Amy Chozick - Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling

For Bobby

I know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist. He is, in his first phase, genuinely romantic. He plans to be both an artist and a moralista master of lovely words and a merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass in his communitythat is, if his career goes on to what is called success. He becomes the repository of all its worst delusions and superstitions. He becomes the darling of all its frauds and idiots, and the despair of all its honest men.

H. L. Mencken

I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.

Hillary Clinton, 1992

This book is a work of nonfiction in that everything in it happened. But this is not a work of journalism, in that the recollections, conversations, and characters are based on my own impressions and memories of covering Hillary Clinton and her family beginning in 2007 and ending with the inauguration of Donald J. Trump on January 20, 2017. I hired a professional fact-checker to reviewand scrutinizemy version of events. My story is based on hundreds of interviews that took place during this ten-year period, documented in transcripts, audio recordings, and stacks of reporters notebooks that I stuffed into plastic containers and kept under my bed just in case I ever wrote a book. I also referred to campaign materials, archival documents, and the Miller Centers oral history of the White House years. Ive always kept journals, and even at my most exhausted would scribble down conversations from the campaign trail and my musings about whatever town we were in or news events that unfolded that day. I took lots of photos to help re-create scenes. I changed some names and identifying details, and gave lots of people pseudonyms, sometimes to protect the innocent but usually to protect the storyI think having to remember the names of dozens of political operatives who all essentially perform the same purpose is boring. In the rare cases in which I couldnt confirm exact details or dialogue, I re-created them from memory and, when possible, reviewed them with the people involved. Any material that was initially mutually agreed upon to be off the record was passed on to me by a separate source or used with permission. This bookindeed, my role in itwould not exist without the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times entrusting me with the Hillary beat, believing in my journalism and springing for me to travel the country to trail the would-be First Woman President.

Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

November 8, 2016

No one spoke on the press van. I rested my knees on the seat in front of me and sank into the back row looking out the window at the Hudson River. In the past twenty-four hours, Id slept maybe forty-five minutes and that was by accident. Id fallen asleep sprawled out longways in an armchair in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton in White Plains, New York, waiting for her campaign staff to wrangle us back into the press van to go watch Hillary Clinton vote. Ever since Labor Day, wed basically lived in the slim silver tower that, until Hillarys press corps arrival, seemed built for the sole purpose of accommodating hedge-fund managers and hookers.

Hillary and Donald Trump both liked to fly back to New York at night so they could sleep in their own beds. The Ritz put the traveling press in proximity to the Clintons home in Chappaqua while still acquiring Marriott points, which were really the only thing that sustained us in those final months on the road. Entire conversations revolved around Marriott points, how many we had, how wed cash them in when the campaign came to an end.

I couldnt tell if I was just tired or still had the busy, swirling head of someone who had downed three Dixie cups full of lukewarm champagne before filing my final campaign-trail story for the New York Times at around 3:45 a.m. It was probably both.

At first, Id resisted the leftover champagne that hours earlier made its way from Hillarys front cabin on the Stronger Together plane to our rowdy press quarters in the back.

Id learned my lesson eight years earlier, before I joined the Times and adopted my role as detached political reporter. Hillary had walked to the back of her 2008 campaign plane, the Hill Force One, and stretched out a tray of peach cobbler shed picked up from the Kitchen Express in Little Rock. I heaped a pile of it onto my plate. The image landed in the Associated Press. There I was, a Wall Street Journal cub reporter, literally allowing the candidate to feed the press.

But now it was after 2:00 a.m. on Election Day, and it was setting in that it was all over. The traveling press (or Travelers, as the campaign called us) was a pile of emotions and adrenaline. This wasnt just Hillarys victory party. It was ours. Wed made it through 577 days of the most noxious, soul-crushing presidential campaign in modern history. Now wed get our rewardthe chance to cover history, the election of the first woman president, or the FWP as we called her.

The campaign sent the Travelers our final schedule. After over 120 schedules, 300 meals, and countless Marriott points, we hope you enjoy the day on the road...

White Plains Pittsburgh Grand Rapids Philadelphia Raleigh White Plains

Until that last day, I hadnt felt as though I was covering a winning campaign. Not that I thought Trump would win. I believed in the data, yet I couldnt shake the nagging on-the-ground sensation that Hillary wouldnt win. In mid-October, after the Access Hollywood video landed, Id been working mostly from the New York office trying to keep up with the dizzying news cycle. Id asked my editors at the Times to send me back out on the road.

I just feel like the election isnt happening in my cubicle, I pleaded to Very Senior Editor, whohand raised as if answering a question in science classreminded me that the Times Upshot election model gave Hillary a 93 percent chance of winning. But its over, Very Senior Editor replied.

It was over, and we had to prepare. I put the finishing touches on a thirty-five-hundred-word tome about Hillarys path to the presidency that the Times art department had already laid out across six front-page columns under the headline Madam President . The nut graph, which my coauthor, Patrick Healy, and I had spent weeks perfecting, read:

No one in modern politics, male or female, has had to withstand more indignities, setbacks and cynicism. She developed protective armor that made the real Hillary Clinton an enigma. But if she was guarded about her feelings and opinions, she believed it was in careful pursuit of a dream for generations of Americans: the election of the countrys first woman president.

I had two more stories to finishone on how Hillary planned to work with Republicans and one on the Hillary Doctrine, foreign and domestic policy. I also had a couple of features in the can, scheduled to run in the Times commemorative womens section the day after the election. Advertisers had already bought space in the historic special edition. I even had a story ready for the papers Sunday Styles section about how Hillary would be the booziest president since FDR.

Beset by stereotypes that she is a hall-monitor type, buttoned up and bookish, churchgoing and dutiful, but not much fun at a keg party, in reality, Mrs. Clinton enjoys a cocktailor threemore than most previous presidents.

I could see everything from where I was sitting. Hillary in the front cabin. Bill, Chelsea, all their aides, standing in the aisles and on their seats. Towers of pizza boxes balanced on turned-down tray tables. The champagne, followed by coffee, that went around to all Hillarys closest aides, the ones from the White House and the State Department, the ones whom shed pretended to sideline during the campaignHillarys soon-to-be West Wing caffeinated and floating at thirty-nine thousand feet. Jon Bon Jovi, a family friend, perched on Hillarys armrest with his guitar, his black jeans practically touching her shoulder.