Book Review, New York Times Sunday Book Review Section, November 18, 2001:

Pantsuit Detail
Date: November 11, 2001, Late Edition - Final
Byline: By Patricia O'Brien
Lead: THE GIRLS IN THE VAN
Covering Hillary.
By Beth J. Harpaz.
Illustrated. 294 pp. New York:
Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, $24.95.

Text:

Almost any female reporter covering politics has at one time or another worried that the best story of the day -- the one she is missing -- is coming from a casual exchange in the men's room. So when the women covering Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign for the Senate were finally free to follow a candidate into the ladies' room, what happened? The Associated Press reporter Beth J. Harpaz, who covered that race, reports in ''The Girls in the Van'' that they were too intimidated to ask her anything.

''I couldn't deal with it. I turned around and walked out,'' one reporter confessed when she rejoined her colleagues. Harpaz was quick to console. ''You did the nice thing. You were just being human.'' You'd never hear that exchange between male reporters, and that is one of the charms of this memoir.

''The Girls in the Van'' (the title echoes ''The Boys on the Bus,'' Timothy Crouse's classic macho chronicle of reporting the 1972 Nixon-McGovern presidential race) is an entertaining, bouncy romp through the usual fun and games of covering a campaign. But it offers more than a story of reporters sharing the perils and tedium of the road. It gives an illuminating glimpse at how the celebrity of Hillary Clinton kept the news media off base. This campaign was remarkable neither because a woman was running nor because women were covering her, but because of Clinton's dual identity. ''What's wrong with us?'' a colleague of Harpaz's lamented as they waited outside a school for the candidate to talk to them. ''We're still treating her like a first lady!''

Harpaz also gives a frank account of what it was like to be the mother of two children while following an energy-devouring campaign like this one. In 1972, no male reporter was shopping for diapers on the way home. Now, women reporters do just about anything they have to do to cover both the campaign and their own home front, and they see the women on the other side of the divide -- the candidate's staff -- doing the same thing. Harpaz describes how this makes for a certain uneasiness in the classic push-pull struggle between press corps and staff. What do you say when a press secretary delays the release of a new advertisement so you can get home in time to see your kids before they go to bed? Thank you. Sort of. But Harpaz still worried about compromising herself.

These worries infiltrate her book in ways that may seem like ethical hairsplitting to non-journalists. Should Harpaz accept a signed copy of Clinton's book for her child, who, she knows, wants it? Should she and her fellow reporters have sung ''Happy Birthday'' to Hillary? Was it over the line to give her a cupcake with a candle on it? On the other hand, is it really fair to deny your sons a chance to tag along and meet the awesome senatorial candidate whose campaign is sucking up so much of their mother's time?

Harpaz freely admits to failings. She chafes over the fact that neither she nor her colleagues could ever puncture Clinton's protective bubble. She acknowledges how this frustration intensified the effort to snatch -- and run with -- the unguarded comment from Clinton's lips.
Just how fair, she asks herself, is it to pounce on a blunder on gun control and turn it into the lead of a story? ''I was torn. . . . On the one hand, it seemed a little unfair to make such a big deal out of the type of mistake that anybody could have made. On the other hand, it was just about the only unscripted moment in an otherwise canned event. If that wasn't the lead, what was? The first lady supports gun control?''

In the face of intense and constant criticism, Clinton somehow managed to work her way diligently to victory, and it says quite a lot for Harpaz's memoir that she spends the latter part of her book mulling this over, even coming to a grudging respect for a woman who couldn't seem to please anybody for quite a long time.

The Clinton campaign staff felt from the beginning that the press corps was underreporting their candidate's base of support, and Harpaz concedes that she and her colleagues resisted the positive reactions of people who came to hear Clinton speak. ''But when you've heard a hundred gushy tributes to a woman who's been handed 'thousands of plaques,' you don't really feel that it's news, in the strictest sense. . . . And when someone who strives to be as perfect and scripted as Hillary does makes a mistake or gets heckled, that's the definition of news, and therefore worthy of a story. Besides, the people who hate her are always more dramatic than the people who love her.''

As the campaign wore on, Clinton began holding meetings with women who didn't love her, and Harpaz marvels at how this changed the minds of many of them. She asks herself: ''Did I pay too much attention to the Hillary-hater who ran down the street screaming 'You're an enabler' and not enough to the ladies who told me how brilliant she was? Would the coverage have had a different tone had the pre-election polls indicated more strongly how decisive her victory would be?''

It's true that Clinton went into her campaign carrying an unbelievable amount of scandal baggage, everything from cattle futures to Whitewater to Monica, and it dogged her tracks every step of the way. She won anyway. How? Harpaz buttonholed voters with that question after the election. Over and over, people told her, ''It's her understanding of the issues, her passion for the issues, her ability to listen.'' There's just enough boilerplate campaign hype in those responses to make a reporter's eyes glaze over. Yet Harpaz all but admits that the journalistic hunger for slip-ups left the news media blind to the possibility that such comments might be precisely why Clinton never lost her bedrock support.
For all of her conflicts, Harpaz comes across as a hard-working reporter in the classic style, trying to do her best and then to think about what it all means when it's over. She remains dissatisfied with the rigidly controlled woman she covered and never understood. But she also retains a healthy frustration with herself and her craft, examining with a skeptical eye her own cynicism -- what she calls the ''occupational disease'' of reporters. Harpaz has written an honest book. The result is an insider's view of a female reporter grappling with a groundbreaking campaign -- one that could never have surfaced back in the days of Timothy Crouse.