Margaret Brennan on the things women don’t talk about

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Mar 18, 2022 View in browser   By Katelyn Fossett POLITICO illustration/Photo by Invision/AP Happy Friday, rulers! We've made it to spring! What are your favorite Washington-area summer activities? I've always loved the public pools. My friend and I visited the Banneker pool one year and had it completely to ourselves. Thanks to Maya Parthasarathy for helping to put this newsletter together! Margaret Brennan might be the busiest woman in Washington these days. She's chief foreign affairs correspondent at CBS News, the only woman to helm a Sunday show, "Face the Nation," which was the most-watched Sunday public affairs program in the 2020-2021 season, and the mother of two young children. She came back from her most recent maternity leave in the fall of 2021. This time around, she did a few things differently than she did with her first child, including taking the full length of leave that her company allowed. In an era where companies are becoming more generous with parental leave, but workers are also finding it increasingly difficult to juggle work and life, I was curious to hear about Brennan's experience taking maternity leave with a particularly demanding, public career. Women need to talk about balancing all this, she told me in an interview. "If I just say, 'Oh yeah, I pulled it off,' that's a lie," she said. "It was really hard. It's hard for everyone." We also talked about everything from how hard it is to hear from public figures these days when they'd rather just tweet and getting breast milk delivered to Vietnam. (This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity) Katelyn Fossett: What has your experience been like as the only woman host of a Sunday show? Margaret Brennan: A friend of mine sent me a meme the other day on social media and I thought it kind of captured the essence of some of this. It's a woman asking somebody, "What's the difference between assertive and aggressive?" And the response was, "Your gender." You know, certainly people's impression of women in tough interviews or questions ... I think it's impossible to ever truly get away from that. I have always been taught to not let other people's issues become mine, so I try not to let that inhibit me, but it is a real thing, I think, for women when it comes to how people receive you. I do think that's shifting with younger generations. But that's still there. If you want to put a positive spin on it, it's good to be underestimated sometimes. But the way that we operate as a show team — the executive producer and I are very much of the same thinking on this — is that if you show basic respect for people, that should be reciprocated, and we treat all of our guests with respect and hear them out. I will push hard on your facts, but not be disrespectful to you, right? I do respect that people make the decision to come out and answer questions because in this day and age, many elected officials are choosing not to put themselves forward for it, right? They'd much rather tweet or just post something on social media, or not sit and have an extended back-and forth.-And I do really respect when people choose to do that. I mean, I had a pretty tough exchange with the Russian ambassador to the United States [in February]. But I respect that he came and he answered questions. I know he wasn't very happy with me, because they released a statement afterwards, but he came out and he sat, and I think that is something that we need to see more of because it helps educate the public and helps them understand if they can actually hear a conversation on a topic in an extended format, in a thoughtful way. Fossett: Do you think it's become harder to book people in recent years because of that kind of reluctance? Brennan: Yeah, but it's not a tussle for the sake of one, right? That's the thing that I don't find value in, when you just invite someone on to yell at them. That's theater. That's not journalism. And I do think sometimes these days I see that embraced. And one of the things that frustrates me that is sometimes I hear people say, "Well, how could you even ask that question?" I tweeted about this actually recently because it astounded me that people thought questions I was asking reflected my point of view or a conviction I was arguing for. And that's not what our job is, right? Fossett: I know you recently returned from parental leave. Do you think attitudes toward parental leave have changed in journalism in the past decade or so? Brennan: Yeah. I have two children, and with my son, Malik, who is now 10 months old, I took the full corporate allotment for parental leave, and I'm really glad I did. With my first son, Eamon, I did not. Corporations leave it up to you to choose how to use it and when to use it. And that's where some of this gets to be a little bit tricky because no one told me I could not take my full leave with my first son. No one told me that explicitly, but the reality is that all of us know the pressures on us and our job. And frankly, I have a fairly unique job, and I was new to that job, and I felt like I had these two babies, essentially: the show and my physical child. And I didn't want to let anyone down. I came back after eight weeks with my first son. It is physically possible. I wouldn't say it is advisable, but I felt like I needed to do that at the time. Having a child is the most extraordinary physical strain I think you'll go through in your entire life. It's also incredibly draining. You are sleep-deprived. Your body is just keeping another human alive on the outside of your body for the first time after nine months; you are feeding them literally every three hours for the first few weeks of their life. After my first child, I didn't want to talk about any of that, and I never would have talked about it with someone like you because I thought that I didn't want people to focus on my gender. It really, really bothered me, because I didn't want people to judge me differently. I wanted to be judged on the quality of my work, full stop. I don't know how many women I've talked to who have said, "How come no one told me about X, Y or Z?" And you're like, because women don't talk about this stuff. And you know what? They need to. They need to talk about it. You know, so when I found out the corporation would help you with shipping breast milk if you're on a shoot — I was literally in Vietnam on assignment chasing Donald Trump, who was meeting with Kim Jong Un, and carting a breast pump around the world and figuring out how to get my breast milk back to my baby. Those are things that moms just do and women don't talk about, and I personally chose to start talking about it more because it's just really hard to figure out. But if we just say, "Oh yeah, I pulled it off," that's a lie. It was really hard. It's hard for everyone, and we should recognize that.   Sponsored by Business Leader members of Women Rule: The Exchange: As inflation rates soar and disruptions to the global supply chain persist, all eyes are on the nation's economic recovery. But getting back on track in an inclusive and sustainable way is no easy feat. 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