Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  Pitchers of the local Smuttynose beer—a staple in Hillary’s stump speech ever since she toured the brewery and held a roundtable discussion on small-business development with the owners (“I always drink Smuttynose when I’m in New Hampshire!”)—and platters of crispy buffalo wings, flatbread, and other assorted starters sat in the center of the wooden tables for four that were pushed together to form one long, boxy table so wide we had to lift up out of our chairs and lean over our plates to grab the appetizers, dangling our press credentials in puddles of queso and marinara sauce. I got a seat toward the middle and didn’t move again until Hillary had come and gone.

  I don’t remember seeing her come in, but from the very first—“Hi, everyone. Where should I sit?”—I could tell she would’ve rather been testifying before the Benghazi committee.

  She took a quick survey of the two open seats, both of which happened to be to my right. She noticed me, said hello, and took the seat one away from me and next to JenEps of Bloomberg. That left the spot to my right for Brown Loafers who formed a physical barrier, in a button-down shirt and leather-trimmed messenger bag, between Hillary and me.

  A martini glass appeared in front of her, placed next to an untouched pint of Smuttynose. I noticed her hands, the sunspots of a grandmother, the neat buffed nails, the modest wedding band, and the gold chain-link charm bracelet with a tiny photo of her granddaughter, Charlotte, hanging down. Seeing her scrape the cheese off her flatbread and then leave the bread on the plate, I mentioned the Whole30—a starvation diet of thirty days of no sugar, no starches, no dairy, and no alcohol that several reporters in the Hillary press corps (including me) were trying to stick to with varying degrees of success. She shook her head. Hadn’t heard of it.

  I can’t say that she was ever impolite, but she delivered some soul-crushing (and not entirely unfounded) criticism of the political press. We were essentially gossip peddlers, uninterested in policies that affect people’s lives and too dim and driven by traffic and Twitter mentions to grasp said policies even if we wanted to. At least, that’s how I interpreted it. Brown Loafers would probably characterize things differently. Without our knowledge, he recorded these off-the-record sessions and sent transcripts around the campaign, the highlights of which a source shared with me.

  Relations between Hillary and the press had been rocky since the start of the campaign, but that evening she exuded a particularly icy aloofness and a how-long-do-I-have-to-talk-to-you-assholes demeanor that made me feel as if I’d never been born. A younger TV reporter, less cynical than I was, later compared her disappointment in Hillary’s phony response about Biden mulling a run (“You know, I didn’t even think about that. I’ve got enough to think about.”) to learning Santa Claus wasn’t real. All I could think about was something I’d read in Diane Blair’s journal: “HC says press has big egos and no brains.”

  When the conversation started to lull, a pile of discarded bread on her plate and an empty martini glass, Hillary looked over at Brown Loafers, who nodded in unspoken obedience. She patted the table with both palms and exhaled something like “Okay! Should we get going?”

  The next morning, I woke up in my ground-floor room at the Holiday Inn Express feeling like a teenage girl just expelled from the pep squad. A tiny sliver of muted sunlight and the sound of passing cars came through the vinyl curtains. Still underneath the sheets and smelling the powdered eggs at the free breakfast buffet around the corner, I called Bobby, who was already at work and unlike me hardly ever complained. I moaned, “She really, really hates me . . .”

  Even as I whined, full of self-pity, a part of me realized my dejection made perfect sense. Between Bathroomgate and the Biden story and “Spontaneity Is EMBARGOED Until 4:00 p.m.,” why on earth would Hillary like me? And yet, for the first time in seven years I woke up clear-eyed and a little sad that ours was destined to be an impossible, tortured, and unrelentingly tense relationship weighted down by old grudges and fresh grievances. To Hillary, I was a big ego with no brain and no amount of cordial small talk could make up for the bad blood between her world and mine. “Not been good at press relations,” Diane Blair wrote. “Feels intensely about zone of privacy; constantly betrayed and abused.”

  On the drive back to Boston on I-93 to fly back to New York, my windshield wipers smeared a layer of icy grime right, left, right, left, and the defroster drowned out a public radio program about interest rates. I thought of Jill Abramson, before she was ousted as executive editor, sitting on a bar stool in front of an upstairs window at an Irish pub across from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. She was offering career advice to a group of young women journalists. There were the usual concerns about work-life blah blah blah balance and a lament that Albany seemed impossible to cover with a D cup. “They just assume you’re sleeping with your sources,” somebody said, and all the less-endowed girls looked down at their pinot grigios. When a sheepish reporter asked how to come to terms with the distinctly female instinct to always want to be liked, while also writing the tough stories, Jill looked her in the eyes and said in her slow, deliberate way, “I always thought, you’re either hated or you’re irrelevant.”

  When I got back to the newsroom, I wrote the words “You’re either hated or you’re irrelevant” down in black Sharpie on a yellow sticky note that I kept taped to the center of my computer screen for the rest of the campaign.

  21

  “Schlonged”

  Lower East Side, Manhattan, December 2015

  Three days before Christmas Hillary Clinton gave Donald Trump a gift. The back-and-forth went like this: Trump told a Grand Rapids, Michigan, rally of presumably non-Yiddish speakers that Hillary got “schlonged” during the 2008 primaries. He also called her bathroom break during a Democratic debate in New Hampshire “disgusting.” Hillary told the Des Moines Register, “it’s not the first time he’s demonstrated a penchant for sexism.” Maggie Haberman and I wrote a front-page story about how Hillary hoped to use Trump’s comments to energize women voters, who really should’ve already been energized, but that’s another story.

  Brooklyn mobilized its network. Democrats called Trump a sexist practitioner of “pathetic, frat-boy politics,” more suited to run for “president of the fourth-grade football team.” Communications director Jen Palmieri tweeted that she wouldn’t respond to Trump, “but everyone who understands the humiliation this degrading language inflicts on women should. #imwithher.”

  Our story had just published when Trump fired a cryptic warning shot. “Hillary, when you complain about a ‘penchant for sexism,’ who are you referring to. I have great respect for women. BE CAREFUL!”

  He didn’t say Bill Clinton’s name. He didn’t have to. Hillary had, in Very Senior Editor’s words, “poked the crazy bear that is Trump.”

  The strategy came right out of Roger J. Stone Jr.’s raunchy, rumor-filled book, The Clintons’ War on Women. Scoops are not my forte. I prefer lunch-based reporting. I usually hear something newsy, let it percolate through a dessert course, and then sit on it for several days as I craft a feature around it.

  But I do have a knack for convincing a range of sources to leak me books prior to publication. Seven days after Hillary declared herself “a champion for Everyday Americans,” a source slid under my front doormat a copy of Clinton Cash, the partisan investigation into the Clintons’ wealth that Breitbart News had baked up.

  A couple months before Trump’s warning shot, another source emailed me (subject line “Merry Christmas”). Attached I found a PDF of Stone’s 476 pages of X-rated allegations against the former first couple, including kinky sex (obviously), drugs, prostitution, and an Arkansas scheme to sell HIV-positive prisoners’ blood to global plasma traffickers. “And Happy Hanukkah!” I wrote back.

  Stone, a Republican operative with a head of white hair, a tattoo of Nixon’s face spread across the expanse of his often-exposed back, an Upper East Side apartment packed with Le Corbusier furniture and more shoes than Imelda Marcos (we did have sho
es in common), had it out for me. I heard that he’d said I did most of my reporting on Bill Clinton while on my knees, among other choice descriptions. (It was in this period that I started to develop a distant solidarity with Monica Lewinsky.)

  In the book, Stone wrote, “Reporters like the New York Times’ Amy Chozick mistakenly think that Hillary Clinton has a lock on women voters that will send her to the White House.” (It wasn’t lost on me that even as Hillary hated me, Stone accused me of being on the Clintons’ payroll. Ah, balance.)

  I wrote a brief post about the book, but my editors said Stone’s allegations were too over-the-top, unproven, and conspiratorial to have any real impact on the election. They decided not to publish. I agreed.

  Less than twenty-four hours after Trump’s initial tweet, I was taking a rare nap. It was Christmas Eve, and I planned to cook Bobby an Irish dinner, which meant heating up premade turkey and ham, boiling potatoes, and some Stove Top stuffing. Being Irish and married to me, Bobby didn’t have high culinary standards.

  I woke up an hour later, and my phone was exploding. I had hundreds of new Twitter followers and a stream of text messages. The texts came from second cousins and high school friends in Texas, from at least two senators, one sitting cabinet secretary, and a former Wall Street Journal colleague in Hong Kong. My first thought was that I must’ve inserted a terrible mistake in our story. My career was over. Then I saw @RealDonaldTrump’s tweet: “Third rate reporters Amy Chozick and Maggie Haberman of the failing @nytimes are totally in the Hillary circle of bias. Think about Bill!”

  Trump sat back and waited. Had Hillary responded to his threats or continued to say he had a “penchant for sexism,” he may have abandoned Stone’s strategy. But Hillary went silent. A close Trump aide later summed it up to me: “He knew he could throw Bill’s past back at her and she couldn’t say a word . . .” Who knows? Maybe he could even win (white) women.

  With a couple of days before New Year’s and the Bill-is-a-rapist meme ratcheting up, I emailed Trump to ask if he was an imperfect messenger, given his own very public infidelities and his ex-wife, Ivana, recently denying rumors of assault charges against him. “I believe that I am the perfect messenger,” Trump replied, “because I fully understand life and all of its wrinkles.”

  I forwarded his response to my editors with the very professional subject line “OMG.”

  22

  “I Am Driving Long Distances in Iowa and May Be Slower to Respond”

  Iowa, January 2016

  A lot was made about Hillary’s predominantly female press corps, dubbed the Girls on the Bus. On any given day, in our cohort of about twenty regular Travelers, as many as eighteen of us were women. Politico did a story on the phenomenon. Vogue profiled us. This involved Irina Aleksander, an elfin Los Angeles–based freelance writer, accompanying me to an Applebee’s in Polk County. The headline asked Have Female Journalists Ended the Boys-on-the-Bus Era of Campaign Reporting?

  Short answer: No. We didn’t even have a bus.

  For the first ten months of the campaign, I was Girl in a Rental Car. I’d spent so much time in a rental car trying to chase Hillary’s motorcade while fighting the urge to check Twitter and my overflowing inbox that for my own safety and the safety of others, I set my out-of-office to read, “I am driving long distances in Iowa and may be slower to respond.” On a nearly three-hour drive back to Des Moines from Monticello, with Ruby Cramer in the passenger seat and Maggie Haberman on speaker, a state trooper pulled over my silver Ford Focus. He said I was speeding . . . and swerving. As he walked to the driver’s-side window and shined his flashlight inside, Ruby and I both thrust our hands up in a don’t-shoot motion. “You can put your hands down, ladies, I’m not going to shoot you,” he said. He entered my driver’s license into the system and issued me a warning. The prospect of not speeding again in Iowa seemed pretty slim.

  In New Hampshire, I’d almost driven into a frozen lake trying to keep up with the Scooby van and motorcade in a torrential downpour while navigating the state’s obscene amount of seemingly unnecessary traffic circles. What did New England have against a simple stop sign? When it got so dark I couldn’t see the road, I pulled into a Holiday Inn Express.

  Then there was the Hummer that dinged me at the Wing Ding, an incident that made me even more uneasy behind the wheel.

  Lately, each time I got behind the wheel, my mind raced. I could see the truck that would sideswipe me, its oncoming headlights, the cornfield where some poor state trooper would find my body. I even imagined how The Guys would react. Would they feel remorse, or would they say good riddance as they had when the Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings died in a single-car crash at age thirty-three? “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy,” one of The Guys said.

  Then on a Tuesday in mid-January, Braden Joplin, a twenty-five-year-old from Midland, Texas, with a newly grown beard and tender brown eyes, died at 4:30 p.m. CST in the Nebraska Medical Center’s trauma unit. I read all the details. The driver lost control of the van that was carrying Joplin and three other Ben Carson campaign volunteers between events on an icy stretch of I-80 near Atlantic, Iowa, causing the van to careen over the median and collide with an oncoming Chevrolet Avalanche. I urged the campaign to get us a press bus.

  In 2008, the Travelers all rode together in a press bus paid for by our news outlets and coordinated by Jamie, the Clinton campaign press wrangler whom we all came to adore. The 2008 crew so settled into our bus that we’d each mark our territory with power cords and raggedy scarves. Any newcomers outside our established cliques would be destined for the Landfill Seats—what we called the back row of seats sandwiched between the trash and the toilet.

  But eight years later, Robby didn’t want to spend money on a Jamie-like staffer. At least that’s what the campaign told us.

  From the start Hired Gun Guy told us, as if in a studied trance, the same thing about Robby. That Robby, what a tightwad. Man, he is cheap. He’s such a bean counter. There were carefully placed stories about Podesta riding a thirty-dollar Vamoose bus between DC and New York.

  Robby’s cheapness was supposed to signal to donors that there would be none of the lavish flourishes of Hillary’s ’08 effort, which ended so in debt that she had to loan her campaign $13 million of her own money—an experience that made her a real coupon-clipper in ’16. There would be no chartered Hill-A-Copter. No $95,000 spent on sandwich platters for caucus-night parties when there was nothing to celebrate. No splurging $3,000 on six hundred snow shovels for elderly caucus goers when the forecast didn’t call for snow (and any self-respecting Iowan already owned their own snow shovels, thank you very much, New Yorkers).

  But, once again, Hillary’s biggest missteps of 2016 stemmed from trying to prove she’d learned from mistakes made in 2008. Robby’s penny pinching meant organizers and volunteers in Ohio and Florida had to go to Walmart to buy clipboards and pens. I talked to one organizer in North Carolina who’d rolled his mom’s office chair down the sidewalk to man a volunteer sign-up table because the campaign didn’t provide chairs. Supporters begged for lawn signs and bumper stickers. Most never got them.

  Many months later, during the general election, Brooklyn resisted dispatching resources to Michigan and Wisconsin, despite on-the-ground pleas from labor unions that Trump was gaining there. Ed Rendell, the cocksure former Pennsylvania governor who has butt-dialed me more than once, urged Brooklyn to spend more to reach suburban and rural parts of his state, but he was always told no. Three weeks before the election, Brooklyn stopped polling altogether in Pennsylvania, Florida, and other states. By one estimate, the campaign ended with $20 million in unused funds, which could’ve paid for a pile of yard signs and polling and targeted ads in the Rust Belt but instead partly went to Jill Stein’s recount efforts in Wisconsin.

  After Braden’s death, I pleaded with the campaign on behalf of all the Travelers, “We all worry it will soon be untenable and unsafe to travel between events.”

  With
no commitment on the bus—and Hillary content to have us trailing her at eighty miles per hour like paparazzi—I landed in the Quad Cities bracing to spend the final month before the caucuses driving on Iowa’s frozen farm roads. I asked for the biggest, baddest motherfucking truck they had. The black Toyota 4Runner had stained upholstery and no power anything but looked as if it could’ve been driven by a dude in a monster truck show crushing all my months of Ford Focuses in its wake.

  The woman at the Avis counter apologized that the layer of grime from off-roading couldn’t be washed off because of the freezing temperatures. I examined the truck, dangling its keys around my index finger. It had a don’t-fuck-with-me silver grill, half-a-foot lift on the enormous all-season tires, and by some stroke of rental-car fate, Texas plates.

  23

  Meeting Our Waterloo

  Des Moines, January 23, 2016

  “And what rough bureau, its hour come at last / Slouches towards Des Moines to be born?” John, the news assistant, emailed the politics team. The New York Times had arrived in Des Moines.

  Our temporary politics bureau was up and running in the Waterloo conference room, a windowless space with loud carpet, beige walls, and a low-hanging popcorn ceiling on the third floor of the Des Moines Marriott near a covered walkway that led to a Quiznos and the parking garage. I’d parked Beast, my name for the 4Runner, and walked inside to see the sign that displayed the daily forecast (high 32 / low 17), a stock image of a martini resting on a bar, and we’ve been expecting YOU: new york times newsroom.

  In the two years, six months, and twenty-four days I’d been on the beat, I had the freedom to travel almost entirely without adult supervision. I once went to Montana just to try to smooth things over with one of The Guys during a dinner of artisanal beer and cow testicles. I’d been on so many trips to Little Rock that I’d turned one of the doormen at the Capital Hotel into a source (“Pile of Clinton old-timers here. Something’s up,” he’d whisper at check-in). I knew where to find homemade tamales in Vegas and a surf-simulation workout in St. Louis. I’d racked up so many Avis miles that when Bobby and I rented a compact car to drive from Miami to Key West, they welcomed us on a red carpet and presented me with the keys to a convertible BMW Z8 roadster.