Betsy McCaughey

Elizabeth Helen McCaughey (/məˈkɔɪ/; born October 20, 1948), formerly known as Betsy McCaughey Ross, is an American politician who was the lieutenant governor of New York from 1995 to 1998. She unsuccessfully sought the Democratic Party nomination for governor after Pataki dropped her from his 1998 ticket, and she ended up on the ballot under the Liberal Party line. In August 2016 the Donald Trump presidential campaign announced that she had joined the campaign as an economic adviser.

McCaughey has been a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and Hudson Institute thinktanks and has written numerous articles and op-eds. She was a member of the boards of directors of medical equipment companies Genta (from 2001 to 2007) and Cantel Medical Corporation, but she resigned in 2009 to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest with her public advocacy against the Affordable Care Act.

McCaughey and her twin brother, William, were born in Pittsburgh to Ramona Peterken, and her husband Albert, a factory janitor. The family moved around the Northeastern United States for six years before it settled down in Westport, Connecticut, where McCaughey's father did maintenance and later engineering work at a nail clipper factory. McCaughey recalled her parents' difficulty in affording medical treatment: "my brother was a serious asthmatic as a child. I remember my parents sitting at the kitchen table wondering if they could afford to take [him] to the hospital."

McCaughey attended public schools in Westport through the 10th grade. After receiving a scholarship, she transferred to a private Massachusetts boarding school, the Mary A. Burnham School, for her last two years of high school, rarely visiting home, then or during her college years.

She received a scholarship to attend Vassar College, where she majored in history. She wrote her senior thesis on Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville, and received her AB in 1970.^{[citation needed]} McCaughey went on to graduate school at Columbia University in New York City, earning her MA in 1972 and her PhD in constitutional history in 1976.^{[citation needed]}

She won Columbia's Bancroft Dissertation Award in American History in 1976 and her dissertation was published by Columbia University Press in 1980, From Loyalist to Founding Father: The Political Odyssey of William Samuel Johnson.

She also contributed a chapter about Johnson to the 1979 book The American Revolution: Changing Perspectives by William M. Fowler and Wallace Coyle.

McCaughey's father died in 1970 at the age of 60. Her mother, an alcoholic, died the next year of liver disease at the age of 42. In 1972, she married Thomas K. McCaughey, a Yale College graduate she had met in college. He was then moving up as an investment banker. The McCaugheys separated in 1992 and divorced in 1994, with McCaughey and her ex-spouse sharing joint custody of their three daughters. In January 1993, she filed an affidavit in her divorce proceeding in which she said she had no annual earnings from employment during most of the 18 years of her marriage to Thomas, and she had never earned more than $20,000 per year except in 1990, when she "sold an idea to Fox television for a windfall once-in-a-lifetime sum of $75,000".