“I think that’s correct,” she said. “And I think my own children have that towards me. And I feel endless guilt about it. And it’s not something that I can ever reconcile in my soul.
I understood. I still asked him to try to reconcile these two things.
“I love being a journalist. I do. There are things that I do not have Finished. I did not transfer my children to Washington. I haven’t taken any overseas assignments, have I? What I do is not the same as what my father did. But did I miss more time than I would like? Yeah. It’s 100% true. And I make up for it by trying to be a lot more present now. And I am. But it’s also my job,” she said. “Whatever rhythm I cover, I will do it with intensity.”
She got her first pager in 1996. She got her first cell phone in 1998. She was reachable. Still. In 2001, she told me, while covering Bloomberg, a colleague of hers came across a direct mail that made an exaggerated claim about a hospital of which he had been president, and it was 8 a.m. evening, and his editor called. “I’ll start tomorrow morning,” she said, “and he said, ‘No. Now.'” And so she did. In 2007, she said, she and her husband had tickets to a play his mother had given them as a present the year before, and they were on 47th Street, about to walk into the theater. “And my editor called me and said, ‘ I need you back.’ Because he needed me to write part of this story about how Rudy Giuliani’s wife, Judith Nathan, had a third husband, and the Daily News was about to break it,” she said. “And so I went back to the newsroom. And it was my night. And it wasn’t great. But that’s what she did. And then when she started at POLITICO, she had a blog, and then there was no end of the day. It was just a long day. And then Trump took that and squeezed it, endlessly, endlessly perceptibly.
Haberman joked with Eli Stokols about a book they both love. It’s called The Iowa Baseball Confederationa lesser known work by WP Kinsella, who also wrote the book that became the movie “Field of Dreams”. The Iowa Baseball Confederation is about a game that never ends.
Over the past two years, she has been posting old photos of her children, now aged 11 to 17, to her Instagram, photos of her holding, kissing and looking at them when they were little as a single parent. the fact. She posted a video of them playing in the snow. “This is joy,” she wrote. She posted a photo someone took of her throwing a Wiffle ball to her youngest son. She posted pictures of Cookie Monster cupcakes she baked. She posted a screenshot with “Minority Report” captions. (“You can choose, you can choose, you can choose …”) She posted a screenshot with captions from the Marvel movie “Doctor Strange”. (“There was no other way …”) And it is posted a pass of The heart is a lonely hunter: ” What’s the point ? That was the question she would like to know. How good was that. All the plans she had made, and the music. When all that came out of it was this trap – the store, then the house to sleep, and back to the store. …and she had just come down. Whenever there was overtime, the manager always told him to stay. Because she could stand up longer and work harder before giving in than any other girl.
“That’s how I am,” she tells me now.
Now, here, approaching the release of Man of confidence, she came out of Gargiulo and in the early evening light. We crossed the lot on foot. We got in his Periwinkle Honda CRV with an empty seltzer bottle and a Wiffle ball and Andrew Kirtzman’s new book on Giuliani at my feet in the front passenger seat. She left Coney Island and started on the Belt Parkway. The dashboard screen rang regularly with calls and texts from around the Trump world and beyond. She called a colleague who was in Washington to write the article corresponding to the article in the Job. “I will jump at some point. I just need to get to a fixed place,” she told him. For me, she kept worrying about how the Job had it first. “I apologized to my editor,” she said.
At one point, she looked up at the exit signs she was passing and not taking.
“Am I going the right way? ” she says.
She was not. She was heading east, to the deepest parts of Long Island, when she needed to go west, home.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
Now we were going in the right direction. “I’ve done a lot of work that I’m really, really, really proud of,” she said. “We had reports that wouldn’t have gone public – never, I think – if we hadn’t had them. And so that’s what we do. This is the nature of what we do. It’s not a dependency on who’s up, who’s down. This stuff matters.
Word addiction made me ask something I wanted to ask.
“Are you addicted to this job?”
“Yes. One hundred percent,” she said. “I think you knew the answer to your question. It’s my curse and my salvation.”
His phone kept ringing. And now it was a source for a different story. I could only hear his end of conversation, but it was obvious the source wasn’t happy at all, and it was equally obvious that Maggie Haberman wasn’t having it. “It’s not a cheap shot,” she said. “You think facts you don’t like are cheap shots, and they’re not,” she said. ” Do not speak to me like that !
She hung up. And we were finally back in Brooklyn, in her neighborhood, which she called her “happy place”. She pulled into her driveway, and she opened her door. On the floor of the room at the front of his house was a box of an early batch of his books. She said hello to her husband, and she said hello to her daughter, and her sons were upstairs. The dining room table was covered in clutter. She sat down, opened her laptop and started typing.