by Amy Chozick
The candidates actually wanted to do interviews with me. I got a forty-five-minute sit-down with Hillary, my longest ever. She predicted the housing crisis, warned that the US could slip into a Japanese-style “malaise” (something I did know about), and criticized NAFTA, the trade deal her husband signed into law in 1993 that would dog her through both of her presidential campaigns.
“There have been some very positive results of trade [but] . . . there is still too much of the benefits of trade and the global capital markets favoring elites and multinational companies in a way that is not spreading prosperity,” she told me and my Journal colleague, the economics writer, Bob Davis. Bob and Hillary knew what derivatives were.
A couple of weeks before the caucuses, the Journal’s politics editor Jake Schlesinger called. “Edwards wants to sit down for an in-depth interview about the economy after his rally today. Can you get to Vinton by two p.m.?” Jake asked.
I hesitated. I’d been in Iowa long enough to know Vinton was in the Cedar Rapids metropolitan area (if you could call 255,000 people a metro area), a two-hour drive from Des Moines on a good day. But on that day, a blizzard had parked over the state making driving conditions perilous for locals and a particular death trap for a transplant New Yorker driving a rented Hyundai Elantra with no snow tires.
“This would be exclusive. He asked specifically for the Journal,” Jake said, in a tone neither pushy nor impolite but that told me I didn’t have a choice.
“Leaving now,” I said, and started to pull on my army-green parka and snow boots.
The Edwards campaign was in crisis mode after the National Enquirer’s John Edwards Love Child Scandal! story broke. We’d all been too polite to follow the story, maybe because Edwards’s wife Elizabeth had cancer or because we all thought ourselves above chasing the Enquirer or both. Still, for Hillary there exists an alternative route in the Rube Goldberg of why she will never become the FWP: The media runs with the Edwards baby-daddy scandal, causing him to drop out before the caucuses, allowing Hillary to pick up enough of his supporters to win Iowa, halting Obama’s momentum before it started, and allowing her to win the nomination and defeat John McCain.
Trucks skidded off the interstate. I could hardly see the road and felt my tires floating on a layer of ice and snow. By the time I arrived in the cafeteria of Vinton High, Edwards was finishing his tirade against the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots. I wouldn’t appreciate Edwards’s “Two Americas” and his populist pitch decrying inequality and global trade until 2016 when Bernie and Trump used an almost identical playbook. Edwards ended up an imperfect messenger, a slick millionaire trial lawyer with a love child. We know, we know, you’re the son of a millworker. But he was ahead of his time.
I found an empty seat next to the New York Times’ Julie Bosman. Julie was the paper’s Edwards beat reporter until, as a Times editor liked to say, “Her horse didn’t just die. He got caught fucking Secretariat.” Edwards concluded his Vinton speech by pointing to our thinly populated press area.
“You see all those reporters in the back?” he said, in a gesture that felt like a game-show host breaking the fourth wall. A scattering of heads turned around. I met eyes with an older white man in denim overalls and a purple-and-gold SEIU button. “They’ll be writing ‘He said, she said,’ while we’re TAKING BACK AMERICA!”
He was even ahead of his time in shaming the elite media.
I approached Edwards backstage as his press secretary had instructed and extended my hand to shake his.
“Hi, Senator, I’m . . .”
Edwards glanced briefly at me and kept walking. “Just a second honey,” he said, flashing a palm at me in a halting motion. “I got an interview with the Wall Street Journal.”
“I am the Wall Street Journal,” I said.
9
Leave Hillary Alone
Washington, DC, 2014
I knew Hillary was running again on a Monday afternoon in early May. She’d sent all The Guys, including Outsider Guy who avoided DC and had to fly cross-country, to attend the meeting, along with her closest aides. These included Cheryl Mills, the classy, elusive lawyer who’d defended the Clintons during impeachment and Benghazi and who knew how to drape a scarf in even the hottest State Department convoys to Senegal; Tina Flournoy, a former union leader and boxing aficionado from Georgia whose combination of tenacity and Southern charm made her uniquely qualified to hold the unenviable role of Bill Clinton’s chief of staff; and Huma Abedin, the elegant waif and tabloid fixture who’d worked for Hillary since she was a nineteen-year-old White House intern and George Washington University student.
Ever since I arrived in Iowa in 2007, I’d marveled at Huma the way women tend to marvel at impossibly thin, fashionable women. She was the only one (including Hillary) who didn’t gain at least ten pounds in 2008. It got so bad that by the Indiana primary, I saw Chelsea swat her mother’s hand away (“Mom!”) from a deep dish of chips and salsa. And I watched, hardly able to keep up in my bulky snow boots, as Huma glided alongside Hillary in stilettos during the Scranton St. Patrick’s Day parade. The press speculated about whether Huma had hooked up with one of The Guys who had a fiancée in New York, our very own soap opera unfolding on the plane. But on one flight toward the end of the primary, Huma introduced the ’08 traveling press to her new boyfriend—a promising young congressman from New York named Anthony Weiner.
It had been just over a year since Hillary had stepped down as secretary of state, and now certain that Carolyn Ryan had inherited the personal vendetta against her family, she had instructed her most trusted loyalists to convene at the New York Times’ Washington bureau and express her concerns about my coverage. Why would Hillary do that if she wasn’t running?
When The Guys emailed us a list of the seven aides who planned to attend the meeting, Carolyn wrote back, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
We all agreed the discussion would be off the record, but it didn’t take long for somebody to tip off the conservative Washington Free Beacon, which soon after published a story with the headline Hillary to New York Times: Back Off. But the Beacon story only mentioned the presence of Original Guy and Huma—who was hard to miss floating through our slovenly newsroom like an exotic bird in a red wool coat. They didn’t know the half of it.
Everyone huddled into the narrow entryway under the bureau’s fluorescent lights. The Guys forced themselves to offer me their usual clipped hello, which always reminded me of Seinfeld opening the door for Newman. “Hello, Amy.”
After some handshakes, Carolyn led everyone down the drab, carpeted stairway to the conference room where The Guys helped themselves to coffee only to find that it had been left over from a previous meeting. The brown liquid was dank and acidic, and the creamer crumpled as it splashed into their Styrofoam cups. We hadn’t planned it that way, but serving stale coffee and day-old Danish to DC’s most powerful people did send an effective message that things probably wouldn’t go their way.
I can’t get into the details. I can only say that they griped about stories I thought were positive, like one about Bill building a charitable legacy in Africa. (They hated the timing.) They complained about stories I thought were neutral, like Hillary working to rebuild bonds with black voters. (Black people never left the Clintons, they said.) They understandably despised a story about a Ukrainian oligarch, Victor Pinchuk, who’d given millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation and had a slew of meetings with State Department officials. (Victor liked the story. He invited me to his annual conference typically held in Yalta, the tsars’ fabled Black Sea resort town. I declined.) But mostly, they hated that the beat existed at all. They said Hillary was a private citizen.
The story that put me on the radar as the Times’ Hillary chronicler and made that proverbial target on my back more like a permanent tattoo arrived in a January 2014 issue of the New York Times Magazine, along with a doughy Hillary moon face floating amid intergalactic dysfunction on its cover. I�
�d meant for my “Planet Hillary” story to serve as a fifty-seven-hundred-word primer about all the people the Clintons had collected over the years and the “organizational meshugas [that] already threatened, once again, to entangle” Hillary as she prepared for 2016. In an accompanying chart, I categorized the Clintons’ minions (and almost all my would-be sources) into competing solar systems. There was “The Inner Circle,” “The 2008 Victims,” “The People Who Do All the Work,” “Loyal Henchmen,” “Frenemies,” “Poseurs,” and so forth. Not surprisingly, almost everyone hated their designated place in the universe.
Doug Band called to complain that he’d been positioned (in the category “The White Boys”) next to the floating head of the irascible wonk and former White House policy adviser Ira Magaziner. “I can’t believe you put me next to that asshole. You know I hate that guy!”
One of the Poseurs yelled at my editor that the placement could’ve cost him his gig as a paid Fox News contributor. Another offered to get Bill Clinton on the phone to tell us that he wasn’t a poseur. To which my editor replied, “That’s exactly what a poseur would do!” A New York executive told me the “Poseur” label had been the “worst thing to ever happen to me.” (He lived a charmed life.) Worse, I’d been somewhat of a puppet in all of this, later learning that all the poor schmucks who ended up designated as Poseurs had at some point pissed off The Guys, who’d accordingly steered me toward tagging them with that label. One of them, a friend and donor, was also the ex-husband of the buxom blonde whom one of The Guys had an affair with on an earlier Foundation trip to Africa.
I’d started to get used to the idea of breaking some eggs to make an omelet, but with the “Planet Hillary” story, I’d dropped the whole damn carton.
Carolyn always had her reporters’ backs. I knew that after the DC meeting, she’d plop down on the sofa in her office next to the Ping-Pong table and tell me to never doubt my coverage. She’d remind me that we should have a combative relationship with the people we cover—and she’d say that I deserved combat pay. But during the meeting, Carolyn didn’t say much. She disarmed the group the same way she disarmed reporters who came into her office unprepared. She took exaggerated sips of Diet Coke and squinted as they spoke, sometimes jutting her neck toward our visitors and then leftward to me giving the impression that she was listening to crazy talk and craved simultaneous translation.
I kept trying to fill the silences. I apologized. I said I’d try to do a better job next time and I’d be more careful moving forward. But that just pissed The Guys off more. The shrinking violet act and all.
They all seemed trapped in a time warp. Whitewater was yesterday, but all the positive stories and endorsements the Times had given Hillary in recent years were worthless relics.
I could’ve tried to defend myself, but I was up against seven much smarter professional Hillary defenders, including Cheryl, a former deputy White House counsel. I didn’t stand a chance. I kept thinking of the scene from Full Metal Jacket when Matthew Modine’s Private Joker says, “Sir, the private believes that any answer he gives will be wrong and the senior drill instructor will only beat him harder if he reverses himself, Sir!”
My train back to New York after the meeting was delayed for hours. I crouched on the floor of Union Station between a Jamba Juice and an Auntie Anne’s pretzel to charge my iPhone and check my messages. The Guys had dumped me. Their email might as well have said, “It’s not you, it’s me.” Or they could’ve used the same line the Colombian waiter I went on a couple of dates with in my twenties did when he texted me, “U R 2 high maintenance.”
From then on, I was to deal directly with Cheryl.
Though she outranked The Guys, this didn’t feel like a reward. My job required me to have some semblance of a relationship with Hillary’s press aides. There wasn’t even a campaign yet, and I’d already failed. As it turned out, my interlude with Cheryl lasted a couple of weeks until she got sick of me, too, and kicked me back to The Guys. Only this time instead of the OG, I was now to deal with his less experienced but more presentable protégé, the brown-loafers wearer.
Months later, when OG presented his Mini-Me to the rest of the political universe, everyone thought of him as the nice one. They’d gush, “Have you met him yet? He is such a nice guy.” And at first, Brown Loafers Guy was a breath of fresh-faced air. He burst with optimism about Hillary’s future and his own. He had OG’s biting wit and a full suite of adorable facial expressions that played well on cable TV. He had a direct line to Hillary (who adored his adorableness) and none of OG’s dark edge, sexist undertones, or tendency toward high drama.
The Guys got help from outside supporters. A ragtag group called the HRC Super Volunteers sent me a warning: “We will be watching, reading, listening, and protesting coded sexism . . .” According to their list, sexist language included “polarizing,” “insincere,” “inevitable,” and “secretive, will do anything to win, represents the past, out of touch . . .”
David Carr always had my back. Like the blunt conscience of the Times, David proved the only person who could really defend me. “HRC’s minions throw brush back pitch at NYT. Look for NYT to lean in and hit one hard up the middle,” he tweeted after news of the DC confrontation leaked.
He’d tell me again and again, it’s not you, it’s them. “You never made a single enemy on the media beat,” he’d say.
Sometimes, when I needed an extra confidence boost, he’d email me one of his David emails. “There is no one else like you,” he wrote. “Doubt yourself as a writer if you need to—it will drive you to new ways of thinking—but don’t doubt that. You are your own damn thing.” Despite writing a weekly column, mentoring Lena Dunham, and helping out on every breaking news story he could get his tarry hands on, David still made time to bestow emails like that (and corresponding spirit animals) on a small army of younger journalists.
Around the same time, The Guys took smug satisfaction in the Times’ abrupt firing of Jill Abramson, a development that had nothing to do with Hillary coverage and that left me, like many young women in the newsroom, floored and sad. David would swing by my cubicle, a scarf wrapped in a Parisian knot around his pencil-thin neck, crumbs from his morning donut stuck in the crevices. He wouldn’t say anything. He’d just make a claw motion with his hand and growl, a reminder that I was the Polar Bear.
But polar bears are also lonely and endangered. I was floating on my own little iceberg, and it was melting fast.
My interactions with Hillary over the course of 2014 continued to be few and far between, usually chance encounters when she’d always pretend to be thrilled to see me.
In the spring, Bobby and I went to the premiere of a documentary film that Chelsea had executive produced about the unlikely friendship between an imam and a rabbi. It wasn’t exactly the red carpet event of the century, and I turned out to be one of the only reporters there.
Halfway through the cocktail party, Hillary walked in and made a beeline for the bar. Chelsea had announced earlier that day that she and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, were expecting their first child. I no longer saw myself in Chelsea. She had grown into her celebrity, with flowing, straight hair and a permanent strawberry glow. Chelsea told Elle magazine that in her early twenties, her curls just naturally subsided, an affront to frizzy-haired women everywhere. I also happened to know her New York hairdresser—and a keratin job when I saw it. Chelsea’s press aide told me they’d studied how Britain’s royal family had handled Princess Kate’s pregnancy to devise the media strategy.
“Congratulations! Such wonderful news. How excited are you to be a grandma?” I said, sidling up to Hillary at the bar. I put my hand on her shoulder and felt the luscious satin of her chartreuse tunic beneath my palm.
Hillary took a sip of pinot grigio and as she swallowed said, “Oh, Amy, it is just the absolute best.”
We walked into the crowd. “Secretary, I’d like you to meet my husband, Bobby,” I said.
Bobby, the oldest son o
f Irish school teachers, is from County Meath, a sweep of fluorescent green farmland on the River Boyne. The Trim Castle, a grand Norman structure used as the backdrop of the movie Braveheart, stands blocks from his family’s redbrick house.
Like many Irish, he has a special place in his heart for the Clintons and their commitment to the peace process. He has hazy childhood memories of the British army shoving their guns into his parents’ Datsun Bluebird when his parents would drive across the border to Belfast. I picked up early on that the best way to get on my mother-in-law’s good side was to declare something Irish superior to its English equivalent. “The brown bread just tastes better in Ireland.” Or, “Why can’t an English breakfast come with black and white pudding?” I learned the Irish words for Christmas sweater, geansaí Nollag.
Bobby had hardly said hello when Hillary interrupted. “Is that an Irish accent I detect?” she said.
They tucked into a corner (out of my earshot) and talked for ten minutes about the Good Friday Agreement, their mutual concern that the crash of the Celtic Tiger could reignite the Troubles. I stood there making small talk with Marc Mezvinsky, watching Hillary and Bobby out of the corner of my eye. They ended up talking for longer than I’d talked to Hillary in months (years?). I wanted to crash, but I didn’t. For all the times Hillary had inadvertently interfered in our relationship, leaving them alone to chat was the least I could do.
