by Amy Chozick
PHILADELPHIA—Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, who sacrificed personal ambition for her husband’s political career and then rose to be a globally influential figure, became the first woman to accept a major party’s presidential nomination on Thursday night . . .
I’d thrown my elbows around enough that by then I wrote or cowrote front-page stories several times a week, but this one was different. I held the paper in my hands staring at my oddly Slavic surname. The name passed to me from the shtetls of Poland and the Lower East Side to my traveling salesman grandpa in Waco. The name I just couldn’t change when I married an Irishman. I envisioned mothers reading our lead to their daughters, historians referring back to our words.
I’d been on the beat for so long that it hadn’t occurred to me that there would be a time when Hillary would no longer be running for president. With the conventions behind us, everyone started to think about what they’d do next. This added another layer to our already competitive politics pod. I had colleagues like Jonathan Martin who were born to cover politics. A couple of years back, when I told Jonathan I was in Texas for my grandpa’s funeral and that he was almost 101, Jonathan wrote back immediately, “Wow . . . Born in the Taft admin!” I told him he could own any beat. “Nah,” Jonathan replied. “I’m like a podiatrist. I just do toes.” But I’d become a campaign reporter not because of my love for politics or my encyclopedic knowledge, but because my career had from an early age become intertwined with Hillary’s. Now I couldn’t imagine a future separate from Hers. I didn’t really want to move to Washington, but I needed to be there for the Final Act—covering Hillary as the FWP.
“So, I know I was wavering on DC the last time we talked, but I really would love to cover the White House if Hillary wins . . .” I told Very Senior Editor over coffee that morning.
He crumpled his eyebrows behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “Would you move to Washington?” he asked.
I nodded, hoping to convey that I would do anything for the Times. “Absolutely,” I said.
Bobby never said so, but I knew he would’ve preferred that my next posting take us to Hong Kong or Delhi, somewhere far away from the Clintons and that reminded us of the adventures we’d had in Japan. But he knew me well enough to know that I wouldn’t be able to let Hillary go if she became the FWP. In the past few weeks, he started to peruse job listings in DC and signed up for Trulia updates, fixer-uppers in Georgetown mostly.
“Well, that would make sense,” Very Senior Editor said. He was supportive but noncommittal.
Maybe I wanted my editors to want me for the White House job more than I actually wanted the job.
Several years back I’d let one of the Iraq War vets who taught my boot camp talk me into signing up for something called a Spartan Super Race. This included an eight-mile run over sand and mud, crawling under barbed wire, and jumping over fire. When I arrived in Staten Island to register, I looked around and saw brawny shirtless men in military fatigues writing their race numbers on their foreheads with permanent marker. (I knew I wasn’t cut out to be a Spartan when I inquired whether this numerical system would make my skin break out.) Five hours later, when I got to the grand finale—a gladiator arena where race organizers in leather loincloths pummel contestants with pugil sticks—I didn’t feel like a badass Spartan queen. I felt really fucking stupid for signing up in the first place.
The White House job would’ve been Gladiator Arena. Four more years of fighting with The Guys. Four more years of fighting to write the same stories as the rest of the pack. Four more years of waiting for a press aide to tell me “OFF THE RECORD” and “FOR PLANNING PURPOSES ONLY” that I needed to arrive by 7:00 a.m. so that I could sit in a press van. But I had some masochistic urge to do it anyway.
After all, I’d jumped through fire—or at least being fired—to get there. Condé Nast had done away with the rover program years ago, but part of me was still the interloper staring at the back of David Remnick’s head in the elevator. I still needed to prove something. Christina, one of my few friends who can get away with passing off unsolicited life advice picked up from her therapist and self-help books, diagnosed me as suffering from “striveritis.”
After the last balloon had dropped, Hillary spent at least an hour backstage, exchanging air kisses and pleasantries with Meryl Streep, Katy Perry, and other assorted VIPs, before she went back to the Logan hotel and sipped champagne with friends. Trump had entered the third day of his feud with the grief-stricken Muslim parents of Humayun Khan, an army officer killed in the Iraq War, and a lot of Hillary’s friends saw an opening.
“Now is your chance, Hillary, to get out and show people who you really are. They’ll love you like we love you,” one girlfriend told Hillary backstage.
But Hillary was done trying. A week earlier, she’d cut off Joel and the pollster John Anzalone, as they walked her through the almost daily reminder that half the country disliked her. “You know, I am getting pretty tired of hearing about how nobody likes me,” she said.
“Oh, what’s the point? They’re never going to like me,” Hillary told this friend.
I thought of something Bill had told me in Uganda, how Hillary had laughed when they were dating at Yale and he suggested she run for office. “Look at how hard-hitting I am,” she’d told him. “Nobody will ever vote for me for anything.”
After the Philly rally, Hillary, Bill, Kaine, and his wife, Anne Holton, would embark on a three-day Jobs Tour across an industrial swath of Pennsylvania and Ohio. Brooklyn thought Trump’s meltdown with the Khans, and all the independents and military men who spoke at the convention, could give Hillary an opening with Romney voters.
“I’m also going to pay special attention to those parts of our country that have been left out and left behind,” Hillary had said in Philly. “From our inner cities to our small towns, from Indian country to coal country. From communities ravaged by addiction and places hollowed out by plant closures. Anybody willing to work in America should be able to find a job and get ahead and stay ahead. That’s my goal.”
But after the bus tour, Hillary spent most of August hobnobbing with the ultrawealthy. She hauled in $143 million that month, including $50 million at twenty-two fund-raisers in the last two weeks of August. After months of trying to portray Trump as the embodiment of “a system where the rich and powerful stick it to everybody else,” Hillary closed out the summer by averaging $150,000 an hour.
43
“HRC Has No Public Events Scheduled”
The Hamptons, August 2016
Hillary always broke down Trump supporters into three baskets:
Basket #1: The Republicans who hated her and would vote Republican no matter who the nominee.
Basket #2: Voters whose jobs and livelihoods had disappeared, or as Hillary said, “who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures.”
Basket #3: The Deplorables. This basket includes “the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.”
The Deplorables always got a laugh, over living-room chats in the Hamptons, at dinner parties under the stars on Martha’s Vineyard, over passed hors d’oeuvres in Beverly Hills, and during sunset cocktails in Silicon Valley. As Hillary was breaking down the baskets to donors, Trump spent August as if anticipating the gaffe gift basket. He told a crowd in Manchester that Hillary “lies and she smears and she paints decent Americans—you—as racists.”
I’ll pause here to add a subcategory to Brown Loafers’ Gaffe Matrix: the damning statements that aides see coming but don’t have the cojones to stop.
In 2008, Michelle Obama’s team grimaced every time she said, “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country,” at dozens of private fund-raisers before she blurted it out at a Milwaukee rally and handed the GOP an attack on the Obamas’ patriotism more potent than any flag pin. Mitt Romney didn’t start talking about the
“47 percent” that night in Boca Raton. The Guys and other senior aides who heard Hillary talk about the baskets could’ve warned her that the whole Deplorable thing wouldn’t look so good if it got out. But Hillary liked the line. Who was going to tell her to stop?
The Travelers weren’t allowed to cover Hillary’s fund-raisers. This made her comfortable testing out new lines in the safe haven of friends willing to pay $10,000-plus. We traced the origins of a general-election favorite—“Friends don’t let friends vote for Trump”—to Hillary’s LGBT fund-raiser with Cher in Provincetown.
“I stand between you and the apocalypse!” a line that Hillary used in interviews throughout the fall and that ended up a headline in a New York Times Magazine cover story started in the backyard of Jimmy Buffett’s beachside estate. Calvin Klein, Harvey Weinstein, Andy Cohen, and the other guests, who’d paid $100,000 to attend, ate up the apocalypse joke.
For the “Hey Jude” finale, Hillary danced under a tent lined with tiki torches alongside Buffett, Jon Bon Jovi, and Paul McCartney. To see Hillary dance, really dance and not attempt the whip/nae nae on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, was worth the steep price tag. She is a collection of mismatched limbs and hip rolls, the joyous, intoxicating cavort of a rhythmless but happy woman.
For months on almost daily conference calls, Joel told Hillary that most of the country hated her. “Note to self: Tho she professes indifference to what people think, she is acutely aware of opinion polling on her,” Diane Blair wrote of Hillary during the White House years. In the Hamptons, Hillary felt loved. Hillary the introvert, Hillary the “compassionate misanthrope,” Hillary of Coke-bottle glasses and hairdo changes became the belle of the ball.
I stopped traveling regularly. Hillary’s public schedule was scant and while I’ve often surrendered my dignity for the job (yelling at Bill Clinton about emails as he visited with impoverished children comes to mind), I drew the line at sitting outside rich people’s houses hoping for a glimpse of Hillary. On most days, the Travelers didn’t see her. Typical dispatches from the road would read, “Pool was unable to hear a word of HRC’s remarks at first cocktail party. She also took questions, which pool was also prohibited from hearing,” and “Pool could hear Clinton’s voice, but could not make out any exact words.”
The caretaker of a Bridgehampton compound spotted the press sitting around in the pool house and asked when they’d go inside to see her. “We told him no, we aren’t allowed to do that. He seemed incredulous,” Peter Nicholas wrote. “Pool reported no sighting of Clinton the entire day.” Annie Karni summed up the summer as a “sensory deprivation experience.”
After our last interview, Hillary promised to compare our reading lists at the end of the summer. I nagged and nagged the campaign, even preemptively sending my own list which included not one but two self-help titles. But this never happened. Instead, Hillary chose to talk about her reading list with an eleven-year-old blogger at Elle magazine.
Each week I forwarded to editors the “FOR PLANNING PURPOSES ONLY” guidance from Sarah, who fielded the Travelers’ complaints from the Brooklyn HQ:
Saturday, 8/20—HRC will attend finance events on Nantucket, MA and on Martha’s Vineyard, MA.
Sunday, 8/21—HRC will attend finance events on Cape Cod, MA.
Monday, 8/22—HRC will appear on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and attend finance events in Los Angeles, CA.
Tuesday, 8/23—HRC will attend finance events in the Los Angeles and Orange County areas and then the Bay Area, CA.
Wednesday, 8/24—HRC will attend finance events in the Bay Area, CA.
Thursday, 8/25—HRC will campaign in the Reno, NV area.
Friday, 8/26—HRC has no public events scheduled.
Saturday, 8/27—HRC has no public events scheduled.
Sunday, 8/28; Monday, 8/29; Tuesday, 8/30—HRC will attend finance events in the New York [area].
Wednesday, 8/31—HRC will address the American Legion’s 98th National Convention in Cincinnati, OH.
Thursday, 9/1—HRC has no public events scheduled.
Friday, 9/2—HRC has no public events scheduled.
Saturday, 9/3—HRC has no public events scheduled.
Sunday 9/4—HRC has no public events scheduled.
“Does she even want to be president?” an editor wrote back.
I had so much time in New York in late August that I started thinking about my ovaries again. In the three years since I’d blown off Dr. Rosenbaum’s advice to have a baby and bring an au pair on the campaign trail, Bobby and I had filed the baby thing so deep in the back of our minds you’d think I was a seventeen-year-old on the pill. I had no eggs on ice. We didn’t talk about becoming parents or envy our friends’ kids. Our five-year plan included potentially moving to Washington, followed by the 2020 election.
As the taxi sped along the East River on my way to an appointment with a new gynecologist, I looked out the window and noticed Roosevelt Island, where Hillary had delivered her milquetoast kickoff speech. The island, the bust of FDR where it all started, taunted me. Your fertile window is closing.
Dr. Broderick looked at my file. She had a moon face framed by wisps of strawberry-blonde hair. “You’re not old,” she said. I liked her.
I told her about my insane work schedule (“So, I can’t do anything at least until November, but then there will be the transition . . .”). I told her about the judgy fertility app that kept guilting me while I was on the road. She agreed with Maggie that I should delete it immediately. I said that if Bobby and I decided to really do this, it would have to be an “off-cycle baby,” what the female Travelers said when they would time births between presidential campaigns.
Dr. Broderick listened. She didn’t look at me as though I was crazy, which made me seriously question what New York women in their midthirties have confided to her. She said we’d run some tests when I had time, and then said, “It’s New York, Amy, everybody who wants a baby gets a baby.”
In the old days, before David Geffen slept in the Lincoln Bedroom (twice), before a Texas oilman and a Cincinnati trial lawyer got rides on Air Force One, and before a telecom executive and her third husband honeymooned in the White House, Democrats raised money from labor unions and East Coast liberals. Then Bill and Hillary came along and the game changed.
With the help of moneyman Terry McAuliffe, the Clintons built a coast-to-coast network of Southern trial lawyers, Hollywood producers, Midwestern businessmen, and Wall Street executives, and they treated these donors like family.
Hillary showered them with handwritten notes and birthday calls (“It’s your secretary of state calling to wish you a happy birthday . . .”). Terry once left his wife crying in the car with their newborn son so he could pop in at a fund-raiser on the way home from the hospital. “I felt bad for Dorothy, but it was a million bucks for the Democratic Party,” he wrote. Donors ate up the personal treatment. One donor who loved the attention complained to me that Obama didn’t do the same. “I could donate a kidney to Malia and not get invited to the White House,” he said.
Hillary was always paranoid about money. She once said she’d been worrying about her commodity trades while in labor with Chelsea. And just as leaving the White House with $5 million in legal fees drove a “dead broke” Hillary to hit the Wall Street speech circuit, lending her 2008 campaign $13 million of her own money had turned Hillary in 2016 into both a cheapskate and a ravenous fund-raiser. But the Clintons’ style of fundraising was anachronistic, especially in a “Two Americas” election year.
Throughout the primaries, Hillary would exhaust herself dropping off the campaign trail weekly to crisscross the country and hit up a living room full of rich people for $2,700 checks. Bernie, meanwhile, had a couple of kids working his website who turned online donations of five dollars or ten dollars into a $230 million windfall. His campaign raised $8 million in the forty-eight hours after winning New Hampshire, $3.6 million in the days after #BirdieSanders.
Hillary relied on Dennis Cheng, a
sleek London School of Economics graduate who wears pocket squares and Paul Smith socks and has amassed the most impressive Rolodex in Democratic politics. He’d leveraged the precampaign period to build up a $250 million endowment for the Clinton Foundation—or what one former aide called “Chelsea’s nest egg.” Dennis struck a more refined, reserved presence than the avuncular frat boy Terry, but they shared the same attentiveness.
Donors described Dennis as “a master concierge.” He offered a full menu: For $250,000 per person, donors could have an intimate chat with Hillary at a waterfront estate in Sagaponack. For $2,700 the children (sixteen and under) of donors at the Sag Harbor estate of hedge-fund magnate Adam Sender could ask Hillary a question. “I go to Dalton, but how would you make sure every kid gets to go to a good school?” asked an eight-year-old boy, who in ten years will surely be dropping the H-bomb into mid-conversation. Want a family photo with Hillary? That’s an extra $10,000.
I’d carved out a tabloidy mini-beat reporting on Bill and Hillary in the Hamptons, partly because any story that merged the two topics almost guaranteed me the cover of Sunday Styles. But I also had some sociological urge to understand why the area and its old money had such a hold on us transplants.
Trump and the Hamptons never mixed. His is not the kind of wealth that wants to hide behind the hedges. He’d once yelled at Rupert Murdoch that he’d sue for libel after the New York Post reported that the exclusive Maidstone Club in East Hampton denied his membership. Screw ’em, Trump would take the gaucheness of Palm Beach instead.
But Bill and Hillary were Gatsby’s pursuers.
I didn’t believe the spin that Hillary only spent time in the Hamptons because she had to fund-raise. She thought she was going to win and she liked it there. Those were her people.*
