THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Esther Newberg

“I stood up for myself in part because my mother was so strong.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, July 2025

JW:  Would you please give us your full name and when and where you were born?

EN:  Esther Newberg, Middletown, Connecticut, December 25, 1941.

JW:  Tell us a little about your childhood, your ethnicity, siblings, your parents.

EN:  I have one sister who is nine years older. She’s still alive, plays bridge four times a day. She’s very healthy and very active. My mother was a force in Democratic politics in Connecticut. She ran the local Democratic headquarters and party. My father had an insurance and real estate agency. And one of your questions was, when was I liberated? I think in eighth grade. My mother was a force of nature. My father let her be as active in politics as she wanted to be. There was no asking, she just did it. So she was liberated way before her time.

JW:  When did you get interested in the women’s movement?

EN:  I would say when I worked for Bella Abzug in the 70s, even though I had been in Washington from 1963 until 70. But working for Bella, of course, you had to be interested in women’s issues. Also, I had an abortion when I was in my 20s. And while it wasn’t legal, it was in Puerto Rico. The person doing it was a doctor. So I didn’t have a back alley horrible experience. It just wasn’t legal even there.

JW:  So how did you get connected with this doctor?

EN:  I went with my best friend. We stayed at a hotel. We’re sitting at the bar and two guys come and pick us up and start to talk to us and “what are you doing here?” And because I’ve always spoken my mind, I said, “I’m here to have an abortion.” He said, “Well, it’s not legal in Puerto Rico.” I said, “Don’t be ridiculous. My uncle, who was a doctor, told me that it was.” We found out that it wasn’t. And this guy recommended we go to a clinic he knew.

The next day, we went to the clinic, walked in, and the guy behind the desk said, absolutely not. No Americans. And we go out into the parking lot and there’s a guy in a taxi with a young girl, maybe eight years old, with him, his daughter. And he said, “Do you need an abortion?” And I said, “I do.” He drove us 20 minutes out of town to some little suburb kind of place, outside of San Juan. And I walked up the steps to the second floor of a building and inside with a doctor who had a degree on the wall that said University of Texas at something or other.

He said, “If you’re more than three months pregnant, I won’t do it.” I said, “I’m almost that.” He said, “Well, let me see.” And he said, “I’ll do it.” He gave me a spinal. Could have paralyzed me if he was a quack, but he wasn’t. Then I started to bleed a little bit. We go back to the hotel. I called my uncle, the doctor, who’s a miserable son of a bitch who could have done it but didn’t. And he said, get back to Washington and go to the hospital, and they’ll give you a D and C. So I bled all the way back to Washington, and that’s my abortion story.

JW:  Did you go to this person in Puerto Rico by yourself? You said you were with a friend.

EN:  I was with my roommate and best friend. And it cost $700, and she had loaned me $500 of it. When I got back to Washington, the guy who had impregnated me was contacted by a couple of friends of mine, and they said, you know, you did this. You need to pay for it. We lived in the same big apartment building, he came down to my apartment, knocked on the door and threw $700 at me, literally.

JW:  What year was this? Do you remember?

EN:  Yes, it was 1964. I was working at the Democratic National Committee, and I lied to them and said that I had to go to Boston for a special procedure. I didn’t want my parents to know in case they called the office. And I think I was going to be okay, but maybe I wasn’t.

JW:  You were brave.

EN:  Stupid. I was stupid.

JW:  Well, I don’t know. You may have saved your life that way, but that’s an amazing story. So what did you do with the DNC? You were in college at the time?

EN:  No, I just graduated. I was a nothing. Little assistant kind of thing.

JW:  How did you get connected to Bella Abzug?

EN:  That was many years later. I had become very active in New York politics. And I was introduced to her by a woman who’s still alive and actually has her own radio show. She’s 94. Ronnie Eldridge. And Ronnie was married to Jimmy Breslin. Not then, but a second marriage. And she was a friend of Bella’s. And so Bella didn’t want to take the person who had run her campaign to Washington because he was kind of an overweight, unattractive guy, and she thought it was giving out the wrong signal.

It was not nice of her, but I didn’t find that out until afterwards. I was her administrative assistant, and I helped her hire the staff. And she was very smart. She said, “I want a staff that can attach things that I care about onto bills the way Southern senators do it.”

JW:  So you said you then had to be interested in the women’s movement. Well, tell me what you meant by that.

EN:  Bella was all about ending the war and the women’s movement.

JW:  Right.

EN:  Everything that was involved in the women’s movement, she was involved as one of the most active people.

JW:  And were you involved then in any of her issues?

EN:  I was in the office, and we dealt with all the issues so, yes.  The concept of equal pay we worked hard on.

JW:  What can you tell us about Bella? Some memorable experience you had?

EN:  I was telling Clara Bingham that all my experiences that I remember with Bella are negative, which is not fair to Bella, because she was right on every issue. And she was attacked. They said she wore her hat on the floor. No, she did not. She wanted desperately to get everything done, and she couldn’t get it done because there weren’t enough women in Congress to help her. Or liberated men. But she had an explosive temper if things didn’t go her way. And then she was always sorry.

JW:  And what did you do after that? What did you do after working for her?

EN:  Before Bella, I worked for Abe Ribicoff in the Senate office, for Robert Kennedy, in his Senate office and then in the Kennedy campaign. And then I ran New England for Mo Udall’s presidential campaign, and in between was Bella. And then I came back to New York in the early 70s and was executive director of the Democratic Party for three years. And then the Udall campaign.

He was the biggest feminist of all, Morris K. Udall. Every person that mattered on his staff was a woman. He came to Middletown, Connecticut, where my mother, I told you, was the political boss. And we [were] in a limo, and he was going to spend the morning in Connecticut because the Connecticut primary was the next week. And we pull up and my mother had managed to get a lot of people to the downtown part of Middletown. And we go up on the stage, and he gets up and he says, “I thought I owed Middletown a lot because of (whatever he called me, and he said my name), but then I met the mother. I was not getting the full treatment.”

So then we get back into the limo. He had Secret Service then. As we were driving away because [it] was down to Carter and Udall at the end of that campaign in 76 on the Democratic side. We get into the limousine, and he looked at me and he said, “Don’t get used to this.” He came out against the Trident submarine in Groton, Connecticut, where they’re built, the day before the Connecticut primary, which is why he lost that primary. But he believed what he believed, and he was a great man. Then went on to write a book of humor. When I became a literary agent. It was one of the first books that I did.

JW:  And are you still doing that?

EN:  Yes. My 50th year in the business will be October 8th. I did Geraldine Ferrara’s book when she ran for vice president. I represent Maureen Dowd. Caroline Kennedy, who did four books. Ellen Goodman, who won the Pulitzer for her column in the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. Patricia Cornwell, the novelist. Lots of women and lots of men. More men because I’m a huge sports fan and a lot of books I’ve done over the years have been sports related.

JW:  I see. Well, tell me, what can you tell me about Geraldine Ferraro during that time?

EN:  I didn’t think she was bright. I think she was lucky. She was sort of the Sarah Palin of our side. She wasn’t that dumb. She was no Bella Abzug or Ella Grasso. My mother ran Ella Grasso’s campaign for governor in Connecticut. That was the first woman governor elected in her own right.

JW:  Not being a spouse of somebody who died.

EN:  Correct. And she was brilliant, but Gerry Ferraro was not that.

JW:  Who are you representing now?

EN:  I represent Tom Friedman, Tom Hanks, Henry Winkler just wrote a memoir. I have a huge client list. I’ve been doing it for a very, very, very long time.

JW:  Why don’t you tell us what you think those years may be with Bella and concentrate on women and women, equal pay or whatever. How did that affect your later life?

EN:  Well, I always wanted it. And I stood up for myself in part because my mother was so strong.

JW:  Right.

EN:  She did it all without a college education. Her father wouldn’t let her take a scholarship to college. He made her go to work. I always felt that and because of the abortion, I worked hard to get people to understand that it was a right that we needed to have. But the equal pay thing, we’re still not there. In my company, at least the women in my division are paid certainly as well, if not better, because we’ve been doing it longer and we have better client lists. So in some professions we’ve achieved that, but not in all, obviously, and not in some of the more aggressive Republican companies.

JW:  What would you like to say in closing about all your experience and what it all meant to you?

EN:  I was very lucky because I worked with some of the great figures of politics, and now I get to read a book first before anyone else sees any part of it, and to sell it. And some of those books are incredibly influential, obviously. It’s been a wild ride.

JW:  Anything else you’d like to add?

EN:  My best friend from college is Leslie Stahl. She did a book for me, too. Hopefully she gets to stay at 60 Minutes and that there is a 60 Minutes. But she’s a great example. She pushed very hard to get equal pay over the years, and she achieved it. It’s sad that we have to be 83 and finally getting equal pay. I have a great niece who’s recently married. She just turned 30, and she’s working [for] a public interest law firm, and she probably will serve on the Supreme Court next year, Princeton and Harvard and, and very, very, very smart. When her mother got married, stopped working, had five kids. My sister never really worked. She just raised kids. We were all always involved in politics, however. I like being a model for these kids because there’s a work ethic that doesn’t exist with a lot of them now.

JW:  Well, you’ve done an amazing variety of things and obviously have been incredibly successful.

EN:  It wasn’t really different jobs. First 12 years of politics and the next 50, books. It’s not like I became a flight attendant or an engineer. I like to tell young people that you don’t have to make up your mind what you want to do, women especially, until you’re 35. And I believe that because that’s what I did. You can do a variety of different things, but at the point where you have to make a living, then you have to concentrate and pick one of the things you worked in.

JW:  Thank you so much.