Former CNN correspondent and “State of the Union” host Candy Crowley has given one of her most extensive interviews since leaving the network earlier this year–a move she described as tough. “It’s pretty hard to walk away from the one thing you had some skill at.”
Over the last few months, Crowley’s been relaxing, scuba diving, and catching up on decades of lost sleep. In a podcast interview with Michael Schulder, a longtime senior executive producer at CNN, Crowley said she spent most of January feeling run down and sick. Friends told Crowley “I think this is you catching up on thirty years of never getting enough sleep.”
What’s next for Crowley? She has ideas–and options. “There are, blessedly, offers.” But she won’t make a decision just yet. “Talk to me in September. I think I may have made up my mind.”
In the meantime, she’s following the 2016 campaign from an unusual vantage point for a reporter who’s been on the trail since Ronald Reagan–the sidelines. She sees Hillary Clinton as a survivor, a woman who “was hurt to the core of her heart” in public, and had to find a way to protect herself. As a result, Crowley believes Clinton is perhaps the least “known” of the potential candidates.
Crowley, who says all candidates are guarded around journalists, found Clinton to be the most guarded. She recalled seeing then First Lady Clinton drawn into a dance in Morocco years ago when she suddenly became unguarded and “she seemed sort of completely free.”
“I realized just how thick that plexiglas is between who Hillary Clinton is… and who her friends tell us she is–the funny, warm, embracing Hillary Clinton that you always hear intimates talk about– is not that woman that is in public.”