Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  I discovered the Hamptons after Mr. Ascot at Condé Nast passed off that unwanted invitation to the Sex and the City party. But for Bobby and me, the exclusive shores of Long Island usually meant a half day of fluke fishing in Montauk and a room at Daunt’s Albatross, a 1970s-era motel with a complimentary VHS library and walls so thin that we played guess-the-fake-orgasm. If the motel didn’t work out, we did what Bill, Hillary, and most of New York did: We mooched off rich friends.

  In late August, Bill showed up with Hillary’s two dogs, Maisie, a curly-haired mutt, and Tally, a toy-poodle mix, to crash in Steven Spielberg’s East Hampton guesthouse. Previous summers, when the Clintons rented their own beachside estates, Hillary’s brothers, Tony and Hugh, and the entire extended family showed up—the moochers of the moochers. (A grocer in East Hampton told me he saw Roger Clinton buying milk in a tracksuit.) In 2012, the Clintons had a dispute over the security deposit of the twelve-thousand-square-foot East Hampton mansion they rented, the one with the heated pool that typically goes for $200,000 per month in August.

  These details went over about as well as the Yorkie and only added to The Guys not taking me seriously. But I couldn’t help it. I mean, who brings their dogs?

  “Where Has Hillary Clinton Been?” Ask the Ultrarich was just about the last front-page headline that Hillary wanted splashed across the Sunday Times. She also didn’t want Anthony Weiner’s latest dick pic, this time with the pixilated image of his three-year-old son, Jordan, in bed next to him, to appear on the cover of the New York Post (Pop Goes the Weiner). Or for her eight-point postconvention lead in national polls to have evaporated to three points. But before Labor Day, Hillary would get all of this—plus a budding case of pneumonia.

  44

  “Media Blame Pollen”

  Labor Day 2016

  “Hope you’re enjoying a last weekend in the Hamptons before things get crazy,” Brown Loafers closed his brief but effective email shaming me for the “Hillary and the Ultrarich” story.

  Westchester County Airport Departure

  Date: Monday, September 5, 2016

  Media Arrival: 6:00AM EDT

  Time: 9:30AM EDT

  Where: Westchester County Airport–Ross Aviation West FBO–White Plains, NY

  I wished I were in the Hamptons. On the last Sunday of the summer, I was on my way to White Plains, a sturdy commuter town, an hour north of the city, that is the opposite of the Hamptons. We had to be at the airport near Chappaqua early the next morning to cover the most anticipated event of the campaign (at least to us): The unveiling of a squat Boeing 737 strewn with a shiny new coat of white paint, an H on its scion-blue tail and the newly minted stronger together slogan splashed across its side torso. The plane had arrived.

  The Travelers welcomed this development with the silly enthusiasm of neglected hamsters about to be handed a carrot. We took selfies in our assigned seats, piled stacks of h-branded cocktail napkins into our bags, and shot Snapchat videos of our shared quarters.

  “Look! There’s Huma . . .” one of the Travelers said. Mike, the campaign’s freckled luggage handler, pulled a sheer navy-blue curtain closed to block off the front cabin where the staff took their seats. We hadn’t seen Huma since she announced her separation post–Pop Goes the Weiner.

  “I guess that answers whether Hillary’s gonna sideline her . . .”

  “Dude, she’s never gonna sideline her.”

  “Poor Huma.”

  After a few rounds of Whole30 and regular workouts on the road with Annie, I’d managed to gain only a few pounds. But I remembered from ’08 that the real gluttony came with the in-flight catering.

  When we boarded the Stronger Together Express, plates of fresh fruit and cheese, yogurt parfaits and bottles of sparkling water sat on our downturned tray tables. (For all the legends of the inebriated traveling press corps, we preferred guzzling down buckets of Perrier.) We’d already been fed Dunkin’ Donuts in the hanger while waiting on a team of German shepherds to sniff our luggage. But when the flight attendants came down the aisles listing the breakfast offerings, I said, “Oh, I just had a donut. I guess I’ll take the omelet.”

  We were so fat and happy on the plane that we adopted a new word—the slunch, short for the second lunch. The slunch usually arrived around 3:00 or 4:00 p.m. and often had a local theme. Lobster rolls left on our seats after a stop in Boston. (Annie sat on hers.) Empanadas after a rally in Miami. Barbecue on our flight out of Kansas City.

  I couldn’t have timed my Hamptons story any worse. The first day we finally shared close quarters and no one from the campaign, not even Barb, the petite photographer whom I’d been friendly with since 2008 and who went on the Africa trip in 2012, was speaking to me. I’d walked into the private-jet terminal in Westchester acting as if it were the first day of school. “Hey, how was everyone’s weekend?” I said to a private-airport lounge full of campaign staffers’ eat-shit looks.

  “I just thought that story was really unfair,” a young press aide said as we washed our hands and partook in the free mouthwash in the ladies’ room. “What’s she supposed to do, not fund-raise?”

  The story, cowritten with Jonathan Martin, was meant to be a light, airy romp explaining to readers how Hillary spent the last couple of weeks of August. We filled it with vapid Yorkie details. The $100,000-per-couple lamb dinner that Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild hosted under a tent on the lawn of her oceanfront Martha’s Vineyard mansion. The ten-person chat in Sagaponack that raised $2.5 million. Hillary sandwiched between Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel in a photo booth set up at a $33,400-per-guest lunch at the couple’s Hollywood Hills home.

  The campaign called it snarky. The #ImWithHer crowd called it a hit job.

  I’d spent the summer mostly writing glowing stories, not because I wanted to suck up—by then Hillary’s and my relationship, which had early on wavered between courtship and repulsion, had been undone—but because I wanted to give Hillary her rightful front-page (above the fold) due for becoming the first woman to capture the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, standing up to Trump, and pulling off a smooth, even inspiring, convention.

  The campaign wasn’t perfect. Hillary wasn’t perfect. And I got my fair share of hell for covering those flaws in real time. Much of what I got, from Hillary and her supporters, I deserved. But the vast majority of my stories had nothing to do with emails or the Foundation or Hillary’s perceived flaws. Taken as a whole, they’d rank neutral to positive, with plenty of wet kisses thrown in.

  Ever since the Journal, I’d been drawn to policy stories. Before the 2016 campaign even started, I wrote about Hillary working to craft an economic agenda that would address growing inequality and stagnant wages. For the next two years, I wrote about every one of Hillary’s major policy rollouts—taxes, infrastructure, immigration, gun control, early childhood education, and others—all the while knowing that these stories would go virtually unnoticed by my editors, by readers, by the campaign.

  And I gravitated to lengthy features about little-known chapters of Hillary’s life. This was not easy to do with a presidential candidate who’d first been featured in the Times in 1969, five years before the paper first published the name Bill Clinton, and who remained in the public eye ever since.

  Tension didn’t always mean negative stories. I wrote features about Hillary’s tortured relationship with her sullen, unappeasable father, Hugh Rodham; about the two years after Bill Clinton lost reelection in the 1980 Arkansas governor’s race, when it fell on Hillary to find a place for the family to live, care for nine-month-old Chelsea, and pick up extra hours at the Rose Law Firm, all while Bill cheated and sulked, playing “I Don’t Know Whether to Kill Myself or Go Bowling” on the jukebox. I wrote about Hillary as a fish-out-of-water litigator trying cases in Arkansas, including defending a pawnshop bouncer named Tiny (because he was anything but) who stood accused of beating up his girlfriend and a crop duster who flew his plane too close to the fields and injured a farmwo
rker.

  I thought of this as explanatory journalism and that my features would help Americans see this enigma of a public figure as a daughter, a young activist, a jobbing lawyer, and a working mother stressed about her family’s finances.

  These pieces required digging through documents in Arkansas, a welcome change from the pack journalism of the bus, and almost always humanized Hillary in ways her campaign often failed to do, yet The Guys either ignored my interview requests on these stories or tried to kill them outright. Hillary (whose friends always said she was “the most famous person no one knows”) didn’t want to leave anything to chance. If she was going to reveal glimpses of her biography, it would be on her own terms.

  In the end, none of it mattered. I’d always tried to see and cover Hillary as a complete person, with black and white and lots of gray areas, but there was never any gray area in how Hillary saw me. No number of positive, front-page stories could change her mind. And I understood why Hillary hated the Hamptons story in particular. Mingling with the .001 percent looked terrible. But it was true, all of it.

  We’d hardly laid eyes on Hillary when we all unbuckled our seat belts and poured into the aisle to watch her stride to the back of the plane. She walked past the rows of Secret Service and staff to greet our rowdy rear cabin. Hillary was Labor Day casual, in the cotton baby-blue shirt with a wide collar like the one she’d worn to the Iowa State Fair. Brooklyn proposed Hillary have a barbecue with the Travelers and our families before the inaugural flight, an easy way to butter us up before the general election. The idea never got past Huma. “Not happening,” she said.

  “Hey Guys. Welcome to our BIG PLANE. It’s so exciting,” Hillary said in a tone that communicated the excitement of a visit to the post office. “I think it’s pretty cool, don’t you?” No one said a word.

  “You’re supposed to say yes,” Hillary said.

  She surveyed our blank stares and tried again. “I am sooooooo happy to have all of you with me,” she said, clutching her fists and stomping them up and down her torso like a toddler demanding a toy. “I’ve been just waiting for this moment. No, really, and I’ll come back to talk to you more formally but I wanted to welcome you on to the plane.”

  I thought of the time in 2008 when Hillary stepped onto the bus in Des Moines bearing bagels and coffee that no one accepted. As much as I’d whined and pushed for a shared plane, by the time the Stronger Together Express arrived, we got the message. Hillary didn’t want to finally get to know the women (plus Dan Merica) of her press corps. There would be no late nights gossiping off the record over a goblet of cheap wine. But with two months left, facing an opponent who ruled the airwaves, Hillary decided she needed us.

  Later that afternoon Hillary assumed the position of a QVC host walking back to our press quarters to display at chest height a copy of her new Stronger Together book, a collection of Clinton-Kaine policy proposals on sale in your local bookstores starting Tuesday for the bargain price of $15.99. Trump’s 757 sat on the tarmac in Cleveland in a kind of high-noon showdown with the peppy Stronger Together Express. “I heard now that we’ve got this great plane that Donald Trump actually invited his press on his plane where I’m told he even answered a few questions,” Hillary said. “So following my lead as he just did I would hope he continues and releases his tax returns.”

  Part of a campaign reporter’s job is allowing yourself to be used. At worst, we are captive stenographers, the Tripods at the back of the gym. At best, we are the unruly conduits to the American people. The campaign must endure and accommodate us to get its daily message out. But I’d never felt more like a NY Times Presstitute than on the inaugural Stronger Together flight.

  I started to think of myself as a secretary, valued by my employer mostly because of my ability to crank out 120 WPM on my lap in a speeding motorcade. I’d record the audio of Hillary’s rallies or press conferences and, as we piled into the motorcade to get back on the plane and fly to the next swing-state city, transcribe the quotes that fit the day’s theme (i.e., Trump’s taxes, Trump’s treatment of women, Trump’s bankruptcies). I’d type so fast that my cursor had a hard time keeping up and then send a feed on to one of my colleagues in New York, who wrote the main “lead all” Frankenstory that day, which was almost always Trump focused.

  Or I’d pull any Hillary news into a tight eight-hundred-word “daily,” the obligatory news stories that typically ran online or in the vitamin pages. I could write dailies half-asleep while drinking red wine out of a plastic cup.

  Six hundred ten words, web only:

  Moline, Ill.—Hillary Clinton accused Russian intelligence of interfering with the American election, implying that President Vladimir V. Putin viewed a victory by Donald J. Trump as a destabilizing event that would weaken the United States and buttress Russian interests . . .

  Back in the newsroom, my Times colleagues made calls, pored over documents, and even got Trump’s taxes in the mail. But the Travelers, well, we were the yeomen of political journalists, shuttling between states to hear the same speech over and over and fighting over Gogo in-flight wireless that was so temperamental that we’d started calling it NoGo.

  But even on days when the K-9 crew that sniffed our luggage logged a more productive day’s work than I did, I believed the trail was about more than seeing the country (or at least its high school gyms), being immortalized in a pile of front-page bylines, and having some good stories to tell the kids (that was, if my fertile window hadn’t closed). I was never one of those political reporters who, reared on a diet of All the President’s Men, held lofty notions about holding the powerful accountable and uncovering a scandal that leads to the toppling of an administration, international fame, and getting paid to blab on cable TV in perpetuity. That wasn’t me. I just wanted to tell good stories that helped explain the world to people.

  In Japan, I started to see myself as a cultural anthropologist, using my reporting to demystify a culture that many American readers had reduced to a few geisha flicks and the atomic bomb. I had the same self-important notion when it came to Hillary.

  In minutes, and over Katy Perry lyrics blared from scratchy speakers, I could weave into my stories references to Hillary’s winning campaign for student government president at Wellesley (which the college paper called “vague as to exactly how” she “would implement the change in the power structure”); her work on the Children’s Health Insurance Program as first lady; her stance as secretary of state that the 2011 Russian parliamentary elections had been rigged, important backstory for the argument she was now trying to make about Russian meddling in the US election. I could even drop references to the first time Hillary ordered room service—she was a Goldwater girl staying at the Fontainebleau hotel on Miami Beach to see Richard Nixon nominated at the 1968 Republican National Convention.

  I hoped this context, my up-close observations of Hillary, her aides, her supporters, her reception in black churches and inner cities and steel towns that she’d zip in and out of, would help readers feel like they better understood this unknowable being. That they could walk into the voting booth on Election Day a little more informed about their choice. If we really do all have a part to play in this messy, mesmerizing process that every four years alters the course of the country, then my mental trove of Hillary trivia and hammering out words on a rickety tray table on a refurbished 737 was mine.

  The cough started in Luke Easter Park on Kinsman Road in a black area of Cleveland.

  “Hey Cleveland! Happy, happy Labor Day,” Hillary said, letting out the first phlegmy whopper. “When we were trying to figure out where we could be, we all said, ‘Let’s go to Cleveland!’”

  Her voice cracked. She coughed again, five, six, seven, eight times. She reached under the podium and took a sip of water. Campaign staffers winced. Voters looked at each other with clenched jaws. Somebody started a lukewarm chant of Hill-a-REE, but Hillary, now in a full coughing fit, put her hand up to silence the crowd. She convulsed and patte
d her chest with her hands a few times. A prayer for this to pass.

  “I’ve been talking so much . . .” she started, but she couldn’t finish.

  Thing was, Hillary hadn’t been talking that much. She’d spent the last couple of weeks talking remarkably little. She unwrapped a honey-flavored Halls and managed to joke, “Every time I think about Trump I get allergic.” But it came out more like an extended wheeze.

  The coughing attack pained me. Yes, Hillary was extremely pissed at me that day, but she didn’t deserve this. She didn’t deserve to spend sixteen months on the road only to play into all the conspiracies about her health. The Drudge Report led with a photo of Hillary’s head cocked back mid-cough with the headline Choke! More Pain on Plane and eight accompanying stories including “10 Doctors Question Hillary Health,” “Media Blame Pollen,” and the requisite “Complete Timeline of 2016 Coughing Fits.”

  The next day, Hillary came to the back of the plane to tell us that twice a year, in the spring and the fall when the pollen comes out, her allergies flare up. “I just upped my antihistamine to try to break through it,” she said. “It lasts a couple days and then it disappears.”

  Drudge was right. I wanted to blame it on pollen. I wrote a lighthearted blog post about Hillary’s allergies in which I compared conservative media’s innuendo about her health to conspiracies about Obama’s birth certificate. I quoted Hillary telling us, “I have created so many jobs in the sort of conspiracy-theory machine factory. Because honestly, they never quit.”

  But Hillary was clearly sick. Four days after the Labor Day croup, she clutched onto the lectern at the New-York Historical Society and said in a frail, diminutive voice, “I believe that America’s national security must be the top priority for our next president . . .”