Elisabeth Bumiller Is Not Panicked Yet?
It’s an average afternoon in Washington, D.C., so of course the nation’s top diplomat has just been fired. I’m due to meet Elisabeth Bumiller, the New York Times Washington bureau chief, in a few hours, but when I ask her if she needs to reschedule, she shrugs it off. Over 40 percent of Donald Trump’s most senior aides have at this point departed the White House. If she canceled an appointment just because someone had been canned, she wouldn’t have had lunch in 15 months. “It was, it is, it will be cataclysmic,” as she puts it. “This is how it is now.”
But the truth is, for Bumiller, in a sense it's been like this since she joined the Washington bureau, almost two decades ago. Her start date: September 10, 2001. Less than 24 hours later, she watched the Twin Towers fall on live television. “We weren’t prepared at all,” she remembers, but she understood her responsibilities. People needed news. She sped to the White House, even as speculation grew that it, too, could be under threat. “For months, it was nonstop.” Still, it didn’t quite prepare her for the Trump administration. “That was intense,” she concedes. “This is relentless.”
Bumiller, born in Denmark, has obsessed over American politics since childhood. She studied at Northwestern’s Medill School and went on to earn a master’s degree from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Weeks before she was due to graduate, a note arrived in her mailbox: it was from Sally Quinn, a venerable style reporter at the Washington Post. She wanted to chat. No sooner did Bumiller pick up the phone than Quinn made her case. “Let me tell you why this job isn’t that awful,” the reporter said. Quinn wanted to offer her a position in the style section, though Bumiller had intended to cover hard news.
But it was the Washington Post, and Bumiller wanted in. She moved down to the capital as soon as she received her diploma. For months, she went to a lot of parties. “I met everyone,” Bumiller recalls, with a smile. And when the festivities were over, she would jump into a taxi and file her stories in time for the 10:30 P.M. deadline-still in her little black dress. She credits the experience for her fearlessness. She’d butted into hundreds of intimate conversations, she’d whipped out her reporter’s notebook in the middle of black tie events. It was a crash course in the field-ask questions, be fast, write clean.
Bumiller met Steven Weisman, also a journalist, while at the Post. After they married, she followed him to New Delhi, where he ran the New York Times outpost in India, and then to Tokyo, where he led its office in Japan. Meanwhile, she continued to contribute to the Post and wrote books; plural. When Weisman was offered a job at the paper in New York, she accepted one, too. When she was tapped to cover the White House, it was Weisman’s turn to follow her. The couple has been in Washington, D.C. ever since. In 2013, Bumiller made the transition from reporter to editor. In 2015, leadership announced she’d be the new Washington bureau chief.
“I’ve known her as a competitor, I’ve known her as a colleague, and I’ve known her as an editor,” Peter Baker, the New York Times chief White House correspondent, tells me. (Baker covered the White House for the Washington Post before he joined the Times.) “So I know you definitely do not want to be her competitor. You absolutely would like to be her colleague. And you’d be super lucky to ever have as an editor.” Baker searches for the words to explain it; what it is that Bumiller does that most editors do not. It’s not just that “she has the best instincts, the absolute best in the business.” It’s that her reporters trust her-to defend them, to push them, to tell the truth. “She’s one of us,” he concludes. That’s it; his highest praise.
But Bumiller is not one to rest on her laurels-or the paper’s. When I want to know whether the Times has had to revise its practices, the better to suit the Trump era, she gives me a hard look. “We have to do it all. We have to be first and the most thorough and the best.”
Later, when I leave her office, I do what I do whenever I want to glimpse the end of the world: I check the Times website. Rex Tillerson has been out of work for no more than five hours, but the stories have poured in. I scan the initial report on his ouster. I read a rundown on Tillerson’s successor, Mike Pompeo. I open a piece on what the news means for the State Department and one on how diplomats around the world have reacted to his dismissal. I resolve to come back to these headlines. I didn’t even have to write them, and I’m exhausted.
If Katie Rogers can relate, she doesn’t let on. A relentless reporter, Rogers has been in the Washington bureau since Trump was sworn into office. She’d only intended to write from D.C. for a few months, but Bumiller wanted her on the Trump beat full-time. Bumiller secured a promotion for her and a raise. She went to bat for her. “The person Elisabeth is to me...” Rogers pauses to mull it over. “I just don’t want to let her down.” Rogers is one of at least 10 women that Bumiller has hired to staff the Washington bureau, a concerted effort that she frames as no more or less than due diligence. “I’m not one of those people who goes, ‘Oh, women are nice and more cooperative.’ You know, ‘women are better collaborators.’ I just think the desk needs to look more like America.”
Rogers feels it. “Before I came to Washington, all I’d really heard about the bureau was that it was old and it was white and it was male. I think Elisabeth has taken steps to change that reputation, both internally and externally.” Which is all well and good, of course, except that her revolution is far from complete. Not only is the newsroom still less diverse than Bumiller herself tells me she would like it to be, but it was the site of one of the most prominent examples in which a man who was accused of sexual misconduct this fall was allowed to return to work. Glenn Thrush, one of the Times’ White House correspondents, was suspended from his post after Vox published an article in which several women recounted his unwelcome behavior. The piece, which chronicled unwanted “wet kisses out of nowhere” and more than one sexual encounter that involved alcohol, prompted an internal inquest at the Times. Over a month later, it was determined that Thrush would not be fired, but that he would submit to a kind of reorientation “to improve his workplace conduct,” according to an email sent to staff. He was also moved off the hallowed White House beat.
In the midst of the investigation, Vanity Fair reported that the Thrush scandal uncovered a “schism” at the paper. Many millennial staffers in the New York office, it said, felt it would be impossible for the Times to continue to lead the coverage of this cultural moment when one of its own remained entangled and undisciplined. But in the D.C. bureau, the article went on, most seemed to feel that Thrush’s misdeeds should cost him his job, and that included Bumiller. At the time, she declined to comment. But now, months on, she discusses it with no evident unease.
She asserts that there is a generational divide, a “giant divide,” even, “between those who are under 30 and those who are over 30” at the paper. From her side of the chasm, it was the wise decision to reinstate Thrush. “We believe in due process here,” she offers. “I don’t feel what Glenn did was a fireable offense, and I know there’s a lot of disagreement about that out there. But I think in this bureau, it felt like a decent decision.”
But then, when conversation turns to whether she experienced harassment in her career, whether what’s been exposed in the media over the past six months struck some deep chord for her, she waves it off. “It was never an issue with me,” she tells me. Sure, at parties in the 80s, she met “grabby” members of congress and entitled men. But she “just didn’t experience” it as such or to some “great degree.”
No, she decides. She hasn’t “evaluated the past” like that. She hastens to add that she applauds the women who’ve come forward, but her own experiences-she sees no reason to reevaluate them. The present seems to command most of her attention.
In the center of the newsroom, there’s a piece of paper pinned up in a cubicle. In block letters, it reads: “In a Constitutional Crisis.” Next to it, a smaller sheet can be flipped up or down to recalibrate its import. It has one word on it: “Not.”
Gary Cohn has just quit, and Rex Tillerson has just been fired, and in a few months, H.R. McMaster and David Shulkin will be out too. In the meantime, Elisabeth Bumiller is braced for whatever’s next. The “Not” is flipped down. It isn’t time to panic just yet.
Elisabeth Bumiller will appear in The Fourth Estate, a forthcoming documentary series which will premiere on Showtime on May 27, 2018.
You Might Also Like