Mandy Grunwald - Biography

Mandy Grunwald (born c. 1958) is an American professional political consultant and media advisor for the Democratic Party.

She is the daughter of the late Henry Grunwald, former editor-in-chief of Time magazine and the sister of the author Lisa Grunwald. She grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and on Martha's Vineyard. She attended the Nightingale-Bamford School in New York, and then graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University.

Upon graduation she worked at the Sawyer-Miller Group in New York. Gaining prominence through her work on the successful 1992 Bill Clinton presidential campaign, in which she was director of advertising, made television appearances defending Bill Clinton, and helped produce The Man From Hope, the biographical film that was the centerpiece of the 1992 Democratic National Convention. The Washington Post subsequently identified her as one of the key members of "Hillaryland", Hillary Rodham Clinton's closest advisors beginning with her First Lady days. Grunwald's position as a White House advisor faded after 1995, when she and others were supplanted by Dick Morris.

Mandy Grunwald subsequently became president of Grunwald Communications in Washington, D.C. She served as media consultant for three successful Senate campaigns for Daniel Patrick Moynihan (presumably 1982, 1988, and 1994) as well as for the Ruth Messinger's losing effort in the 1997 New York City mayoral election. In 1999 she served as a broker across the frosty relations between the retiring Moynihan and Hillary Clinton, who would successfully gain his seat in the 2000 New York senatorial election. In 2004 she worked for the senatorial campaign of Ken Salazar in Colorado and gubernatorial effort of John Lynch in New Hampshire, both of whom won. She then worked for Gifford Miller's poorly-finishing Democratic primary campaign in New York City's 2005 mayoral race.

She was the head of campaign media relations for the 2008 Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign.

In 1997 Grunwald married journalist and future Plame affair figure Matthew Cooper. They separated in late 2007. They have a son, born in 1999.

She is believed to have been the inspiration for the character "Daisy Green" in the roman à clef of the 1992 presidential campaign, Primary Colors, published by "Anonymous" in 1996. Moreover, before Joe Klein was revealed to be the creator, Mandy Grunwald and her novelist sister Lisa Grunwald were among the authorial suspects. In the 1998 film Primary Colors, the character based on her was portrayed by Maura Tierney.