Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  Asked, again, why young voters weren’t supporting Hillary, Robby said, “You’d have to ask the voters that.” Hired Gun Guy—sensing a malfunction—earned his keep. He staged a hostile takeover, picking up the toughest questions and answering with his usual smooth élan of a spokesman for BP after the oil spill.

  Reporter: Do you or do you not think there’s an element of sexism in the way he’s [Bernie] talking about Hillary Clinton?

  Mook: I’m going to leave—I’m going to leave you guys to judge that.

  Hired Gun Guy: Can I make one comment on that?

  Then Hired Gun, who looked less and less like Ben Affleck as the campaign wore on, with dark circles under his eyes and the pasty skin of someone who spent too much time in a drab office building in Brooklyn and a Manchester Radisson, went into a lengthy presentation about Bernie’s “troubling adoption” of the same attacks lobbed by the so-called Bernie Bros.

  “It can be vitriolic,” he said. “And I think the Sanders campaign needs to be aware the extent to which, in an effort to mobilize and galvanize their supporters, they let the mentality or crudeness [of the Bros] seep into their own words and criticisms that they hurl at Secretary Clinton.”

  After Iowa, the Bros, a vile caboodle of loosely organized online trolls who harassed anyone (particularly those of us with vaginas) who seemed disloyal to Bernie, became emboldened. Every time I wrote about Hillary, I heard from enraged Bros furious that the media had discounted their man. They flooded the Times comments section and wrote letters to the editors littered with four-letter words. They regularly addressed me as a “NY Times Presstitute,” a “donkey-faced whore,” and a “life-support system for a cunt” who works for the “JEW York Times.”

  People started to whisper that Brooklyn had invented the Bros in some dark-arts effort to drive young women to their rightful place, With Her. I like a good Clinton conspiracy as much as the next reporter, but Brooklyn didn’t create the Bros. It took six staffers and a focus group to compose an official tweet, signed with an “H.” (“FOR APPROVAL: Slight Edit to Tweet,” the emails read.) There was no way Hillary’s campaign had the creativity to come up with “NY Times Presstitute.”

  Now Hired Gun Guy was trying to tell us that Bernie and his Bros were one and the same because Bernie had the anti-woman audacity to claim Hillary wasn’t a true progressive. The offending line came at a CNN forum the day before the breakfast when Bernie said, “Some of my best friends are moderates. But you can’t be a progressive and a moderate at the same time.”

  As Hired Gun Guy made his case, the press rolled our collective eyes so far back in our heads that the first question that popped in my mind was from the movie Heathers—“Did you have a brain tumor for breakfast?”

  Somebody let out a groan and said, “C’mon. Do you think the umbrage really fits the comment here? I mean, he was asked if he thought she was a progressive. He basically said, ‘Well, she said she was a moderate and she says she’s a progressive and you can’t be both.’ That’s not exactly the insult of the century.”

  “I would just put it back and say what’s the intent in making the comment? . . . In trying to deprive her of the compliment it is to be called a progressive?” Hired Gun Guy said. Robot Robby sat silently, his lips pursed into a heart-shape.

  I hadn’t realized Hillary was such a delicate flower, but I understood the frustration. She’d spent much of her career trying to overcome a caricature of the liberal feminist. She’d written her senior thesis on Saul Alinsky and told the Wellesley women of ’69 that politics was “the art of making what appears impossible, possible.” As first lady, she’d been the leftist foil to her husband’s centrist agenda. She’d privately opposed NAFTA, pushed for universal health care, lamented the welfare overhaul that gutted federal assistance of the poor by $55 billion and effectively ended her friendship with her mentor Marian Wright Edelman. The West Wing called Hillaryland “the Bolsheviks.”

  But—even in a primary race where she could have used her progressive past to help brush back Bernie’s attacks from the left—Hillary never mentioned the Bolsheviks or any of this, too afraid of sounding like she opposed her husband’s administration and of rekindling the old commie caricature that she’d worked so hard to shake and that would haunt her in a general election. We are all forged in the crucible of our mistakes.

  I had to practically pound on the table to get Robby and Hired Gun Guy to take a question from the estrogen-heavy end of the room. I asked if Hillary had expressed to her top aides her frustration that she spent most of her career trying not to be a liberal cartoon and now she was trying to convince voters she was a “progressive who likes to get things done.” The way I remembered it, I phrased this question brilliantly, inserting cultural nuances and gender dynamics into an otherwise dry political debate. But when I looked back at the transcript, this is what I actually said: “Has she ever, like, expressed to her aides frustration that, like Jesus, the whole early part of my career was [inaudible] that I wasn’t like a scary [bra-burning liberal] [inaudible] we need to convince them that I have been there on all these issues?”

  Snorts from the middle of the table. Heh. Heh. Heh.

  “Yeah, when is she going to burn her bra?” Heilemann asked

  Heh. Heh. Heh.

  The breakfast had descended into an episode of Beavis and Butt-Head.

  “Are there burnt bras in the archive in Little Rock? If so, when will we see them?”

  Heh. Heh. Heh.

  All Robby could say was “Wow.”

  After the Bra Breakfast, I wanted to run away from the Radisson, get in my Subaru, and drive to the barre class in Bedford that I’d found the day before. A former state representative taught the class in a carpeted attic converted into a workout studio. Christmas lights hung overhead, and clients affixed paper hearts for Valentine’s Day to the walls, with messages like i love me and i ♥ god.

  Instead, I ended up in a lobby showdown with Policy Guy over a web only story that had long been lost in the news cycle and the deluge of post-Iowa, pre–New Hampshire hot takes.

  I needed to defuse the situation, to stop being so defensive, and just give him the apology he wanted to hear. But when I did, the words came out as sincere as Hillary’s “I’m sorry that this has been confusing to people.”

  “Look, I hear you,” I said. “I’m sorry you hated that story, but my meter ran out, and I’ve really gotta go—”

  “No, tell me,” he said, swerving his neck forward and down to meet my eyes as I pretended to dig around for my keys. “Are you in my head?”

  Apparently so.

  I would’ve had more patience for this ass ripping had the Clintons not simultaneously sponged off my reporting. I spent months reporting a feature about how Hillary had gone undercover to investigate school segregation in the South.

  DOTHAN, Ala.—On a humid summer day in 1972, Hillary Rodham walked into this town’s new private academy, a couple of cinder-block classrooms erected hurriedly amid fields of farmland, and pretended to be someone else.

  The Guys, as usual, doubted my motives and tried to kill the story. It ran right around Christmas on the front page, the primest of prime real estate the Clintons, a couple of Times print subscribers in their late sixties, could’ve hoped for. By February, at the same time Brooklyn was ready to string me up in a plaza in Manchester, the Clintons had turned my reporting into full-blown agitprop.

  Hillary was twenty-four when Marian Wright Edelman’s advocacy group was investigating the hundreds of private schools that sprung up across the South to cater to white families after the 1969 Supreme Court decision forced public schools to integrate. She went to Dothan, a town near the Chattahoochee River and the Fort Rucker Army Base named after Genesis 37:17: “They have gone away, for I heard them say, ‘Let us go to Dothan.’” She pretended to be a housewife who wanted to enroll her son in the town’s new private academy.

  “I went through my role-playing, asking questions about the curriculum
and makeup of the student body,” Hillary wrote in Living History. “I was assured that no black students would be enrolled.”

  For whatever reason, Hillary didn’t like to talk about Dothan. She devoted only three hundred words in her 567-page memoir to the experience. Even during the 2008 primary amid accusations of racism, Hillary didn’t talk about her undercover work. (“Ya think that would’ve been good to know?” a Guy from the ’08 campaign said after my story ran.)

  When I initially told The Guys I wanted to do a deeper piece about this brief chapter of Hillary’s career, they assumed I’d make her look shady or underhanded. “You always find a way,” they’d said. She’d recently told voters at a diner in Manchester that the Marine Corps turned her away in 1975—biographical color that led to at least three days of mockery and “Two Pinocchios” from the Washington Post’s fact-checkers.

  I cried, actually broke down in my mother’s bathtub in San Antonio over Thanksgiving weekend, after a Brooklyn source told me Hillary hadn’t even considered my months of interview requests.

  “But, but, this is a positive story. I’m not trying to screw anyone,” I said between sobs. “And, and, she just gave an interview to the Boston Globe. Why not the Times?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Well, Annie [Linskey] went to Wellesley so she wanted to do it.”

  Now, with Hillary about to lose New Hampshire and reliant on a firewall of black voters in the South, my “Undercover Hillary” story became political gold, tangible evidence on the front of the Times that she’d been at the forefront of civil rights. She was a progressive who liked to get things done.

  Without mentioning me or the Times, Bill started to refer crowds to “a very nice article in the press.” He painted a portrait of Hillary as a young activist, unafraid and on a mission in the Deep South when women didn’t do such things. He added a few factual flourishes.

  “She posed as a housewife who had just moved to this little town in Alabama, and you know, she made small talk with the guy at the school . . .” I heard Bill say at an event in Rochester, New Hampshire. “It took guts forty years ago to do that and it changed and they lost their tax exemptions and they had to change all their practices.”

  (Houston Academy, the private school Hillary visited—and that I toured in the course of my reporting—didn’t lose its tax-exempt status. In 2013, eight of its 527 students were black.)

  Bill loved the “Undercover Hillary” story so much that months later he made it a central part of his prime-time address to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

  “They exchanged pleasantries, and finally she said, ‘Look let’s just get to the bottom line here, if I enroll my son in this school will he be in a segregated school, yes or no?’ And the guy said absolutely,” he told a hushed Wells Fargo Center. “She had him!”

  I may have been in open warfare with the Hillary who won Iowa with the help of a coin toss and who thought I was an insipid bottom-feeder, but I adored the Hillary who went undercover that summer in Alabama. The Hillary who met with civil rights leaders in Atlanta and rented a car and drove to Dothan where she checked herself in at a Holiday Inn off Ross Clark Circle.

  I pulled up my fur-lined hood and made my escape back into the grimy Manchester air. I heard the salt and ice on the sidewalks crush beneath my boots. I wanted to believe that this Hillary would’ve kind of liked me, too.

  27

  “Saint Hillary”

  Flint, Michigan, February 2016

  “Saint or Sinner, Moralist or Machiavelli, Mother Theresa or Lady Macbeth,” Diane Blair wrote in a 1996 journal entry. “Hillary, like most of us, some of both and much in between.”

  The black block letters on the low-hung billboard hovering over the awning of a MetroPCS store, the only vibrant retail I saw in Flint other than a pawn shop and a funeral home, if a funeral home can count as retail, read rejoice in hope. be patient in tribulation. romans 12:12.

  It was Sunday morning, forty-eight hours before the polls opened in New Hampshire and 730 miles away. Most of the Travelers stayed behind in Manchester, but I’d made my way to Flint so I could go to church with Hillary. The water crisis had become a national health emergency, and Hillary was still one of the only politicians, and the only candidate, really talking about it.

  I waited at the end of the second to last row of purple upholstered pews at the House of Prayer Missionary Baptist Church. The lead came from the Flint River and the corroded pipes had pumped the brown sludge into public schools and kitchens and bathrooms in homes that had once been aspirational middle-class bungalows but that now dotted the landscape of postindustrial blight. On the drive to Flint, I’d passed a truck propped up on cinder blocks and spray painted with the silvery sprawl of make america great again. If there were a travel poster advertising like a cruise getaway to this previously Great America, it would’ve looked like Flint, when it was white and before the factories closed.

  In the church bathroom, as Rev. Kenneth L. Stewart delivered a sermon about Flint being on “God’s waiting list,” I saw a little girl in braids and a white dress perch on her patent-leather tippy toes to wash her hands. I ran into the stall and sobbed. The Flint trip slapped me upside the head and woke me up from my fights with The Guys, my wrestling over bylines, all my unimportant coastal concerns.

  I went to Flint mostly because I wanted to see Hillary in a different setting after so many town halls in Iowa and New Hampshire, where almost everyone was white. The Flint trip signified the next stage of the race—when she would rely on black voters. Critics would describe the visit as the most jarring example of Brooklyn’s overreliance on “identity politics” and Hillary’s overreliance on the black voters who elected Obama twice. But when I got to Flint, it didn’t feel like pandering or identity politics. It didn’t feel like politics at all.

  A young woman told me she’d miscarried twins. A mother of four said her eight-year-old son had been bright, smarter than most in his first-grade class, until the lead got into his blood. A man pulled up the sleeve of his maroon suit jacket to show me the chalky white rash that ran from his wrists up his arms and wouldn’t wash away. I asked Bobby Blake, a pastor at another local church, if people thought Hillary was there because she needed black voters. “I don’t care why she came,” Blake told me. “This town has been living out of a bottle. My question is, where’s everybody else?”

  For over a year, I would go to at least one black church with Hillary almost every Sunday. We went to black churches in North Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kansas City, Texas, and Brooklyn. I started to learn the rhythms. How Hillary would always step to the pulpit, take a deep, freeing Sunday morning inhale, and then open her remarks with Psalm 118:24: “This is the day the Lord hath made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” She’d talk about working to end “systemic racism” and, well before the general election, she shat all over Trump’s slogan. “America has never stopped being great,” she told the Greater Imani Cathedral of Faith in Memphis. When the choir belted out “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah,” I couldn’t help but shake my shoulders. I pretended to look down at my phone as I bowed my head and mouthed the words “Lift every voice and sing.”

  Between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and noon, Hillary became a different person. She recited scripture with the fluency of a renowned theologian, the verve of a TV evangelist. She loved the Epistle of James: “Scripture tells us that faith without works is dead.” She said she tried to live up to the prophet Micah’s teachings, “that we do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with our God.” She explained that her Christianity is “a journey that never ends.” She described her calling as answering “the charge given to us by Jesus, as Matthew records” and heaping love on “the least, the last, and the lost.”

  In another life, she could’ve been a Methodist pastor or Princeton theology professor. She could’ve been a spiritual guide steering her young congregants not “to slumber while the world changed around us,” as she often said she learned in 1
962 when her own youth minister, Don Jones, at the First United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, took her to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak.

  On the campaign plane in 2008, I saw Hillary, late into the night, reading the leather-bound Bible that she travels with. But only once a week would she step to the pulpit and publicly draw into this divine reserve. This is the day the Lord hath made . . .

  Hillary used to talk about her faith all the time. In a 1993 speech at my alma mater in Austin, Hillary said the country was suffering from a “crisis of meaning.”

  “We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society . . . as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves,” she said.

  The Austin speech led to a New York Times Magazine cover story by Michael Kelly, who by then was on his way to becoming a neocon. Saint Hillary: More Preacher Than Politician, the First Lady Seeks a New Reformation, Concerned Less with How Government Should Behave Than with How People Should, the headline read.

  The Times story made Saint Hillary seem like a kooky, New Agey do-gooder. She quoted Dietrich Bonhoeffer and said that “the very core of what I believe is this concept of individual worth, which I think flows from all of us being creatures of God and being imbued with a spirit.”

  If there’s one thing the political press can’t stand, it’s sanctimony. The mockery came from all sides. The Atlantic said the first lady had pulled on a “quasi-mystical-socio-politico-psychological coat of crazy colors.”

  After that, Hillary rarely talked about her spiritual side. She even hesitated to wear all white, as she had for the Times cover photo, until twenty-three years later when she won the Democratic Party’s nomination. “Still endless press about Saint Hillary piece by Michael Kelly,” Diane Blair wrote at the time. Another thing to blame the Times for.