Chasing Hillary

A Paying Subscriber Special: Although the Secret Service kicked me out of her private meeting, I got my interview with Hillary Clinton.

Note: Readers have asked for the backstory to this image of (a way too clean-cut) me and Hillary Clinton included with my essay about journalism and Substack last week. So here it is for paid subscribers or with your seven-day trial subscription to Chasing Nature. At the end of this post, see my note about upcoming nature seminars.

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Chasing Hillary

By Bryan Pfeiffer

HILLARY CLINTON’S secret service agents were on to me. I knew it the moment one of them began talking into a microphone hidden in his sleeve. As I maneuvered through a crowd toward Hillary, two agents advanced. “If you don’t leave now,” the tall one said politely, “we’ll take you out of here.”

And so ended my chance to interview First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in Woodstock, Vermont, on June 18, 1993.

Or so I had thought.

In another life I was a newspaper reporter covering politics for The Rutland Herald and The Barre-Montpelier Times Argus. My beat included health care reform here in Vermont in the early 1990s. As her husband’s point person on national reform, the First Lady was key to Vermont’s success. So when she came to the Woodstock Town Hall for a policy address on health care, I was determined to get an interview.