Backgrounder: Beth Harpaz

By Ashleigh Ormsby

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Lecture: Beth Harpaz

These days, Beth Harpaz, 46, is the travel editor for the Associated Press. But she's best known for The Girls in the Van, about being a reporter on Hillary Clinton's campaign for the U.S. Senate. "Harpaz gives a trenchant reporter's-eye view of the candidate, her political machine, and her prospective voters—from skeptical to blindly enthusiastic—across New York state," wrote a reviewer for the online edition of The Washingtonian Journal. Like the 1970's bestseller The Boys on the Bus, by Timothy Crouse, The Girls in the Van gives the reader an inside look at the largely female press gang that covered the campaign as well as a front-row seat at the political circus. Harpaz "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," wrote Patricia O'Brien in the November 11, 2001 New York Times.

Beth Harpaz
After discussing her coverage of Hillary Clinton’s senatorial campaign, Beth Harpaz speaks with members of the “Politics and Policy of Women and the Media” class in the Women & Politics Institute at American University. Photo courtesy The Women & Politics Institute. © The Women & Politics Institute, 2004.

Harpaz cut her political eyeteeth at Parliamentarians for World Order, an anti-nuclear NGO (non-governmental organization). She began working there after graduating from Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, in 1981. She escorted people from conferences and wrote reports for her boss, Nick Dunlop, about different countries and issues of the day. "That was...the first time I was exposed to these kinds of controversial political things going on in the world," she said, in a September 26, 2004 phone interview with this writer.

One day, Dunlop suggested that since she was not intimidated by prime ministers, presidents, and other powerful people, and because she had strong writing skills, maybe she should consider journalism. "[T]he bell went off in my head," said Harpaz.

Enrolling in Columbia University School of Journalism, she gained the expertise and experience that enabled her to land jobs at The Staten Island Advance and The Record of Hackensack, New Jersey before joining the Associated Press in 1988.

At the AP, she covered "crime and politics, and a lot of really small boring stories—just what happened in New York City everyday," Harpaz said. In the fall of 1998, she was assigned to cover Hillary Clinton's senatorial campaign. For the next two years, she spent much of her working life "writing and thinking and talking about Hillary," as she recalls in The Girls in the Van's opening chapter:

I documented her screw-ups and her finest moments; I dismissed her as an amateur and pronounced her senatorial; I memorized her speeches and obscure facts about her life (middle name, Diane; birthdate, 10-26-47; favorite color, yellow; number of months she took for maternity leave after Chelsea was born, four; where she met Bill, in the Yale law library); I watched her laugh hysterically and I saw her eyes well up with tears; I sang her "Happy Birthday" and I received a present from her for my children; and I asked her everything from whether she had plastic surgery to her views on a Palestinian state to why a guy who owns strip clubs in Chicago was on the list of donors who slept over at the White House. When she made news, it was exciting; but more often, it was mundane, and the way I entertained myself was by becoming a Hillary Kremlinologist, the type of person who knows that when she drapes a blue sweater over her shoulders without actually putting her arms through the sleeves, she's trying to appeal to suburban women; when she wears a skirt, she's going to church; when she's happy and making jokes with her press corps, she's up in the polls; when she shuts down every question by answering, "I'll leave that to others to characterize," she's gotten a talking-to from Bill about how to get reporters to change the subject; and when she calls somebody "My good friend…" she's pandering to whatever ethnic group the alleged friend belongs to.

This year, Harpaz published her second book, Finding Annie Farrell: A Family Memoir, a true story about her mother's life. Deeply personal, it is poles apart from a political book like The Girls in the Van. When her mother died, Harpaz discovered her mother's real name was Annie, not Lena—the name by which she had known her. Delving into her family history, Harpaz uncovered her mother's difficult beginnings in Mechanic Falls, Maine: Annie's mother died in childbirth, her father ended up in jail, and she and her five siblings were sent to live with strangers. Harpaz relives her mother's self-transformation when she moves to New York City to work for the war department, reinventing herself as Lena. "In the end, the author concludes that the purpose of adulthood is to 'let go of all the things from your childhood that were awful and recreate all the things that were wonderful,' something her troubled mother could never do," wrote Jane Dystel, in Kirkus Reviews.

Feeling burned out from writing two books, not to mention covering 9/11 and politics, Harpaz has been looking for more uplifting subjects. "I just wanted to do…something happy," she told this reporter. In July 2003, when a position for travel editor opened at the Associated Press, she jumped at the opportunity. "Travel stories are happy stories, because people are going on vacation," said Harpaz. In the year that she has worked as the AP's travel editor, she has "edited stories about destinations around the world, from diving in Kenya to civil war sites in the South to hiking in Maine to clubs in Miami," she recalled, in an e-mail. Occasionally, she noted, she writes about her own family vacations.

Before becoming a journalist, Harpaz never imagined she would end up a reporter and editor for a wire service, a career that has earned her feature-writing awards from the Newswomen’s Club of New York and the New York Press Club. During her time as an English major at Cornell, she knew she wanted to write, but never considered journalism. "I read Victorian novels and wrote poetry," she said. "I didn't even work on the school newspaper."

There was no question, however, that she would one day be a writer. She still remembers the first time she used a typewriter, in the second grade. She recalls thinking a thought, then typing it, and "feeling like, 'Oh man, now it's written down. Doesn't matter if I forget it; nobody can take it away from me.' It was just this really magical experience."

Ashleigh Ormsby is a junior at NYU double-majoring in politics and journalism.

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