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AT THE STEAK fry, Iowa Hillary—the most belabored of all the versions of Hillary I’d mentally characterized—delivered an unintentionally ominous “Hello, Iowa, I’m baaaaaaaack.” She cracked a joke about Bill’s vegan diet. “It does really feel just like yesterday when I was last here at the Harkin Steak Fry, or as my husband now prefers to call it, the stir-fry,” drawing some giggles from the leery crowd of party faithful.
She then embarked on fifteen minutes of vanilla remarks. “In Washington, there’s too little cooperation and too much conflict …” she said, in what, even for Hillary, ranked high in the pantheon of pabulum political talk. This was when Bernie Sanders was still an obscure socialist senator from Vermont, and Hillary’s aides had urged her to take out any references to raising the minimum wage, advising that “this might still be too hot and partisan and might prefer just saying ‘We have a choice whether to move forward …’”
Bill sat behind her, his mouth newly flopped open in a way that made people assume he was older and sicker than he actually was. He wore a red-and-white gingham print button-down shirt, a recent birthday present from Hillary. “It kinda makes me feel like a tablecloth at a diner,” he told us.
When Hillary finished, Tom Harkin took the podium and in nine folksy words stroked Bill’s fragile ego and undermined Hillary in a scene that stayed with me for the rest of the campaign. “We saved the best for last, didn’t we, folks?” Harkin said. Chants of “Bill!” echoed over the grassy field.
As both Clintons headed back to their SUV and an accompanying eleven-car motorcade, a handful of young Latino immigrants, whose numbers had swelled since 2008, shouted out to Hillary about whether she agreed with Obama’s mass deportations. Would she deport their families, too? She shoved a thumbs-up their way and said, “Yaaaay!”
Salon called the event THE DUMB IOWA STEAK FRY: AN OMEN FOR THE HORRIBLY DULL POLITICAL YEAR TO COME. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said of the footage of Hillary flipping steaks with a forced grin, “Hillary Clinton’s problem for people that know her and like her—like I know her and like her—she puts on that political hat, and then she’s a robot.”
WHEN I GOT back to Des Moines that night, I grabbed a seat at Centro at the end of a long table next to Hillary’s faith adviser, a blubbery, histrionic man. We called him Hands Across America (HAA) because he’d traveled the country with us in 2008 after a sexual harassment allegation led to his brief banishment from the Hillary campaign’s Virginia headquarters. A young staffer said he planted a wet, unwanted kiss on her head. (The staffer was transferred to a different department.)
After that, HAA ran an outside group that supported Hillary’s 2016 bid, using his position to regularly feel up several of the young women who worked for him in hopes of landing a job on the campaign. He would be frozen out of the official 2016 campaign team.
HAA exhibited generally creepy behavior, but seemed more pitiful and effeminate than threatening, which is why I tried to ignore his rubbing up and down my back at the steak fry as we posed for a selfie that I posted on Instagram as if we were old friends. I once had a meeting in DC with HAA and a family friend of Hillary’s who had the porcelain smile and abundant black lashes of a daytime TV host. HAA rubbed his hands together and said in his Southern drawl, “Ay just luv my job. I get to be in a locked office with all y’all pretty, young girls.” Hillary would sometimes mention him on the campaign trail, referring to her “friend” who “sends me scripture and devotionals, sometimes mini-sermons every day,” always leaving out the small detail that everyone suspected he was a pervert.
As I took my seat next to HAA I tried to ignore this detail, too, because that’s what political reporters do when we are in Iowa. We write identical stories and suck up to drunk, lecherous sources at Centro.
HAA massaged my shoulder with one hand and drank a whiskey on the rocks with the other. I put a couple of the fried brussels sprouts with ranch dressing on my plate and sat there without speaking, attempting to contort my face into the expression I thought an unbothered male reporter would make.
The other reporters grilled HAA about when Hillary might declare and whether she would even have a primary opponent. He pretended, like everyone on the unofficial payroll then, that she hadn’t made up her mind.
“Now, c’mon y’all, give her the space to make up her mind. She wants to take her time, do it right this time. I sent her a scripture this morning that said …”
I felt his hand move down my back.
“I’m not feeling great, I think I’m going to head back to the Marriott,” I said, jumping up.
“No, Ames, now c’mon, you just got here,” HAA said, tugging on the arm of my blazer.
I dug around in my backpack and pulled out all the cash I had, eleven dollars, and tossed it in the middle of the table.
11
The Last Good Day
HONOLULU, DECEMBER 2014
Carolyn couldn’t get me combat pay, but she must’ve known I was about to crack because she agreed to put me on the cushiest assignment in journalism as a reward after a bruising year in Hillaryville: babysitting the Obamas on their annual Hawaiian vacation.
By my third day at the Moana Surfrider hotel in Honolulu, I had the timing down. I’d wake up at 4:00 a.m. in my corner room of the old side of the hotel, overlooking Waikiki Beach and Diamond Head, and check in with my editors in Washington. I’d file the first draft of the “setup story” with any anticipated news (e.g., POTUS’s statement about the North Korean hack on Sony; his planned visit to a mess hall at the Marine Corps Base) around 7:00 a.m. This is all Hawaii-Aleutian time. Then I’d head downstairs to find a spot on Waikiki Beach close enough to where the waves broke so that the sound of the saltwater drowned out passing tourists, but far enough from the shoreline that the late-afternoon tide wouldn’t sweep up my laptop and reporter’s notebooks and Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes, the 1,072-page tome on the 1988 election that I was determined to get through before the 2016 campaign started, even if it meant skipping the Gephardt chapters.
There were only a couple weeks left of 2014. Almost a year had passed since “Planet Hillary” made me persona non grata, and even some of the Poseurs were speaking to me again. Six months had gone by since the DC confrontation and nothing made Carolyn happier than strutting into the daily morning meeting with the Times’ top editors and fighting to get my stories on the front page.
I’d learned not to rely on The Guys. I’d cultivated a variety of sources that ranged from one of Bill Clinton’s kindergarten friends to a State Department official turned Wall Street executive. Sourcing up usually involved a friendly off-the-record breakfast (I stopped doing dinners after the “inside you” incident). A morally ambiguous donor and former aide always insisted we meet at the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis in Midtown Manhattan under the gilded Parrish mural of merry Old King Cole surrounded by his obsequious court of knights, musicians, and servants. I always wanted a shower after.
The Times’ new executive editor, Dean Baquet, gave me his full support as Jill had. Dean is from New Orleans and wore black suits with red pocket squares and rimless glasses. He called me “kiddo” and loved to gossip about Little Rock and Juanita’s, the Tex-Mex restaurant where he met sources when he was a Los Angeles Times reporter looking into Hillary’s commodity trades. Because of this early stint in Arkansas, Dean, along with Carolyn, succeeded Jill and Howell Raines as the latest embodiment of the Clintons’ theory that the Times had it out for them.
The bad blood from Bathroomgate never went away. I remembered something a Journal editor told me after a lengthy correction was appended to one of my early stories: “We are all forged in the crucible of our mistakes, both professionally and personally.” That was true of me and the CGI bathroom story. I assumed it was true of Hillary, too. Forged in the crucible of all the conflicts she’d endured and the mistakes she’d made, ready to confront another campaign as an older, wiser, better version of herself.
Ever since Jill put me on the beat, I’d anticipated 2015—the year Hillary would be a formal candidate and I’d have an actual campaign to cover. But I also dreaded what was to come: the stress, the constant travel, the battles both with The Guys and inside the Steel Cage Match. Until then, the Hillary story had been mostly mine, but soon it would be bigger than me, bigger than any of us. I couldn’t postpone the inevitable, but by some stroke of luck and a lot of sucking up to Carolyn, I could ring in 2015 on Oahu, one of the last places on earth to celebrate the New Year.
By 3:00 p.m. Hawaii-Aleutian time, Washington had completely forgotten about me. They’d practically forgotten about POTUS. I’d send notes updating my editors on his movements, as instructed—“Presidential motorcade departed Kailua compound at 4 p.m.,” or “POTUS is bowling with friends.” But Obama’s mundane vacation whereabouts hardly warranted a story. So I packed every indulgent afternoon with things I knew I wouldn’t have time to do in the next twenty-two months until Election Day.
I took surfing lessons. I discovered the Frosé and sucked them down like seventeen-dollar Slurpees. I tested out various shave-ice options before settling on a little stand in a back alley behind a Thai massage parlor. I never wore makeup or anything other than flip-flops and left my watch in my hotel room because I didn’t want a tan line. I didn’t care what time it was anyway. Bobby came to visit for a few days with his golf clubs and SPF 50.
On day seven, reinforcements arrived to help me with this arduous assignment.
The Times’ Mike Schmidt waddled onto the warm carpeted sand of Waikiki fully dressed and squinting. With a bulky black ThinkPad under one arm and his other hand cupped over his eyes looking out toward Diamond Head, he spoke loudly into an earpiece. (“No, it has to go tonight or we lose the exclusive.”) Had anyone else’s restive DC ambition planted itself upon my eighty-five-degree beach day, I would’ve been pissed off, but the sight of Schmidty made me smile. I waved for him to come sit, but he looked right past me.
“Yo, Schmidt, over here!” I stood up.
“Hold on a sec,” he said into the phone. “I didn’t recognize you. You look Latin.”
This didn’t feel like an accomplishment. In the time that I’d worked on my tan and learned to stand up on a surfboard for a grand total of fifteen seconds, Schmidty had already written a feature about Obama’s mediocre golf skills (14 handicap, at best) and had broken a real talker on the presidential motorcade tapping inexperienced volunteer drivers to shuttle the press. He’d reemerged onto the beach in a swimsuit and was talking about how he needed to “source” (i.e., drink) with White House staffers who spent most of the Hawaii trip lounging around the pool hoping not to have to partake in tropical beverages with some go-getter reporter in Panama Jacks. We were bad enough fully clothed.
I loaned Schmidt the highest SPF I had and dragged him into the ocean. We didn’t so much swim as wade in to where the water was so deep we couldn’t touch and buoy around—a couple of uptight beat reporters dipped into the warm water.
The surfers and catamarans on the horizon drew nearer and my de facto beach office became a tiny sliver on the sand. I don’t want to call it a baptism. That would be melodramatic, and if the two of us had anything besides scoring the winter White House gig in common, it was that we looked like old friends from Jewish summer camp. But the universe was trying to tell us something in the ocean that day.
Schmidty calls it the Last Good Day. I think of it as the Afternoon of Impending Doom. Whatever you call it, we got back to the mainland and before our tans had faded, an editor called me late one Thursday night to tell me that David Carr had collapsed and died in the newsroom.
I dragged myself into the office the next morning, past the spot under the Times awning where David always smoked. I took the elevator to the second floor, walked to what had been David’s corner cubicle—his piles of illegible notes scrawled on legal pads, the backsides of press releases, and the insides of file folders; his silly Minnesota knickknacks; donut crumbs sprinkled like a dusting of snow across his desk; that scarf strewn over the back of his chair. I sat on the floor, by the trash can, pressed my back against the cold windows overlooking the Port Authority Bus Terminal, hugged my knees into my chest, and bawled. I tried to muffle this drooling, groveling fit into my gray sweatshirt. So many people lost David—his wife and three daughters; his siblings; his journalism students; his neighbors in Montclair, New Jersey, who knew him as the goofy suburban dad with the leaf blower; the millions of readers who relied on his steady, scathing voice to make sense of things. But for those three minutes in a cubicle that still smelled of Camels and cafeteria coffee, I let myself wallow in self-pity, sobbing to the spirit of David that I couldn’t make it through the election without his all-knowingness, without our ramen lunches and his reminders that I deserved to be where I was, doing what I was doing.
Two weeks after that, Schmidty broke the story that Hillary exclusively used private email at the State Department. I soon found myself at the United Nations for the first “WHAT ABOUT YOUR EMAILS?” press conference and everything took an irrevocable turn for the worse.
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