Jane Mayer

Bedales 1972-1973

Family

Married

Bill Hamilton

Children

Kate (4)

Occupation(s)

Journalist & Author

Address

Washington DC, USA See

News/Message

Sorry to say I can't make it to the big reunion bash, much as I’d like to. My husband, Bill Hamilton, and our four year old daughter Kate, will be in Switzerland that week on a long planned family get away. I send lots of hullos to other Bedalians, so many of whom remain wonderfully distinct characters in my mind. Any chance you’ll get together a directory and booklet with a few paragraphs from everyone explaining what is become of their lives? I’d love to see it.

As for me, I’m a writer now, author of two best selling books, and on the staff of the new Yorker, working for Brit Boss Tina Brown! I’m picking a school for my daughter and looking for a place like Bedales, but closer to home!

All the Best

Jane Mayer

GOSSIPFrom the Spectator Taki - High Life May 1998 ….Very Briefly: a New Yorker hack by the name of Jane Mayer is given access by an assistant defence secretary to secret Pentagon files concerning Linda Tripp. It is called Form 171, the standard government-employment document. Mayer wrote her New Yorker report ‘exposing’ Tripp as having been arrested in her youth for grand larceny. But, as it turns out, this was a total invention. Tripp was the victim of a juvenile prank, perpetrated against her. A judge ruled her infraction, if there was one could not be ruled as an arrest. She had filled in her government form truthfulyy and accurately. But the damage had been done……

Books

Landslide : The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988
by Jane Mayer, Doyle McManus

Houghton Mifflin Co (T); ASIN: 039545185X

Reviews

Booknews, Inc. , 10/01/90

Thoroughly researched and documented journalistic account of the Iran- Contra affair and the unraveling of the Reagan presidency. Originally published in 1988, this first paperback edition includes an updated epilogue by the authors. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Booknews, Inc. , 02/01/89

This is a fascinating, if somewhat opinionated, look at the last of four years of the Reagan presidency. Of particular interest are the stories of personal intrigue among the staff. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

SStrange Justice : The Selling of Clarence Thomas (us ed)
by Jane Mayer, Jill Abramson

Hardcover - 406 pages (November 1994)
Houghton Mifflin Company; ASIN: 0395633184

Reviews

Excerpt from the Prologue
The falsehoods and distortions involved in the selling of Clarence Thomas to the American people neither started nor ended with the treatment of Anita Hill's accusations. From the beginning, the placement of Thomas on the high court was seen as a political end justifying almost any means. The full story of his confirmation thus raises questions not only about who lied and why, but, more important, about what happens when politics becomes total war and the truth--and those who tell it--are merely unfortunate sacrifices on the way to winning.

Jane Mayer is a senior writer for the Wall Street Journal and co-author of Landslide; The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988. Jill Abramson is the Journal's deputy bureau chief in Washington, covered the Thomas confirmation battle and is co-author of Where They Are Now: The Story of the Women of Harvard Law 1974.

From Booklist , 12/01/94
Of the horde of recent books withheld from prepublication reviewers until formal release, Mayer and Abramson's expansion of their New Yorker article on the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court is arguably the most eagerly anticipated. It is a largely reportorial account of the lives of Thomas and his accuser of sexual harassment, Anita Hill, up to and including the encounters that were exposed in his confirmation hearings. The book also tells of the campaign by the Bush White House to place Thomas on the Court as a sop to conservatives angered by the scuttling by liberal special-interest groups of Robert Bork's Court candidacy and the subsequent appointments of moderates Anthony Kennedy and David Souter. Its virtues are its presentation of Thomas and Hill as complex persons whose earlier experiences and attitudes help explain his denials of her charges and her long reluctance to voice those charges and its exposure of a presidential administration so determined to succeed that illegality was frequently skirted and improprieties definitely indulged. Its defects are Mayer and Abramson's unwillingness to interpret their evidence forthrightly, no documentation of far too many factual and sociological assertions (e.g., "Historically, many black men felt that black women had succeeded at their expense and so owed them special deference"), and the use of such undefined terms as Far Right, conservative, and Religious Right as epithets apparently assumed to connote political chicanery, hypocrisy, and bad faith. Perhaps the great begged question of the well-enough-written book is what effects their religious convictions--established but never taken seriously by Mayer and Abramson--had on how and why those two staunch Christians, Thomas and Hill, behaved as they did. Obviously not the last word on this controversial contretemps, Mayer and Abramson's effort is more credible than Brock's Real Anita Hill (1993), more evidentiary than Danforth's Resurrection. Ray Olson
Copyright© 1994, American Library Association. All rights reserved

Landslide : The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988