Chasing Hillary

3

“The World’s Saddest Word”

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS, 1996

Doris and my mom worked together at a public school with half a dozen or so pregnant thirteen-year-olds and a vice principal who’d served in the Marines and once wrestled a gun away from a seventh grader. It was Doris who told my mom about her big plans for that weekend: the first lady was in town promoting her child-rearing book, It Takes a Village, and Doris was going to hear her speak.

I can see my mom in the staff room at Pat Neff Middle School, pulling an orange out of the brown paper bag she packed for herself and thinking about this concept of the village raising a child. That same year she would be diagnosed with, and later recover from, breast cancer. I’d bring her strawberry popsicles that stained her lips red during chemo. Most people in Texas adhered to Bob Dole’s belief that “it takes a family to raise a child” and saw the whole village thing as a commie concept from a radical, uppity first lady. The San Antonio Express-News would describe the women’s organization represented at the book event as “‘feminists’ (whatever that means).”

My mom must have told Doris that I had a budding interest in politics, or maybe Doris offered to take me to meet Hillary Clinton, but either way, Doris picked me up early Saturday morning in her white Cadillac DeVille coated in a layer of saffron-colored pollen. The interior smelled like cigarette smoke, and a dangling air freshener shaped like a cowboy boot hung from the rearview mirror. Doris wore her hair in a dyed-black beehive that practically rubbed against the car’s interior roof. She told me she was a psychic and predicted I’d write children’s books one day. She asked me about the tennis team. I told her I’d quit. She told me my mom was proud of me. I said nothing.

Doris signed herself in at the Hilton Hotel conference room overlooking the River Walk and grabbed us a bar table by the windows. She brought me a Coke. I looked at my Swatch watch. I had no idea that would be the first of hundreds (thousands?) of times I’d find myself waiting on Hillary. Clinton Time, I’d learn to call it. By the time Hillary arrived that afternoon at the Hilton, I’d been through four Cokes. Doris smiled, her caked-on makeup cracking around her eyes. She pulled my wrist and led me to the front of the room where Hillary took her place behind a microphone.

“Go! Get in there. Get close,” Doris said.

I don’t remember anything Hillary said that day. But I remember the feeling I had when I saw her, the caffeine and adrenaline, the rush of a real-life celebrity who was not Selena or a member of the Spurs, in my hometown. She was pretty. She wore some version of pink or blush, definitely pastel, and looked like the kind of woman who might have belonged to the Junior League. (I later learned Hillary agreed with Anna Quindlen’s characterization of the role of first lady as having to be “June Cleaver on her good days.”)

I didn’t know then that Hillary hatred was already, as the author Garry Wills called it, “a large-scale psychic phenomenon.” Or that the RNC sold Hillary rag dolls that could be dismembered. Don Imus played “That’s Why the First Lady Is a Tramp” on his radio show. (“She won’t do housework because it makes her sick, doesn’t bake cookies like the rest of the chicks …”) But I knew my friends all hated her, which meant their parents must have hated her, too. I didn’t know why. She didn’t look scary to me.

I made my way to the front of the hundred or so women and reached my hand out to shake Hillary’s. I hadn’t thought about what I’d say to the first lady, and all I could spit out was “I’ll be old enough to vote in September and I’m going to vote for your husband.” I may have let her speech drift in one ear and out the other, but I can hear myself so clearly say those first words I’d ever say to Hillary: your husband. Not Bill Clinton, not President Clinton. Your husband.

Hillary shook my hand and held on for a while. She leaned down a little to meet eyes with me. She thanked me, and I hear her saying, “It’s terrific you’re already thinking about voting. We need you!” Then Hillary disappeared out a side door with a couple of Secret Service agents trailing behind.

My mom asked how the afternoon went.

“Fine,” I said, pulling ranch dip out of the fridge. “I shook Hillary’s hand.” Then my seventeen-year-old self said what Hillary the candidate would struggle and ultimately fail to make the country say: “She seemed nice.”

That was it. My first astute political assessment of Hillary Clinton. She seemed nice.

I AM A fifth-generation Texan Jew, the youngest of two daughters of a public school teacher from San Antonio and a self-employed attorney born and raised in the Baptist heartland of Waco. We were curiosities amid the megachurches and the Hobby Lobby stores and the fast-food restaurants with signs out front that say CLOSED ON SUNDAY FOR FAMILY AND WORSHIP. My friend Jenny gave me a silver cross with a dove in the middle hanging on a delicate chain by James Avery, a Hill Country craftsman who specialized in Christian-themed jewelry … for my bat mitzvah.

Politics became inseparable from religion, from our otherness. Jews had big noses and frizzy hair, and everyone assumed, correctly or not, that we were—gasp—Democrats.

I might as well have pulled on a skullcap and recited my haftorah when I told Mrs. Shepard’s fourth-grade class that I was supporting Dukakis. My parents took me to meet Ann Richards once. I remember her white bouffant and reaching my entire body over a heavy wooden desk to shake her hand. But I couldn’t have told you whether my parents were Democrats or Republicans. Politics wasn’t something that came up a lot in our house. If presidential politics reached our family at all, it was some homework assignment my dad helped us with or background noise on the TV as my exhausted mom got home from work, threw on jeans and a T-shirt, and tossed into the oven canned crescent rolls and chicken strips.

Yet we couldn’t escape local politics.

Sometime in the 1990s, the Texas legislature decided that public school kids, in addition to reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to both the American and Texas flags, should also begin each school day with “one minute of silence.” Everyone knew this meant Jesus. My parents told me to sit down quietly after the pledge and skip what teachers called the silent prayer. I decided to boycott the morning ritual altogether.

Mid-prayer, Mr. Mack, a photography teacher and Vietnam vet, cracked one eye open, noticed me sitting down, and instructed me to “stand the hell up.” When I shook my head no, he kicked me out and gave me three days’ detention. I was shoving my notebook and Epson Luster paper into my JanSport with a lot of eye rolling and zero sense of urgency when a linebacker who sat across from me gave us all a civics lesson. “We’re a Christian country,” he said. “It’s called one nation under GOD.”

BY THEN I’D grown out of what my sister Stefani called my giant dork stage, when I wore tortoiseshell glasses and had my head buried in books, Jack Kerouac and Oscar Wilde, years before I really understood them. I even saw myself in Chelsea then. We were about the same age, from neighboring Southern states, both avid readers and uncomfortable in our skin, with smiles full of braces, curls we couldn’t control, and frilly dresses with bubbly shoulder pads. I then graduated to my jock stage when I played varsity tennis and was a starting point guard with a reputation for excessive personal fouls. By the time I met Hillary, I was well into my stoner poet stage, during which I maintained an A average while spending most of my junior year in the parking lot of Rome’s Pizza hotboxing my friend Kate’s cherry-red VW Beetle while reciting Nikki Giovanni poetry.

Years later, when I came across Hillary’s college letters to her own high school friend, I thought of these stages and our shared adolescent misanthropy. “Can you be a misanthrope and still love or enjoy some individuals?” Hillary wrote to John Peavoy when she was a sophomore at Wellesley in 1967. “How about a compassionate misanthrope?”

She wrote about the “opaque reality” of her own self and confessed “since Xmas vacation, I’ve gone through three-and-a-half metamorphoses and am beginning to feel as though there is a smorgasbord of personalities spread before me,” including “alienated academic, involved pseudo-hippie, educational and social reformer and one-half of withdrawn simplicity.”

I didn’t care enough about anything to belong to the Young Democrats (if such a thing existed in my public school, I wasn’t aware) or the debate team. I didn’t pass around petitions to end the death penalty and didn’t have much of an opinion about the news of the day, even though my dad was from Waco and everyone wanted to ask me about the Branch Davidians and if I knew David Koresh. “That was outside of Waco,” I’d say.

I decided, for no other reason than that it would piss off every football player who stood around the kegs of Shiner we’d set up in the middle of a field on Saturday nights, that I hated the Cowboys. I didn’t eat red meat. I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Texas and move to New York. I loved Bill Clinton … and, worst of all, I loved his wife.

I THOUGHT THINGS would be different in Austin. I didn’t need ivy affixed to a sandstone library, and as my dad reminds us whenever Stef and I bemoan that we never really had a chance to go anywhere besides the University of Texas, “It wasn’t like Harvard was knocking our door down.” But I envisioned something artsy—conversations about Camus over absinthe, maybe—something more than dope bud, a Ben Harper show, and seven of us splitting the same bowl of queso at Magnolia Cafe.

I had even more disdain for the sorority girls, the “debutantes,” than I did the druggies “expanding” their consciousness, as Hillary summed up both social castes in her college letters. I counted down the days until I could move to New York and become a writer.

My closest friend, Barry Dale—who theorizes that we’d found each other in middle school and both wanted to move to New York because “I was the gay and you were the Jew”—had an assignment in his film class. He needed a model to sit in an empty diner in downtown Austin to re-create Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks.

I wore a tight black tube dress with a deep V-neck from Bebe, fishnet hose, and a pair of shiny black heels I’d bought a couple of years earlier with my employee discount at Banana Republic. I sat cross-armed at a bar table as Barry stood on the sidewalk outside snapping photos through the glass.

That’s the photo I think of from my college years. Not drunken spring break nights or fraternity toga parties or eating stale pizza on deadline in the basement of the Daily Texan. Me, in an almost deserted diner, wearing black, looking slightly slutty in a mall-bought dress, staring forward and down at nothing and everything. Barry got an A+. “I love the feel of the girl,” his professor wrote of the photo.

It should’ve been titled the same woe-is-me sign-off that Hillary used to close her college letters.

“Me (the world’s saddest word),” she wrote.

4

Bill Clinton Kaligani

SOUTH AFRICA, 2012

Bill Clinton was holding a glass of chardonnay but not drinking it the night I walked into his suite at the Saxon Hotel in Johannesburg. It was after midnight. I’d just flown to South Africa in a cramped coach cabin with a team of teenage rugby players who were bursting with testosterone and fist pumping during the entire sixteen-hour flight, plus a refueling stop in Senegal.

I’d checked into my room in the main house of the Saxon, once the palatial private residence of Douw Steyn, an eccentric billionaire who befriended Clinton during his presidency. As I walked toward Clinton’s private luxury villa, I passed rows of photos of Steyn with a younger, plumper Clinton. I crossed a wooden bridge over a pond, the sound of peacocks and fireflies and the hum of cicadas in the distance. I opened the villa’s heavy engraved doors. The stand-alone suite had a private bar and a living room decorated in tasteful neutral hues with a scattering of African sculptures.

A handful of Friends of Bill, also known as FOBs, sat at a nearby table playing oh hell!, Clinton’s card game of choice. They made small talk about Hillary’s 2016 prospects. (“If Romney wins, the party will have to pave the way for her …”)

Clinton stood by a row of neatly arranged beige leather bar stools, wearing a baby-blue V-neck cashmere sweater, tan driving shoes, jeans, and a friendship bracelet tied around his frail wrist. Chelsea sat on a sunken taupe sofa sipping Evian alongside Bari Lurie, her chief of staff.

I’d later confess to one of the donors, Raj Fernando, an algorithmic trader in Chicago, that I felt guilty about how much the Times had paid to send me on the Clinton Foundation trip—a six-night swing through Mozambique, South Africa, Uganda, Rwanda, plus a pit stop in Cyprus so Clinton could deliver a paid speech. “Believe me,” Raj said. “I paid more.”

It was the summer of 2012, right before Clinton’s spellbinding speech renominating Obama at the Democratic National Convention, when no one was paying much attention to Bill Clinton. I’d been in Sun Valley, Idaho, chasing down media moguls and crashing a cocktail party with Wendi Murdoch (“Rupert hates the New York Times, but I love you!”) when Jill Abramson approved the Africa trip, never mind that it had nothing to do with my beat at the time.

Looking back, it’s astonishing that The Guys ever allowed me to cover this philanthropic swing. We were all so simpatico then that when the Times photographer showed up from a stint in Yemen with no luggage, Clinton loaned him a razor. I was the only reporter who stayed the entire trip, starting with that first night at the Saxon when Bill Clinton talked my ear off well into the early-morning hours.

Among about a million other topics, he explained that Nelson Mandela had written his memoir on the grounds of the Steyn mansion before it became a five-star hotel.

“Where you’re staying was his home, and that’s where I stayed until 2010,” Clinton said. He looked around at the villa, with its high, airy ceilings and spotless marble floors. “It’s a wonderful place. I love this place,” Clinton said.

He paused for a moment. He’d visited the Soweto slums earlier that day. The next day we would fly to Rwanda where we’d take a military helicopter to a red-dirt village to visit a children’s hospital.

“Yeah, I always feel slightly guilty staying here,” he said. He took a sip of chardonnay. “But I get over it.”

OVER THE NEXT six days, I vacillated between awe at Clinton’s brainpower and verve—feeling blessed to be in this brilliant man’s presence—and total exhaustion from his self-absorption and driveling on. After a couple of nights of hotel-bar banter, I began to feel like the lucky passenger upgraded to first class on a transatlantic flight only to wind up next to a raconteur who never needs a nap and who rambles on because of some internal hole they need to fill.