Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  Hillary squeezed him back with a look not of adoration but more like that of a mother trying to control a problem child. Bill glimpsed the press piled up, like coiled springs waiting to pounce. Seeing me scrunched in the bottom front, he said, “Oh, hi, Amy.” (Unlike Hillary, who had a gift for looking straight through me as if I were a piece of furniture, Bill always said hello.)

  Asked about the significance of the evening, he said, “To finish here tonight I felt was important because that is where the country began.”

  Then Bill Clinton did what he always did. He made the biggest night in Hillary’s life about himself. “It was interesting. You know, I sit on the board of the National Constitution Center . . .”

  At that point, Hillary thrust her entire body toward the cockpit, the opposite direction from our scrum, dragging Bill, whose arm was still affixed tightly over her shoulder, With Her.

  “Did he just say he was on the board of the National Constitution Center?” a wire reporter, to my right, asked.

  “Yes, yes, he did,” I said.

  “Classic.”

  Only a handful of Travelers (the “tight pool” in Trailese), including the Wires, a print reporter from one local and one national newspaper, and a rotating TV crew that shared its footage with the rest of the pack, could fit inside the elementary school’s auditorium to watch Hillary vote the next morning. I’d spent the past week pleading with The Guys to let me be in the pool on Election Day. In 2008, by a stroke of dumb luck, I’d wound up in the pool in Chicago. I still have my notes: “7:36 a.m., Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side. Obama votes, Sasha and Malia with him.”

  That night, I’d waited outside the Hilton as Obama and his family and closest aides watched the returns come in. I remember the corrugated metal arm of a loading dock pulling closed over an armored SUV and, like some magic trick, opening again seconds later with the country’s first black president-elect inside. From there we rode in the motorcade where 240,000 people waited in Grant Park.

  “You have to let me. The Times is the local New York newspaper. The hometown paper always gets to be in the pool,” I begged one of The Guys, a slick newcomer and hired gun to Hillaryland, whom we thought of as the poor man’s Ben Affleck because he could’ve had Hollywood good looks if he didn’t spend most of his time like an overly made-up windup doll dispensing legalese about Hillary’s emails on cable news. Hired Gun Guy, who’d come up in New York politics, pointed out all the times he’d tried to get the Times to cover some small-ball press conference only to have us push back with “We are a global news organization, not some local paper.”

  But my request worked its way up the ladder at the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters and, figuring I couldn’t do too much damage at that point, they agreed.

  You’d think that after weaseling my way into a spot as the local pooler, I would’ve used the opportunity for some grand journalistic purpose. Instead, as the press van took us from the Ritz to the elementary school in Chappaqua, where Hillary would cast her vote, I stared out the windows entering a numb, almost meditative state.

  To my right, a BMW pulled out from behind black iron gates that swung open to reveal a long driveway that led to a limestone mansion. To my left, the sun came up over the Hudson and painted the sky with pastel peaches and sherbet oranges against the fall leaves.

  In the reflection, I saw dark circles under my eyes and flashed back to a sixth-grade slumber party. We’d been upstairs at my friend Heather’s house playing Jenga in a carpeted den when a prissy girl from a private school I’d just met asked me if my dad was a pilot.

  “I know another girl who has those black circles under her eyes and her dad is a pilot,” she said, as if a parent’s sleeplessness could be passed down genetically.

  Growing up in south Texas, I can’t say I ever envied the people who grew up in places like Chappaqua and Rye and Scarsdale, but that’s only because I didn’t know this Platonic ideal of suburbia existed until my life became intertwined with Hillary’s. I’d never given Westchester much thought until that morning when I realized my early ideas about what adulthood should be had been crafted around the problems I imagined the people who lived here had. Problems rooted in stock prices and boredom and private-school entrance exams, ripped from the pages of my rumpled copy of Revolutionary Road—and not the batshit redneck things that happened in my 1970s-era subdivision in San Antonio. It occurred to me that of all the people in black churches and union halls and high school gyms and factory floors all over the country whom I’d talked to and who told Hillary their problems, it was the lucky bastards here, behind the secure gates and neat hedges of Westchester County, who got to pick our presidents.

  The Travelers hoisted ourselves up onto the wooden stage of the elementary school, resting our heads on each other’s shoulders. On the cinder-block wall, a glittery handmade sign thanked the school’s janitorial staff: we sparkle because of adelino, alfredo, henry, manuel and mario.

  All the Hillary faithful showed up. The ones who couldn’t fit inside pressed their bodies and their Patagonia fleeces against metal barricades. They held we believe in you and hillary for chappaqua signs. There were no “Lock her up!” chants in Chappaqua.

  Voters lingered in the auditorium, overcrowding the room and forcing security to form a human walkway around Hillary when she arrived as if she were a heavyweight champion entering an arena. That’s when everyone exploded, forming a mosh pit of positivity around her. Fathers hoisted up little girls on their shoulders, including one in a pink puffer coat who was entirely too old for a piggyback ride.

  Hillary, looking rested even though she couldn’t have slept much longer than we did and no longer wearing the thick glasses she’d had on when she greeted supporters at the White Plains airport at the 4:00 a.m. tarmac meet and greet, slumped over to fill out the New York ballot. She extended an arm and gave a wristy wave.

  “It is the most humbling feeling,” she told us outside the polling station, a tree so red it looked lit on fire behind her. “So many people are counting on the outcome of this election, what it means for our country.”

  I asked Hillary if she’d been thinking about her mother, Dorothy Rodham, born into poverty and neglect on the day Congress granted women the right to vote.

  “Oh, I did,” Hillary said, squinting in the bright Election Day sun.

  2

  Jill Wants to See You

  What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject’s blind self-absorption and the journalist’s skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject’s account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.

  —Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer

  New York City, July 2013

  I reclined on the exam table. My heels rested in the cold metal stirrups when Dr. Rosenbaum asked me (again) about children. This should have been the start of a heartfelt discussion about motherhood and how to start tracking my menstruation cycle, but all I could think about was Hillary and the election cycle. I did the math in my head. It was 2013. I was thirty-four. Three years until Election Day.

  I peered over the tent my medical gown had formed as it tugged tight around my bent knees. The paper crinkled beneath me as I wiggled upright.

  “So, how much would it cost to freeze my eggs until after the election?” I asked.

  Four months earlier, I’d come back to my cubicle at the Times to find a sticky note affixed to my desktop. “Jill came by. Wants to see you,” it read.

  My stomach sank. The air was sticky and Midtown had started to empty out by noon ahead of the Fourth of July weekend. I’d been at Bryant Park eating a salad chopped so thoroughly it might as well have been pureed.

  I was wearing a pair of torn Levi’s at least a decade old with scraggy seams and holes so wide my knees jutted out. When you reach a certain stature at the Times, you can dress like the Unabomber, but I was a media reporter who’d been at the paper less than two years. I c
ouldn’t meet with the boss in those jeans. I sprinted through Times Square, past the throngs of tourists and Elmo characters, to the Gap to buy a pair of white pants. They were high-waisted and fell a couple of inches too short around my ankles, but they were on sale, and I could keep the tags on and return them at the end of the day.

  I peeked my head in the corner office. Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the New York Times, sat on a love seat in front of a wall of windows looking out on Forty-First Street. Her bangs flopped on her forehead and the afternoon light formed a sort of halo around her petite frame.

  For me, Jill had been like some very intimidating guardian angel of journalism. Eighteen months earlier, she’d plucked me out of relative obscurity as a features writer at the Wall Street Journal to cover media companies at the Times. Now Jill told me she remembered reading my Hillary stories in the Journal, where I’d covered her doomed 2008 primary campaign before switching over to cover Barack Obama.

  2008 seemed like another life. I was twenty-eight and unmarried then, still trying on various personalities to see what fit. I’d already tried Poet, hooking up with men I’d meet at open-mic nights. And Magazine Writer, hopping between assistant jobs hoping that organizing the fashion closet at Mademoiselle would somehow lead to a staff writer position at the New Yorker. More recently, I’d tried Foreign Correspondent in Tokyo. This included a hot-pink cell phone and regularly spending nights in a jasmine-scented capsule at a spa in Shibuya. In 2007, I experienced the culture shock of going straight from Japan to Iowa to cover the presidential election for the Wall Street Journal. Four years later, Jill brought me to the New York Times.

  I adored the Times more than I ever thought it possible to love an employer. Worshipped the place entirely out of proportion. Each time I’d walk in the headquarters, usually stopping to talk to David Carr, the media columnist who was almost perpetually outside smoking, I felt a surge of gratitude mixed with suspicion that someone would figure out that I didn’t belong there.

  David had survived Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and his gaunt frame, gravelly voice, and spindly neck cut a frightening figure for the people he covered. But to me, he resembled a lovable tortoise in a black overcoat, feet up, extending his nape over his cubicle wall, or slurping up a bowl of ramen at his favorite Japanese joint on Ninth Avenue. He may have had to bolt out of the newsroom to meet Ethan Hawke for lunch on the rooftop of the Soho House, but he never lost a mix of folksy Minnesota nice and edginess that reminded me of the people I grew up with in Texas—salt of the earth and sweet as pie until you cross us. He’d wrestled with addiction and mostly worked at alt-weeklies before he landed at the Times. He liked that I was from south Texas and that in college I’d worked at a snow cone stand and flipped tortillas at a Tex-Mex restaurant.

  One night, David and I were locked in a conference room eating the last of the stale donut holes he’d picked up that morning and trying to chase down a tip about an unscrupulous consortium of New Jersey Democrats and businessmen trying to buy the Philadelphia Inquirer. We hammered the publisher and CEO on speakerphone until I finally got him to break down and admit to meddling in the news coverage. David and I silently high-fived each other. After that, David called me the Polar Bear because, he said, “you look sweet and cuddly, but really you’re a fucking killer.”

  In my first years at the Times, I spent weeks in London covering the phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids. And I got to tour the Paramount lot in Los Angeles with Sumner Redstone and a woman in six-inch Lucite stilettos with ample silicone breasts, who his corporate PR team told me was the pervy billionaire’s “home health aide.” But I missed politics and more specifically, I missed covering Hillary.

  On the side, I kept a hand in Clinton coverage during the State Department years. In 2011, I got the first-ever official interview with Chelsea, which doesn’t seem like much of a feat now but in those days she told a nine-year-old “kid reporter” with Scholastic News that she didn’t talk to reporters, “even though I think you’re cute.” The following year, I joined Bill, Chelsea, and a chartered Sun Country jet full of donors on a Clinton Foundation trip to several African nations. It was late one night at the hotel bar in Johannesburg when Bill told me his daughter is “a very unusual person.”

  That she was. A couple of nights later, over a South African chardonnay at the Serena Hotel in Kampala, I suggested to Chelsea that we check out the market in the morning. “It’s supposed to be the biggest market in East Africa,” I said. “Actually, in terms of square footage, Nairobi would dispute that,” Chelsea replied.

  Jill had tattoos of a New York subway token and the Old English T for the Times. She was a stone-hard badass who cut her teeth covering politics and had known Hillary since she was a lawyer at the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas. Jill had been among the post–civil rights movement wave of Harvard-educated New Yorkers drawn to the South. She had more history with the Clintons than most journalists and more foresight than anyone about what Hillary would do next.

  “It’s obvious she’s going to run again,” Jill said to me in her unhurried way. “We need you to cover her full time.”

  I said yes before she even finished speaking. Hillary and Jill, two women at the vanguard and me in the middle.

  “I would love that,” I said. “Ever since ’08 that’s been my dream job. I’m so honored you thought of me for this. Thank you so, so much.” And then I asked, “When would I start?” thinking Jill would suggest the fall or maybe early next year or after the midterm elections.

  She looked at me instead as if I were a small child. “Immediately,” she said.

  It was 649 days before Hillary would announce she was running for president again, 1,226 days before she would lose to Donald Trump.

  It took years for me to understand the significance of Jill’s decision and my own naïveté about what I was stepping into. At first, I embraced my new beat with unfettered enthusiasm; I would be covering the FWP for the paper of record. I considered several of The Guys, especially the originals who’d been with the Clintons for years, friends. I knew about their hookups. I knew which reporters they liked and which ones they hated. I’d met their dogs, rescue mutts. We’d banter about the Times staff, and I’d pass on my palace intrigue in exchange for theirs. They’d complain that Chelsea had become a real pain in the ass (“raised by wolves,” was how one of them put it), and I’d commiserate with them about colleagues. I even invited two of The Guys to my wedding.

  The first of The Guys I called to tell about my promotion to the politics team, I’d known since we met on a frozen tarmac in Elkader, Iowa, in 2007. We’d bonded over a shared love of Jason Isbell and our self-proclaimed outsider status. Neither of us lived in Washington or had any desire to. Of all The Guys, Outsider Guy was the one who I thought transcended the source-reporter relationship, and over the next few years he would become the cruelest, the one whose name I most feared seeing in my inbox. I would eventually create a special dickhead file for his emails. I’m certain that I let him down, too, and that my emails likely wound up in a snaky bitch who pretended to be my friend file.

  “How cool is that? We’ll get to work together all the time,” I said.

  The line went silent. Outsider Guy’s demeanor was as icy as that tarmac had been, and in an instant I knew that we’d never go back to being friends. I thought I heard his pit bull mix growling in the background. The rest of The Guys’ reactions continued like that, ranging from stunned (“Uh, okay. You know she’s a private citizen, right?”), to aggressive (“Just know you’re gonna have a target on your back.”), to personal (“You don’t get it, do you? Jill hates Hillary.”).

  The Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, wrote that the paper’s “treatment of Mrs. Clinton as an undeclared, free-agent front runner helps her.” Hillary didn’t see it that way. The Guys let me know that their hostility came directly from Hillary. She was outraged. She’d hoped to ride the years between the State Department and her next campaign
outside the media’s glare.

  The Times’ decision to put me on the beat so early fundamentally changed how Hillary’s fledgling campaign was covered. Pretty soon, a super PAC called Ready for Hillary gained traction to support her 2016 run. The group became, as one source said, “a make-work program” for old Clinton hands angling to get back in the game. Other news outlets soon announced their own Hillary beat reporters, mostly women: Brianna Keilar (CNN), Maggie Haberman (Politico), Ruby Cramer (BuzzFeed), Liz Kreutz (ABC), Monica Alba (NBC), etc. The Hillary press corps had started to take shape three years before the election.

  Hillary had a 70 percent approval rating then and hoped to spend her days quietly laying the groundwork for 2016 and her evenings basking in adoration at Manhattan charity galas where she could reconnect with donors. (“Okay, I’m rested!” she’d told a friend when she called before 7:00 a.m. the day after she left the State Department.)

  In this period, she’d be feted for saving the whales, combating malaria, working to eradicate adult illiteracy, supporting the Jews, being a Methodist, cracking down on elephant poaching, speaking out against female genital mutilation, rebuilding lower Manhattan after September 11, and popularizing pantsuits.

  But it wasn’t just that Hillary didn’t want media scrutiny. It was something specific to the Times. Something larger than me. Bill and Hillary both believed that the paper was out to get them. That may sound irrational to people who think, The liberal New York Times, out to get Hillary? But they had their reasons.

  Hillary didn’t see me as I was—an admirer in a Rent the Runway dress chasing this luminous figure around Manhattan and hoping to prove myself on the biggest opportunity of my career. To her, I was simply the latest pawn in the decades-long war that was the NYT vs. HRC.