Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  Earlier that afternoon I was in the New York office watching a gaggle on TV. Hillary had been shaking hands at a senior center in Compton when the Travelers gathered around to ask about the heft of what she’d accomplished. She responded with her usual stoic restraint. “I am really just so focused on all of the states that are voting tomorrow. That is my singular focus because I know that there’s a lot of work still going on.” Pressed again, Hillary didn’t waver. “I’m going to wait until everyone has voted. Tomorrow night we will have a chance to talk more about this.” I thought back to one of the low points in the fourteen-month campaign, when a woman at a town hall in Vegas asked Hillary for a hug, and she’d replied, “Sit down right there. When I finish my Q&A, I will give you that hug, I promise.” Sit right there, and when I kick Bernie’s ass in California, I’ll acknowledge the historic moment I’ve spent decades dreaming of and that generations of women have hoped for, I promise.

  When the AP headline moved across the wires, I was on the F train and specifically in the black hole between West Fourth Street and Broadway-Lafayette, the only stretch on my commute when I lost service entirely.

  8:27 p.m. ET. “Next stop, Delancey-Essex,” the conductor muttered. That’s when I saw the tweets, saw all the missed calls and voice mails, scrolled through the frantic emails flooding in. I felt the stab in the gut when I read a note from Carolyn: “Maggie and Nick did a quick cut.”

  For eight years, ever since Hillary declared under the atrium of the National Building Museum in Washington that 18 million cracks had been made in “that highest hardest glass ceiling,” I’d imagined the night she’d finally become the nominee and thought about what my story would say. Now, after two presidential campaigns and five months of primaries and caucuses, it had finally happened, and I’d been in the bowels of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority as a couple of colleagues who happened to be in the newsroom wrote the first draft.

  In the approximately six minutes I’d been underground, a heated newsroom-wide debate had erupted about how to handle the AP’s call. Everyone had an opinion . . .

  “Nobody asked me but isn’t this a bit of an AP news gimmick?”

  “FWIW, this is also how the AP got to the twelve hundred and thirty-seven number for Trump—calling superdelegates and getting them to commit on the record.”

  “It’s like the AP is ‘reporting’ her way into the nomination, as opposed to waiting for her to win it tomorrow. At this stage after months of primaries and caucuses and a big day tomorrow, I wouldn’t go big with this.”

  “They did the same damn thing in 2008.”

  “You could write a story attributed to the AP but hedging (if you’re not ready to buy the whole hog) or you could declare it over and run the story you intended to run tomorrow.”

  “I can imagine some of the more devoted Sanders fans have some strong feelings about the timing of this.”

  I was a block away from our apartment, passing the Chinese bodega with the handmade we sell beer sign and scrolling through the emails to try to figure out if anyone had come up with a plan. I landed on Carolyn’s definitive “Really need everything.” message. I picked up into a jog. My colleagues had saved my ass and gotten a couple of quick graphs onto the home page as a placeholder until we could get a longer version online and in the next day’s paper. My back wasn’t spasming the way it usually did when I ran under the weight of my laptop, chargers, a change of shoes, and a few bottles of water. When I stopped to look for my keys, I realized why my backpack felt light. I’d left my laptop at the office. By the time Bobby heard me rummaging around for my keys and opened the front door, I was hyperventilating.

  For weeks, I’d started to pour everything I knew about Hillary’s life, all her contradictions and what her career meant for women and our rapidly changing expectations of ourselves, into a tight twelve-hundred-word story that would run when she captured the nomination and which was partially written on a laptop that was half an hour away in Times Square. I tried to use Bobby’s computer—a brick of an old HP that we named Big Eddy. But after five minutes trying to browse Internet Explorer, Big Eddy overheated and crashed. I called the office. Nick Corasaniti, a Trump reporter who appreciates cheap eats and surfing in that order, was about to leave for the night. I lured him to the Lower East Side with my laptop and the promise that he could also pick up a poke bowl at Dimes, the California-cool eatery down the street. I couldn’t stop working long enough to run downstairs. Bobby went down for the laptop, sprinted upstairs, and stretched my MacBook Air toward me like a relay race runner passing the baton.

  Pat had been at the gym when the news broke. By then, we’d teamed up on dozens of stories about the Democratic primary. But Pat covered the Republican primary, too. Pat covered everything. Trump favored him, calling him “smart Irish.” Pat could churn out a perfectly crafted front-page Times story during a commercial break with sixteen colleagues, five editors, and a cranky copy editor shouting unsolicited advice at him. I needed his help with this one. He wiped off his sweat and headed to the newsroom so we could team up on the story.

  We filed the story in two-hundred-word chunks, as we wrote it, so that editors could piece it all together in real time. The copy desk came up with the careful headline Clinton Reaches Historic Mark, A.P. Says. The “I wouldn’t go big with this” contingent lost. The story ran across six columns on the front page.

  “Thanks to you, we’ve reached a milestone—the first time in our nation’s history that a woman will be a major party’s nominee for the president of the United States!” Hillary said twenty-four hours later in Brooklyn.

  In 2008, Mark Penn had advised she run as a man, and I’d raced out of an auditorium in Salem, New Hampshire, to try to talk to the man who’d waved a yellow sign and interrupted Hillary with chants of “Iron my shirt!”

  In her potpourri of a 2016 announcement speech a year earlier on Roosevelt Island, even the feminist lines were sort of about men. Hillary said she dreamed of “an America where a father can tell his daughter: Yes, you can be anything you want to be, even president of the United States.”

  Bernie’s supporters, Republicans, and garden-variety Hillary haters always told me it wasn’t about gender. They’d vote for a woman, just not THAT woman. Hillary walked onstage in Brooklyn wearing white for the suffragettes. I wanted to scream at every critic that thirty years of sexist attacks had turned her into that woman. That sooner or later, the higher we climb, the harder we work, we all become that woman.

  Hillary stretched out her wingspan wide enough to embrace the entire screaming crowd, all the little girls hoisted on their fathers’ shoulders. Okay, so most of their fathers were Wall Street donors, but she spoke in language of social activism, always we instead of I, as in “the history we’ve made here.” She took the stage after a video showed the women of Seneca Falls, Shirley Chisholm, Gloria Steinem, and Hillary’s own “women’s rights are human rights” declaration in Beijing, putting the evening into the context of decades of struggles in the women’s movement. I’d sent an early glance of the introductory video around the newsroom. A male editor replied, “Where are all the men?” The Drudge Report headline read I Am Woman Hear Me Roar.

  Hillary devoted the victory to her mother, Dorothy, born June 4, 1918, the same day Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment that would grant women the right to vote. “I wish she could see her daughter become the Democratic nominee for president of the United States,” she said.

  She wasn’t a blubbering Lifetime movie, but at this point, Hillary was clearly fighting back tears. In 2008, I’d been a couple of feet away from Hillary at diner in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when the waterworks burst. Jamie had stepped outside for a second and missed it. The Guys called panicked asking her what the hell happened. The teary moment became an earth-shattering inflection point debated by political pundits and historians for years to come. I considered it progress that eight years later, Hillary cried all the time and no one really noticed.

&n
bsp; There was the time backstage in Manchester when a part-time librarian told Hillary his eighty-four-year-old mother had Alzheimer’s and he couldn’t afford her care, “so I take her to work with me.” Her eyes welled. “Oh my gosh. I’m sorry I didn’t mean to . . .” And there was the town hall in Keota, Iowa, when ten-year-old Hannah Tandy asked Hillary what she would do about bullying. “Can you tell me a little bit more about why that’s on your mind?” Hillary asked. “I have asthma and occasionally I hear people talking behind my back,” Hannah said. A teary Hillary pulled Hannah in under one arm. Brooklyn promptly turned the interaction into an anti-Trump ad.

  I’d been more sentimental than usual, too. When Hillary said her mother “taught me never to back down from a bully, which, it turns out, was pretty good advice,” my thoughts drifted to the Bernie Bros. I’d spent most of my day the way the other women covering Hillary had—fending off death threats from the Bros who thought we prematurely called the race in Hillary’s favor. The colorful strings of expletives I’d grown used to, even amused by, became more violent. Several Bros called my number at the Times to tell me the revolution was coming for me. One of them left me a voice mail about how he knew my type of “rich bitch.” Others seemed to read from a script that went something like “You lying, Hillary-loving cunt. We will hunt you down in the fucking streets.”

  I needed to bask in some girl power or at least commiserate with my fellow Hillary-loving cunts. Before Hillary took the stage, on an esplanade of the Brooklyn Navy Yard overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge, my closest female friends among the Travelers—Ruby Cramer, Annie Karni, Jennifer Epstein—and I posed for a photo. We are in our typical position, guzzling down iced coffee and cradling our laptops as if they were newborns. We made it through the primaries. We were there to write “Herstory,” as JenEps called it, and for about fifteen minutes, it felt damn good.

  I was back to reality when I ended up watching Hillary’s speech through the isosceles triangle of a photographer’s denim thighs after he’d parked his schlubby ass right in front of me on the press riser just as she took the stage. Herstory, as witnessed through the filter of a male crotch.

  Making matters worse, I looked over at the second press riser, even closer to the stage, and saw a shih tzu that appeared to have Bell’s palsy, his pink tongue falling out one side of his furry, lopsided face, sitting on a cozy pillow with a prime view. After the speech, I climbed off the riser and raced over to Hired Gun Guy to rip into him that a dog had been assigned a better position on the press riser than the Times.

  “That fucking dog and his little doggie bed had a prime view,” I’d said.

  “You’re kidding me, right?” Hired Gun replied. “That’s Marnie the Dog. She has like two million followers on Instagram. Sorry, but the shih tzu has more reach than the Times and the AP.”

  The next day, another story I’d written in my head ever since Hillary’s 2008 concession speech ran on the front page under the headline Hillary Clinton’s Long, Grueling Quest. To me, the single moment that encapsulated Hillary’s path to the Democratic nomination wasn’t “her sun-splashed campaign kickoff in New York,” or her speeches “celebrating hard-fought primary victories,” but the unscripted instant during her eight hours of testimony to the Republican-led Benghazi committee when “a blasé Mrs. Clinton coolly brushed from her shoulder a speck of lint, dirt—or perhaps nothing at all.”

  The next day Hillary agreed to give the print reporters interviews, something we’d been collectively requesting for months. I had twelve minutes on the phone that I stretched into fourteen minutes and thirty-five seconds, only because I turned the conversation to our summer reading lists. Hillary said she planned to hit the Chappaqua bookstore. “I love to wander around bookstores and see what strikes my fancy and hear what the people who work there recommend,” she said.

  I asked her what the last book she read was, and she recommended Diana Nyad’s memoir, Find a Way, about her nearly 111-mile swim at age sixty-four from Cuba to Florida.

  “It is something that when you’re facing big challenges in your life you can think about Diana Nyad getting attacked by the lethal sting of box jellyfishes and nearly anything else seems doable in comparison,” Hillary said.

  “Is Donald Trump the box jellyfish in this scenario?” I asked.

  Hillary let out one of those guttural Hillary belly laughs. “I don’t know about that.”

  37

  Who Let the Dog Out?

  A tarmac in Phoenix, June 2016

  In the span of a couple of months, Bill Clinton’s conversations on private-plane tarmacs went like this: He chatted with Orrin G. Hatch in Louisville after speaking at Muhammad Ali’s funeral. He ran into Paul D. Ryan and gave the Republican speaker a polite piece of his mind. He said a quick hello to Arnold Schwarzenegger and, in Mobile, Alabama, he even shook hands with Ted Cruz, despite the Texas Republican having recently called for Hillary’s imprisonment.

  But in late June, with the Democratic primaries over and everyone saying the fall election was Hillary’s to lose, Bill made twenty minutes of tarmac small talk that altered the course of the race.

  In the midst of a ten-city fundraising swing, he stepped off the scorching asphalt at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and onto the airplane of the attorney general whose Justice Department was investigating his wife’s handling of emails at the State Department. It took a while for anyone in Brooklyn to learn about the tarmac chat with Loretta Lynch, and even then they didn’t initially see it as much of a problem.

  Josh Schwerin, the press aide who had accompanied Clinton on the trip, didn’t think to tell Brooklyn. Josh’s status as the youngest of the Schwerin brothers, after Ben, who worked in the Clinton White House, and Dan, who had interned in Hillary’s Senate office until he worked his way up to the chief speechwriter position, protected him. But for a few days, when Lynch distanced herself and said she’d accept the FBI director James Comey’s decision in the email investigation, the well-meaning kid thought for sure he’d be fired.

  I sympathized with Josh. In keeping with my inability to gauge Clinton scandals, I didn’t initially realize that a little tarmac small talk would become a major story either. When I first ran it by my editors, they told me I could skip it.

  I don’t know why Clinton did it. Lynch later said Clinton came over mostly to say hello and “talk about his grandchildren and his travels and things like that” and that “no discussions were held into any cases or things like that.” The worst Democrats would say about the meeting on the record was that it had been “irresponsible.”

  The Guys returned to the lovable St. Bernard defense. He just wanted to say hello to an old friend and talk about the grandkids. There were theories that Clinton subconsciously didn’t want Hillary to be president, but I didn’t believe those, especially not when it meant his surname would forever be associated with giving the world Donald Trump.

  FOBs told me he probably was trying to influence Lynch, not directly, but just a mild charm offensive that he thought would help Hillary.

  “OTR—” read a text message from a source who knew Clinton better than most, shortly after news of the meeting broke. “President Clinton is ‘irresponsible’ like a fox.”

  38

  “Man, Y’all Are Jittery”

  Fear can be conquered. Anxiety must be endured.

  —Max Brooks, Minecraft: The Island

  North Carolina → Florida, July 2016

  We all stood there in our own worlds—me; Michael Shear, a White House correspondent; and Matt Flegenheimer (aka Fleg), a wunderkind who’d been on the Ted Cruz beat and would now help out with Hillary coverage. We’d all flown into Charlotte, North Carolina, to cover Hillary’s first joint rally with Obama. But as soon as we landed, we learned that the rally wasn’t the news, not even close.

  I’d spent the Fourth of July weekend focused on two activities. Continuing my habit of overcorrecting and going full Martha Stewart when I was home, I baked Bobby a fl
ag cake and decorated it with white icing and rows of strawberries and blueberries. And I’d written about Hillary, accompanied by five of her lawyers, sitting down for three and a half hours of questions from eight FBI and Department of Justice officials. In any other election year, the sight of the leading candidate for the presidency and her phalanx of lawyers strolling into the J. Edgar Hoover Building would have shattered the political universe. But this was 2016.

  By late morning on July 5 when our American Airlines flight landed at Charlotte Douglas International Airport, the FBI director, James Comey, had given a press conference in which he recommended no criminal charges be brought against Hillary’s use of private email. But (and with Hillary, there was always a but) he also said she and her State Department aides had been “extremely careless” in handling classified information.

  We stood at the Hertz rental car counter alternating between checking Twitter and throaty gulps of iced coffee. We shook with the edgy irritation that only comes from flying to a place thinking you’ll write the big story and then realizing once you’ve landed that you’ve missed the story entirely. Adding to this agitated stew was the dynamic with my newly installed sidekicks on the Hillary beat: Fleg, with the slumped posture, sense of humor, and prose style of a Times reporter several decades older than his twenty-seven years; and Tom Kaplan, a menschy boy genius with too many Ivy League degrees to be sending me feeds from a town hall in Akron. I adored both like the little brothers I always wanted, and the travel and daily story demands were too much for any one reporter. But I’d never shared the Hillary beat before. I remembered my days as a starting point guard in Texas prone to offensive fouls. Mine, mine, mine.

  We tried to stream highlights of the Comey press conference, while all talking into our earpieces at once. “No, the story needs to run tonight . . .” and “Just landed. Need anything from me on the Comey presser?” and “Does this mean we’re bumped off the front?” The Obama endorsement became such a nonstory that our editors asked us to “chunk it up.” In Times-speak, Chunky Journalism means the listicles of photos with snappy captions, tailor-made for millennials to scroll through on iPhones. I’m not opposed to the idea, but I hated the name. I didn’t want to be called chunky and neither did my journalism. When I raised this concern, a politics editor proposed Tapas Journalism instead. “Who doesn’t like tapas?”