Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  I’d been talking to Andrea Mitchell when a Muslim woman in a hijab dove her torso over the press barricade and grabbed onto my arm. “Tell me she can still win. What are you seeing? Tell me.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that the Times’ Upshot needle had swerved away from nearly 90 percent for Hillary earlier in the evening and quickly plummeted toward Trump, giving him a 50 percent, 60 percent, 70 percent chance . . .

  Earlier, the Javits had been swarming with campaign aides and Democrats, all happy to do TV hits about how confident they were. But after Florida, almost everyone quotable—even Hired Gun Guy—disappeared. Brooklyn gathered in a windowless holding room, the kind we’d used for hurricane drills in Texas. Robby and Podesta warned everyone not to talk to the press—as if that mattered now—so the only information I could get came via text.

  Sean, the same source who had helped me break the Kaine news, texted me all night with mostly optimistic updates. (“He has no chance in NV,” and “Nothing is over until it’s over.”)

  But at 9:47 p.m., I looked down and saw the text. My stomach churned.

  “We’re fucked unless we hold the Rust Belt,” Sean wrote.

  I called Carolyn and told her Hillary was going to lose.

  11:51 p.m.

  Subject line: Wisconsin

  From: Chozick, Amy

  To: Carolyn, Jonathan, Patrick, David, Ian

  Date: Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2016 at 11:51 p.m.

  Not gonna happen for them.

  Gone.

  From: Ryan, Carolyn

  To: Chozick, Amy

  Date: Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2016 at 11:55 p.m.

  Where are you getting that

  From who

  From: Chozick, Amy

  To: Carolyn, Jonathan, Patrick, David, Ian

  Date: Tuesday, Nov. 8 at 11:57 p.m.

  From BK source who is at Javits, says Milwaukee is gone and that was her best shot.

  Of all the Brooklyn aides, Jen Palmieri had the most pleasant bedside manner. That made her the designated deliverer of bad news to Hillary. But not this time. She told Robby there was no way she was going to tell Hillary she couldn’t win. That’s when Robby, drained and deflated, watching the results with his team in a room down the hall from Hillary’s suite, labored into the hallway of the Peninsula to break the news. Hillary didn’t seem all that surprised.

  “I knew it. I knew this would happen to me . . .” Hillary said, now within a couple of inches of his face. “They were never going to let me be president.”

  1:36 a.m.

  Hillary had already taken to bed when the AP called Pennsylvania for Trump. There had been talk of Chelsea or Bill addressing supporters at the Javits, but that wasn’t happening. Podesta agreed to do it. Cheryl Mills was on the phone with the lawyers about possible voting irregularities and recounts. Bill lay on a sofa in an adjacent room, silent and gnawing on the rotting end of an hours-old cigar.

  Nobody planned for Hillary to concede that night. They’d decided to fight. But the contract at the Javits was expiring and supporters would be kicked out soon.

  “We can wait a little longer, can’t we?” Podesta told the crowd. He instructed everyone to go home. “They’re still counting votes and every vote should count. Several states are too close to call so we’re not going to have anything more to say tonight.”

  After his brief remarks, Podesta went into the holding room and assured the campaign staff that “we are coming to the office tomorrow and identifying our narrow path forward.”

  He really thought that. But back at the Peninsula, Hillary was preparing to call Trump.

  2:36 a.m.

  The AP declared Trump the winner. Huma called Kellyanne Conway. She patched Hillary through. “I have President-Elect Donald Trump for you . . .” Hillary was brief, a simple “Congratulations, Donald,” uttered in a half-asleep haze.

  Obama had been glacial when Hillary called him minutes earlier. “You need to concede,” he told her. “There’s no point dragging this out.”

  I wandered around Midtown with all my luggage. The streets were populated mostly by homeless people, a few remaining XXX-rated video stores, and Hillary supporters, their VIP Election Night passes still hanging around their necks. I headed to the F train, several long blocks over, but halfway there spotted a taxi. I sprinted toward it and thrust my suitcase in the trunk. We were headed down the FDR when I confirmed Hillary had called Trump to concede. I let my editors know.

  The taxi driver overheard my calls.

  “I’m from Pakistan,” he said, his voice breaking. “Is Trump going to send me back? I have a green card. I’ve been here twelve years.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I looked out the window at the East River. “I don’t know anything.”

  7:55 a.m.

  The final alert from the campaign arrived in my inbox:

  Hillary Clinton to Offer Remarks This Morning in New York City

  Hillary Clinton will deliver remarks to staff and supporters at 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, November 9 at the New Yorker Hotel, Grand Ballroom—481 8th Ave NY NY 10001.

  I fell asleep on the couch with all my clothes on—jeans and a plaid flannel shirt that flared in a ruffle at the bottom to hide my gut and that I’d worn for three consecutive days. I hadn’t turned the TV off after Trump gave his acceptance speech, and the glow of depleted pundits on a CNN news panel filled the room as I nodded off.

  At 6:30 a.m. I heard rain outside and the beeping of a trash truck and bolted upright, disoriented and lightheaded with a chalky taste in my mouth from the protein bars and pretzels, the only things I’d eaten the night before. I had a text from a source in the campaign (or what used to be the campaign) saying Hillary would address supporters at the New Yorker Hotel in Midtown later that morning, and I needed to get there “ASAP.”

  “Pretend you’re in the pool. Text me with any problems,” he said.

  I rubbed my eyes smearing the mascara I forgot I was wearing all over my face. I typed back, “Will do, thx.”

  I hadn’t seen Bobby in over a week. He came out of the bedroom and without turning on the lights unlocked the dead bolt on our front door and plopped the Times on the coffee table. The headline stared at me: TRUMP TRIUMPHS: Outsider Mogul Captures the Presidency, Stunning Clinton in Battleground States.

  Bobby had tears in his eyes, his posture slumped over in his white T-shirt and boxer shorts. “I’ve been waiting for four years, longer, eight, to pick up the paper the day after the election and see your name,” he said. “I’ve,” he stopped himself. “We’ve given up a lot of our lives, all so you could have that front page.”

  “That’s not why I did it,” I said, jumping up to brush my teeth and wash my face.

  “Then why?” he asked, sitting down on the sagging part of the sofa where I’d slept.

  “I don’t know, to witness history? To travel the country? To cover one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century. Why are we talking about this? I gotta go. She’s speaking soon.”

  “Sure, go. I haven’t seen you in weeks, but go. Hillary calls.”

  I peeked my head from around the hallway and said to the back of his head, “Well, this is the last time . . .”

  A printing plate, the sliver of silver aluminum that had been spooled around a cylindrical tube like yarn on a loom and used to print the front page of the Times the night in 1992 when Bill Clinton won the presidency, sat on the filing cabinet in front of my cubicle. I glimpsed it every time I walked to the printer. William Jefferson Blythe Clinton: A Man Who Wants to Be Liked, and Is read the headline of the “Man in the News” story by Michael Kelly. Kelly died covering the Iraq War in 2003. The other bylines on the front page, Robin Toner, the first woman to be the national political correspondent at the Times, and R. W. Apple Jr. (aka Johnny Apple), the paper’s legendary political journalist, had both died of cancer. But they were still alive on that front page, forever intertwined with history.

  For three years, every time I felt like I
was too much of a chickenshit to last on the beat (There’s a target on your back . . . ), I’d think about the immortality of a byline, of people rushing to newsstands to buy the paper the morning after Election Day. My name among those beneath the six-column banner headline Madam President.

  I hadn’t been in the newsroom on Election Night, but the Times had sold “Times Insiders” special access to watch coverage unfold. For two hundred and fifty dollars per person, subscribers in a downstairs auditorium got live play-by-play updates from Times journalists. Other assorted VIPs got to tour the newsroom and gawk at editors as if they were zoo animals in need of a tranquilizer.

  The Upshot’s data projections had been so deceiving that, like most newsrooms, we’d hardly had any contingency plan for a Trump victory. (“We got nothing!” an editor was heard yelling across the newsroom.) A color piece that had been envisioned as capturing the white patrons at a dive bar in a Pennsylvania steel town “crying in their beers” after Trump lost was quickly reworked into a front-page story on how white men had delivered for Trump.

  By 10:00 p.m. Michael Barbaro and Fleg locked themselves in an office to write the “Trump Wins” news story. The “Hillary Wins” story Pat Healy and I had spent months on; they hammered out its replacement in a couple of hours.

  Before I ran out the door, I picked up the paper off the coffee table. I looked at the image, Trump casting his ballot in a dominant blue tie, Jared Kushner by his side, and skimmed over the words “. . . Mr. Trump’s unvarnished overtures to disillusioned voters took hold.” The bylines read, “By Patrick Healy and Jonathan Martin.” But they hadn’t written the story. I later learned that the news desk had been so rushed to make print deadlines that they’d put the wrong bylines on Michael and Fleg’s story. The eternal life of a byline bestowed on the wrong reporters. I heard later that one editor apologized for the error saying, “Sorry, there’s a lot of shit on that front page.”

  I was still in reporting mode, consumed with covering Hillary’s concession speech and my next story. It would take weeks before it sank in that I would never write the FWP story. The Times’ byline mix-up had been a stroke of gruesome symbolism—a slap alongside the head that everything we thought mattered, didn’t.

  54

  The Morning After

  New York City

  From: Varun Anand

  Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2016 10:55 a.m.

  To: Traveling Press

  Subject: HRC

  Has departed the Peninsula and is en route the Wyndham New Yorker Hotel at 10:55 a.m.

  By the time I got to the New Yorker Hotel, a couple of blocks from the Javits, hundreds of journalists were snaked around Eighth Avenue and across Thirty-Fourth Street. The air was damp and a light drizzle fell. If I’d gone to the end of the line, there was no way I’d make it inside in time to hear Hillary’s concession speech. If I cut in, I’d evoke the wrath of an army of sleep-deprived TV correspondents and their crews of haggard cameramen. I saw the same “tight pool” of Travelers—the Wires, one TV crew that shared its footage with the other networks, and a single print reporter—who’d gone to vote with Hillary the day before, assembled in the foyer. I walked inside.

  “I’m the local print pooler,” I told the press wrangler, Sarah.

  Ever since our bus arrived in Waterloo, Sarah had been so upbeat and patient with us, but now she appeared dazed, her eyes bloodshot. She gave me a look as though she didn’t have the energy to fight and waved me inside.

  The eight or so Travelers who made it inside stood in the art deco lobby not speaking. The hotel staff was replacing a flower arrangement in a large slate urn. I hadn’t noticed it until I smelled the fresh forsythia, branches brought back from the Flower District where I’d spent so many mornings at House & Garden.

  Secret Service led us into a ballroom with stacks of folding tables under black tablecloths and banquet chairs. A lazy-eyed Belgian Malinois, led by a burly agent, moped around to sniff our bags. The Travelers sat on the gold-and-scarlet carpet, a loud violent pattern. We unfurled our chargers, thirsting for a power outlet one last time before we returned to our comfortable office existence. We’d already been swept. I asked permission to use the bathroom.

  “Will I still be clean?” I asked the agent, one of my last conversations in Trailese.

  “I can hand wand you when you get back,” he said.

  Wanda, our housekeeper, whom we happened to share with Eric and Don Jr., comes on Wednesdays. As I waited in line for the bathroom, I looked down at my texts. “Don’t worry Amy,” Wanda wrote. “You can come to WH with me.” Smiley face with sunglasses, thumbs-up emoticon. Our Polish cleaning lady had become my closest tie to the White House.

  Sarah led us inside to a row of a dozen or so chairs, hardly enough to accommodate the pool, much less the hordes of reporters waiting to get inside. Annie texted me that it didn’t look as though she or the rest of the pack would get in. I sat thigh to thigh with the Wires, JenEps to my right. The network embeds set up behind us, unfurling their tripods one last time.

  For years, I’d walked up the West Side beneath the glare of the red-lit New Yorker Hotel sign that sat on top of the building. During a trip to New York in college, I’d assumed the brown pyramid-shaped edifice had been the headquarters of the New Yorker magazine, all forty-three stories of it. Later, I’d rush past thinking the building condemned, a once-grand squat house for homeless people and hookers, certainly not the kind of place that Hillary would rent out for the biggest speech of her political career and the bookend of all my years covering her.

  I’d never been inside. The ballroom looked recently renovated, with crystal wall sconces, chandeliers, and white crown molding. But none of these flourishes could mask the room’s sad shabbiness. The recessed lighting, the metal vents that exhaled warm, dry air. The dim yellow light and the harried look of the empty stage awaiting Hillary.

  Huma and the other aides, who hours earlier popped champagne on the Stronger Together Express, sat in the front row before the stage, which had been thrown up in front of faux Grecian columns and a creased blue curtain and lined with twelve American flags. Capricia and some of Hillary’s girlfriends sat cross-legged on the carpet, their shoulders sloped. The junior Brooklyn staff watched from the gold-rimmed balcony above.

  I twisted my neck up to the left and made eye contact with some of the press advance kids who devoted themselves to our lunch orders. Their hopes of a White House job dashed, at least for now. Shell-shocked was the word everyone used to describe the mood. I would’ve said heartbroken, or worse, gutted.

  The half dozen Girls on the Bus who made it inside were all in some stage of a breakdown. Glasses on, no makeup, hair pulled back in tangly bird’s nests. We comforted each other with pats on the shoulder. Hugs would’ve been too conspicuous. The emotions hadn’t come so much because Hillary had lost but because her defeat had exposed something about our own insecurities as professional women.

  “It was the all-female press corps. It was just too much. The country couldn’t take it,” Lisa Lerer of the AP said.

  For me, the breaking point came with the stream of emails and voice mails from editors beckoning me back to the newsroom. I thought I’d done my paper a service by squirming my way inside, but my editors didn’t see the point. They informed me that Matt Flegenheimer would be writing about the speech from the office. Why did it not surprise me at that moment that a less experienced (sorry, Fleg) man got the job? I was only six blocks away from the Times. I could get there in ten minutes, fifteen with a stop at Starbucks, yet I still felt as torn between the road and the newsroom as I had on the bus in Iowa or wrestling with the Gogo Wi-Fi on the Stronger Together Express. I pleaded with Carolyn.

  “Can I please do this speech story? I will make it very quick and then head back to the office.”

  “No, we need you to dive into how she lost. We can just get the speech from TV,” she said.

  I’d never defied Carolyn. I lived to make Mamma happy.
But what was she going to do at this point? Punish me by putting someone else on the Hillary beat?

  “For ten years of my life, I’ve covered this woman trying to become president,” I said, trying not to let my voice crack. “This might be the last speech I ever see her give. I’m not leaving. I’ll come back as soon as it’s over.”

  I stood up and watched as Hillary entered the ballroom with her entourage. Bill looked comatose in his purple satin tie. His mouth hung angry and ajar. Hillary had been caked in makeup, but her eyes still looked as though she’d been crying. You will look happy, no use this time.

  Brooklyn said she always had two versions of an Election Night speech, but that wasn’t true. She’d only had one, the one in which she’d dedicated her victory to her mother. Megan Rooney built out the bare-bones defeat speech. Hillary knew she wanted to say something about how “we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling.”

  People had all kinds of theories about why Hillary wore purple. The purple of the suffragette flag. The color of LGBTQ anti-bullying. Hillary later said she picked the suit to symbolize red states and blue states that together make purple. She planned to wear it to Washington that day as president-elect. But I had another theory. In Methodism, purple is worn during Advent and Lent, a symbol of penitence. We were watching Saint Hillary.

  “I know how disappointed you feel, because I feel it too and so do tens of millions of Americans who invested their hopes and dreams in this effort,” Hillary said. “This is painful and it will be for a long time.”