no punches and criticized the First Lady when we thought
she deserved it. No doubt, some readers got confused.
Our worst moment: publishing the satiric "Hillary's Shocking
Drug Diary" (available on this site). Although we believed it was clearly
tongue-in-cheek, our suspicious American press corps was inclined to take it seriously.
The result was a phone call from an angry White House, which in turn had gotten calls from
wire service reporters wondering "what the hell this was about." It took a
personal visit to the bureau chief at the AP office in Concord and phone calls to AP and
Reuters reporters in Washington to kill the story. Very scary!
We also learned something about the vagaries of publishing. At one
point we were selling nearly 10,000 copies of HCQ. . .not bad for a newsletter
published out of a small office in Concord, New Hampshire. By late 1994, however, after
the Gingrich revolution, after the Whitewater mudslinging, after the failure of national
health care reform, interest in the First Lady waned tremendously.
It wasn't for financial reasons that we
stopped publishing HCQ, however. In fact, both our
newsstand and subscription circulation remained viable until the
very end. Looking at the
political scene "up close and personal," the idealism that we started with
turned to disillusionment, with the Clintons specifically, and with American national
politics generally. Ultimately, we sagged under the cynicism and mean-spiritedness that we
witnessed on both sides of the political aisle. It took another two years before we
recovered emotionally from our "investment" in a place called Hope.
Thanks to our publishing experience, we have a new realism
about the political process.
Given all that, we are enormously pleased that we published HCQ.
It was one of the most exciting and challenging things we've ever done. Happily,
the Internet has given us an opportunity to make available many of our original feature
articles, as well as add new material about Hillary.
By creating new editorial material, managing this
web site, writing A Rake's
Progress, responding to your letters and queries, and maintaining our links to news
stories about the First Lady (now Senator Clinton), we can continue our mission of "keeping up with
Hillary."
My co-editor, Rake Morgan, and I hope you enjoy your visit to the online version of the Hillary Clinton Quarterly.
Frank Marafiote
Editor & Publisher |
