“That’s only possible here” in the U.S., she says—and only here that a law-school dropout with a liberal arts degree “could go on to lead a top tech company.”
[...]
What Fiorina hadn’t told her audience is that her father, Joseph Tyree Sneed III, who died in 2008, was a law professor at the University of Texas, Stanford, and Cornell, the dean of Duke Law School, a deputy attorney general under President Richard Nixon, and a longtime senior judge on the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Nor does she mention that she worked only briefly in that real estate office before heading off to Italy for a year with her first husband, Todd Bartlem, a Stanford classmate who’s told other reporters that in the years they were together, she had no political opinions and considered Dress for Success her bible. When reached by phone recently, Bartlem said only, “You’re wasting your time, and I don’t want you to waste mine. In the clown car that is the Republican Party, she’s the ultimate clown.” (Click.)
[...]
At HP, Fiorina came to seem constitutionally incapable of asking for help. Small moves that suggested a big ego offended many workers—things like hanging her portrait in the lobby and passing out noisemakers that employees were supposed to use when she took the stage at a company rally.
