The Caroline Of The Catskills

From the moment Caroline Kennedy let it be known that she was interested in Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat, she was barraged with media queries. Her tax returns – her nanny – her marriage: all were made the subject of speculation. Harsher critics wondered whether anybody would take her seriously if not for her famous name. But few have been quite as willing to look as deeply into the narrative of Hillary Clinton’s successor, Kirsten Gillibrand. Few questions have been raised about the large Democratic machine that backed her rise to political power. At the press conference announcing her appointment, Gillibrand acknowledged: “Over these next two years you will get to know me …” One thing New Yorkers may decide after getting to know Gillibrand: Their new senator is as much or more a beneficiary of patronage and favoritism as her defeated Kennedy rival.

Kirsten Gillibrand grew up as Tina Rutnik on a sprawling estate in Albany, New York. Located just off New York’s I-87, her childhood home was built on a lane that bore the name of her grandmother, Polly Noonan. Much of Gillibrand’s political achievement can be traced to her grandmother’s involvement in Albany politics and the three-generation political dynasty that she would set in motion.

Noonan had been a close confidante to eleven-term Albany Mayor Erastus Corning. Indeed, their relationship was so strong that when Corning passed away, he bequeathed his successful insurance business not to his own children, but to those of Noonan’s. As local Albany paper the Times Union put it in 2001, Noonan “handled patronage and political campaigns, handing out jobs that were the lifeblood of the old Democratic machine”. A state investigation commission would call Corning’s and Noonan’s Albany “the worst-run county in America”.

Both of Gillibrand’s parents followed in Noonan’s footsteps, and became powerful political figures within Albany’s sphere of influence. Gillibrand’s mother once sought the Democratic Party’s endorsement for a state senate seat, and was considered a strong candidate for an appointment to Albany’s City Court. Gillibrand’s father became an influential lobbyist in the state’s capital, taking advantage of his mother-in-law’s “sophisticated brand of machine politics”. In turn, Gillibrand’s parents’ connections may have helped launch her own career.

Gillibrand’s supporters make much of her seemingly impressive academic background. After graduating from Dartmouth in 1988, Kirsten Gillibrand went straight to UCLA Law School, graduating in 1991. From there, she acquired an extremely prestigious clerkship with Judge Roger Miner at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

This clerkship was the first in a series of impressive promotions for Gillibrand. She was appointed a special counsel to HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo in the Clinton administration. Later she would become a partner in the law firm of David Boies, the litigator who represented Al Gore before the Supreme Court in 2001. She invested with Joseph Bruno, the now-indicted former leader of the New York Senate.

Yet there was something curious about the clerkship that set Gillibrand on her way.

Clerkships in a court of appeals are notoriously difficult to attain, especially without prior work experience in lower courts. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals counts within its jurisdiction New York, Connecticut and Vermont, and is counted among the most competitive of clerkships. Second Circuit clerkships typically go to students of top-fourteen law schools that have graduated at the top of their class, are members of their law review, and have clerked at a district level first.

While there is no way to investigate what Gillibrand’s law school grades were, there is evidence that she was not a top student at UCLA. This is because UCLA law students who graduate from the top 10% of their class are inducted into the Order of the Coif, an elite legal society. A recently obtained list containing Order of the Coif members from Gillibrand’s graduating year doesn’t include the name Tina Rutnik, or any other variation of that name. It is unlikely that Senator Gillibrand declined to join the Order. Lolly Gasaway, Secretary-Treasurer of the National Order of the Coif, writes in an email to NewMajority that she “has never heard of anyone turning it down”.

Further, Gillibrand’s biography does not indicate that she graduated from UCLA with any sort of academic honors, nor does it suggest that she was a member of the UCLA Law Review. How do you get a clerkship without high grades? Politics can play a part. Judge Miner was a Reagan appointee. But Tina Rutnik had interned in college in the offices of Republican Senator Alfonse D’Amato. Village Voice columnist Wayne Barrett observes that Gillibrand’s

father, Doug Rutnik, was so close to D’Amato that, while still married to Gillibrand’s mother, he covertly double-dated with the then single senator, squiring a D’Amato press aide on a two-week Caribbean tryst to celebrate the senator’s re-election in 1992.

D’Amato was standing on the platform throughout Gillibrand’s press conference – and of all the dignitaries present, it was D’Amato who received her most effusive greeting.

It seems that Governor Paterson’s politically-loaded search for a Senate appointment has led him from one entitled family to the next. Under pressure from those who saw Caroline Kennedy as inarticulate and inexperienced, Paterson passed over the heir to the Kennedy dynasty for the scion to the Noonan Democratic machine. Upon her appointment to the Senate, President Obama praised Kirsten Gillibrand as a “strong voice for transparency in government”. Perhaps she could start by clearing up how she got the coveted clerkship that set her on her way.