by Amy Chozick
Clinton had been so morose thanking the two hundred or so CGI staff members, many of whom would soon be out of a job, standing in the hub of the Midtown offices, slumped shoulders, bags heavy under his eyes, his gaunt frame swallowed under a navy-blue blazer, that Tina Flournoy, his chief of staff, prompted everyone to break out in “Happy Birthday.” “I don’t think I’ve ever done anything that I’ve loved as much as this foundation,” Clinton said, the sad, lovable St. Bernard. “This is like a root canal for me.”
But it wasn’t just the foundation or the women. The entire election had become a repudiation of the Bill Clinton years—NAFTA, the 1994 crime bill, his dismantling of financial regulations, his gutting welfare by $55 billion. People—Democrats, even—linked the rise of Trump, the general degradation of the office of the presidency, to Clinton. He lied about getting a blow job in the Oval Office, so why not turn to a reality TV star who brags about sexual assault and seems proud to be propped up by the Russians?
It seemed the whole country was in open, angry revolt against a presidency that until recently most people would’ve said was pretty good. What part of the 1990s didn’t you like—the peace or the prosperity? Incomes rose for everyone, not just the rich. No major wars, unless you count the Balkans and Somalia.
In the spring, Clinton had this embarrassing showdown with Black Lives Matter protesters. They waved signs like clinton crime bill destroyed our communities and black youth are not super predators, a term Hillary had used in 1996 to describe gang violence. Instead of ignoring them, Clinton extended a long finger and entered, as Jezebel called it, “Peak White Mansplain” mode.
“I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got thirteen-year-old kids hopped on up crack and sent them out onto the street to murder other African American children,” Clinton said, his bloodshot eyes bulging. “Maybe you thought they were good citizens. She didn’t. She didn’t.” He raised his voice. He would’ve been at a yell if his voice had been stronger. “You are defending the people who killed the lives you say matter. Tell the truth.”
Black leaders said it was a Sister Souljah moment for an entire generation. They weren’t wrong.
As a proxy for his wife’s primary campaign, which at that point was kept afloat almost entirely by black voters, the confrontation was a disaster. But the people who knew Clinton best said he was looking ahead to the fall, and especially the white working-class voters who put him in office in the first place. He figured that, for the most part, those voters would’ve agreed with him.
Not long after Hillary started her campaign, Clinton told the NAACP that his 1994 crime bill sent too many low-level criminals to prison “for way too long” and “made the problem worse.” Even then, people saw only politics.
“I keep waiting for somebody to spring a trapdoor on me, oh look at Bill Clinton,” I once heard Clinton say at a book party in New York that I wasn’t really supposed to be at. “He really is still slick.”
Like most reporters, I loved covering Clinton, being around him, watching him work a room, even (or especially) at his most self-indulgent. He constantly disobeyed his staff and security detail. In White Plains, before the New York primary, he shook hands at a Hillary field office and then walked across a busy two-lane street. He blocked traffic and almost caused a multicar pileup with a single outstretched palm so he could drop in on the Dominican bodega across the street.
“Amy, Amy, take a look at this. This woman is Peruvian, but she has a Hindi tattoo on her hands,” he said.
“Trump’s America,” I said.
Just then a tiny Mexican woman with a red purse sprinted across the street and dove into Clinton’s arms. I don’t know how she got past Secret Service except that she seemed hardly over four feet tall. Clinton hunched down and in a reflexive move, wrapped his whole body around her, both arms, his chin slumped down on her shoulder. Their cheeks touched. It could’ve been the last scene in Dirty Dancing, except with an elderly Mexican woman and a white-haired former president.
By the fall, Clinton was tired of reaming Robby out on conference calls, screaming that the campaign shouldn’t ignore the white voters he’d won in ’92 and ’96 and whom Hillary won over in upstate New York in the Senate years and in her 2008 campaign.
Clinton tried to tell them that he knew Trump better than any of the other candidates did. Hillary, thinking Trump was a bigger donor than he actually was, had insisted they attend his 2005 wedding to Melania Knauss, despite a couple of aides warning her not to go. Hillary ended up sitting behind Shaquille O’Neal at the ceremony and could hardly see anything except the ninety meters of white satin tulle of Melania’s Dior gown pass down the aisle.
Clinton thought Trump’s antitrade economic message could be lethal. He said something like “This guy is making Hillary look like the elitist” almost daily. Nobody reminded Clinton that his sexual past left the campaign paralyzed in hitting Trump’s treatment of women. Or that shouts of “Bill Clinton’s a RAPIST!” now interrupted almost all Hillary’s rallies.
The campaign treated Clinton like a distraction, a gifted but problematic child who needed to be kept busy. Regular updates to Brooklyn from Clinton’s team included, “Fair to say we didn’t break anything.” By October, Clinton had splintered off from the campaign, venturing on a series of “Stronger Together” bus tours. He went places Hillary wouldn’t go to—tried to talk to the Bubba-Trump continuum. North Florida, eastern Ohio, the Mahoning Valley, Iowa, rural Pennsylvania, stops in Wisconsin and Michigan. At a diner in Buffalo, Clinton ate a french fry off a customer’s plate (with permission).
In East Africa, I wrote in my notebook the Zulu greeting Clinton used wherever he went, sawubona, which means “I see you,” to which villagers would reply ngikhona or “I am here.” He felt the same way about Trump voters. “An enormous number of people feel like they’re not seen, that nobody gets them,” he said.
“You can actually go places where you can make a difference in the vote because people don’t expect you to show up there,” Clinton said. “I found it was the most efficient use of the things I could do for the campaign, but I also just like it. It’s much more like the ways I campaigned when I was a young person starting out. When I was out at nineteen years old working for other people.”
But if there was one thing Clinton would remind you, and keep reminding you until you got it, it was that he wasn’t nineteen anymore. This came out in all types of weird ways. At a black church in Detroit, he’d had body envy. “Anytime I watch an NBA basketball game, I think, if I had a body like that I would’ve gone into a different line of work,” Clinton said.
On a stop at a Mexican restaurant in Santa Fe, a twenty-four-year-old Bernie supporter, Josh Brody, ripped into Clinton about the welfare overhaul and Wall Street.
“It’s a nice little narrative,” Clinton said, hovering over his booth at Tia Sophia’s.
“The Democratic Party is now a party that’s supposed to represent the working class without many working-class constituents,” Brody said, blaming the shift on Clinton moving the party toward big business.
“If you never have to make a decision, then you can go back to the past and cherry-pick everything [for a] narrative that is blatantly false. What you’re saying is false,” Clinton said.
He could’ve walked away. His aides kept urging him to walk away. (“Other people are waiting,” his body man, Jon Davidson, said. “I think we’re gonna agree to disagree here, guys.”) But Clinton wasn’t finished.
“People like you show up in presidential elections. A lot of them stay home. That gives you the benefit of being able to criticize everybody,” Clinton said. His aides were physically nudging him to the next booth. “If the best thing to do is just say no and lob bombs, you don’t get anything done.”
I didn’t believe the rumors that Bill was sick or losing it. My Irish power broker friends—the same ones who invited me to a luncheon the year before at which Hillary sat next to Gerry Adams (“palling a
round with terrorists,” a source texted me)—invited me to a St. Patrick’s Day event with Clinton. Mouths fell open as he extemporaneously wove a speech decrying political polarization into a crescendo with flavors of Yeats.
“We can never let our hearts turn to stone, and we can never let things fall apart so much that we cannot build a dynamic center where the future of our children counts more than the scars of our past,” he said.
But something had changed in Clinton. He meandered through his usual remarks, telling his extremely elderly, almost entirely white crowds how Hillary was “the best damn change maker.” And he spoke with a kind of schmaltzy desperation I hadn’t heard before. “You guys did well when I was president, let’s come in and talk,” he told a couple hundred people at a rally in Fort Collins, Colorado. He raised his dry voice to speak over the hum of a turboprop plane circling overhead with the words go trump painted on its wings.
In Pueblo, Clinton told the crowd, “Look, his base is where I grew up. I was born in Arkansas to a mother of Scots-Irish lineage. These are good, honest people,” he said, “but always and forever we’ve been manipulated by scoundrels.” In the back, a man shouted, “Lock that bitch up!”
50
Chekhov’s Gun
New York City, October 28, 2016
File under headlines that didn’t hold up: Stop Trying to Make Anthony Weiner’s Sexting A Political Issue, New York magazine, August 30, 2016.
The day October delivered its final big surprise, my colleague Mike Schmidt was visiting from DC. He sat in the cubicle next to me in the newsroom as we both worked our sources. Twenty minutes after the Clinton campaign announced in a show of confidence that Hillary would hold an early voting rally in Arizona, a state that had gone red in eleven of the past twelve presidential campaigns, but seemed potentially in play, news broke that James Comey sent a letter to Congress stating the FBI had found additional emails related to Hillary’s private server. Trump wasted little time declaring, “This changes everything.”
Schmidt heard the emails had been unearthed during a separate investigation into Anthony Weiner’s sexting with an underage girl. He kept yelling into the phone, “They’ve got Weiner by the balls!” until I finally G-chatted him that he had to stop saying that.
The Times news alert went out that the emails had been found on a computer Huma had used. The Weiner connection both was unbelievable and yet, in some sad way, made perfect sense: Hillary, married to an alleged sexual predator, could lose to Trump, an alleged sexual predator, because of Weiner, an alleged sexual predator.
No one understood why Huma had stayed with Anthony for so long, but the best explanation I’d heard came from a close girlfriend of Hillary’s who reminded me that Huma had grown up amid the tumult of the Clintons’ own marriage.
“You can’t blame her,” this friend said, using the same excuse The Guys had used for Chelsea. “She was raised by wolves.”
I thought back to 2013 when I first heard about the “Carlos Danger” scandal, to the stories I wrote about The Guys hoping to contain Huma’s personal life so that it didn’t spill into Hillary’s political future. They protected Huma as if she were a beloved little sister and a vital appendage of Hillary. Big donors were less sympathetic, imploring Hillary to put Huma in a less visible role. At least one top donor confronted Huma directly, in 2013, pleading with her, for Hillary’s sake, to step down. “I’m good at what I do and that’s Hillary’s decision,” Huma replied.
Now, in the last act, with eleven days before the election, Huma’s problems exploded in one final self-inflicted, seismic wound.
“It’s like Chekhov’s gun,” I said as we stood around discussing the news.
A colleague who overheard this said, “I didn’t know they knew who Chekhov was in Texas.”
Very Senior Editor came by my desk to ask, “She’s not gonna lose, right?”
I gave my extremely professional assessment of the situation.
“Brooklyn is freaking the fuck out,” I said. “Her trust numbers are already shit.”
In August, after the Pop Goes the Weiner cover in the New York Post, Trump told us, “I only worry for the country in that Hillary Clinton was careless and negligent in allowing Weiner to have such proximity to highly classified information. Who knows what he learned and who he told? It’s just another example of Hillary Clinton’s bad judgment. It is possible that our country and its security have been greatly compromised by this.”
His statement had seemed so far-fetched that Pat Healy and I took a fair amount of outrage from the #ImWithHer contingent for including it in a front-page story (“This Changes Everything”: Donald Trump Exults as Hillary Clinton’s Team Scrambles). But Trump had been half-right. The FBI didn’t find any additional classified or incriminating emails on Weiner’s computer, but the “bad judgment” line stuck.
Hillary was en route to Cedar Rapids when the news broke, accompanied by her childhood friend, Betsy Ebeling, a sweet gray-haired Midwesterner whom the campaign rolled out every time they needed a testament to Hillary’s warmth and down-to-earthiness, and the celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. Robby Mook had been on board to brief the Travelers about Hillary’s trip to Arizona and how she’d expand the map. Hillary didn’t initially see the news—nor did most of the press—thanks to the plane’s shoddy Wi-Fi.
When the Stronger Together Express touched down, disbelief, followed by alarm, spread throughout the front cabin. The Travelers bustled onto the tarmac hoping to scream a question, “SECRETARY! WHAT ABOUT THE FBI?” Hillary lingered on board. She had the photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz to finish. She’d later tell friends that the development was “just another crisis” in a career full of them.
In the newsroom, we turned up the volume to watch Hillary’s brief press conference that evening. Part of me longed to be there shouting questions myself.
But mostly, I thought of Sara.
I’d spent the past year bringing chocolate babka and challah loaves to Sara Ehrman, the feminist firebrand whom Hillary had lived with after law school when she worked on the Watergate Committee. Forty-two years earlier, in August 1974, Sara drove Hillary, then twenty-six, to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to be with Bill Clinton. Sara tried to talk her out of the move the whole way down. “We’d drive along, and I’d say, ‘Hillary, for God’s sake, he’ll just be a country lawyer down there.’” And each time, Hillary would answer the same way, telling Sara, “I love him and I want to be with him.”
Sara was ninety-seven but feisty, still dispensing tough love to her most famous protégé, Hillary, and a revolving door of Washington women who came to her sunny Kalorama apartment, bearing gifts and seeking career advice. We’d become close over the many afternoons I’d try to woo her into talking on the record about the two-day 1,193-mile journey that changed Hillary’s life. For over a year, Hillary had turned down my many interview requests to do a piece on their relationship, and Sara remained reluctant. After the election, Sara showed me emails from Brown Loafers instructing her not to talk to me, basically saying that I hated Hillary and couldn’t be trusted to be fair—a warning Hillary had asked him to pass on. But Sara finally agreed to talk to me anyway, writing back to Brown Loafers something like “For God’s sake, she’s just a nice Jewish girl from Texas.”
Sara reminisced about Hillary’s sloppy room, with brown clothes and books and a bicycle strewn about. She told me about the deeply personal conversations they shared on the two-day drive down Interstate 81 in Sara’s beat-up ’68 Buick sedan (“an old rattletrap,” she called it).
The journey, I wrote in the Times, had “the ingredients of a classic American road trip—a cheap motel, tchotchke purchases, encounters with drunken strangers and deeply personal conversations” and offered “a glimpse of Hillary the public seldom sees . . . wide-eyed and eager, vulnerable and afraid, at the cusp of a momentous decision that would alter the course of her life.”
The road trip story—and accompanying video interview with Sara, sit
ting on the sofa in a sea-foam sweater set that brought out her eyes—was my favorite article that I ever wrote on the beat, maybe in my entire career. It was published on the Times website hours before news of the Comey letter broke. Hardly anyone read it. The story had been scheduled to run prominently on the next day’s front page, but never even made it into print. Several months after the election, I would write Sara’s obituary. Hillary told the story of their road trip at the memorial service.
The Comey news would lead the entire front page—three stories, seven bylines (including mine), a four-column photo of Hillary, Huma standing over her shoulder arms akimbo. The layout would live in infamy, proof to Hillary and the #StillWithHer crowd that the Times blew the email story out of proportion, the climax of its decades-long anti-Clinton vendetta.
“I am confident whatever they are will not change the conclusion reached in July,” Hillary told reporters when barraged with questions that afternoon about the newly unearthed emails. Asked about the Anthony Weiner connection, Hillary said, “We’ve heard these rumors, we don’t know what to believe.”
Less than four minutes later, she closed her green binder and turned to leave.
The Travelers yelled, “Secretary, is this going to make your campaign so much harder?”
“Secretary, how did you learn about this?”
Hillary pointed at the scrum. “Same way you did, from the press.”
“Are you worried this could sink your campaign, Secretary?”
Hillary, now almost out of sight, shook her head and laughed.
51
Hillary’s Death March to Victory
You are in Akron, Ohio, for an Ohio Democratic Party Voter Registration event with Secretary Hillary Clinton at the Goodyear Hall and Theater on Monday, October 3, 2016.
