Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  That’s when we realized the woman behind the Hertz counter was looking at us up and down, her eyebrows peaked. She shook her head and, as she handed over the keys, said in a slow Southern timbre, “Man, y’all are jitt-ehr-eeeeeeeee.”

  Two weeks later, on a hotel patio overlooking a man-made lake in Orlando, I reached peak jittery.

  Everyone was in Cleveland to cover the Republican National Convention, but I’d flown into Orlando the night before to meet up with Hillary. It takes a lot to make me envious of a Red Roof Inn on the outskirts of Cleveland, but being left behind for the sole purpose of trying to break who Hillary would choose as her veep was worse. Trying to scoop the veep was one of those competitive sports in campaign reporting that made me wish I were still wandering around Shibuya writing stories about oxygen-infused water and the latest hot-tub karaoke craze. The history books hardly took note of running mates, never mind the hack reporters who spent months trying to break the story. Get it right, and you were rewarded with the warm bath of three minutes tops of praise on Twitter from a tiny clique of political reporters. But get it wrong, and you’d live in Dewey Defeats Truman infamy—which very nearly happened to me eight years earlier.

  I was sitting on the toilet at the InterContinental Hotel on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile with my BlackBerry in hand waiting for the late-night text from the Obama campaign to announce his vice-presidential pick. My Journal editor, whose steady neurosis and Harvard economics degree made him both brilliant and unsuited to steer political coverage, sent out a news alert that went something like WSJ BREAKING NEWS: Senator Barack Obama Chooses Virginia Governor Tim Kaine as His Running Mate.

  I bolted up as if an earthquake shook the ground beneath me and, pants around my ankles, called the desk. “Take that down immediately! I never said it was Kaine! TAKEITDOWNNOW!”

  I’d escaped calamity that time, but there would be no way as a Times reporter in the Twitter era that the Internet would be so forgiving again. I’d fallen off Carolyn’s radar as she focused on the GOP side. There was only one way to regain the twinkle Carolyn bestowed on the reporters who brought to her the biggest, the yummiest, the hardest-to-get scoops: I needed to break the veep news. I had to make Mamma happy.

  I’d spent a week practically alone in the newsroom chasing every wacko lead. I read two books by James G. Stavridis, a retired four-star navy admiral, before a senior aide told me he gave new meaning to the words short list. “Have you seen James Stavridis?” (He stood a couple of inches shorter than Hillary, without her kitten heels.) I recruited a body-language expert to study Hillary’s demeanor, including the brush-off she gave Cory Booker after he spent thirteen minutes sucking up to her at a rally. This included quoting Maya Angelou, Abraham Lincoln, and Jon Bon Jovi. “I hate to contradict Bon Jovi,” Booker said, “but dear God, Hillary Clinton, you give love a good name.” Hillary patted him on the back, a gesture that reminded me of the time Matt Paul, her campaign’s former Iowa state director, had tripped as he shuffled alongside the rope line next to her. “That’s Matt Paul,” Hillary said. “He’s from Iowa and he’s doing the best he can.” That’s Cory. He’s from New Jersey and he’s doing the best he can.

  I’d flown to Orlando the night before and watched Trump’s I-alone-can-fix-it acceptance speech in my heavily air-conditioned hotel room while texting with one of my most credible sources. I’ll call him Sean. Sean assured me Kaine was the guy. (“They figure if she wins Virginia, Trump has no path.”) Jen Palmieri, intent on avoiding leaks, could smell on me the fragrant stew of desperation and self-doubt. “Your veep source,” the subject of one email read, “is either terrible or deliberately messing with you.”

  I held an eyelash between my finger and thumb and blew into the humid July air. “I wish this day were over and the veep news was behind me.”

  A draft of my “Hillary Chooses Tim Kaine as Running Mate” story was edited and ready to publish. I told my editors to hold off and texted Sean again.

  “What’s the latest? You still hearing Kaine?” I patiently gave him two full minutes to reply and texted again. “Are you there? Are you pissed at me?”

  The bouncing dots appeared . . . “Don’t worry, nothing changed overnight. She’s not going to cross Bill, never has, and has McAuliffe support, too.”

  The Travelers were even more high-strung than usual. With Cleveland behind them, all our editors had turned to Hillary. They called us all nonstop under the laughable assumption that traveling with the campaign must mean we knew what was happening in the campaign. Hillary held a roundtable discussion with community leaders to talk about the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub massacre a month earlier. After that, she went to Pulse to lay a dozen white roses at a makeshift vigil for the forty-nine victims. I watched Hillary walk past Catholic prayer candles in glass jars, rainbow flags, bunches of fresh sunflowers, and a collage of faces so young they could’ve been high school yearbook pictures. Whom she picked as her veep had never felt so beside the point.

  The day dragged on. The “Hillary Picks Kaine” story sat unpublished. The text messages flooded in. We were at the Florida State Fairgrounds in Tampa when one of the possible veep picks texted to tell me Podesta had called him to tell him it wasn’t him. Sean texted again: “Any second. Go for it.” A press aide yelled, “LOADING!” and she led the Travelers through a pitch-black warehouse adjacent to the fairgrounds. I could hear the stampede of the Travelers, but couldn’t see anything. My iPhone lit up. It was my colleague Jonathan Martin, who knew Virginia politics better than anyone. “KAINE.” A second later, “GO WITH IT!” I called the desk and told them to publish. The rush of adrenaline, the darkness, the sense of dread if we didn’t get it right, all made me feel as if I were wading through a haunted house. Roughly eight minutes later, Brooklyn blasted out the official announcement. The text to supporters read, “I’m thrilled to tell you this first: I’ve chosen Sen. Tim Kaine as my running mate. Welcome him to our team, Amy.”

  Hired Gun Guy tried to smoke out our source. “Based on your sourcing, should I assume someone on the campaign confirmed it ahead of the text?” he emailed. I took more satisfaction than I should have in sending back an emoji smiley face with his lips zipped.

  Brooklyn settled on another theory to explain how the news had not only leaked but been attributed to a source inside the campaign. They thought I’d pretended to use the bathroom at the Tampa fairgrounds and eavesdropped on Jen and Huma, who stood behind a nearby curtain and loudly discussed the logistics of Hillary and Kaine’s meeting later that night in Miami. I wish I’d thought of that.

  After weeks of misleading us and telling us our sources were full of shit, The Guys climbed onto the press bus to make sure we all wrote the same dramatic, highly favorable tick-tock. Brown Loafers delivered a readout that went like this: Podesta had visited Hillary in Chappaqua, after the New York primary, with Duane Reade bags full of binders with background on potential vice-presidential candidates. He told us how Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea bonded with the Kaine family over lunch, and how aides had slipped out of Brooklyn via a freight elevator to usher Kaine away from a Newport fund-raiser and fly him incognito to Miami. We all wrote down “April” and “Duane Reade bags” and “Newport fund-raiser.” The headlines came out exactly as planned: Behind the Choice: How Hillary Selected Her Running Mate and Car Chases and Secret Getaways: Tim Kaine’s Wild 78 Hours.

  The Guys didn’t mention that Podesta and Cheryl started the vetting process way before the New York primary. In mid-March, Podesta passed on a list of possible veeps arranged into “food groups.” This balanced diet included Latinos (Tom Perez, Julian Castro), women (Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand), blacks (Cory Booker, Eric Holder), white male politicians (Tim Kaine, Terry McAuliffe), military men (John Allen, Mike Mullen), and assorted billionaires and businessmen (Bill Gates, Mike Bloomberg, Tim Cook). Thirty-ninth, and last, on the list in a food group all his own was Bernie Sanders.

  The press charter to fly us to Miami that night hadn�
�t even started to taxi when I pulled down my tray table and popped open a Pabst Blue Ribbon. I closed my eyes and listened to John Coltrane and felt my restlessness recede into the tenor saxophone of A Love Supreme. With the veep pick behind us, the end was in sight. I could do this.

  In three months, the campaign would be over. The Steel Cage Match would disassemble. I could put a close to my years of only covering Hillary in the defensive crouch of a presidential campaign. I zoned out the window at the dark swampy air, wondering what Hillary would be like to cover as president. Sure, we had a convention and a general election to get through, but how bad could that be?

  And right when I expected to feel the skip of the wheels as they lifted off the tarmac for Miami, we were told there was a “crew rest” issue and the plane couldn’t fly. The pilot and flight attendants started to deplane. Brown Loafers—who on any other night would’ve flown on Hillary’s jet, which was well on its way to Miami—called Brooklyn to figure out how to get us out of Tampa. The prognosis wasn’t good. We had two options: We could track down a bus and drive the 280 miles to Miami, or we could spend the night at an airport hotel and fly out at six the following morning. Brown Loafers burst from his seat in disbelief. “Stuck in the great coastal shit hole of Tampa Bay!” Bill Nelson, the Florida senator and former astronaut who flew on the mission right before the Challenger exploded, had been at Hillary’s rally and hitched a flight to Miami on the press plane. Hearing this debate unfold, somebody suggested that Nelson fly the plane. This led to a split among the Travelers.

  “Is that a good idea?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know . . .”

  “Is that even allowed?”

  I’d hardly spoken to anyone on the bus that day, but I took off my earphones and yelled down the aisle, “The man flew the fucking space shuttle. I’m pretty sure he can handle a rent-a-jet on a thirty-minute flight to Miami.”

  I lost. We would spend the night at a Renaissance near the airport attached to a mall called the International Plaza. At the bar of the Capital Grille, I ordered a dry-aged porterhouse and three glasses of a Napa Valley pinot before the bartender announced last call. I walked back to the hotel nice and buzzed, weaving through a series of outdoor walkways made to look like a street in Roman Holiday, but with sports bars and a California Pizza Kitchen. Stuck in the great coastal shit hole of Tampa Bay, and for the first time in months, I was free.

  39

  The Bed Wetters

  Washington, DC → Atlantic City → New York City, Summer 2016

  Democrats started to worry. When Trump called Bill Clinton a rapist on Fox News, Hillary responded by telling CNN, “I have concluded he is not qualified to be president.”

  Brooklyn was elated that she’d really gone there.

  “She actually called the presumptive Republican nominee unfit,” Hired Gun Guy said.

  “Uh, yeah, but he did call her husband a rapist,” I said.

  When Trump suggested he’d reduce the national debt by negotiating with creditors to accept less than a full payment, one of his more batshit ideas that would lead to global economic calamity, Brooklyn issued a press release calling the proposal “risky.”

  Hillary was still following the Mitt Romney Playbook, not realizing that she was the Romney in the race. She tried to make Trump a cold corporate titan who got rich screwing over the little guy. She had an event in Atlantic City with the fading outline of the Trump Plaza casino sign in the background.

  “Just down the boardwalk is the Trump Taj Mahal. Donald once called it the eighth wonder of the world,” Hillary said. She liked trolling Trump and smiled a little as she gestured toward the decrepit hotel, now dotted with busted light bulbs and dust-covered faux-gold urns. She tried to make her put-downs snack-size. “People get hurt and Donald gets paid.”

  But Trump wasn’t Romney. He could have a car elevator and no one would care. Reporters would ask for rides on the damn thing. Meanwhile, Trump feasted on the FBI press conference and his rat-a-tat recitation of “Crooked Hillary,” while she criticized his plan to eliminate the estate tax and cut corporate tax rates.

  “Sometimes you get the feeling they’re in a professional boxing match and he’s in a street fight, and they’re coming in with their gloves on,” Rev. Al Sharpton said. “This is a street fight with a guy with a razor and a broken Coca-Cola bottle. You’ve got to fight him like that.”

  Chuck Schumer told Jonathan Martin that he’d implored Brooklyn to hire a senior staffer whose only job was to respond to Trump on an hourly basis. John Hickenlooper, the Colorado governor, said he was reading The Art of the Deal and that Hillary “has to be careful because now he [Trump] has momentum.”

  Matthew Dowd, a former chief strategist to George W. Bush who is now an independent, told me in late February, “Hillary has built a large tanker ship and she’s about to confront Somali pirates.”

  Brooklyn blew it all off. The math was on their side. “It wouldn’t be a general election without some early bed-wetting from Washington insiders,” Robby said.

  no caller id flashed on my phone. I’d left the newsroom and was sitting in Bryant Park to soak up the early summer air and clear my head. It was June, days before Hillary would win the nomination. People with normal jobs spread picnic blankets and wine and Brie out on the lawn as a trio of flamenco guitarists set up on a temporary stage.

  “Hello?”

  “Amy, it’s Donald Trump . . .”

  In a speech in San Diego, Hillary had finally delivered the takedown Democrats wanted to hear, mixing in her wit and signature sarcasm. Megan Rooney, who like Dan Schwerin worked with Hillary at the State Department, perched on the armrest of Hillary’s luxe leather seat on the flight to San Diego to hammer out the most lacerating lines.

  Hillary looked like she was enjoying herself when she called Trump’s foreign policy pronouncements “not even really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds, and outright lies.”

  “This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes because it’s not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into war just because somebody got under his very thin skin,” she said.

  Trump had called the Times during the speech to yell into the phone, “I’M NOT THIN-SKINNED AT ALL. I’M THE OPPOSITE OF THIN-SKINNED.”

  The day before, Policy Guy gave me a rundown of what the speech would say so that I could write a curtain-raiser. When Carolyn came back from the page-one meeting with the most beautiful words in the English language, “They want it for the front,” I reached out to the Trump campaign for comment. I expected a statement from Hope Hicks, Trump’s competent and responsive spokeswoman. Instead, Trump called directly.

  In this period, most of my colleagues had stories of standing in line at Starbucks or climbing onto the elliptical when the infamous “no caller id” Trump call came in. I’d spent months requesting interviews with Hillary. Always the answer from Brooklyn, no matter how positive or substantive the topic, was either stone-cold silence or a hard no. But there I was in Bryant Park, picking up my phone to . . .

  “Amy, it’s Donald Trump . . .”

  I dug around in my bag for a pen and pulled out some loose scraps of paper. Trump repeated the phrase “America First” at least six times, attributing his favorite pet phrase to “your very good, very smart colleague David Sanger, excellent guy.” (I agreed.) He then laid out his plan to counterattack.

  “Bernie Sanders said it, and I’m going to use it all over the place because it’s true,” Trump said. “She is a woman who is ill-suited to be president because she has bad judgment.”

  We bantered about The Apprentice a little. (“Can you believe Schwarzenegger thinks he can do it?”) Then I said something I never should have said.

  “Thanks very much for calling, Mr. Trump. I’ve been covering Hillary since 2007, and she’s never called me.”

  “Is that right?” The wheels were turning. “When was the last time she talked to you?” Trump asked.

  I thought abo
ut it. “I don’t know. I guess it’s probably been five, six months since she had a press conference.”

  Silence. The wheels turned some more.

  “You know why?” Trump said. I wanted to say, Yes, Mr. Trump, because she hates us and thinks we have big egos and tiny brains. But I’d already said too much. “She doesn’t have the stamina,” Trump said. He raised his voice. “It takes STAMINA to talk to the press.”

  I don’t know if I gave Trump the idea or he’d had it for weeks, but after that he started to tell crowds, “So, it’s been two hundred and thirty-five days since Crooked Hillary has had a press conference . . .” His campaign started to blast out a daily reminder: Hillary Hiding Watch: Day 262 Since Last Press Conference.

  40

  Off the Record . . . Until Hacked

  Philadelphia, July 2016

  An oppressive heat wave settled on Philadelphia the week of the Democratic National Convention. The city wasn’t baking like south Texas, where the temperatures climb to over 100 and sit stubbornly on top of strip-mall parking lots, but the air was thick and soupy. Even the breeze that came in before a downpour carried an ominous combustibility.