Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  Russians had hacked into the Democratic National Committee emails. The Bros continued with their death threats. They’d jumped on an email exchange in which a DNC press aide said I was “kind of friendly” with Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who resigned over the hack. The Bros took this as clear evidence I was colluding with the chairwoman to elect HRC, texting me their usual short and sweet messages like “You Hillary loving cunt.” My emails to the DNC were nothing. Mostly Debbie and I talked about dieting, workouts, and dealing with our unruly Jewfros. Not exactly the makings for a grand conspiracy. But Times reporters, Democratic leaders, donors, Brooklyn aides, hell, even campaign volunteers, were panicked. Could our emails be next? Sources got so nervous at least two of them started to text me “OTR until hacked.”

  Ever since the State Department, Hillary had a thing about Putin and vice versa. Months before she declared her candidacy, at a paid speech in Winnipeg, she’d broken into an impersonation of Putin. Without being asked about the Russian leader, she put on a deep, accented voice and swayed her head left and right pretending to be Putin having a conversation with himself. “Vladimir, you think you’d like to be president again . . .”

  Now, as she tried to woo Republicans, Hillary sounded positively Reaganesque as she criticized Trump’s Russophilia. “He praises dictators like Vladimir Putin and picks fights with our friends,” she said the previous month. “Putin will eat your lunch.” In May, she said a Trump presidency would be like “Christmas in the Kremlin.”

  But the evidence that Russian intelligence had been behind the twenty thousand stolen DNC emails released at precisely the right time to disrupt the convention handed Brooklyn a good vs. evil plot out of a le Carré novel.

  “There have been larger forces at work to hurt Hillary Clinton,” Robby said in the opening hours of the convention.

  I wrapped all this Russian intrigue into a scene-y blog post casting Trump as a Manchurian candidate, Putin’s unwitting puppet. I liked the story, but I also saw the wisdom when my editors deemed it was too unsupported to publish.

  “God forbid they make one dick soft in a swing state!”

  Linda Bloodworth-Thomason talked as you’d expect the creator of Designing Women to talk. She was particularly saucy the second morning of the convention. She’d been fighting with Brooklyn over a biographical video she and her husband, Harry Thomason, made that was supposed to introduce Hillary that evening.

  At the 1992 convention, the Thomasons, Hollywood filmmakers and writers who have been friends with the Clintons since the 1970s, wove Bill’s hard-knocks childhood into one of the greatest origin stories of modern politics with The Man from Hope video. “Some people think that Bill must have been born wealthy and raised wealthy,” Hillary says while sitting on a patio in pink shoulder pads. Insert Dickensian images of his childhood in rural Arkansas here. “Well, you know instead of being born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he was really born in a house with an outhouse in the backyard.”

  The Thomasons wanted to pull off the same feat for Hillary, but her origin story—a nuclear family in an upper-middle-class Chicago suburb and Wellesley education—didn’t exactly give them the same artistic tableau. They needed to go one generation back to Hillary’s mother, Dorothy, abandoned by her parents at eight years old, on her own and working as a housekeeper for three dollars a week at fourteen, before raising the little girl who was one election away from becoming the FWP. The Thomasons enlisted Meryl Streep to narrate. “Her name, like another little girl who got caught up in her own history-making tornado, was Dorothy . . .” Streep said. The footage then moved on to the women who came before Hillary—Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, and Sally Ride. It ended on a 2010 photo of Dorothy, Hillary, and Chelsea at Chelsea’s wedding.

  On my second day in Philly, I sat in a cracked leather armchair in the lobby of the Hilton Garden Inn to download the ten-minute video. It gave me the chills.

  The video, called Shoulders, was the first time so far at a convention designed to celebrate Hillary when I actually felt moved by her arc, not the one created for her by pollsters and strategists, but the real one, rooted in a daughter’s love for her mother. I know that sounds cheesy, but Meryl was narrating . . .

  Ad man Jim Margolis, Joel, and Mandy took one look and killed it.

  The plan had been to not overplay the history-making part. Hillary did that already in the Brooklyn Navy Yard speech and in the where-are-all-the-men introductory video. Now she needed to broaden her appeal and reach Republicans and men. Brooklyn decided Hillary would promise to “break down all barriers.” For Christ’s sake, no glass ceilings. “Press will immediately go to this as a more narrow attempt to appeal to women,” Joel said when the “ceiling language” had crept back into a speech during the primaries. Podesta agreed, “Ceilings language is catnip for press and will drown out break down barriers.”

  Like a lot of Hillary’s female friends, Linda worried the campaign could’ve been slicing and dicing the data needed to sell any Democratic nominee. The newer aides didn’t know Hillary and didn’t really care to. She was a blank slate on which to project a rainbow coalition of Obama voters. “Dorothy is the only poetry she’s got,” Linda said.

  The campaign went instead with a biographical video from Shonda Rhimes, the Scandal creator. (All roads lead back to Tony Goldwyn.) On the final night of the festivities, the video would show scenes of Hillary when she was a New York senator, comforting first responders after the September 11 terrorist attacks and imploring George W. Bush in the Oval Office for $20 billion to rebuild New York. In this version of her story, Hillary sits in a sunny kitchen, in front of a vase of fresh flowers and a stack of cookbooks (wink, wink, women) as Morgan Freeman’s languid narration explains how she almost single-handedly captured and killed Osama bin Laden.

  “Look at her, look at her face,” Freeman says of the photo of Hillary in the Situation Room holding a hand to her mouth and surrounded by men paralyzed, their eyes fixed to a screen showing images of a Navy SEAL raid on a compound in Pakistan. “She’s carrying the hope and the rage of an entire nation.”

  In 2011, Hillary attributed her expression in the photo to her pollen allergies. But I guess “the hope and rage of an entire nation” sounded better.

  I walked past the Ritz-Carlton near Centre Square, where black SUVs lined up outside to drop off wealthy donors. They wore a rainbow of credentials and VIP passes around their necks. Protesters yelled into bullhorns. And each time the bellmen opened the door and welcomed guests into the Ritz’s cool marble lobby under the calming hum of classical music, protesters’ chants of “Hell no, DNC!” and “We won’t vote for Hill-ah-ree” and “Wik-EE-Leaks! Wick-EE-Leaks!” would blow in with the soup and retreat again as the doors swung shut.

  “This is what democracy looks like!” a protester with dreadlocks and Clearasil-perfect skin yelled from a bullhorn. A security guard pushed along two young girls who wore T-shirts that said i’m not a super predator. The sun beat down on the cement, and the police stood in clusters trying to find shade.

  41

  The Red Scare

  Philadelphia, July 2016

  “I saw Debra Messing downstairs earlier,” a woman with Prada sneakers said to no one in particular as the elevator doors closed. The blue-lit lobby at the Le Méridien had leather benches and a sleek silver bar where a couple of donors sipped mimosas before stepping out into the soup.

  “Can you hit six for me?” the woman said.

  When the elevator doors opened again, Bryan Cranston got off.

  This is what democracy looks like.

  The press took our seats in a ballroom at the Le Méridien for a “Bloomberg Politics Breakfast with John Podesta.” I walked the length of the rectangular table twice, passing name tags of journalists who didn’t need any introduction—Andrea Mitchell, John Heilemann, Susan Page—before I remembered Jonathan had RSVP’d for the breakfast and then given the invite to me. I pulled out the chair behind
jonathan martin, the new york times.

  Podesta sat in the center, hoisting his head left and right as the reporters yelled, “John, over here!” and “John, to your left.”

  “John, tell us a little bit first about last night. About I think it’s safe to say eight, eight thirty, there was a lot of tension on that floor . . .”

  “John, are there still more disruptions, more booing, more anger today?”

  “John, what if there is a walkout, what if there is a big protest? How would you deal with that?”

  “Everybody is going to get a chance to vote, and then she is going to make history,” Podesta replied.

  Next question.

  When the talk started to lag, I saw an opening. The Russians hadn’t come up. The Bernie Bros seemed the more imminent threat.

  The Russian meddling subplot still seemed far-fetched. Even Nancy Pelosi, when asked if the Trump campaign could’ve played any role in the release of the twenty thousand DNC emails, said, “I have no reason to think that.” Hillary aides pushed that the Russians were helping Trump, but always in hushed off-the-record winks and nods, like they didn’t really believe it but wanted it to be true because it would help Hillary. “He certainly has a kind of bromance going on with Mr. Putin, so I don’t know . . .” Podesta said.

  When the Washington Post’s Phil Rucker asked Robby if he was concerned about threats Julian Assange had made about future hacked emails that WikiLeaks could release to inflict damage on Hillary and the campaign, Robby replied, “I’m not going to put a lot of stock into what Julian Assange says. I mean—he says a lot of things and, um, so I’m not going—I’m not going to pay attention to that.”

  I asked Podesta, who’d worked extensively on cybersecurity in the Obama White House, whether his own or anyone else in the campaign’s emails may have been hacked.

  “There is—we don’t know the answer to that, and we feel like we have robust security within the campaign, and obviously are contacting on a daily basis,” he said.

  “So the FBI hasn’t warned you or anyone else—” I continued.

  He cut me off. “No. The FBI, no.”

  His head whirled left, right. Next question. “Andrea?”

  A few days later I saw the Yahoo News headline FBI Warned Clinton Campaign Last Spring of Cyberattack. FBI agents had met with senior campaign officials in Brooklyn to warn them that their emails, and particularly Podesta’s, may have been penetrated through so-called spear-phishing emails. I never knew why Podesta hadn’t been honest about that. But maybe it was because Outsider Guy had been right when he told me, “No one takes you seriously.” If I’d been Jonathan Martin, would Podesta have at least pulled me aside afterward to explain things?

  Brooklyn didn’t want any more hacking news to overshadow the convention, but Trump couldn’t resist urging Russian intelligence to hack into Hillary’s emails. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing,” he said at a news conference in Doral, Florida. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

  Thing was, Trump didn’t need to put on a public display. In March, around the time the FBI paid a visit to Brooklyn, Russian hackers sent a phishing email to Podesta’s personal Gmail account. He’d opened the link and clicked on the Change Password button.

  42

  Gladiator Arena

  Philadelphia, July 2016

  While Trump had emerged as a fog-enshrouded silhouette at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Hillary, a reluctant star in the four-day infomercial of her life’s work, had watched most of her convention at home on TV. She didn’t arrive in Philly until Wednesday and didn’t appear onstage until the third night and only for a second to give Obama a warm, prime-time hug.

  “She’s an introvert,” Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, told me. “The spotlight is pretty glaring, and she likes to deflect from it.”

  Brooklyn worried, too, that the hagiography of a political convention would only add to the perception that Hillary is all about herself. They made behind-the-scenes efforts to revise “I’m With Her,” to the less self-centered “She’s With Us.”

  Hillary had no problem with conventions when she played a supporting role. In 1992, she’d waved and exhaled clutching Chelsea’s hand tight, a tinge of relief and anticipation and a what-now look on her face as the confetti blanketed Madison Square Garden moments after Bill, still doughy and cherub-cheeked, spoke of the “New Covenant” and a country “of boundless hopes and endless dreams”—a far cry from the 2016 message: Vote Hillary. The other guy is a sociopath.

  She’d hardly finished delivering her nomination acceptance address when everyone agreed that the speech had been “serviceable.” Editors and reporters nodded that she “did what she needed to do.” She hadn’t blown anyone away, but she just needed “to not be Trump.”

  A month earlier, Hillary, who’d begun jotting down what she wanted to say after the New York primary in April, sat down with Policy Guy and speechwriters Dan and Megan. Dan had heavy brows and a neat beard that ran directly into his head of brown curls. In addition to being Hillary’s chief speechwriter, he was best bros with Brown Loafers, which protected his position even as outsiders constantly grumbled that Hillary’s speeches had become a blur of bromides. If Hillary wasn’t promising to “build ladders of opportunity,” she was vowing to “reshuffle the deck” and to make sure “every child can live up to his or her God-given potential.”

  I didn’t envy Dan. I had three, maybe four, editors read my big stories. He had to collect and entertain opinions from an apparatus as ungainly and hierarchical as the Clinton campaign (plus family) and somehow weave it all into a salient speech. Dan’s emails often included feedback like “Big revision from WJC.” Or Podesta’s critique that an early draft “has the feel of the kitchen sink being thrown in.” Joel provided the constructive: “For what it’s worth, I hate the yelling/screaming/Trump graph. It sounds completely contrived and doesn’t deliver a big joke or a big point.” Then there were the findings of focus groups, like “Let’s make sure we don’t go too far with anti-corporate rhetoric despite the anger we heard in yesterday’s groups in Detroit.” I imagined an elderly woman behind two-way glass at an office park in greater Miami reaching for the chicken chow mein and explaining to JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen, “That ‘Ask not what your country can do for you . . .’ line just seems so bossy.”

  Dan’s position as the chief speechwriter irritated some of Hillary’s aides who projected onto the Andover grad all their frustrations that crafty men always seemed to upstage more talented, low-key women, namely Megan. Dan had already started to think about Hillary’s inauguration speech and would talk about how he’d structure his White House speechwriting team, with everything (national security, domestic agenda, etc.) reporting to him.

  Lissa Muscatine, the warm co-owner of the Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington who had written speeches for Hillary since the White House years and knew her and her voice better than any of the younger generation of writers, pitched in, as did Jon Favreau, Obama’s star speechwriter. The Guys hated it when we gave Favreau credit for a Hillary speech. Favs brought out all their insecurities about 2008 and the Obama bros. Yes, in 2008 Jon had posed groping the right breast of a cardboard cutout of Hillary. But mostly Jon’s involvement undermined Dan, who considered himself the New Favreau.

  Dan and Megan and Policy Guy ordered room service in a deluxe king suite at the Logan hotel and worked until four of the final morning of the convention.

  In a backstage locker room, Hillary scratched last-minute changes to the final draft right until she walked onstage. In a white Ralph Lauren pantsuit and crew-neck shirt underneath, she looked resplendent. Seeing Hillary take the stage as the Democratic Party’s nominee, the waving white solo speck at the center of a circumference of fifty stars, made all the complicated feelings I had about her briefly fall away.

  She warned of “a moment of r
eckoning”; referenced great presidents past, both Republican and Democrat. “He’s taken the Republican Party a long way from ‘Morning in America.’” And “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” She scattered in some self-deprecation—“It’s true, I sweat the details of policy.” And she recited some résumé points: “I went to a hundred and twelve countries.” “In the White House Situation Room . . .” And “I wrote a book called It Takes a Village.”

  The press started to file out of the arena leaving the Times’ row of assigned seats littered with empty Pepsi cans, tangy crumbs from a family-size bag of Cheetos, and the wrapper from a frosted Pop-Tart. The intensity of covering the convention had caused us all to revert back to eating like ten-year-olds reared in 1980s suburbia. I stayed behind and kept my eyes fixed on the stage. I remember feeling delight as I watched Hillary. She’d looked childlike, staring up with an oblong mouth and the bulbous, happy eyes of an anime character as the red, white, and blue balloons and a deluge of patriotic confetti showered around her. I saw her kick a red balloon with her kitten heel and catch an oversize blue one with white stars in her arms, hugging it tight as if her night had been oxygen trapped inside its latex belly.

  It was after midnight when Pat Healy and I closed our story. Carolyn, putting an end to two weeks straight of convention coverage, picked up one of the half dozen cans of Diet Coke and, noticing that it was empty, dropped it and picked up another. She stared at our story on her screen in its sixty-four-point font, as Very Senior Editor looked over her shoulder. When she finally hit Send, dispersing our copy to printing plants nationwide, I packed up my temporary desk, including all my chargers and notebooks.

  The newspaper that next morning was a thing of beauty. The headline Clinton Warns of Moment of Reckoning—Accepts Historic Nomination, Promising to “Repair the Bonds of Trust” stretched across all six columns. I stared at my name in print under Pat’s and next to a photo of Hillary waving to the convention crowd.