“My job is to be around the most successful people, the most up-and-coming people, and the people who have impact,” Tammy told me. She kowtows to them, or those who think they are “them,” or want to be. This group has always existed in the ornate playground of social climbing that is This Town. Only now it is big enough to contain an entire subeconomy, and a business for Tammy Haddad.
Haddad grew up in Pittsburgh, the granddaughter of Syrian immigrants and the daughter of a gas station owner. Her father, Edward David Haddad, eventually started a truck rental company above his Amoco station that grew into a large operation known as Haddad’s Trucks (the “Can-Do People”), which specializes in renting to the makers of feature films—the first being Flashdance, filmed in Pittsburgh in 1983. Haddad’s now operates up and down the East Coast with a particularly large and intrusive presence in New York City. The behemoth loads will often insinuate themselves into the city’s crowded streets and take up lots of space—an association that seems particularly apt for the Tamster. “Your brother’s trucks are blocking my street,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg once complained to her.
Tammy graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, where she was head of the student programming council and played the flute and the piccolo in the school’s marching, jazz, and concert bands.
She went on to become an accomplished cable TV producer. That’s what she did for Larry King Live, a show she helped create and produce for many years. Given King’s cachet and reputation for friendly interviews, Haddad was immediately exposed to a veritable parade of fame. In other words, there were worse places to build a network of “people who matter.” She did a series of other jobs in TV, eventually landing with Chris Matthews as a producer of Hardball. That marriage ended in 2007, with some of Matthews’s friends worrying that if it continued, Matthews would have a nervous breakdown (in fairness, many of Tammy’s friends worried that the same would happen to her). Regardless, after leaving Hardball, Haddad went into full Force of Nature and reinvention mode. She became a perfect flower of an emerging Washington moment.
Part of the producer’s job is to make the talent feel comfortable and confident. That makes it easier for them to go on the air and project comfort and confidence, no matter what their ratings or what the critics say. That’s what she does, or tries to do, for fancy-pants Washington—those who are invited! “Hi, doll!” she will boom, and, “You just have to meet the supertalented author. Come with me.” Next thing you know, you’re across the room, part of a scrum waiting to meet the supertalented author. As you wait, Tammy holds court, going on about how Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s economic adviser, is such a total sweetheart, and how you have to meet him, too, and how Cate Edwards, John and Elizabeth’s oldest daughter, is engaged, and how Arianna was just telling her something or other. And here comes the big cake that Tammy arranged, and the presents, and maybe a special toast for the honored guest, or even a skit. She plants herself right in the nation’s courtyard and enables This Town’s perpetual adolescence.
Tammy loved Tim, and Tim thought Tammy was a trip and maybe a little much at times, but he appreciated her because he liked Washington originals, and that’s what the Tamster was and is. Perhaps a bit of a cartoon. And we could leave it at that, except that Tammy has made herself “necessary” and deftly ensconced herself into an Obama World that had also vowed to avoid precisely her ilk of Washington socialite.
Shortly before the first Obama inauguration, the New York Times published a story on what Washington hosts were doing to attract the new president and first lady to their parties. The first step is to reach out to the people who have influence with the Obamas, Tammy was quoted as saying. “The social question is, Who are the closest people to the Obamas personally?” she said. “Who is the hottest property inside their small circle?”
Haddad knew exactly who the hottest Obama properties were. And she got right up in their faces like that towering Great Dane from the old Marmaduke comic strip. Resistance was futile. They became her really good friends. She hosted parties “honoring” them. She welcomed them to town and celebrated their new jobs. She helped organize parties at which the featured guest was Valerie Jarrett, the Obama BFF and White House senior adviser; she organized a dinner for Dan Pfeiffer as he was ascending to White House communications director. She helped arrange events and throw parties for people, whether they wanted to be feted or not (“party rape,” one close friend of a reluctant honoree called the phenomenon).
Tammy also worked to raise money and awareness for epilepsy research, even though she had no personal connection to the disease. But her new friends David and Susan Axelrod did, and they welcomed her help, as any parents would. Clearly, David Axelrod’s elevated status in Washington was helpful to their cause, and no one was more helpful than Tammy. She became a tireless promoter and fund-raiser for CURE (Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy), which raised $1.6 million from private sources in 2009, according to financial statements—three times as much as it had raised the previous year, before David was in the White House. None of these donors have been disclosed, nor are they required to be. But donating generously to CURE could at least carry an appearance of trying to curry favor with the new White House. Tammy learned about the Axelrod family saga after reading a cover story about it in Parade and then seeing Susan Axelrod interviewed on the next day’s Today show. Tammy was moved by the story and also saw great possibility in Susan.
Other than possibly the Tam Cam, Tammy is best known for the A-list brunch she throws on the day of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. The event has become a massive spectacle that attracts swarms of Hollywood, Washington, and New York celebrities, in addition to plenty of media attention. Part of the game is to have big-ticket “sponsors” for the event and also to attach it to “good causes” that will attract attention and coat the sweaty affair in a virtuous glaze. Tammy wrote a letter to Susan Axelrod, whom she had never met. She knew David a little (but not well), in part because, as she likes to say, she “covered” the 2008 campaign with the Tam Cam for Newsweek and the Washington Post. She turned up a fair amount at political events, debates, conventions, and big scenes like that. Indeed, Tammy exists in a murky space between being a journalist, a businessperson, a philanthropist, a producer, a party host, and a full-service gatherer of friends of different persuasions unified by the fact that they in some way “matter.” Susan Axelrod not only mattered, but also was a good and compelling and committed soul whose daughter had suffered tragically. And it also didn’t hurt that her husband was the new president’s closest adviser. When Tammy finally got through, she told Susan that if she served as a cohost of that year’s brunch (with NBC’s Ann Curry), Tammy would devote the following year to helping her campaign to promote awareness about epilepsy.
In October 2009, Tammy helped organize a luminary gathering at a Georgetown mansion to watch David and Susan discuss their parental ordeal with Katie Couric on 60 Minutes. Several top administration officials showed up at the watch party, including Vice President Biden and Rahm Emanuel. “There’s nothing worse than having your child cognizant enough to know what’s going on, and know what’s happening, and begging you to help,” Susan Axelrod said. The Couric interview was another tremendous boon to CURE. The following year, Tammy was honored with the annual Friend of CURE award at a party at the Newseum. David Axelrod says that Haddad has never asked for any favors relating to his official role, and Haddad says she has been careful not to do so.
Tammy would make herself many close friends in the Obama White House. She was pals with Goolsbee, a top economic adviser to the new president; and she cohosted a party for Michelle Obama’s chief of staff’s son, the “supertalented author” who had written a novel, and one for David Axelrod’s assistant, who was headed off to law school, and another for Rahm Emanuel’s longtime senior adviser, who had taken a new job at Bloomberg News, one of the many media companies that Tammy’s media company, Haddad Media, did
work for. Haddad helped with video producing. She organized special events and did various odd jobs to create “buzz” for herself and for her clients and for her thousands of superstar friends. She brings boldface names together.
Along the way, Haddad acquired a coveted mantle of her own: someone who had “connections” to the Obama White House. She won access to key quadrants of Obama World, even as the administration was taking great pride in refusing access to traditional influence peddlers, like lobbyists. One top White House aide described Tammy to me as an “access peddler.” Her business has thrived.
Tammy is not a Washington social convener type in the tradition of Georgetown hostesses like Sally Quinn, Katharine Graham, and Pamela Harriman, all of whom were married or linked to wealthy and powerful men or institutions. Their social efforts might have carried some business impetus (Quinn and Graham on behalf of their newspaper, Harriman for her work as a political activist and eventual diplomat). But none of them were working on behalf of paying clients like Haddad often does. She was doing consulting work for media outlets such as Politico, Bloomberg, National Journal, Newsweek, the Washington Post, Condé Nast, and HBO. Her work seemed to include video production, event planning, and some promotional components. She is also helpful in using her connections to gain journalistic access for her clients. When Politico did a ten-week series of videotaped interviews with administration officials, Haddad arranged the bookings with high-level administration officials. In addition, Tammy signed on to be a consultant to Newsweek through her friend Jon Meacham, who was then the magazine’s top editor. She worked on special video projects, did Tam Cam interviews, and performed assorted odd jobs.
The struggling newsweekly had been trying for months to land an interview with the president. Haddad “worked her contacts”—her friends in the White House, the hottest of properties inside the Obama’s small circle. She helped deliver the Newsweek interview as well as one with the first lady.
On the website of “Haddad Media,” there is a photo of Tammy aboard Air Force One, towering over Meacham—“a poet-historian,” she called him—as he interviewed President Obama. She includes, on the website, a description of her experience riding on “the Bird,” as insiders (like Tammy) call the presidential jet. Obama mentioned that he’d heard she’d had a great party the previous weekend. Tammy was thrilled by such high-level acknowledgment, naturally, and also by the “Cadillac-quality leather toilet seat cover” in the bathroom, “as wide as any Sumo wrestler could want.”
She also gushed over how generally roomy the Air Force One bathrooms seemed. “I could have comfortably brought a friend in,” she said.
Comfortably! This is what makes us great.
Alas, Tammy did not take any video of the Air Force One visit or the Meacham interview for Newsweek. In other words, it was not immediately clear what Tammy was doing there. Only that she was there, and that it mattered, and how could This Town not be impressed?
3
Three Senators for Our Times
A man never stands taller than when he is down on all fours kissing somebody’s ass.
RAHM EMANUEL
Entrusted with a Senate supermajority and endowed with all the magnetism of a dried snail, Harry Reid owned the beleaguered face of change in 2009.
But the opening scene, at least mine—because I was in the room!—played out a few years before, on Election Night of 2006, the night Democrats regained control of the House and Senate for the first time since 1994.
Reid, then the Senate minority leader, and Chuck Schumer, who had run the Democrats’ Senate campaign committee, were watching returns in a suite at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill. The Felix-and-Oscar pair—Reid a hush-voiced Mormon from Searchlight, Nevada, and Schumer a bombastic Jew from Brooklyn—was becoming more and more silly as the night wore on. At one point Schumer, whose chin was smeared with mustard in two distinct splotches, exploded off the couch. CNN was calling the close Missouri Senate race for Democrat Claire McCaskill.
“Yeah,” Schumer grunted out through his food, holding two fists over his head.
Reid, a man of thoroughgoing cynicism, is nonetheless capable of a boyish hullabaloo at times like this. So what did Harry Reid do to mark this key step in his ascent to Senate majority leader? He rose from the couch and he kissed the TV—tenderly, caressing the screen. And then he sat back down to receive from Schumer something between a pat on the head and a noogie.
Reid then started placing congratulatory calls to the Democrats who had won. None of the calls exceeded thirty seconds, and each was punctuated by a variant of “I love you.” Reid professed his love to Senator Kent Conrad, who was reelected in North Dakota (“Love you, man”), Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Hillary Clinton in New York, who told Reid she loved him back.
I was standing a few feet away from the couch, sanctioned that night by Reid and Schumer to be a “fly on the wall,” a journalistic practice that is both a cliché and a misnomer: no one notices an actual fly on the wall while everyone is fully mindful of the maggot reporter taking notes. But these moments can be revealing, especially in the midst of such punch-drunk victories. Reid must have detected my amusement at the “I love yous,” which he explained to me matter-of-factly. “They need to hear that,” he said.
“They” are political people. And Reid, their leader, a former Nevada gaming commissioner, parcels out love like casino chips. Whether it is real love or pseudo love doesn’t quite matter. Love is gold currency in the rolling transaction of politics, a game played by the nation’s most ambitious and insecure class. In his stooped and unassuming and easy-to-miss way, no one understands this better than Harry Reid.
A few months later, Reid showed up on the Senate floor to hear John Kerry announce that he would not run for president again in 2008. It was a difficult moment for Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee who was now shedding an ambition he appeared to have held since kindergarten. Just before the 2006 midterms, Kerry had acquired a nasty case of political cooties after attempting a laugh line about the war in Iraq—never a good idea—which many construed as a knock against U.S. soldiers. Now Kerry was making this heavy announcement to a near-empty chamber that included only Reid and Kerry’s fellow Massachusetts senator, Ted Kennedy. After Kerry finished, Reid, who was standing next to him, gave Kerry a hug and said a few words for the record.
“He is one of those people who meant so much to me,” Reid said of Kerry, belying the scorn he had expressed to others for the lanky Bay Stater over many years. Reid had observed privately to colleagues that Kerry had no friends. No matter: Reid was John Kerry’s friend today, publicly, and it felt nothing but sincere.
“So I say to John Kerry,” Reid concluded, “I love you, John Kerry.”
Kerry nodded slowly and appeared to choke back tears.
• • •
Bespectacled and slight, Reid is frequently described in terms of something else (“He looks like a civics teacher”). It is similar to how, say, the size of hail is never described on its own merits, only in terms of other things—marble-size, golf-ball-size. Reid could also pass for an oddball taxidermist who keeps a closet full of stuffed pigeons, or maybe the harried proprietor of the pet store that has just been robbed for the third time this month (or, in his case, hit up by Ben Nelson of Nebraska for some provincial goodie in the stimulus bill). What Reid does not look like is the amateur boxer and habitual street-fighter he was in his youth—or, more to the point, one of the most potent, odd, and overlooked phenomena of This Town.
• • •
Reid once invited me to his home in the desert smudge of Searchlight, Nevada, population 539—a town of twelve brothels and not a single church during his childhood of unspeakable poverty. It was just after he had become the minority leader of the Senate in 2005. This was not an invitation that Reid would typically extend a reporter on his own. But he had been catching heat for having made a series of ineleg
ant comments—calling, among other things, President Bush a “loser” and a “liar,” Alan Greenspan a “political hack,” and Clarence Thomas “an embarrassment”—and his image guardians feared the remarks might “negatively impact his brand.”
Reid welcomed me into his kitchen with an overly self-conscious—or self-consciously self-conscious—string of solicitations.
“Hey, you want a drink or something? Water?”
No, thanks, I said.
“They said I’m supposed to offer you a drink, so that’s what I’m doing. If anyone asks, just tell them I offered you a drink.” In other words, this charming mannerly recipe that Reid was following came from someone else (“them”).
“I don’t go to dinner. I don’t do any of the social things,” Reid said later. By contrast, he said, Tom Daschle, the top Senate Democrat before him, went to dinner every night. “I have beady eyes,” Reid points out, and “lousy posture.” And he doesn’t “speak well.” He is always reciting the litany of reasons why he is so unfit for his big-deal Washington job. He is an anti-prototype of This Town, which makes him an unlikely king of the place. The needy actors can have their love, just as long as Harry Reid gets to be in charge. “There are people who could be majority leader who could probably be better than I am,” Reid told me years later in his office. “They’re smarter, they’re better-looking, they speak better. But they don’t have the job. I have the job.”
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