“Patti fired me,” Reines recalled, adding with a smirk, “I just sort of ignored it, like George Costanza. I was in the office the next day at 7 a.m.” He said that Clinton had known about the profile before it ran and that she decided to keep him on. “Ultimately, the organization was and is run by one person,” he said. “One person wanted me there.”
Solis Doyle declined to comment on the incident.
The quotable Reines
In October 2006, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd quoted a Clinton adviser attacking McCain as “looking similar to the way he did on those captive tapes from Hanoi, where he recited the names of his crew mates.” Clinton had to apologize to McCain for the comment, which came from Reines. Her brass again decided Reines had to go, but Clinton kept him in purgatory instead: her Senate office.
The prize destination for Clinton’s Senate staffers was campaign headquarters in Arlington, but Reines wasn’t welcome there. Adding insult to injury, Clinton hired Reines’s rivals in Schumer’s press office. They disparaged him as the “purse holder,” after the New York Times described Reines toting Clinton’s handbag.
Reines was patient. “I knew that the first ones in are not always the last ones out,” he said.
He also kept fighting for Clinton from the Senate office. In May 2007, when a spate of unauthorized biographies came out about Clinton, Reines nearly nullified them in one much-publicized quip: “Is it possible to be quoted yawning?”
“Killing books has always been a fun pastime,” bragged Reines, who considers the quote his “Hall of Fame moment.”
For Reines’s enemies, his real Hall of Fame moment was still to come.
On Sept. 26, 2007, Clinton met her campaign team for a debate preparation session at the Phoenix Park Hotel. In the middle of the session, she excused herself for an appointment on the Hill and then, to the horror of her campaign, voted for a measure to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization — a disastrous move for a candidate looking to shed a hawkish reputation in a Democratic primary. Her campaign’s senior strategist, Mark Penn, fired off an e-mail to Reines, one of the 859,200 Senate and campaign e-mails Reines has saved, expressing frustration that the Senate staff didn’t tell the campaign that the vote was coming. “We didn’t know she was leaving prep to vote,” Reines wrote at the time. “And were surprised when she did.”
Former campaign officials still blame Reines for failing to flag the vote. Reines places the blame elsewhere. “In fairness to her,” Reines said of Clinton, “she did what she always does; she looked to other people to see how they were voting. So she looked at Chuck. Chuck voted for it. She looked at Harry Reid. Harry Reid voted for it. She looked at Carl Levin. Carl Levin voted for it. It was the first time that a vote had become so charged” in the run-up to the 2008 election.
After the fatal Iowa caucuses, Clinton pushed Solis Doyle aside and tasked Reines with watching over Chelsea Clinton on the campaign trail. Reines “could be mistaken for a Secret Service agent for Chelsea Clinton,” according to a Politico profile at the time. In February 2008, a TV anchor said Clinton had “pimped out” her daughter by allowing Chelsea to campaign on her behalf. According to several people on the conference call, Clinton choked up with anger and emotion when her communications director, Howard Wolfson, broke the news. Reines, usually silent on such calls, handed his phone to the candidate’s daughter.
“Mom, Mom. It’s Chelsea. I’m okay,” she broke in, according to several participants.
“I remember thinking,” said Reines, “she would feel a lot better talking to her daughter.”
Loyalty & friendship
Reines grew up in Manhattan with his mother, Judith, and grandmother in a rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment. The quarters were tight, but the family wasn’t.
Judith, an insurance broker, never married Reines’s father, Ionnis Papadakis, and her son met him only once, in a childhood encounter he doesn’t remember. Steven Kleiner, a classmate and frequent sleepover guest at the Reines home who’s now a psychiatrist in Massachusetts, described the partnership between mother and son as a “business relationship.” Reines acknowledges that he and his mother are not especially close. In Kleiner’s view, his friend resented his mother for neglecting the issue of his father’s absence and compounding the burden by enrolling her son in a Jewish private school with “family values of the 1950s.”
As teenagers, the two attended Ramaz, a tony Jewish academy on the Upper East Side where future spinmeister Steven Rubenstein and other children of powerful and wealthy New Yorkers populated the student body. Kleiner said they both were out of place among the elite overachievers. Reines, Kleiner said, was especially “lost.”
Reines, a lackluster student prone to day-dreaming, had a real passion for building friendships.
He lent Kleiner money from his savings account to buy an expensive tennis racket and then urged him on at tennis team practices. After graduation, the two attended the University at Albany. He left after one semester and soon followed other friends to Clark University in Massachusetts but never enrolled.
“Some people are addicted to being in a giving relationship,” Kleiner said. “He needs to always be giving or he gets lost. He needs an object to whom he can be helpful.”
For Reines’s friends, the ultimate example of his emphasis on loyalty came in 1994 when he tried to rescue a roommate who fell victim to what Reines thought was a con. The friend had invested in “EZ Score,” a startup company built around a basketball hoop that always sent the ball bouncing back to the shooter, and had given his new Lincoln to the company’s president. Reines objected. He located his friend’s car and a tow truck driver, who, for a price, was willing to repossess it. Reines recalled with pride that after reclaiming the car he sent his friend to Puerto Rico to lay low. Ultimately, he acknowledged, “the friendship fell apart.”
In 1998, at 29, with most of his friends having moved on in life, Reines enrolled in a program at Columbia University designed for students who belatedly discover their academic ambitions. On the day of his graduation in 2000, he flew to Nashville to volunteer for Gore. In 2009, he returned to his school as commencement speaker. Hours earlier Clinton had addressed the university’s Barnard College graduates from the same podium.
“As she was leaving campus,” Reines said facetiously of Clinton in his address, “she noticed that I wasn’t leaving with her, and she looked at me and asked, ‘Aren’t you coming?’ And I told her, ‘Nah, I’m going to stay and see my mother.’ ”
He then briefly saluted his mother in the audience before continuing to talk at length about Clinton and how she “might have suggested I practice in front of her” if he’d told her he was sticking around to give a speech.
“So,” Reines concluded, “if anyone happens to bump into the secretary of state between now and whenever, please remember, I was not here.”
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