Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  He approved a six-night reporting trip to Iceland so I could write a feature story that ran on the cover of the Media & Marketing section. I wrote half a dozen A-heds—the Journal’s term for the quirky middle column that runs daily on the front page. One was about women undergoing surgery to reconstruct their hymens so they appear to be virgins again, a story I’d come across while browsing the ads in the back of Hoy, the Spanish-language newspaper. I took the F train to Queens to meet Esmeralda Vanegas at Hymen RidgeWood Surgery. “It’s the ultimate gift for the man who has everything,” one of her patients told me. (An editor proposed the headline One Night Strand; we went with Virgin Territory.) And I wrote a couple leders—Journal parlance for the serious economic or business story that runs in two columns on the front page.

  I also left a delegation of Brazilian diplomats waiting in the lobby so I could finish an interview. I was on deadline and forgot to order coffee and Danish for a meeting with top editors and a dozen Alibaba executives visiting from Hangzhou. I had about 200,000 rupees worth of expenses piled up that I needed to process. I’d screwed up the conversion and thought this was about US$150, but turned out to be more like US$3,000.

  I killed it at being a bad assistant.

  Bureau chiefs who worked for Bussey used to warn me that I should always check for my wallet when I left his office. I didn’t know what they meant until he offered me a job as a foreign correspondent based in Tokyo. After our talk, I felt like a rock star, the euphoria lasting about four minutes until the practicalities of this position set in. I didn’t speak Japanese. The little I knew about Japan I’d picked up from a couple Murakami novels and a five-day vacation in Tokyo to visit my friend Aika, a man-eating deejay whom I’d backpacked around South America with in college. I could hardly afford to live in New York on my salary, let alone Tokyo.

  But I was cheap. The Journal gave me a salary raise to $40,000 a year, and called it “a suitcase relocation.” I had no family or house full of belongings to relocate. I could pick up in the same red suitcase I’d used when I first moved to New York.

  My mom cried when I told her. “No, no, I’m really happy for you,” she said through sobbing so loud I had to hold the phone away from my ear. “But JAPAN?!”

  A couple of weeks before my big move, Ellen Byron, who covered retail at the Journal, urged me to go out with her on St. Patrick’s Day.

  “C’mon, you’ll meet an Irish guy,” she said.

  She knew that my fling with an Iraq correspondent who called me habibti and had a fiancée in Washington had imploded. I don’t know if I even liked him that much, but I’d been so impressed with his career and his dispatches from war zones that I became infatuated. I confided this to one of my bosses, a page-one editor who shook her head of short gray curls. “Amy,” she said. “You can’t fuck the copy.”

  I agreed to go for one drink, as long as I didn’t have to wear green or talk to anyone wearing a kiss me, i’m irish T-shirt. There in the Pig ’N’ Whistle, the type of generic Times Square pub I would never normally go to, I saw Bobby. He was brooding against the bar, a trio of blondes forming a half circle around him. He wore a khaki trench coat and had the gentlest hazel eyes framed by sad, expressive lines. With a head of thick black hair, he stood a good foot taller than the blondes. He drank a freshly poured pint of Guinness, licking his upper lip to remove the frothy white mustache that formed after each sip.

  I tugged at Ellen’s arm, subtly pointed his way, and said, “See that guy right there? He’s my new Irish boyfriend.” He was a friend of a friend, Ellen said and introduced us. Bobby told me he was from a town called Trim, “about forty-five minutes outside Dublin.”

  “Isn’t the whole country forty-five minutes outside Dublin?” God, I was awful at this.

  But he seemed amused. We all left the bar to see a U2 cover band called Unforgettable Fire. Bobby bet me five dollars that the final song would be “Where the Streets Have No Name.” I agreed, not knowing that he’d already looked up the set list.

  When the concert ended and everyone spilled out onto the sidewalk, I handed Bobby a five-dollar bill. He wrapped my navy peacoat around my shoulders and flagged me a taxi. He was drunk and his upper lip quivered. We hugged goodbye. I’d just met him, yet I had the strangest feeling of my feet elevating off the sidewalk. Or maybe it was the sidewalk that had sunk beneath us. Either way, I looked up at him, disoriented, feeling punched in the gut, that place where the heart is.

  “Chozick, Bussey,” the voice said before I could say hello. He always ran the words together into one Slavic-Norman surname. Chozickbussey. “How’d you like to go to Iowa to cover Hillary Clinton?”

  It was 2007 and Rupert Murdoch had just paid $5 billion for the Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones. Management, unsure what the takeover would mean for the paper’s political coverage, needed to install a loyal Journal lifer as Washington bureau chief. And there was no one more loyal than Bussey. Within days he’d left the Journal’s Hong Kong bureau overlooking Victoria Harbour, to move to a dreary office building off K Street. There were no niceties with Bussey. No explanation of what the job would entail or what I’d be paid. (The same salary I’d made when I left Japan, $43,000 a year.)

  I’d only moved back to New York from Tokyo a couple of weeks earlier. A squishy brown Kapibara-san charm, a plush version of the world’s largest rodent, still hung from my cell phone—one of my many accessories that seemed appropriate for a twenty-eight-year-old foreign correspondent in Tokyo but that I should’ve retired to a landfill when I got back to the States.

  Bobby and I had done long distance for nearly two years. We’d lose entire days (or nights, depending on who was in which time zone) talking via a scratchy Skype connection. I’d stay in the Journal’s bureau late enough to call and wake him up for work each morning, and he’d do the same when the sun set in New York. I had a Miffy calendar on my desk and would mark off the floppy-bunny-eared days until his next visit to Japan or my next trip to the States.

  I hadn’t intended to do long distance with the Irish guy I’d picked up in a bar on St. Patrick’s Day weeks before my scheduled “suitcase relocation” to Japan. I also had a rule about not dating guys who worked in finance, but Bobby was more math geek than Wall Street wolf. We shared the same gypsy spirit and even when we lay in bed my last night in New York and I confided how terrified I was to move to Tokyo—to leave everything familiar—Bobby only held me tighter, told me that I had to do it and that he’d come visit.

  We fell in love in Japan. Without Bobby, Tokyo was soul-crushingly lonely. With him, we laughed ourselves silly walking through Yoyogi Park. We gawked at the girls in their Bo Peep dresses and the grown men swing dancing, their hair in exaggerated slicked-back pompadours. We practically bankrupted our favorite all-you-can-eat shabu-shabu joint in Shibuya and soaked in Japanese hot springs so long our skin shriveled, Bobby’s cotton yukata hitting knee length on his sinewy six-foot-one frame. “I think we should shack up when you get back to New York,” he said one night.

  On his last visit to Japan, I watched him descend the elevator at Narita airport, in the ratty sweater that he’d had since his University College Dublin days. I pressed my hand against the glass partition trying to touch him and watching him disappear into the foreigners’ immigration line. I turned to walk back to the Narita Express, as I always did, but instead collapsed crying outside the duty-free mall. This led to two police officers asking if I was okay. (“Genki desu ka?”) The Japanese don’t do public displays of emotion, especially not that close to the Louis Vuitton. I had to get back to New York.

  Six weeks later, Bobby moved his meager belongings into the yellow-walled, rent-stabilized East Village apartment that I’d sublet while I was in Japan. The apartment overlooked a courtyard and a Hare Krishna temple with its cloud of patchouli that made our hallway smell like a hippie’s armpit. Randy Jones, the cowboy from the Village People, lived upstairs and transformed the hot tar of the rooftop into an illegal garden with vines of
plump tomatoes climbing up a cinder-block canopy. We were finally nesting.

  Bobby’s office wasn’t far from the Journal’s newsroom. He stood next to me on the sidewalk in lower Manhattan when Bussey’s call came in. It was October but warm. We had planned to walk home after work together, maybe getting dinner in Little Italy on the way, the kind of low-key evening activity that normal couples do all the time but that we’d fantasized about in so many long-distance calls. He saw my face and mouthed “What?” rolling his eyes in anticipation.

  I didn’t have time to explain. Bussey’s tone sounded panicked, like the time he’d tried to stop Blythe and me from going to Vietnam in the middle of the bird flu epidemic. He’d framed the idea—“How’d you like to go to Iowa to cover Hillary Clinton?”—as a question, but there was only one answer.

  “When do I leave?”

  7

  “Scoops of Ideas”

  A zealot cannot be a good cultural anthropologist.

  —Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword

  Des Moines, 2007

  Unlike most campaign reporters who descended on Des Moines each presidential cycle and for all the steak fries and state fairs in between, I’d spent the prior couple of years covering Japan’s consumer culture. I wrote a front-page story about how Westernized diets were causing young Japanese women to have larger breasts (headline: Developing Nation). In 2007, as my competitors were meeting campaign sources at Centro (CHEN-trow), Des Moines’s hottest restaurant (though there wasn’t a lot of competition), I was clubbing in Shinjuku with Ken-san, a Japanese deejay friend who went by the stage name Intelligent Milli Vanilli, a phonetic challenge for the Japanese. I didn’t know who ran John Kerry’s 2004 campaign. I’d never heard of Politico or its Playbook. The name Barack Obama sounded only vaguely familiar. When Bussey asked me to go to Iowa, I thought for sure I would be riding the Hillary Clinton beat all the way to the White House.

  Years later I confessed to one of The Guys that when I got to Iowa, I didn’t know what a caucus was. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “We didn’t know what a caucus was either.”

  I thought it would be a relief to report in English again, but I still didn’t entirely speak the same language as the people I was covering, especially Mark Penn. Penn was Hillary’s trusted pollster who, after her third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, went from being the brains behind the former first lady’s political ascent to the asshole responsible for everything bad about the 2008 campaign. (Poor bastard couldn’t even blame the Russians.)

  Mark had some terrible ideas (like his early reminder before the 2008 campaign that “being human is overrated . . .”), but he always saw Bill’s base of white working-class men as a central part of Hillary’s victory. And he turned out to be correct that most voters didn’t want to elect the “First Mama.”

  On the flight from Des Moines to Manchester after Hillary came in third place behind Obama and John Edwards, Penn pushed his combed-over sweep of coarse brown hair over his sweaty forehead and told us, “We’re in a strong position to move forward.” I whispered to Anne Kornblut, of the Washington Post, who sat in the bucket seat next to me and pounded so hard on her laptop that her tray table vibrated, “Is that really how they talk?” Anne smiled at me, as if I were a yapping lapdog that she wanted to silence. She went back to transcribing Penn’s comments.

  One time in Japan, during an interview with a high-level executive, I asked my interpreter, Ayako-san, to grill him on a question I knew he was evading. She cautioned, “Amy-san, it is extremely rude to ask the same question twice.” I was always inadvertently being rude in Japan, so I told her to go ahead. The executive’s eyes bulged. He leaned in close, his breath smelling of cigarettes and ponzu sauce. “Amy-san, I have already answered that question,” he said in clear but heavily accented English. “My answer is neither yes nor no.”

  I remembered that exchange when I first started covering American politics, and whenever we pressed Hillary and her top aides, I imagined them all morphing into anime versions of themselves, with tiny bodies and round bulbous heads, a floating thought bubble on top: We’re in a strong position to move forward. My answer is neither yes nor no.

  Everything seemed like a story to me in 2008. I wrote a feature about campaign hookups, a topic so baked into the process that no one thought Secret Service guys (motto: “Wheels Up, Rings Off”) ducking into reporter’s hotel rooms was news. I even convinced one of The Guys to talk on the record about hookups.

  When everyone gushed about how nice Iowans were, I caught up with a Des Moines alt-rock band that had gained local fame for venting about the out-of-state media and political elites in a musical number called “Get Outta Our Town (Caucus Lament).” The chorus went, “Get outta our town / Get out of my face / You barged into our home / With your political race.”

  By the time Obama was sworn in in 2009, the Murdoch regime had started to exert its influence at the Wall Street Journal. The new ownership, judging our feature stories as having the “gestation of a llama”—or about 350 days—infused the newsroom with a new metabolism for breaking news. But during the campaign my editors still urged me to look for what they called “scoops of ideas,” the offbeat feature stories that nobody else covered. I didn’t realize how pretentious this sounded until I tried to explain the idea to a Politico reporter who could barely look away from his BlackBerry for the twenty seconds it took to reach into the innards of the campaign bus and pull out our luggage for the night.

  “Did you even file anything today?” he asked me as he fished out his roller bag.

  “No. My editors don’t really want daily stories,” I explained. My inner voice nudged me, Don’t say “scoops of ideas,” but I didn’t listen. “They want ‘scoops of ideas,’ you know, like rather than writing ‘this happened today’ or getting something from the campaign that’s inevitably going to get out anyway, finding a totally different angle that no one else thought of . . .”

  “Uh-huh, you go ahead with your ‘scoops of ideas,’ and I’ll be over here breaking news,” he said.

  What I didn’t tell him was that “scoops of ideas” were my only option. I hadn’t yet developed the killer instinct to compete for news, and my editors didn’t seem to care when the Times’ Pat Healy or Politico’s Ben Smith scooped me. Not that I could’ve competed. I hardly had any sources. Unlike my competitors, most of whom had come up covering New York politics or Congress, no one had heard of my byline or me.

  Nor did Bussey’s installing me on the Hillary beat sit well with some of the paper’s more seasoned political reporters. By the time I’d switched to the Obama bus in the spring, my counterpart on the McCain campaign staged an intervention. She pulled me aside outside the Journal’s workspace at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. We’d previously teamed up on covering a debate during which she reamed me out for not grasping the nuances between Obama’s and Hillary’s health-care proposals. (“Her plan is a mandate. Repeat slowly after me, MAN-date.”) We’d been paired up again, this time to write the front-page story about Hillary’s speech that night in which she would ask her delegates to unite behind Obama. Like Hillary, my coauthor felt the need to extend a strained show of unity to a less experienced colleague.

  “Look, I wanted to say I’m sorry. I know I’ve been really mean to you,” she said, blinking rapidly behind the foggy lenses of her glasses as we stood in the August heat against a chain-link fence adjacent to the Pepsi Center’s parking lot. “It’s just that I really don’t think you’re qualified to be doing this job.”

  The only person on the Hillary campaign I really got to know was Jamie, the dutiful press wrangler who remained catatonically upbeat even after four hours on a bus with reporters asking her nonstop questions about when we’d get lunch and whether we’d get our Marriott points and “Jamie, can you pass the granola bars back here? Not those, the peanut butter ones . . .” and “Jamie, I think I left my power cord in Sioux City . . .” and “Jamie, how long ’til
we get there?” She was so smiley and obedient that behind her back The Guys called her the Golden Retriever.

  Jamie led us into my first Hillary town hall, held in the Shenandoah fire station. Tom Petty’s “American Girl” blasted from the speakers. I soaked up the Americana. There were homemade pies set up on folding tables against corrugated metal walls and red fire trucks and old men in patch-covered garrison caps. Their wives wore Christmas sweaters with puffy-paint Rudolphs and tiny flickering Christmas lights. Hillary appeared at the front of the room, and before she even said anything, I stood up from my seat and clapped. That’s when I felt Jason George of the Chicago Tribune tugging at the right side of my parka.

  “Dude! Dude!” I’d just met Jason that day, but he had the concerned expression of an old friend saving me from swallowing a handful of sedatives. “What the hell are you doing? You can’t do that.”

  I looked at the rest of the press, all staring stone-faced at their laptops, too focused on their screens to notice my faux pas. I quickly sat back down in my chair.

  8

  “Taking Back America”

  Iowa, 2007

  Writing for the Wall Street Journal with the nation on the cusp of the 2008 financial crisis came with some built-in advantages. Although I still dressed like a Japanese teenager—meaning I wore everything in my closet all at once, jeans under dresses, under blazers, over cardigans until I was one chubby gaijin layer—Hillary, and those on her campaign staff, assumed I was policy minded and serious. Even other reporters would frequently turn to me to ask what Hillary meant after she’d shout at rallies “Mortgage-backed securities!” and “Sub-prime lending!” All of this despite the fact that I couldn’t tell you what equity derivatives were. “No one knows what derivatives are, that’s the whole point,” the Journal’s finance editor once assured me.