Art & Creativity Quote by Adam Clymer

There is a particular, newsroom-cool way this sentence stages ambition: it opens as career logistics and quietly pivots into a hunt. Clymer’s “came back to Washington” signals the gravitational pull of the capital for a certain class of journalist, where proximity isn’t just geography but access, tempo, and status. Naming “The Times” functions as institutional credentialing; it tells you he’s not dabbling, he’s arriving with an imprimatur that confers legitimacy and, just as importantly, leverage.

The real tell is “I was looking for a book subject.” That confession reframes the reporter not as a neutral observer but as an author assembling a narrative asset. In Washington, people aren’t only public servants or lawmakers; they’re also raw material for reputations, careers, and publishing contracts. Clymer puts that transactional reality on the table without apology, which is its own kind of candor.

Then he lands on Ted Kennedy, introduced not with ideology or policy but with “two reasons” - a deliberately withheld payoff that mimics the structure of a pitch meeting. It’s a suspense device, but also a subtle admission that biography begins as selection pressure: why this person, why now, what makes him “stand out” amid a crowded field of power? In 1991, Kennedy is both brand and burden - the liberal lion with a long shadow of scandal, influence tethered to myth. Clymer’s sentence telegraphs a journalist’s instinct for a figure who is simultaneously consequential and narratively overdetermined: the kind of subject where access, legacy, and controversy are in constant negotiation.