by Amy Chozick
In the taxi back to the East Village, Bobby sank down into the seat and propped his knees against the back of the Crown Vic. He isn’t a talker. I usually blab, and he listens and then inserts wisdom and witticisms. But that night in the taxi, he went on and on about meeting Hillary and their conversation with the elation of relaying the time he’d seen U2 play at Slane Castle. I listened, happy to see him so happy, grateful for the reminder of that side of Hillary.
A couple of months later, at a naturalization ceremony that included immigrants from a hundred countries all waving American flags and mouthing the words to Lee Greenwood, Bobby was sworn in as an American citizen. Right after that, he registered to vote. I would try to see the 2016 election, and Hillary, partly through Bobby’s uncynical immigrant eyes. “For fuck’s sake, she brought peace to Ireland. I don’t care if she’s funny on SNL,” he’d say during the campaign.
By the fall of 2014, I thought we’d turned a corner. Or, at least, I’d learned how to handle the beat without raiding my mom’s dwindling Xanax stash. There were actual events to cover. Hillary did the Harkin Steak Fry in Iowa. She campaigned for midterm Democrats. Hard Choices, her empty brick of a memoir about the State Department, came out. The fledgling Hillary traveling press corps trailed her to every dreary midterm rally, every Barnes & Noble and Costco book signing.
We all went to Little Rock for the tenth anniversary of the opening of the Clinton Presidential Library, which drew the 1992 campaign alumni. (“Hey, Hillary! Begala’s still got his jacket,” Bill yelled, pointing to Paul Begala in a denim Clinton-Gore ’92 jacket embroidered with a thrusting donkey.)
The weekend included an after-party at the mansion of the Clintons’ Little Rock decorator Kaki Hockersmith (known in DC as Tacky Kaki) and featuring Kevin Spacey holding court at an outdoor bar doing his Bill Clinton impersonation. And there was a late night at the Capital Hotel bar in Little Rock, where an inebriated Terry McAuliffe put his arm around me and said, “Amy, can you believe I’m governor?!” No. Gene Sperling, Clinton’s verbose economic adviser, cornered me until after 3:00 a.m. to defend the earned-income tax credit. Sid Blumenthal stewed in a corner nursing a Moscow mule.
Ready for Hillary, the group that called itself a “grassroots super PAC” (as if that weren’t an oxymoron) held a donor confab at the Sheraton in Midtown. James Carville, Paul Begala, and other members of the original Clinton war room held panel discussions on topics like “It’s the Economy Stupid” and “Lessons Learned from 2008.”
They critiqued Hillary’s ’08 campaign, telling reporters that “every six weeks there seemed to be a new slogan, and there was nothing people could wrap their arms around.” Harold Ickes, known in the White House as Bill Clinton’s garbageman for reasons that had nothing to do with waste disposal, briefed donors from a third-floor conference room. He predicted a hard-fought 2016 general-election battle in which Hillary would confront Jeb Bush–Rob Portman, a ticket bolstered by a simple message along the lines of “It’s time for a change.”
But the biggest precampaign schmooze fest was the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in New York in September (on my birthday, to be exact), the Davos-like gathering that matches wealthy donors with worthy causes. Because this would be the last CGI before Hillary became a presidential candidate, the press shop had assigned handlers to escort reporters everywhere, lest we run into a donor who went off message. The theme that year was “Reimagining Impact,” not to be confused with 2013’s “Mobilizing for Impact” or 2012’s “Designing for Impact.” There was a lot of impact happening at CGI.
I wrote a brief blog post about the young press minder (an intern, I later learned) who had followed me into the restroom. When I asked one of The Guys for comment, he sent me a press release about American Standard’s “Flush for Good” campaign to improve sanitation for three million people in the developing world. “Since you’re so interested in the bathrooms and CGI,” he said.
It was worse than the Yorkie. It was worse than anything else I would publish for the next three years.
I’d written the potty-minder post as a brief, breezy CGI scene-setter, not a serious commentary on relations between the Clintons and the media. But that’s not how the wider world saw things. The Washington Post published a column The Clinton Team Is Following Reporters to the Bathroom: Here’s Why That Matters. The Free Beacon called for one of The Guys, ironically the most decent and professional of the cohort, to “stick his big obnoxious head in the toilet and ‘Flush for Good.’” That didn’t help matters. Until then, I hadn’t fully grasped the impact of a Times story in the viral news era. Bathroomgate was discussed on the Today show, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and ad nauseam on Twitter. I declined every interview request. I just wanted it to go away.
By the time Bill stepped off the stage after CGI’s closing plenary session (called “Aiming for the Moon and Beyond” because he spoke via a satellite link to a couple NASA astronauts who appeared, weightless, on board the International Space Station), the only story out of CGI anyone was talking about was the bathroom incident. “Goddammit, we’re trying to save the world and all these people can talk about is the goddamn bathroom,” was how one person summed up Bill’s backstage reaction.
Hillary’s expletive-laced response was worse. She told The Guys she’d held out hope I might still treat her fairly, but she’d given up on me after the bathroom post. “To be very honest, this episode was upsetting to people, not least of which the foundation team,” Brown Loafers said.
The Guys told me the post and a subsequent selfie I’d tweeted with a different press minder had “humiliated” a young intern. I felt awful about the whole thing. I hadn’t identified the intern and didn’t know her name. I had a handwritten apology note, but The Guys (who demanded I apologize) wouldn’t tell me where to send it. I could handle another fight with The Guys, but the last thing I wanted was for some hardworking kid to be inadvertently swept up in my media shit storm.
After that, The Guys and I tried to avoid one another. They’d ask if I was working with any (preferably male) colleagues or researchers and said they would “gladly” talk to them instead. Of all The Guys, Outsider Guy, who a couple years back had fought to get me access and unleashed on Ugandan military officials who wouldn’t allow me (a “cockroach reporter”) into a Clinton Foundation event, had become the most venomous. Maybe because he knew me the best, ever since Iowa and the time we’d shadowed Bill and Chelsea shaking hands and stirring up mayhem in Las Vegas casinos ahead of the 2008 Nevada caucuses, Outsider Guy also knew how to wound me more permanently than the others. The things he said stuck with me as I morphed, in his eyes and occasionally my own, from ally to cockroach.
On a story about Martin Scorsese killing an HBO documentary on Bill Clinton’s life after Chelsea had allegedly requested final cut, Outsider Guy would deal only with Michael Cieply, my coauthor in Hollywood and a grizzled industry veteran. “It’s hard for me to believe you deal with them for a living,” Cieply said, adding that his brief conversation with Outsider Guy had been the nastiest exchange of a career that had included getting yelled at by Harvey Weinstein and several studio executives sniffing coke off conference tables.
I tried to give The Guys a taste of their own medicine.
One night, at a cocktail party in the West Village townhouse of a former White House aide, a pile of Clinton hands, old and new, talked about the recent news that Robert Gibbs would leave his role as Obama’s White House press secretary to be the top corporate flack at McDonald’s.
“You couldn’t pay me enough,” one of The Guys said.
“I’d rather work for big tobacco. Seems more honest,” a White House aide turned Wall Street executive agreed.
I was in a debate with The Guys about a page-one feature set for the weekend paper. I explained that this would be a heartfelt portrait of Hillary’s mother, Dorothy Rodham, and how her childhood struggles would form the emotional core of her daughter’s 2016 campaign.
“Really? There’s n
othing else I should know?” Hired Gun Guy said. “You always find a way to include some kind of dig . . .”
“You’re serious? You think I’m going to take a dig at her dead mother?”
“I don’t know,” he said, lifting his shoulders a couple of inches and pushing his open-palmed hands out in a cartoonish shrug.
“You know,” I said, taking a sip of rosé and cutting him off, “best case scenario, this all ends with a job at McDonald’s.”
10
“Iowa . . . I’m Baaack”
Indianola, September 2014
“Secretary! Can you believe you’re back in Iowa?”
“Hillary! Does this mean you’re running?”
“Can you win here this time?”
Hillary stood in front of a Char-Griller, pretending to flip a steak at the Harkin Steak Fry in Iowa. It was the political event of the year for Democrats, Hillary’s first trip back to the state that had wrecked her 2008 presidential campaign, and the clearest public sign yet that she would run again. (For decades, the Harkin Steak Fry was the mandatory testing ground for would-be Democratic candidates.) I watched as she held the wooden handle of a spatula at a safe distance, as if a garden snake were coiled around the end. Then she gave the photographers a smile so open mouthed and amplified that, looking back on it, I should’ve seen it as a cry for help. The entire Democratic Establishment should’ve seen it. The image screamed all at once, How long do I have to act like I enjoy this shit? and Why the fuck am I back in this state? and Dear God, what am I doing? But what Hillary actually said to the press that afternoon was:
“It’s gurrrrate. It’s fabulous to be back. I love Iowa.”
I looked around the press scrum at the steak fry. We were all scrambling to write almost identical stories, using almost identical quotes and almost identical color (“She smiled in front of hay bales, an American flag and a John Deere tractor.”). The last time I’d been in Iowa with Hillary, I still felt like a foreign correspondent. Now, my journalism had become more like a feeding frenzy than a moveable feast.
I was no longer the kid who didn’t know any better than to stand up and cheer at a town hall. I’d become omnivorous, driven beyond all rationale by byline count and Twitter mentions. I lived in fear of being scooped over even the most insignificant minutia. Politico may have beaten me on the Ready for Hillary fund-raiser at the Standard Hotel in New York. But damn it, I heard the exclusive news that tickets cost $20.16 and that the signature cocktails included an eighteen-dollar gin-and-lime concoction called the Ultimate Ceiling Breaker. We were so starved for tiny morsels of news that I groveled with one of The Guys to use the names of his cats, Uday and Qusay (named after Saddam Hussein’s sons “because they were little terrorists”), in the “Planet Hillary” story. I was starting to see things—even how Hillary flipped a steak—with cynicism, and I feared the coming campaign would engulf what was left of my wide-eyed 2008 self.
At the steak fry, Iowa Hillary—the most belabored of all the versions of Hillary I’d mentally characterized—delivered an unintentionally ominous “Hello, Iowa, I’m baaaaaaaack.” She cracked a joke about Bill’s vegan diet. “It does really feel just like yesterday when I was last here at the Harkin Steak Fry, or as my husband now prefers to call it, the stir-fry,” drawing some giggles from the leery crowd of party faithful.
She then embarked on fifteen minutes of vanilla remarks. “In Washington, there’s too little cooperation and too much conflict . . .” she said, in what, even for Hillary, ranked high in the pantheon of pabulum political talk. This was when Bernie Sanders was still an obscure socialist senator from Vermont, and Hillary’s aides had urged her to take out any references to raising the minimum wage, advising that “this might still be too hot and partisan and might prefer just saying ‘We have a choice whether to move forward . . .’”
Bill sat behind her, his mouth newly flopped open in a way that made people assume he was older and sicker than he actually was. He wore a red-and-white gingham print button-down shirt, a recent birthday present from Hillary. “It kinda makes me feel like a tablecloth at a diner,” he told us.
When Hillary finished, Tom Harkin took the podium and in nine folksy words stroked Bill’s fragile ego and undermined Hillary in a scene that stayed with me for the rest of the campaign. “We saved the best for last, didn’t we, folks?” Harkin said. Chants of “Bill!” echoed over the grassy field.
As both Clintons headed back to their SUV and an accompanying eleven-car motorcade, a handful of young Latino immigrants, whose numbers had swelled since 2008, shouted out to Hillary about whether she agreed with Obama’s mass deportations. Would she deport their families, too? She shoved a thumbs-up their way and said, “Yaaaay!”
Salon called the event The Dumb Iowa Steak Fry: An Omen for the Horribly Dull Political Year to Come. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said of the footage of Hillary flipping steaks with a forced grin, “Hillary Clinton’s problem for people that know her and like her—like I know her and like her—she puts on that political hat, and then she’s a robot.”
When I got back to Des Moines that night, I grabbed a seat at Centro at the end of a long table next to Hillary’s faith adviser, a blubbery, histrionic man. We called him Hands Across America (HAA) because he’d traveled the country with us in 2008 after a sexual harassment allegation led to his brief banishment from the Hillary campaign’s Virginia headquarters. A young staffer said he planted a wet, unwanted kiss on her head. (The staffer was transferred to a different department.)
After that, HAA ran an outside group that supported Hillary’s 2016 bid, using his position to regularly feel up several of the young women who worked for him in hopes of landing a job on the campaign. He would be frozen out of the official 2016 campaign team.
HAA exhibited generally creepy behavior, but seemed more pitiful and effeminate than threatening, which is why I tried to ignore his rubbing up and down my back at the steak fry as we posed for a selfie that I posted on Instagram as if we were old friends. I once had a meeting in DC with HAA and a family friend of Hillary’s who had the porcelain smile and abundant black lashes of a daytime TV host. HAA rubbed his hands together and said in his Southern drawl, “Ay just luv my job. I get to be in a locked office with all y’all pretty, young girls.” Hillary would sometimes mention him on the campaign trail, referring to her “friend” who “sends me scripture and devotionals, sometimes mini-sermons every day,” always leaving out the small detail that everyone suspected he was a pervert.
As I took my seat next to HAA I tried to ignore this detail, too, because that’s what political reporters do when we are in Iowa. We write identical stories and suck up to drunk, lecherous sources at Centro.
HAA massaged my shoulder with one hand and drank a whiskey on the rocks with the other. I put a couple of the fried brussels sprouts with ranch dressing on my plate and sat there without speaking, attempting to contort my face into the expression I thought an unbothered male reporter would make.
The other reporters grilled HAA about when Hillary might declare and whether she would even have a primary opponent. He pretended, like everyone on the unofficial payroll then, that she hadn’t made up her mind.
“Now, c’mon y’all, give her the space to make up her mind. She wants to take her time, do it right this time. I sent her a scripture this morning that said . . .”
I felt his hand move down my back.
“I’m not feeling great, I think I’m going to head back to the Marriott,” I said, jumping up.
“No, Ames, now c’mon, you just got here,” HAA said, tugging on the arm of my blazer.
I dug around in my backpack and pulled out all the cash I had, eleven dollars, and tossed it in the middle of the table.
11
The Last Good Day
Honolulu, December 2014
Carolyn couldn’t get me combat pay, but she must’ve known I was about to crack because she agreed to put me on the cushiest assignment in journalism as a reward after
a bruising year in Hillaryville: babysitting the Obamas on their annual Hawaiian vacation.
By my third day at the Moana Surfrider hotel in Honolulu, I had the timing down. I’d wake up at 4:00 a.m. in my corner room of the old side of the hotel, overlooking Waikiki Beach and Diamond Head, and check in with my editors in Washington. I’d file the first draft of the “setup story” with any anticipated news (e.g., POTUS’s statement about the North Korean hack on Sony; his planned visit to a mess hall at the Marine Corps Base) around 7:00 a.m. This is all Hawaii-Aleutian time. Then I’d head downstairs to find a spot on Waikiki Beach close enough to where the waves broke so that the sound of the saltwater drowned out passing tourists, but far enough from the shoreline that the late-afternoon tide wouldn’t sweep up my laptop and reporter’s notebooks and Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes, the 1,072-page tome on the 1988 election that I was determined to get through before the 2016 campaign started, even if it meant skipping the Gephardt chapters.
There were only a couple weeks left of 2014. Almost a year had passed since “Planet Hillary” made me persona non grata, and even some of the Poseurs were speaking to me again. Six months had gone by since the DC confrontation and nothing made Carolyn happier than strutting into the daily morning meeting with the Times’ top editors and fighting to get my stories on the front page.
I’d learned not to rely on The Guys. I’d cultivated a variety of sources that ranged from one of Bill Clinton’s kindergarten friends to a State Department official turned Wall Street executive. Sourcing up usually involved a friendly off-the-record breakfast (I stopped doing dinners after the “inside you” incident). A morally ambiguous donor and former aide always insisted we meet at the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis in Midtown Manhattan under the gilded Parrish mural of merry Old King Cole surrounded by his obsequious court of knights, musicians, and servants. I always wanted a shower after.
