Maureen Dowd: Thanks for the Memories (on the WH's Greg Craig)
[Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, became a columnist on The New York Times Op-Ed page in 1995 after having served as a correspondent in the paper's Washington bureau since 1986. She has covered four presidential campaigns and served as White House correspondent. She also wrote a column, "On Washington," for The New York Times Magazine.]
At his Cabinet meeting Monday afternoon, President Obama took a moment to give thanks to his team.
Sipping a glass of water, the president offered special gratitude to the woman on his right.
“I advised this hard-working Cabinet to get a little bit of rest this week,” he said, looking at Hillary Clinton, “particularly the people who have been traveling around the globe day-in and day-out and don’t know what time zone they’re in.”
The secretary of state, with a china cup and saucer in front of her, smiled.
In the back of the room, back where they were parched, back where no water or coffee was served for the two-hour meeting, sat Greg Craig, the White House counsel who was a ghostly presence, given his death by a thousand leaks.
Only a year after he had helped Barack Obama get elected by eviscerating his close friend, Clinton White House colleague and Yale Law School classmate, Hillary Clinton, Craig was himself eviscerated by the Obama inner circle.
I remember meeting Craig at a book party during the campaign. He upbraided me for writing critical things about Obama. I didn’t like being chastised, but I admired his loyalty.
It couldn’t have been easy for Craig, a special counsel in the Clinton White House who directed the response on impeachment, to break away from the Clintons and help the insurgent Obama shatter Hillary’s dream of shattering the Oval glass ceiling.
As Todd Purdum wrote of Craig in The Times in 1998, “At Yale, he surrendered his $75-a-month apartment in New Haven to Mr. Clinton and his girlfriend, Hillary Rodham, who were a class behind him, and he remains especially close to Mrs. Clinton, friends say.”
In a memo he sent to the press during the bitter 2008 Democratic primary, Craig made the case that Hillary had exaggerated her foreign policy experience and that she did not pass “the Commander-in-Chief test.”...
Read entire article at NYT
At his Cabinet meeting Monday afternoon, President Obama took a moment to give thanks to his team.
Sipping a glass of water, the president offered special gratitude to the woman on his right.
“I advised this hard-working Cabinet to get a little bit of rest this week,” he said, looking at Hillary Clinton, “particularly the people who have been traveling around the globe day-in and day-out and don’t know what time zone they’re in.”
The secretary of state, with a china cup and saucer in front of her, smiled.
In the back of the room, back where they were parched, back where no water or coffee was served for the two-hour meeting, sat Greg Craig, the White House counsel who was a ghostly presence, given his death by a thousand leaks.
Only a year after he had helped Barack Obama get elected by eviscerating his close friend, Clinton White House colleague and Yale Law School classmate, Hillary Clinton, Craig was himself eviscerated by the Obama inner circle.
I remember meeting Craig at a book party during the campaign. He upbraided me for writing critical things about Obama. I didn’t like being chastised, but I admired his loyalty.
It couldn’t have been easy for Craig, a special counsel in the Clinton White House who directed the response on impeachment, to break away from the Clintons and help the insurgent Obama shatter Hillary’s dream of shattering the Oval glass ceiling.
As Todd Purdum wrote of Craig in The Times in 1998, “At Yale, he surrendered his $75-a-month apartment in New Haven to Mr. Clinton and his girlfriend, Hillary Rodham, who were a class behind him, and he remains especially close to Mrs. Clinton, friends say.”
In a memo he sent to the press during the bitter 2008 Democratic primary, Craig made the case that Hillary had exaggerated her foreign policy experience and that she did not pass “the Commander-in-Chief test.”...