When Hillary and I visited a group of

My outreach to the ethnic communities was organized by Chris Hyland, a Georgetown classmate who lived in lower Manhattan, one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in America. When Hillary and I visited a group of elementary school students displaced by the attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001, we found children from eighty different national and ethnic groups. Chris started by buying about thirty ethnic newspapers and locating the leaders mentioned in them. After the primaries, he organized a fund-raiser in New York with 950 ethnic leaders, then moved to Little Rock to organize ethnic groups across the country, making an important contribution to victory in the general election, and laying the foundation for our continuing unprecedented contact with ethnic communities once we got to the White House. The unions, especially the public employee groups, have a huge presence and are politically astute and effective. In New York City, the politics of the primary were further complicated by the fact that both party regulars and liberal reformers were active and often saw themselves at odds with each other. Gay-rights groups were organized and vocal about the need to do more about AIDS, which in 1992 still claimed more victims in America than any other country. The press was an ever-present cacophony of traditional newspapers, led by the New York Times, the tabloids, vigorous local TV stations, and talk radioall in hot competition for the latest story. While the New York campaign didnt really begin until after the Connecticut primary, I had been working the state for months with the invaluable help and expert advice of Harold Ickes, the namesake and son of FDRs famous secretary of the interior. By 1992, we had been friends for more than twenty years. Harold is a thin, intense, brilliant, passionate, and occasionally profane man, a unique blend of liberal idealism and practical political skills. As a young man, hed worked as a cowboy out west and had been badly beaten working for civil rights in the South. In campaigns, he was a loyal friend and a ferocious opponent who believed in the power of politics to change lives. He knew the personalities, issues, and power struggles of New York like the back of his hand. If I was about to go through hell, I was at least making the trip with a man who stood a chance of getting me out alive.