Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  Hillary called on me third after a Turkish reporter (per UN protocol) who would prompt ridicule and rumors about a planted question when he innocently asked, “If you were a man today, would all this fuss be made?” MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell (per everything) got the second question.

  Then Hillary pointed toward me. “Hi, right here.”

  For the only time during the press conference, she grinned and in an almost maternal motion batted her hand to quiet the shouts from CBS News and Al Jazeera. “She’s sort of squashed, so we’ve got to . . .” Hillary said.

  “Hi, Secretary,” I said, still crouched down to avoid the German cameraman’s wrath. Ken and I had rehearsed our questions, but I still spoke too fast, running my two-part question together. “I was wondering if you think that you made a mistake either in exclusively using your private email or in the response to the controversy around it. And, if so, what have you learned from that?”

  “Well, I have to tell you that, as I said in my remarks, looking back, it would have been probably, you know, smarter to have used two devices.”

  Hillary could’ve acknowledged it was a mistake and apologized, but even as I joined the delirium of the scrum, I understood her instinct. She thought using a private email was another nonstory (“the biggest nothing burger”) started by the Times and amplified by her political rivals. Every elected official—“even Obama,” aides said (off the record)—used a personal email. Why should she apologize?

  One of Trump’s close associates told me Trump had been baffled watching the spectacle unfold on CNN. It was one of the first times he knew that if he ran, he could beat her. Trump said he would’ve ended the first press conference with an emphatic “I’m DONE talking about this.”

  I sometimes wonder whether Hillary would’ve seemed more genuine if she’d adopted Trump’s tactics. If she’d come out at the stakeout alongside a lawyer (female, fifty-something, attractive but not too attractive) and stacks of documents in manila folders displayed like props—as Trump did at one of his more theatrical press conferences. Should she have ditched the legalese and given us the real reason she used a private server? Of course I didn’t want the DISHONEST MEDIA reading through my emails. Look at what they’ve put me through for twenty-five years! That MAKES ME SMART. Could Hillary have told my profession what she really thought of us and dismissed the email story altogether as more “FAKE NEWS from the FAILING New York Times”?

  Well, shoulda, coulda, woulda. She didn’t.

  There were no taxis so I got on a crosstown bus back to the newsroom, my laptop and MiFi balanced on my lap, my stomach growling. I typed out the first draft of the first “WHAT ABOUT YOUR EMAILS?” story. Schmidt would add his reporting to my coverage of the press conference. Carolyn would give it a read, followed by the copy desk, who scanned it for factual and grammatical errors. The slot would take a look and defy every fiber of a newspaper editor’s old-school being by popping it on the home page as soon as possible. As the afternoon progressed, Schmidt and I would perfect the story, adding insights, fact-checking statements Hillary made, and making adjustments that Very Senior Editors requested until the final version for the historical printed record on page one (above the fold) was as close to flawless as was possible for a story that started on the M42 crosstown bus.

  UNITED NATIONS—Hillary Rodham Clinton revealed on Tuesday that she had deleted about half her emails from her years as secretary of state . . .

  James Carville called it. The Guernica press conference only raised more questions than it answered. We stayed in the newsroom late into the night, studying up on government rules, talking to sources about whether Hillary would postpone her campaign announcement, scheming with Carolyn about the next day’s story and the story for the day after that and the fifth-day story that could anchor the all-important Sunday Times.

  Hillary would say later that the Times covered the email story “like it was Pearl Harbor.” Ever since that first news conference, there was an insatiable appetite for email-related stories. I can’t explain it exactly except to compare it to a fever that spread through every newsroom and made us all salivate over the tiniest morsels. Cable news talkers talked. Readers clicked, clicked, clicked. Republicans feasted. All of this heightened the fever until reporting on Hillary’s emails, asking Hillary about her emails, poring over thirty-four thousand of Hillary’s emails (She got stood up for a cabinet meeting! She can’t work a fax machine! She loves Upstate apples!) became an almost out-of-body impulse turning us all into Whirlpools set on the rinse-and-repeat cycle. I never agreed with Hillary that her email server was a nonstory, especially after the FBI opened its investigation, but I would regret—and even resent—that it became the only story. But that was months later, when the emails swallowed everything.

  In those early days, I felt invigorated and grateful to be so central in covering such a monster news event. I wanted to prove I was worthy, to myself, to my editors, to The Guys. I wanted to keep the Polar Bear alive.

  I left the newsroom after 2:00 a.m. still high from closing our page-one story and from Hillary calling me “squashed” on national television. Too antsy to take a taxi, I climbed down the subway stairs at Times Square and dug around in my backpack for my MetroCard. That’s when I felt the manila envelope.

  13

  “What Makes You So Special?”

  April 2015

  I couldn’t sleep the night before the announcement. Bobby was visiting his family in Ireland. I wouldn’t have blamed him for giving me the Hillary-or-me ultimatum after the mortgage fiasco. I lay in bed, stretching a leg over to his empty side of the mattress, wondering how many times I’d let him down over the next nineteen months. How much he’d put up with.

  Not long after the email server story first broke, I made a twenty-four-hour trip to Miami for the sole purpose of shouting a “WHAT ABOUT HER EMAILS?” question at Bill Clinton as he wandered around a Liberty City housing project helping underprivileged kids during a Clinton Foundation Day of Action. I am not proud of this.

  Bill wore blue jeans and a baby-blue T-shirt that hugged his paunch. He looked like he’d wandered away from a game of mah-jongg at a senior center. “I have an opinion, but I have a bias,” he said when CNN asked if his wife had been treated fairly in the private server brouhaha. I pressed again. He took a step toward me. Then he stopped himself. “I shouldn’t be making news on that.”

  Later, Clinton pulled me aside next to a bouncy castle and introduced me to a Bolivian farmer who’d relocated to eastern Arkansas. “Amy, Amy, come over here, here’s a story you oughta be doin’ . . .”

  The Guys were always trying to get me to cover the Day of Action, but for some reason they weren’t thrilled I made the trip down that day. “I don’t care what you write because no one takes you seriously,” Outsider Guy told me.

  I couldn’t get that line out of my head. It hurt even more that it had come from him. No one takes you seriously.

  I lay in bed studying a stack of Times stories I’d printed out to see how my esteemed predecessors had covered previous presidential announcements. Robin Toner, 1991: “Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas entered the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination today with an unstinting indictment of a decade of Republican domestic policies and a promise to restore the American dream for ‘the forgotten middle class.’” The “forgotten middle class” had such lyricism and aplomb, a single evocative expression dreamed up by a centrist think tank with a sentiment similar to “Make America Great Again,” minus the kitschy overreach and racist undertones. I wanted to write a sweeping lead when Hillary started her campaign.

  The Brooklyn campaign headquarters had invited the Hillary press corps to an off-the-record spaghetti dinner at John Podesta’s house in DC. The goal, in addition to trying to signal newly improved relations with the press, had been “setting expectations for the announcement and launch period” and “framing the HRC message and framing the race.”

  Podesta, Hillary’s campaign chairman
and a White House chief of staff to Bill Clinton and counselor to Obama, had a skeletal, hyper-disciplined frame, a distance runner swallowed by a gray suit. He exuded the cool calm and steely on-message detachment needed to wrangle the throng of friends, donors, and advisers that chased after Hillary. He’d known Hillary since the McGovern campaign in 1972, and although she wasn’t as enamored with him as Bill was, they did share some endearing quirks. Podesta believed in UFOs and encouraged Hillary, also a believer and an X-Files fan, to promise during the campaign to “open the files” on Area 51 and to tell the Conway Daily Sun that “we may have been” visited already, “we don’t know for sure.”

  Robby Mook, who had run Terry McAuliffe’s campaign for governor in Virginia, would be Hillary’s campaign manager. The Clintons figured that if the thirty-five-year-old clean-shaven data whiz could get Terry, the original Clinton moneyman who’d founded a fly-by-night electric car company, elected the seventy-second governor of Virginia, then he could get Hillary elected POTUS.

  Robby introduced the twenty or so reporters crammed into Podesta’s eat-in kitchen to the Brooklyn-based campaign team, right down to someone whose title was, I think, assistant deputy director of issues and policy. Finally, at the end of the introductions, he threw up his hands and slapped his khaki thighs and said something like “Oh yeah, and Huma! Where’s Huma?”

  Huma stood near a window overlooking the backyard. She gave an excruciating closed-mouth grin and waved four slim fingers at us. “Huma does the schedule and, uh, a lot of other things,” Robby said. In an instant, Robby had reduced to an afterthought the most important force (whose last name wasn’t Clinton) on the campaign and the person whom many of Hillary’s friends would blame for her loss. Robby didn’t know at the time, he couldn’t have, that the “a lot of other things” Huma would do included his own job.

  I’d been an insecure mess at the Podesta dinner. I was used to attending work parties with David Carr, who’d walk up to the most powerful person in the room and say, “Do you know my friend and colleague Amy Chozick?” Always putting “friend” before “colleague.” In the weeks since he died, it had been hard to be in the newsroom. Editors tried to cheer me up. Dean started calling me Penguin. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I was a Polar Bear.

  By the time I got to the spaghetti dinner, reporters had already thrown their messenger bags and reporter’s notebooks over every seat at the main table in the dining room. I ended up at the kiddie table—a four-top foldout like the one my dad set up for poker nights—squeezed into an adjacent den.

  Maggie Haberman sat near the center of the main table. She didn’t have to work the room. Everyone came up to her. Maggie started at the Times the same day as David’s funeral. Carolyn’s poaching her away from Politico was inspired. We all had whiplash refreshing our Twitter feeds trying to keep up with Maggie’s reporting. I was excited to have her as a colleague, partly because you don’t want to compete with Maggie and partly because she was another badass woman to join our almost entirely male politics team. I wanted us to be friends.

  But The Guys used her arrival as another way to get in my head. “C’mon, you really think they’ll keep you on the beat with Maggie there?” The Guys would say. And when they didn’t like the way I handled a sensitive story, they’d say, “Maggie would never do this to us. . . .” I later saw emails from Brown Loafers Guy instructing donors to talk to Maggie instead of me. Their antics didn’t work. Maggie was a hardened pro and even less susceptible to The Guys’ bullshit than I was, but it was another attempt to undermine me and cast us on opposite sides of the Steel Cage Match. I saw what happened to Anne. You’ve got a target on your back.

  In fact, the gathering was in part to signal that the era of Original Guy was over. Podesta and others called him a “cancer,” bantered that he was “going off the rails,” had been part of a “goat rodeo” at Hillary’s State Department, and may or may not have a “disorder.” OG would still pull the strings from behind the scenes, but delicately, so reporters and even Hillary’s own campaign staff would think he wasn’t involved.

  Jennifer Palmieri, a grown-up who had held the top communications job in the Obama White House, would be Hillary’s new communications director. With her deep-set hazel eyes and wispy blonde hair that softened her strict oblong jaw, Jen brought the cool breeze of sanity and grapefruit-scented bath salts to Hillary’s press operation and helped me get over my phobia about The Guys. We could make small talk about shopping and weight loss, our diets and Hillary’s, too. (This included Hillary staring down a mouthwatering spread of barbecue picked up on a stop at the Whole Hog Cafe in Little Rock and putting a single tomato on her plate.) Jen thought Brown Loafers Guy had potential, “if only we could beat the [OG] out of him.”

  Meanwhile, Outsider Guy ended up leaving his position altogether, taking a lucrative Silicon Valley job. I moved the dickhead file to my archives and never again spoke to the Guy whose support, sarcasm, and frequent sharing of dog photos initially made me believe I had some inside track.

  Feminine bonding aside, what set Jen up as antithetical to The Guys was that while their comebacks to reporters were like those of a rapper seizing an open-mic night, poetry in put-downs (“Is it possible to quote me yawning?”), Jen, the highest-ranking communications professional in Democratic politics, could hardly spit out a sentence. We had that in common, too. I’d listen to the audio of our conversations and transcribe quotes like “It’s um, I don’t, I don’t, we would, uh, it is, uh, I just saw the president’s, um, uh, comments, about it . . .” and “Like, we have a plan, literally.”

  I’d eventually see the sly genius in this potpourri of uhs and likes and ums, peppered with eye rolls, confused squints, and a crooked smile. Jen gave us on-the-record access while rendering virtually every conversation unquotable.

  Making these precampaign receptions off the record didn’t lead to candor. I almost spit out my marinara when Mandy Grunwald leaned in close to tell us Hillary would “fight for every vote” and “take nothing for granted.”

  During the “expectation setting” portion of another off-the-record cocktail party, this one at Joel Benenson’s Upper East Side apartment, the campaign assured me Hillary’s announcement would encapsulate the mood of a nation. As they framed it, her message would be nothing short of poetry, similar in scale and scope to Clinton’s Forgotten Middle Class, with the historic heft of Obama promising—from the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, where Abraham Lincoln started his national political career—to end “the smallness of our politics.”

  Instead, we got a corporate catchphrase delivered in a cheery video that might as well have been a Pottery Barn ad.

  The video was posted online on a Sunday afternoon in April. In classic Hillary fashion, she’d overcorrected from her 2008 announcement video when she’d been criticized for striking an all-about-me tone, telling supporters, “I’m in—and I’m in to win,” and sitting against a chintzy floral throw pillow. This time Hillary handed her video over to a montage of carefully selected nonactors, a multicultural cross section of the comfortably middle class. The black couple awaiting a first child. The earnest Asian American college graduate applying for her first job. A gay couple strolling hand in hand talking about wedding planning. Latino brothers bursting with orgullo as they open a small business. Finally, one minute and thirty seconds into the roughly two-minute video, Hillary appeared standing in the front yard of her Chappaqua home to say, “Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion.”

  It wasn’t so much that the video was bad or did any damage. It was serviceable. It was safe. It was Hillary. But there was no meat on the bone. There was nothing for me, or anyone else, to grasp onto as “that’s why Hillary is running for president.” The best historical analogy was to Edward M. Kennedy, a front-runner ahead of the 1980 election who’d been reduced to incoherence when CBS News’ Roger Mudd asked him, “Why do you want to be president?” Depending on whom you asked, Hillar
y had spent the past eight years or her entire life thinking about that question, yet when she started her 2016 campaign, her only clear vision of the presidency seemed to be herself in it.

  Ever the eager student, Hillary spent the years since the State Department poring over academic papers and dense briefing books to reeducate herself about the country she hoped to lead. She’d consulted two hundred policy advisers and grasped that sociologists and economists had concluded that Americans with annual household incomes of $35,000 to $100,000—the group any presidential candidate would need to win—no longer wanted to be called “middle class.” In the aftermath of the financial crisis, for the first time since the 1960s, the middle class no longer meant the house in the suburbs, the reliable job, the family trips to Disneyland. Middle now meant underwater mortgages, college debt for kids who wouldn’t find jobs anyway, dwindling retirement savings, one diagnosis away from bankruptcy. Academics started using phrases like the “near poor” or the “sandwich generation” and even revived a New Deal–era term, the “submerged middle class.” But nobody was going to win the White House talking about the “near poor” or “submerged” voters.

  It made me think back to a conversation from a decade earlier. I’d worked at the Journal for less than a year when we all stood around discussing our plans for Thanksgiving. I said I was headed back to Texas. I loved Thanksgivings in Texas, which involved turkey picked up from the Rudy’s Bar-B-Q inside a gas station and boxed corn bread and a cherry-flavored Jell-O mold. One of the senior Journal editors said, “Texas, huh? Interesting. Be sure to check out a Walmart,” as if the place we went to buy beach umbrellas and lawn chairs and paper tablecloths for backyard birthday parties was some bizarre retail concept and I was an anthropologist wading into the unknown. Texas, huh?