Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © 2018 by Amy Chozick

Cover photograph © Getty Images

Amy Chozick asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008296711

Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780008296735

Version: 2019-01-21

Dedication

For Bobby

Epigraph

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 moralist—a master of lovely words and a merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass in his community—that 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. MENCKENM

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

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

1: Happy Hillary

2: Jill Wants to See You

3: “The World’s Saddest Word”

4: Bill Clinton Kaligani

5: Roving

6: The Foreign Desk

7: “Scoops of Ideas”

8: “Taking Back America”

9: Leave Hillary Alone

10: “Iowa … I’m Baaack”

11: The Last Good Day

12: Emailghazi

13: “What Makes You So Special?”

14: The Everydays

15: “Fucking Democrats”

16: The Ninnies

17: A Tale of Two Choppers

18: Sorry, Not Sorry

19: The Pied Piper

20: “Spontaneity Is Embargoed Until 4:00 p.m.”

21: “Schlonged”

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

23: Meeting Our Waterloo

24: The Girls on the Bus

25: You Will Look Happy

26: He Deprived Her of a Compliment

27: “Saint Hillary”

28: I Hate Everyone

29: “You Should Be So Pretty!”

30: Prince Harry

31: The Plane Situation

32: The Gaffe Tour

33: “Let Donald Be Donald”

34: Stay Just a Little Bit Longer

35: The Kids Are Alright

36: Writing Herstory

37: Who Let the Dog Out?

38: “Man, Y’all Are Jittery”

39: The Bed Wetters

40: Off the Record … Until Hacked

41: The Red Scare

42: Gladiator Arena

43: “HRC Has No Public Events Scheduled”

44: “Media Blame Pollen”

45: The Fall of Magical Thinking

46: Debate Hillary

47: How I Became an Unwitting Agent of Russian Intelligence

48: The “Big Ball of Ugly”

49: Bill’s Last Stand

50: Chekhov’s Gun

51: Hillary’s Death March to Victory

52: The Tick-Tock Number One

53: The Tick-Tock Number Two

54: The Morning After

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

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 review—and scrutinize—my 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 reporter’s 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 Center’s oral history of the White House years. I’ve 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 story—I 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 couldn’t 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 book—indeed, my role in it—would 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.

1
Happy Hillary

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, I’d slept maybe forty-five minutes and that was by accident. I’d 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, we’d basically lived in the slim silver tower that, until Hillary’s 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 we’d cash them in when the campaign came to an end.

I couldn’t 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, I’d resisted the leftover champagne that hours earlier made its way from Hillary’s front cabin on the “Stronger Together” plane to our rowdy press quarters in the back.

I’d 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 she’d 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 wasn’t just Hillary’s victory party. It was ours. We’d made it through 577 days of the most noxious, soul-crushing presidential campaign in modern history. Now we’d get our reward—the 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 hadn’t felt as though I was covering a winning campaign. Not that I thought Trump would win. I believed in the data, yet I couldn’t shake the nagging on-the-ground sensation that Hillary wouldn’t win. In mid-October, after the Access Hollywood video landed, I’d been working mostly from the New York office trying to keep up with the dizzying news cycle. I’d asked my editors at the Times to send me back out on the road.

“I just feel like the election isn’t happening in my cubicle,” I pleaded to Very Senior Editor, who—hand raised as if answering a question in science class—reminded me that the Times’ Upshot election model gave Hillary a 93 percent chance of winning. “But it’s 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 Hillary’s 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 country’s first woman president.

I had two more stories to finish—one 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 women’s section the day after the election. Advertisers had already bought space in the historic special edition. I even had a story ready for the paper’s 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 cocktail—or three—more 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 Hillary’s closest aides, the ones from the White House and the State Department, the ones whom she’d pretended to sideline during the campaign—Hillary’s soon-to-be West Wing caffeinated and floating at thirty-nine thousand feet. Jon Bon Jovi, a family friend, perched on Hillary’s armrest with his guitar, his black jeans practically touching her shoulder.

Even the Secret Service agents, who usually sat stiff-backed in the middle cabin, dividing the press from the candidate, now roamed the plane. A hunky sharpshooter with camouflage pants, a bulletproof vest, and pointy black eyebrows ventured to our cabin to peruse Hillary’s almost entirely female press corps.

Over the cacophony of the press cabin—a mix of “Single Ladies” and “Don’t Stop Believin’” blasted from a photographer’s karaoke machine and a network producer’s competing portable speaker—I could hear Hillary’s belly laugh. She wore an ample open-mouthed smile.

In ten years of covering Hillary, the formative years of my adult life, really, I’d never seen her so happy. This particular smile, wide and toothy, an O shape that spread over the circumference of her face, I’d seen maybe three other times: on the chilly night in 2008 when she won the New Hampshire primary; in October midway through a late-night flight to Pittsburgh when Tim Kaine, a couple buttons undone and looking like every Catholic housewife’s fantasy, sidled up next to her; and that past Saturday when she raised both arms overhead and allowed herself to get soaked under a tropical storm in Pembroke Pines, Florida, throwing caution and her John Barrett blowout to the wind.

But those smiles always faded. This one lasted for twenty-one hours of campaigning and well into Election Day when Hillary stepped out of her black “Scooby van” at Douglas Grafflin Elementary School in Chappy and followed the VOTE HERE/VOTE AQUÍ instructions.

It was a sign of our exhaustion that no one spoke. Usually, the Travelers couldn’t shut up. The day before, on the tarmac in White Plains, a heated debate erupted about whether Hillary would wear a gown or one of those embellished satin tunics over wide-legged pants to the inaugural balls.

“Of course she’s going to wear a dress,” somebody argued.

“I don’t know. Pants could be revolutionary.”

“Yeah, and has she even shown her shoulders since 2009?”

We snapped selfies and talked about our postelection plans—vacations to Italy, the Turks and Caicos, a spa in Arizona (that accepts Marriott points), a juice cleanse. After that, we’d reunite in Washington to cover the FWP in the White House.

Hillary’s cadre of protective male press aides—whom I will collectively refer to as “The Guys” and whose job descriptions included protecting Hillary in the press and dealing with the endless inquiries, requests, and groveling from the reporters who covered her—compared the mood inside the campaign to the final lap of the Tour de France when the wind whips at your face and you know you’ve done all you can.

We awaited a group photo with Hillary, one of those incestuous campaign traditions that nobody wanted to miss. The group text among the Travelers late the night before went like this:

“Did we get a call time?”

“Not yet, but I heard 9, 9:30.”

“Thanks. I don’t want to miss the photo!”

“History!”

“Yes. Let’s hope she’s nice to us.”

For nineteen months, Hillary had tried her best to pretend a small army of print, TV, and wire reporters weren’t trailing her every move, but that morning she looked tickled to see us.

“Look at the big plane and the big press!” Hillary said, speaking in a baby voice as she stepped out of her black van the morning before Election Day. She was FaceTiming with her granddaughter, Charlotte, and turned her iPhone toward the Travelers as we all arranged ourselves by height in front of the Stronger Together plane.

“Wow! Look at this. Everybody is here,” Hillary said, as if we’d be anywhere else.

She spread her arms wide as if she might even embrace the entire mob. She did not. Barb, the campaign photographer, stood on a stepladder. I sat cross-legged on the far left-hand side, the same position I’d assumed on the final day of the 2008 election, when Barack Obama leapt into the middle of his traveling press corps and said, flashing his signature grin, “Say tequila!”

Barb instructed us all to scoot a little to the left or right and take off our sunglasses. The shutter had hardly fluttered when the mob disassembled and crushed Hillary with questions, rendering her a tiny red line in the middle of a voracious scrum. Surveying the scene, the most genial of The Guys, a preppy brunet with a student-body president’s grin who traveled everywhere Hillary went and who wore brown oxford loafers even in a New Hampshire blizzard, shook his head. “This is why we can’t have nice things,” he said.

“You’ve been often ahead of your time,” said a BBC correspondent, pushing her slender mic and soft question in Hillary’s face. “You’ve been sometimes misunderstood. You’ve fought off a lot of prejudice. Do you think that today America understands you and is ready to accept you?”

Hillary wasn’t about to fuck up hours before the polls opened by talking about sexism and her weird, complicated place in history. “Look, I think I have some work to do to bring the country together. As I’ve been saying in these speeches in the last few days, I really do want to be the president for everybody.”

Right before takeoff, an editor in New York called to check in, asking the question Times editors stuck in the newsroom always asked—“What’s the mood like there?”

“Hillary is orgasmically happy,” I said.

I regretted using such a sexual term to describe the woman who, in a matter of hours, would become the FWP, but I couldn’t describe her any other way. Through two presidential campaigns, I’d watched Hillary wear her disgust with the whole process—with us, with her campaign, with losing—on her face. The previous summer, I had posted a photo on social media of Hillary at a house party greeting supporters in Ottumwa, Iowa. Within seconds, someone commented, “She looks like she’d rather be at the dentist.”

But now Hillary’s expression said it had all been worth it. She wasn’t just about to become president. Hillary, who until Trump came along had been the most divisive figure in American politics for a couple of decades, was about to become the Great Unifier, relegating Trump and his bullying to the annals of reality TV. Her campaign aides in Brooklyn, all the data, and the early-vote returns assured her he couldn’t win.

“We think we’re going to do better in the Philly suburbs than any Democrat has in decades,” Robby Mook, Hillary’s chipper campaign manager, told us. “If we win Pennsylvania and Florida, he just has no path.” In other words, it’s over.

At the election-eve rally in Philadelphia with Bruce Springsteen, Hillary joined Obama onstage. He crouched down a little to kick a step stool closer to her podium. “When you’re president, it’s gonna be permanently there for you,” Obama whispered in her ear before kissing her cheek and exiting stage right.

Later that night, when we boarded the S.T. Express in Philly to fly to Raleigh-Durham for a final “Get Out the Vote” rally with Lady Gaga, the Travelers rushed to the front of the press cabin. We formed a human pyramid in the narrow opening where those of us who didn’t mind squatting on our knees and getting crushed by reporter limbs and camera lenses and dangling furry boom mics got a clear view of Bill and Hillary. They were cuddling.

The cynics will roll their eyes at this, but they weren’t there. Bill cupped Hillary’s shoulder with one of his long hands. He pulled her in tight, under his arm and into his chest, and not in the phony forced way political partners embrace for the cameras. That night, Bill looked at Hillary like she was the prom date he’d wooed all semester. He looked at her like she was the president.

Hillary squeezed him back with a look not of adoration but more like that of a mother trying to control a problem child. Bill glimpsed the press piled up, like coiled springs waiting to pounce. Seeing me scrunched in the bottom front, he said, “Oh, hi, Amy.” (Unlike Hillary, who had a gift for looking straight through me as if I were a piece of furniture, Bill always said hello.)

Asked about the significance of the evening, he said, “To finish here tonight I felt was important because that is where the country began.”

Then Bill Clinton did what he always did. He made the biggest night in Hillary’s life about himself. “It was interesting. You know, I sit on the board of the National Constitution Center …”

At that point, Hillary thrust her entire body toward the cockpit, the opposite direction from our scrum, dragging Bill, whose arm was still affixed tightly over her shoulder, With Her.

“Did he just say he was on the board of the National Constitution Center?” a wire reporter, to my right, asked.

“Yes, yes, he did,” I said.

“Classic.”

ONLY A HANDFUL of Travelers (the “tight pool” in Trailese), including the Wires, a print reporter from one local and one national newspaper, and a rotating TV crew that shared its footage with the rest of the pack, could fit inside the elementary school’s auditorium to watch Hillary vote the next morning. I’d spent the past week pleading with The Guys to let me be in the pool on Election Day. In 2008, by a stroke of dumb luck, I’d wound up in the pool in Chicago. I still have my notes: “7:36 a.m., Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side. Obama votes, Sasha and Malia with him.”

That night, I’d waited outside the Hilton as Obama and his family and closest aides watched the returns come in. I remember the corrugated metal arm of a loading dock pulling closed over an armored SUV and, like some magic trick, opening again seconds later with the country’s first black president-elect inside. From there we rode in the motorcade where 240,000 people waited in Grant Park.

“You have to let me. The Times is the local New York newspaper. The hometown paper always gets to be in the pool,” I begged one of The Guys, a slick newcomer and hired gun to Hillaryland, whom we thought of as the poor man’s Ben Affleck because he could’ve had Hollywood good looks if he didn’t spend most of his time like an overly made-up windup doll dispensing legalese about Hillary’s emails on cable news. Hired Gun Guy, who’d come up in New York politics, pointed out all the times he’d tried to get the Times to cover some small-ball press conference only to have us push back with “We are a global news organization, not some local paper.”

But my request worked its way up the ladder at the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters and, figuring I couldn’t do too much damage at that point, they agreed.

You’d think that after weaseling my way into a spot as the local pooler, I would’ve used the opportunity for some grand journalistic purpose. Instead, as the press van took us from the Ritz to the elementary school in Chappaqua, where Hillary would cast her vote, I stared out the windows entering a numb, almost meditative state.

To my right, a BMW pulled out from behind black iron gates that swung open to reveal a long driveway that led to a limestone mansion. To my left, the sun came up over the Hudson and painted the sky with pastel peaches and sherbet oranges against the fall leaves.

In the reflection, I saw dark circles under my eyes and flashed back to a sixth-grade slumber party. We’d been upstairs at my friend Heather’s house playing Jenga in a carpeted den when a prissy girl from a private school I’d just met asked me if my dad was a pilot.

“I know another girl who has those black circles under her eyes and her dad is a pilot,” she said, as if a parent’s sleeplessness could be passed down genetically.

Growing up in south Texas, I can’t say I ever envied the people who grew up in places like Chappaqua and Rye and Scarsdale, but that’s only because I didn’t know this Platonic ideal of suburbia existed until my life became intertwined with Hillary’s. I’d never given Westchester much thought until that morning when I realized my early ideas about what adulthood should be had been crafted around the problems I imagined the people who lived here had. Problems rooted in stock prices and boredom and private-school entrance exams, ripped from the pages of my rumpled copy of Revolutionary Road—and not the batshit redneck things that happened in my 1970s-era subdivision in San Antonio. It occurred to me that of all the people in black churches and union halls and high school gyms and factory floors all over the country whom I’d talked to and who told Hillary their problems, it was the lucky bastards here, behind the secure gates and neat hedges of Westchester County, who got to pick our presidents.

The Travelers hoisted ourselves up onto the wooden stage of the elementary school, resting our heads on each other’s shoulders. On the cinder-block wall, a glittery handmade sign thanked the school’s janitorial staff: WE SPARKLE BECAUSE OF ADELINO, ALFREDO, HENRY, MANUEL AND MARIO.

All the Hillary faithful showed up. The ones who couldn’t fit inside pressed their bodies and their Patagonia fleeces against metal barricades. They held WE BELIEVE IN YOU and HILLARY FOR CHAPPAQUA signs. There were no “Lock her up!” chants in Chappaqua.

Voters lingered in the auditorium, overcrowding the room and forcing security to form a human walkway around Hillary when she arrived as if she were a heavyweight champion entering an arena. That’s when everyone exploded, forming a mosh pit of positivity around her. Fathers hoisted up little girls on their shoulders, including one in a pink puffer coat who was entirely too old for a piggyback ride.

Hillary, looking rested even though she couldn’t have slept much longer than we did and no longer wearing the thick glasses she’d had on when she greeted supporters at the White Plains airport at the 4:00 a.m. tarmac meet and greet, slumped over to fill out the New York ballot. She extended an arm and gave a wristy wave.

“It is the most humbling feeling,” she told us outside the polling station, a tree so red it looked lit on fire behind her. “So many people are counting on the outcome of this election, what it means for our country.”

I asked Hillary if she’d been thinking about her mother, Dorothy Rodham, born into poverty and neglect on the day Congress granted women the right to vote.

“Oh, I did,” Hillary said, squinting in the bright Election Day sun.

2
Jill Wants to See You

What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject’s blind self-absorption and the journalist’s skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject’s account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.

—JANET MALCOLM, THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER

NEW YORK CITY, JULY 2013

I reclined on the exam table. My heels rested in the cold metal stirrups when Dr. Rosenbaum asked me (again) about children. This should have been the start of a heartfelt discussion about motherhood and how to start tracking my menstruation cycle, but all I could think about was Hillary and the election cycle. I did the math in my head. It was 2013. I was thirty-four. Three years until Election Day.

I peered over the tent my medical gown had formed as it tugged tight around my bent knees. The paper crinkled beneath me as I wiggled upright.

“So, how much would it cost to freeze my eggs until after the election?” I asked.

FOUR MONTHS EARLIER, I’d come back to my cubicle at the Times to find a sticky note affixed to my desktop. “Jill came by. Wants to see you,” it read.

My stomach sank. The air was sticky and Midtown had started to empty out by noon ahead of the Fourth of July weekend. I’d been at Bryant Park eating a salad chopped so thoroughly it might as well have been pureed.

I was wearing a pair of torn Levi’s at least a decade old with scraggy seams and holes so wide my knees jutted out. When you reach a certain stature at the Times, you can dress like the Unabomber, but I was a media reporter who’d been at the paper less than two years. I couldn’t meet with the boss in those jeans. I sprinted through Times Square, past the throngs of tourists and Elmo characters, to the Gap to buy a pair of white pants. They were high-waisted and fell a couple of inches too short around my ankles, but they were on sale, and I could keep the tags on and return them at the end of the day.

I peeked my head in the corner office. Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the New York Times, sat on a love seat in front of a wall of windows looking out on Forty-First Street. Her bangs flopped on her forehead and the afternoon light formed a sort of halo around her petite frame.

For me, Jill had been like some very intimidating guardian angel of journalism. Eighteen months earlier, she’d plucked me out of relative obscurity as a features writer at the Wall Street Journal to cover media companies at the Times. Now Jill told me she remembered reading my Hillary stories in the Journal, where I’d covered her doomed 2008 primary campaign before switching over to cover Barack Obama.

2008 seemed like another life. I was twenty-eight and unmarried then, still trying on various personalities to see what fit. I’d already tried Poet, hooking up with men I’d meet at open-mic nights. And Magazine Writer, hopping between assistant jobs hoping that organizing the fashion closet at Mademoiselle would somehow lead to a staff writer position at the New Yorker. More recently, I’d tried Foreign Correspondent in Tokyo. This included a hot-pink cell phone and regularly spending nights in a jasmine-scented capsule at a spa in Shibuya. In 2007, I experienced the culture shock of going straight from Japan to Iowa to cover the presidential election for the Wall Street Journal. Four years later, Jill brought me to the New York Times.

I adored the Times more than I ever thought it possible to love an employer. Worshipped the place entirely out of proportion. Each time I’d walk in the headquarters, usually stopping to talk to David Carr, the media columnist who was almost perpetually outside smoking, I felt a surge of gratitude mixed with suspicion that someone would figure out that I didn’t belong there.

David had survived Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and his gaunt frame, gravelly voice, and spindly neck cut a frightening figure for the people he covered. But to me, he resembled a lovable tortoise in a black overcoat, feet up, extending his nape over his cubicle wall, or slurping up a bowl of ramen at his favorite Japanese joint on Ninth Avenue. He may have had to bolt out of the newsroom to meet Ethan Hawke for lunch on the rooftop of the Soho House, but he never lost a mix of folksy Minnesota nice and edginess that reminded me of the people I grew up with in Texas—salt of the earth and sweet as pie until you cross us. He’d wrestled with addiction and mostly worked at alt-weeklies before he landed at the Times. He liked that I was from south Texas and that in college I’d worked at a snow cone stand and flipped tortillas at a Tex-Mex restaurant.

One night, David and I were locked in a conference room eating the last of the stale donut holes he’d picked up that morning and trying to chase down a tip about an unscrupulous consortium of New Jersey Democrats and businessmen trying to buy the Philadelphia Inquirer. We hammered the publisher and CEO on speakerphone until I finally got him to break down and admit to meddling in the news coverage. David and I silently high-fived each other. After that, David called me the Polar Bear because, he said, “you look sweet and cuddly, but really you’re a fucking killer.”

In my first years at the Times, I spent weeks in London covering the phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids. And I got to tour the Paramount lot in Los Angeles with Sumner Redstone and a woman in six-inch Lucite stilettos with ample silicone breasts, who his corporate PR team told me was the pervy billionaire’s “home health aide.” But I missed politics and more specifically, I missed covering Hillary.

On the side, I kept a hand in Clinton coverage during the State Department years. In 2011, I got the first-ever official interview with Chelsea, which doesn’t seem like much of a feat now but in those days she told a nine-year-old “kid reporter” with Scholastic News that she didn’t talk to reporters, “even though I think you’re cute.” The following year, I joined Bill, Chelsea, and a chartered Sun Country jet full of donors on a Clinton Foundation trip to several African nations. It was late one night at the hotel bar in Johannesburg when Bill told me his daughter is “a very unusual person.”

That she was. A couple of nights later, over a South African chardonnay at the Serena Hotel in Kampala, I suggested to Chelsea that we check out the market in the morning. “It’s supposed to be the biggest market in East Africa,” I said. “Actually, in terms of square footage, Nairobi would dispute that,” Chelsea replied.

JILL HAD TATTOOS of a New York subway token and the Old English T for the Times. She was a stone-hard badass who cut her teeth covering politics and had known Hillary since she was a lawyer at the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas. Jill had been among the post–civil rights movement wave of Harvard-educated New Yorkers drawn to the South. She had more history with the Clintons than most journalists and more foresight than anyone about what Hillary would do next.

“It’s obvious she’s going to run again,” Jill said to me in her unhurried way. “We need you to cover her full time.”

I said yes before she even finished speaking. Hillary and Jill, two women at the vanguard and me in the middle.

“I would love that,” I said. “Ever since ’08 that’s been my dream job. I’m so honored you thought of me for this. Thank you so, so much.” And then I asked, “When would I start?” thinking Jill would suggest the fall or maybe early next year or after the midterm elections.

She looked at me instead as if I were a small child. “Immediately,” she said.

It was 649 days before Hillary would announce she was running for president again, 1,226 days before she would lose to Donald Trump.

IT TOOK YEARS for me to understand the significance of Jill’s decision and my own naïveté about what I was stepping into. At first, I embraced my new beat with unfettered enthusiasm; I would be covering the FWP for the paper of record. I considered several of The Guys, especially the originals who’d been with the Clintons for years, friends. I knew about their hookups. I knew which reporters they liked and which ones they hated. I’d met their dogs, rescue mutts. We’d banter about the Times staff, and I’d pass on my palace intrigue in exchange for theirs. They’d complain that Chelsea had become a real pain in the ass (“raised by wolves,” was how one of them put it), and I’d commiserate with them about colleagues. I even invited two of The Guys to my wedding.

The first of The Guys I called to tell about my promotion to the politics team, I’d known since we met on a frozen tarmac in Elkader, Iowa, in 2007. We’d bonded over a shared love of Jason Isbell and our self-proclaimed outsider status. Neither of us lived in Washington or had any desire to. Of all The Guys, Outsider Guy was the one who I thought transcended the source-reporter relationship, and over the next few years he would become the cruelest, the one whose name I most feared seeing in my inbox. I would eventually create a special DICKHEAD file for his emails. I’m certain that I let him down, too, and that my emails likely wound up in a SNAKY BITCH WHO PRETENDED TO BE MY FRIEND file.

“How cool is that? We’ll get to work together all the time,” I said.

The line went silent. Outsider Guy’s demeanor was as icy as that tarmac had been, and in an instant I knew that we’d never go back to being friends. I thought I heard his pit bull mix growling in the background. The rest of The Guys’ reactions continued like that, ranging from stunned (“Uh, okay. You know she’s a private citizen, right?”), to aggressive (“Just know you’re gonna have a target on your back.”), to personal (“You don’t get it, do you? Jill hates Hillary.”).

The Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, wrote that the paper’s “treatment of Mrs. Clinton as an undeclared, free-agent front runner helps her.” Hillary didn’t see it that way. The Guys let me know that their hostility came directly from Hillary. She was outraged. She’d hoped to ride the years between the State Department and her next campaign outside the media’s glare.

The Times’ decision to put me on the beat so early fundamentally changed how Hillary’s fledgling campaign was covered. Pretty soon, a super PAC called Ready for Hillary gained traction to support her 2016 run. The group became, as one source said, “a make-work program” for old Clinton hands angling to get back in the game. Other news outlets soon announced their own Hillary beat reporters, mostly women: Brianna Keilar (CNN), Maggie Haberman (Politico), Ruby Cramer (BuzzFeed ), Liz Kreutz (ABC), Monica Alba (NBC), etc. The Hillary press corps had started to take shape three years before the election.

Hillary had a 70 percent approval rating then and hoped to spend her days quietly laying the groundwork for 2016 and her evenings basking in adoration at Manhattan charity galas where she could reconnect with donors. (“Okay, I’m rested!” she’d told a friend when she called before 7:00 a.m. the day after she left the State Department.)

In this period, she’d be feted for saving the whales, combating malaria, working to eradicate adult illiteracy, supporting the Jews, being a Methodist, cracking down on elephant poaching, speaking out against female genital mutilation, rebuilding lower Manhattan after September 11, and popularizing pantsuits.

But it wasn’t just that Hillary didn’t want media scrutiny. It was something specific to the Times. Something larger than me. Bill and Hillary both believed that the paper was out to get them. That may sound irrational to people who think, The liberal New York Times, out to get Hillary? But they had their reasons.

Hillary didn’t see me as I was—an admirer in a Rent the Runway dress chasing this luminous figure around Manhattan and hoping to prove myself on the biggest opportunity of my career. To her, I was simply the latest pawn in the decades-long war that was the NYT vs. HRC.

I knew almost nothing about this battle other than that it started around the time of my bat mitzvah. In 1992, the Times’ investigative reporter Jeff Gerth broke the story about an Ozark land deal gone awry. The Clintons lost money on the development along the White River, but the subsequent investigation into Whitewater would dog the Clinton administration and ultimately lead to impeachment. The thinking went that Howell Raines, the Times’ Alabama-born Washington bureau chief in the early 1990s, wanted to take down Bill Clinton over some deep-rooted Southern white man rivalry.

I first read about this feud in journals kept by Hillary’s closest confidant, Diane Blair. Throughout the White House years, Hillary turned to Diane, whom she’d been inseparable from ever since 1974 when they found each other—kindred, outsiders—in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Diane took detailed notes on their conversations (“Talked books,” “Talked about how should she deal with all this shit,” “Told her about our cerulean sky”) in case Hillary, then the first lady, ever wanted to write a memoir. But when Diane died of cancer in 2000 at the age of sixty-one, her husband, Jim Blair, donated his wife’s piles of papers to the University of Arkansas, where Diane had taught political science, having no idea the boxes included some of Hillary’s most intimate confessions. I learned about this trove in early 2014 and have pored over its contents ever since.

“She and Bill triumphed despite the press, it heightened their antagonism,” Diane wrote in a 1999 entry. “But still, what do you do? Howell Raines of NYT Editor viscerally hates them; wants to destroy.”

The relationship with the Times went downhill from there.

In 2007, Hillary blamed the Times for propping up Obama. A front-page story about his basketball pickup games sent Hillary into a particular rage. “She doesn’t have any camera-ready hobbies,” the 2008 Guys had protested.

I envied Patrick Healy, the Hillary beat reporter for the Times during the 2008 primary. From my perch as a Journal reporter, I thought the campaign treated Pat like royalty, always bestowing on him the aisle seat on Hill Force One, always calling on him second at press conferences, after the Associated Press. I dreamed about one day having that aisle seat, getting that second question. But it had all been smoke and mirrors. The 2008 Guys, most of whom didn’t stick around for 2016, tried to ruin Pat’s life, just like the mix of old and new Guys were gearing up to ruin mine.

In fairness, the torture worked both ways.

The Guys would tell you that I was the worst kind of reporter. Sneaky, a traitor whom they’d given the benefit of the doubt to and who had repeatedly screwed them over in return. They’d say I gravitated to salacious details and always played the victim (“the shrinking violet act,” they called it) when all the while I was the one standing over the barrel of ink. I knew they wanted me to be more transparent and honest about what I was working on, but when I’d tried that, it hadn’t gone particularly well.

I told them about a feature I wanted to write on how Bill Clinton had taken on a larger role in combating climate change, essentially co-opting the environmental movement from Al Gore, who’d become something of a liberal tree-hugging cliché then. My editors wanted it for page one. Before I knew it, The Guys scheduled a special Clinton Foundation panel in New York. Clinton and Gore sat onstage together in a ballroom at the Sheraton Hotel to discuss working together to combat global warming. Charlie Rose moderated. “We do talk a lot, about everything, but especially about all this energy business,” Clinton said.

CBS News called the discussion a “high-profile reunion.” But I suspected The Guys had thrown the panel together solely to kill my story. And it worked. I never said they weren’t good.

Hillary, meanwhile, was such an avid Times reader that over the next couple of years I’d hear that she’d complained about a story’s placement in the print newspaper. “Why wasn’t it above the fold?” or “Did we get two columns?” The Guys informed me she’d been enraged when she saw that my story about the debut rally of her 2016 campaign, a logistical feat in the middle of the East River on Roosevelt Island, ended up on page A24. I explained that I preferred the front page, too, but the rally had been so late that we’d missed the page-one deadlines. “And almost every other paper in America managed,” one of The Guys replied.

The Clintons theorized that Jill Abramson, the first female executive editor of the Times, had a personal vendetta against Hillary, something about them both being powerful women at the top of their fields. This “Jill vs. Hill” rivalry was fiction. I saw how much Jill respected Hillary, always had, but she also loved a good story.

This primal instinct to tell a Good Story, the story that people read and share and talk about breathlessly on cable TV, goes back to the dawn of man and always requires tension. The charcoal scrawls of the Stone Age rarely portrayed human-interest stories. The ancient Greeks didn’t do puff pieces. Tension means the subjects of the Good Story (in my case the Clintons) often don’t think it’s good. They think it’s a heaping pile of bias ordered up by compromised, click-obsessed editors and written by unscrupulous reporters with below-average IQs. They think it’s Fake News from the Failing New York Times.

If I wanted to thrive on the politics desk, I would need to do more than feel-good pieces like the ones I’d written on Bill Clinton’s charitable work in Africa and on Chelsea taking on a more public role as an NBC News special correspondent. I would need Tension. “You’ve gotta break some eggs to make an omelet,” David Carr would remind me.

MY FIRST FRONT-PAGE story on the beat was about Hillary giving paid speeches for $200,000 a pop to the scrap-metal-recycling expo and the National Automobile Dealers Association in which she offered Mitch Albom–style wisdom. (“Leadership is a team sport.” “You can’t win if you don’t show up.” “A whisper can be louder than a shout.”) My second was an investigation, cowritten with my colleague Nicholas Confessore, about mismanagement and dysfunction at the Clinton Foundation.

When Dennis Cheng—the foundation’s top fund-raiser, whom I got to know on the Africa trip—heard from a donor that I was working on the story, he supposedly said, “Amy? But I thought she was our friend.”

Another source likened the Clinton Foundation story to punching the biggest, baddest motherfucker in the prison yard in the face on my first day of a four-year sentence.

“At least they know who you are now,” he said.

“Yes, and they could also shiv me in the shower.”

Carolyn Ryan, the paper’s politics editor and my new no-bullshit boss, made a name for herself at the Boston Globe and had New England newsprint in her blood. She’d led the Times’ metro desk’s coverage of New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s rendezvous with a call girl, a scandal that ended his career and won her reporters a Pulitzer. Carolyn, who had an infectious guffaw, a mischievous smile, and the spunk required to stroll around the Times’ newsroom in a Boston Red Sox hat, was such a straight shooter that even after her reporters’ coverage led to his ouster, Spitzer sent a video message wishing her good luck on her new job leading national political coverage.

At first, it was just me and her and a handful of political reporters scheming up stories that she would then edit and pass on to the copy desk, a grizzled group of editors who saved us from ourselves, scanning our stories for factual errors and slang that didn’t fit the Times stylebook. (For years, hardly anyone “tweeted” in the Times. They “wrote a message on Twitter.” There was no “email,” only “e-mail.”) Copy editors then passed the story on to the slot, another collection of editors (named after the old days when newsprint would be whizzed through a slot to the printing press). The slot editor would give the story a final read before sending it into the abyss until it arrived on doorsteps the next morning.

But the seedlings of the story always began with a reporter and editor talking. Carolyn had a more innate sense of what people wanted to read and a more natural ability to get the best out of her reporters than any editor I’d ever worked for. Talking to her set every brainstorming session off on rollicking tangents that included gossip collected in the congressional dining room, on the Washington softball field, and while waiting for the Times’ vending machine to spit out some stale Twizzlers. Unsubstantiated tidbits—particularly involving Bill and Hillary, Elizabeth Warren, and anything related to New York politics—would cause Carolyn to leap across her desk with a “No way!” and “We gotta get that in the paper.” And once the first draft was written, Carolyn’s editing style was like an episode of Antiques Roadshow. In minutes, she could squint her sea-blue eyes at the screen, sweep her yellowy bangs out of her face, and weed through two thousand words of crap, pulling out a priceless treasure of an anecdote buried in graph fifteen.

The Guys hated the kind of memorable details that Carolyn and I both gravitated to. They could forgive us for writing about potential conflicts of interest at the Clinton Foundation and Teneo Holdings, the shadowy advisory firm cofounded by Doug Band. Doug had a thinning hairline that made him look both older and more dignified than his forty-one years. He’d meet Times reporters for lunch at Il Mulino and slap twenty-dollar bills into the host’s palm, a practice I’d only ever seen in Mexico City. Doug started in the White House as an intern and became Bill Clinton’s closest aide in the post–White House years, parlaying his role into a profitable private-sector gig. One of the ’08 Guys used a Downton Abbey reference to sum up Doug’s position in the House of Clinton: “Doug forgot that he lives downstairs.” The Guys welcomed negative stories about Doug. He was the perfect scapegoat for all Bill’s questionable behavior, as if the forty-second president were just a lovable St. Bernard. He wouldn’t care about making money and about swanky hotels if it weren’t for that Doug Band guy … The most astute mind in American politics reduced, in their spin, to slobbery obedience.

But they could never forgive me for the Yorkie.

I had a detail about the foundation purchasing a first-class ticket for Natalie Portman and her beloved dog to fly to one of its Clinton Global Initiative gatherings. Carolyn loved the Yorkie. She wanted to make it the lead.

“It’s a fucking Yorkie, Amy!” Outsider Guy yelled as I stuttered trying to explain why this was a critical detail that showed the charity’s glitzy overspending. “It weighs like four fucking pounds. It’s not like it needed its own seat on the plane.”

A year later a conservative super PAC sent around an anti-Hillary fundraising plea: “The Clinton Foundation—which pays to fly her around on private jets, flew Natalie Portman’s Yorkie first class.”

Carolyn emailed me, “I knew that Yorkie would be back.”

I STOPPED THINKING of The Guys as individuals. There would be departures and firings and new hires in the Clinton press shop, but they were all the same to me, a tragicomic Greek chorus hell-bent on protecting Hillary and destroying me. “You’ve got a target on your back,” The Guys always told me, like the drumbeat of failure foretold.

They called the Times’ politics team a “steel cage match.” They’d feign concern: “I just don’t want to see you become the Jeff Gerth of your generation.” Whatever that meant.

They told me that Jonathan Martin, a sweetheart of a colleague who had recently joined the Times from Politico, was telling Maggie Haberman, his former Politico colleague who scooped me daily, what I was working on. (He wasn’t.) I later accused The Guys of telling Maggie what I had in the works. This not only wasn’t true and made me sound like a psychotic ex-girlfriend, but the accusation marked the beginning of the end of any semblance of a cordial working relationship. They’d gotten in my head, and I let them. I believed The Guys when they’d warn me that my more assertive (male) colleagues would boot me off the beat and tramp over my bloodied corpse.

“In one corner of the steel cage match, Healy and Hernandez. In the other Chozick …” The Guys said. (Healy and Ray Hernandez would become close friends, it turned out.)

But mostly, The Guys loved to say, “I saw what happened to Anne …”

They meant Anne Kornblut. Jill Abramson put Anne on the Hillary beat during the Senate years as Hillary prepared to run for president in 2008. The way The Guys told it, Anne had been done in by Times political reporters, with Pat and Ray leading the effort to oust her from the most sought-after beat in journalism. In reality, Anne left the Times in 2007 for a generous offer from the Washington Post, where she won a Pulitzer and ended up practically running the place before leaving for a high-powered job at Facebook. Anne turned out just fine.

I felt like a hazed fraternity pledge, aware that even as The Guys tormented me, I needed them.

Not long after Sheryl Sandberg presented Hillary with the Women for Women International Champion of Peace Award, I was on a conference call with five of The Guys, going through a list of facts to check for an upcoming story. I tried to negotiate the use of some innocuous color I’d gathered over a casual meal with the high chieftain of The Guys, the longest-serving Svengali and the most-devoted member of Hillary’s court of flattering men. He was the OG, the Original Guy.

“Absolutely not,” OG said.

I groveled. “But you didn’t say it was off the record.”

“I didn’t know I had to say it was off the record when I was inside you,” he replied, paraphrasing a line from the movie Thank You for Smoking in which Aaron Eckhart plays a slick tobacco flack who is sleeping with a plucky young reporter played by Katie Holmes.

Inside you.

The words hung there so grossly gynecological. On the upside, at least I was Katie Holmes in this scenario.

I started to feel alienated in the newsroom, paranoid about whom I could trust. I stopped having lunch in the Times cafeteria. I even missed burrito day, and I lived for burrito day.

The Guys would time their rants (subject line: “HRC/NYT”) to land in my inbox on Friday nights or Saturday mornings, usually when I was walking into a spin class ready to give myself over to an instructor in a sports bra imparting self-help wisdom. (“Who you are in this room is who you are in life.”) But all I heard over Drake was You’ve got a target on your back.

I still felt some kind of a feminine bond with Hillary then, even though in the months I’d been on the beat, I’d only talked to her for two minutes in a freight elevator in San Francisco after I followed her out of an American Bar Association conference. I assumed she kept The Guys around because they were entertaining. (When the RNC placed a fuzzy orange squirrel outside a Hillary event with the words ANOTHER CLINTON IN THE WHITE HOUSE IS NUTS, one of The Guys said, “Wait, I think I fucked that squirrel in 2008.”) They were handsome (by Washington standards). They had potential.

Maybe Hillary wanted to mold them into better men. After all, I’d spent my midtwenties dating an Italian documentary filmmaker who my friends pointed out was more like a homeless man with a camcorder. Didn’t all women have an unspoken urge to nurse damaged men who worshipped us?

But then that was me doing what I so often did—imagining Hillary as I wanted her to be and not as she really was.

Months later, when I explained to my mom why I needed her to violate controlled-substance laws by filling her unused Xanax prescription and FedExing me the pills, she said, “It’s such a shame. If only Hillary knew …”

It took me years, but when my grasp of the real Hillary finally came into focus, I accepted that it wasn’t that she didn’t know how The Guys acted. It was that she liked them that way.

BY THE TIME, Dr. Rosenbaum puckered her severe features at me and snapped off her rubber gloves, I’d already picked up my phone and was scrolling through Twitter. She suggested I get pregnant as soon as possible. “Take an au pair on the campaign trail,” she said. “I have a lovely student from France. The twins just adore her.”

I nodded and imagined piling into a press riser in a high school gym for a campaign rally in Cleveland with an infant, a French au pair, and possibly Bill Clinton nearby.

Until that afternoon, I hadn’t grasped how intrinsically linked my own life and Hillary’s pursuit of the presidency had become. I threw on my clothes, rushed across town back to the newsroom, and made a mental note to find a new doctor.

It was Hillary Clinton vs. my ovaries.

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.

By the final night in the Kampala Serena Hotel in Uganda, Clinton has relayed his own obscure accomplishments (“In Arkansas, we went from forty-eight percent to fifty-three percent forested land when I left office …”). He has summed up how to solve Africa’s food shortage (“We need to do things Americans did literally eighty years ago during the Depression …”), and he has, for what feels like hours, extolled the virtues of soybeans (“You can grow it with just a thin layer of topsoil …”). He starts every other sentence with “In the 1990s …” and “When I was president …” The Guys even had a name for one defensive monologue I got trapped in after asking about Clinton’s decision to intervene in Somalia in 1993. “You got Black Hawked,” they said.

It was after 1:00 a.m., and all I wanted to do was go to sleep when Clinton told me his advice for how Obama could improve his speech making. “Suppose we’ve been friends for forty years,” he said, resting a palm on my shoulder. “If you came to visit me in the hospital and said something pretty and eloquent instead of saying, ‘God, I’m sorry. This sucks. I wish I could do more about it,’ it’s an insult. So I told the president the eloquence should go at the end of his speeches now, never in the middle …”

I nodded, smiling politely and checking that the red light of my voice recorder was still glowing.

He changed outfits at least three times a day, usually reappearing in the verdant hotel gardens for dinner with donors wearing a linen guayabera and khaki cargo pants. Africa chic. “He’s like Lady Gaga,” an aide said.

The other thing I noticed about Clinton was how often he talked about dying. He hardly thought he’d live to see the 2016 election, never mind wind up back in the White House.

When the manager of a soybean processing plant asked him to come back next year, Clinton said, “I’m older than you. We have to make sure I’m still around.” When I asked him about Chelsea recently joining the Clinton Foundation board, he said, “We’re trying to build it up so it’d still run if I drop dead tomorrow.”

In Nicosia, we sat down for coffee, and when Cypriots weren’t swarming him for photos, I asked whether Hillary would run for president in 2016. “She points out that we’re not kids anymore and a lot of people want to be president,” he responded.

I saw things in Africa that made me less cynical about the Clinton Foundation. Under tamarind and mahogany trees, aid workers set up a station where deaf children from the local villages could be fitted with their first hearing aids. It’s hard to care about whether some sleazy foreign donor wants something from the State Department after you’ve seen a child hear for the first time.

And when the Clinton Foundation is maligned, I think of Bill Clinton Kaligani. We were all standing on the tarmac at the Entebbe International Airport, and I’d completely run out of topics to ask Clinton about. I just extended my voice recorder to pick up his stream of consciousness when a military helicopter emerged on the yellow-orange horizon.

“Is that him?” Chelsea said, cupping her hand over her eyes as she looked into the setting sun.

Moments later, a slender fourteen-year-old Ugandan boy in his threadbare school uniform stepped out of the helicopter. His name was Bill Clinton Kaligani. His mother had named him after Clinton when he visited Uganda in 1998.

A photograph hangs in the Clintons’ Chappaqua home. Clinton is holding the newborn as Hillary, in a wide-rimmed Out of Africa hat, looks on. “He was born the day before we got there,” Clinton told me over the hum of the helicopter. “It was one of the most memorable days of my presidency.”

He walked over and pulled little Bill into his arms. The boy wrapped his hands around one of Clinton’s hands and rested his head on that doughy spot on the chest beneath the shoulder. They stayed there like that.

After they visited for a while, and Clinton said he’d pay the boy’s school tuition fees, the staff and donors prepared to board our chartered 737. Aides tugged Clinton toward a separate Gulfstream, but he wasn’t done. He called me over and told me that on that same Africa trip in 1998, a Senegalese farmer had named a goat after him.

“We’re going to fly the goat in next,” he said.

5
Roving
NEW YORK CITY, 2001

Two weeks after college graduation, I took a one-way flight to New York with no job, no apartment, and a stack of clips from the Daily Texan. I’d saved some bat mitzvah money and what I’d made working in a snow cone stand off Barton Springs Road in Austin.

I temped all over Midtown, insurance offices and nonprofits mostly. Before work, I would run around Midtown in my suit and tennis shoes and drop off my stack of clips with the mailrooms or security desks at Newsweek, Time, Fortune, etc. A month later, I got a job as a rover at Condé Nast, the publisher of magazines like GQ, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker.

Condé Nast rovers were sort of like temps except that they had six months of steady work. We ranked beneath interns—who almost all had parents on the Upper East Side and attended a Seven Sisters school—but slightly above the outside temping agency I’d been working for. We had half a year to impress editors and publishers, demonstrating our efficiency at cleaning out closets, changing coffee filters, or picking up dry cleaning. Occasionally, we got to answer a phone. If no one wanted to hire us after six months, the gig was up and the program would be replenished with a new crop of desperate, broke aspiring magazine writers.

We all wanted our chance to temp at the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, but those magazines rarely asked for rovers. Mostly, we helped executives on the terrifying corporate floor, as white and sterile as a hospital, and were rotated in at magazines like Brides, Self, and Allure. One senior editor told me during an interview for a job labeled “beauty closet organizer” that “the best part about working at Allure is that it’s like a sorority.” Another asked if I would describe myself as a “makeup junkie,” as if one look at my almost-bare face didn’t answer that question.

Every day at Condé Nast was an education, though not necessarily the one I thought I’d be getting.

I was opening mail on the corporate floor for a creative director, a towering, hulking bachelor who wore ascots and had me print out all his emails and then transcribe his scribbles in No. 2 pencil in the replies. I got to a package containing a heavy Lucite box full of sand and aqua seashells, an invitation to a party in Montauk with the Sex and the City cast. He told me to RSVP no, adding, “But do me a favor. Find out if that actress who plays Charlotte is single.” I asked, in the docile voice of domestic help, if I could go to the party in his place.

“How are you going to get to Montauk?”

“Uh, well, I’ll take the bus.” I had no idea that Montauk sat at the tippy-tip end of Long Island.

“You’re gonna take the bus? To a Peggy Siegal party?” Ascot said. He laughed, more amused than irritated, and walked back into his office with the cream-colored carpet and the two white leather bucket chairs that I once heard his assistant describe as “the Herman Millers.” The furniture had a name, and I didn’t.

The one time that I’d rotated into Vogue, helping to organize the small closet converted into an office and library for the magazine’s fact-checkers, I’d worn my brand-new pair of UGG boots. Anna Wintour walked by the closet, paused, and behind her black glasses, fixated on the furry brown boots that I’d spent half my paycheck on. I never wore the UGGs again.

I’d been crashing at my college boyfriend Russ’s place in Bed-Stuy. Back in Austin, Russ and I had bonded over our love of Midnight Cowboy, each of us waxing poetic on its artistic subtleties and our own dreams of moving to New York. I should’ve known the relationship was doomed given that this movie, the ultimate testament to big-city failure, was what brought us together. Russ had an internship at the Nation that paid a stipend of $150 a week, and he liked to remind me regularly that I worked at lightweight capitalist rags and that he was the serious journalist in the relationship.

Fifteen years later, a Bernie Sanders supporter read my biography online and called me “a gruesome cross between Midnight Cowboy and Working Girl.” Pretty much. I’m brand spankin’ new in this here town and I was hopin’ to get a look at the Statue of Liberty …

MY BOSS AT Condé Nast had me come into the office the morning of September 12, 2001. I walked through a nearly deserted Times Square. I tried to remind this editor that no planes were flying, but she was adamant that she get to a photo shoot in Paris.

On my way to the office, Russ finally called. Other than a brief phone call the day before when we both had to evacuate our Midtown offices, I hadn’t heard from him and was starting to worry. He was driving his Honda Civic from its alternate-side parking spot in Fort Greene all the way back to the driveway of his mom’s house in Tulsa, presumably listening to Dostoyevsky on tape. He said he was already in Missouri and had decided to move back to Austin. He’d been the only person I really knew in New York, and he’d abandoned me.

In that first year, just existing in New York exhausted me. I always got on an express train when I needed a local, watching fifteen superfluous stops fly by. I couldn’t walk three blocks without getting stopped by Greenpeace volunteers or some man with a clipboard who wanted to ask me a question about my hair. Not wanting to be rude, I’d always stop. No, I don’t have a perm. No, does it look like I use a deep conditioner?

On most nights, I’d collapse, fall asleep fully clothed with the lights on. I’d wake up between the hours of 2:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. in a pile of saliva, the sound of sirens outside and the shape of the links from my silver Seiko imprinted on my cheek.

FIVE MONTHS AND three weeks into my rovership, I got my first full-time job in New York. I would be the editorial assistant to the garden editor at House & Garden magazine. In the interview, Garden Editor, a fashionably malnourished redhead who wore fishnet stockings and leather skirts, had growled a little when I complimented her leopard-print blouse. “Careful,” she said. “It’s a jungle out there.” Her husband would leave messages like “Tell her I’ll be home at six and will need something hot to eat and cold to drink …”

My duties included running to the Flower District on Twenty-Eighth Street each morning, where the sidewalks become an urban jungle of houseplants and cut flowers that supply the city’s restaurants and hotels and penthouses.

I once got on the Condé Nast elevator hauling cherry blossom branches wrapped in butcher paper when an airy ballerina of a girl about my age strode on, an Hermès Birkin bag slung over her forearm. I only identified this purse—and its $10,000 price tag and waiting list—because of the week I’d spent in the fact-checking closet at Vogue.

“Oh my God, I love your bag. Is it new?” another gazelle of a girl asked.

“No,” the ballerina replied. “I got it like a week ago.”

I tried to time my commute so that I could share the elevator with New Yorker editor David Remnick. Stalker-like, I craved even the tiniest reminder (the back of a brown head of hair) that my dream was still in my grasp.

One time, I stepped off on the eighth floor, with the purple House & Garden awnings, wearing my usual brown plastic banana clip and thinking about my illustrious future writing gig at the New Yorker. When the doors started to close, I overheard a woman announce to the packed elevator, “Okay, who told her she could wear her hair like that?”

Garden Editor would disappear for weeks to scout luscious private grounds in England and France and Morocco. She’d come back with a Longchamp tote stuffed with receipts for me to file and reams of film for me to develop into slides and arrange by theme (“Tuscan,” “xeriscape,” “Cape Cod”). She’d then present the hundreds of photos, which looked identical to the untrained eye, to the editor in chief, who would deem the gardens sufficiently tony (or not) to earn a spread in the magazine.

One afternoon I was arranging the slides into plastic sleeves, and after fifteen images of topiaries and a couple of bonsai, I landed on photos of the garden editor sprawled out naked, posing seductively for Mr. Hot-to-Eat.

In retrospect, I could’ve handled the situation more professionally, but I’ve never claimed to be a good editorial assistant. My gasp must’ve come out louder than I intended because a crowd of colleagues assembled around my cubicle. They held the slides now scattered over my desk up to the light howling that the garden editor “isn’t a real redhead after all.”

It was at that exact moment that Editor in Chief walked by and set her Siberian husky–like eyes on me as if I were some game animal she wanted to mount to the wall of her Pelham colonial.

She tried to have me fired for being “indiscreet” and embarrassing the garden editor. Luckily, the managing editor took pity on me (or anticipated a workplace lawsuit) and talked the editor in chief out of it.

I needed the paycheck and the health insurance, but part of me wished she had fired me so I could’ve filed for unemployment. My roommate at the time had just landed a real writing gig at Variety after being laid off from his job at AOL’s Moviefone. (He’d imitated the languid voice that reads showtimes: “To file for unemployment, press 1. To clear out your cubicle, press 2 …”) I envisioned parlaying unemployment into writing an explosive tell-all in New York magazine or the New York Observer called “The Garden Editor’s Bush.”

I knew my time at House & Garden was up when James Truman, the Condé Nast editorial director who would soon resign to bum around Andalusia and continue his studies with Tibetan Buddhists, flipped through a rough copy of the May issue and instructed Editor in Chief to swap out the cover story for a tiny blurb I wrote on a Chelsea flower shop that stuffed carnations into discarded Café Bustelo cans. This so infuriated Editor in Chief that she sent around a note reminding the entire staff (cc’ing me) that editorial assistants should under no circumstances be allowed to write.

I printed out the email and tucked it in my battered copy of A Confederacy of Dunces, which sat on my new IKEA bookshelf along with two volumes of poetry by Elizabeth Bishop and Isaac Babel’s Complete Works, which I’d borrowed from Russ and never given back.

The dunces, all in confederacy against me …

I TOOK A pay cut to work for a fancy literary agent who wore black leather pants and was on a strict South Beach diet. She’d email two words, “Protein Run,” and off I’d go to buy her hard-boiled eggs or almonds.

Every Friday we had to print out all our email correspondence from the week, and she’d hand the pages back to us on Monday marked up in red ink where she’d fixed typos and stylistic errors. Or, in my case, she explained at length why it was inappropriate to ask the agency’s clients for career advice. She had a point, but the only reason that I wanted the job was because her roster of authors included some of my journalistic heroes.

“You can do that. I mean, we all do that, but don’t ever include it in the correspondence. Duh,” another assistant in the Park Avenue office told me. She knew about my screwup because in addition to Literary Agent editing our emails, her five or so other employees all had to read each other’s marked-up correspondence. This led to grammatical shaming in the break room.

“Can you believe he used the passive voice in a message to Knopf ?” this same assistant said as she showed me how to arrange a hamburger patty on a bed of lettuce as Literary Agent liked. “You’d never think he was a Rhodes scholar.”

Just when I was starting to appreciate this semantic sadism as a useful crash course in email writing, Literary Agent fired me. She thought I’d stolen office supplies, which wasn’t technically true. She asked me to order twelve of her preferred purple highlighters and instead I’d accidentally ordered twelve cases (each of which contained ten highlighters). Paranoid she’d see this Mount Everest of purple in the tiny supply closet and erupt, I took ten of the cases home and put them under the bed figuring I’d gradually restock the office supply with this stash. But as I tried to explain this, Literary Agent just put up her hand in a please-stop-talking position. Ten years later, I was still pulling purple highlighters from underneath my bed.

I applied for assistant positions at Cosmo, the Economist, the Nation, Redbook, InStyle, House Beautiful, and Martha Stewart Living. I interviewed to be Lloyd Grove’s research assistant for his gossip column at the Daily News. (I heard he preferred young female assistants.) But he took one look at me and could tell I didn’t know East Hampton from East Rutherford.

I waited and waited, clutching a faux-leather padfolio filled with clips from the Daily Texan, in the lobby of the old Times building. A political reporter whom my sister met through a mutual friend said she’d meet with me, but she never showed. After an hour, a security guard told me I had to leave.

I scrapped around for freelance writing jobs. I reviewed Greek restaurants in Queens and wrote a story for Time Out about things you can buy for a dollar in New York. I worked part-time out of some rich lady’s Upper East Side basement fact-checking a guidebook to interior decorators that she published for her friends. I applied to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism even though it would’ve taken me the rest of my adult life to pay for a single semester. I was wait-listed. I became an early adopter of Internet trolling, blasting the whores in corporate media in manifestos that my new boyfriend (the homeless Italian with the camcorder) published on his blog. If ya can’t join ’em, troll ’em. I considered starting a dog-walking business. You know it’s bad when scooping poop off sidewalks sounds promising.

Finally, in the dead of February when I was almost broke, I went to the Strand bookstore and bought a lightly used copy of LSAT for Dummies. That same night, over a dinner of yogurt and instant ramen, I got a call from John Bussey, the foreign editor at the Wall Street Journal.

6
The Foreign Desk

What is this gypsy passion for separation, this readiness to rush off—when we’ve just met?

—MARINA TSVETAEVA

NEW YORK CITY → TOKYO → DES MOINES, 2004–2007

The legend went that on September 11, 2001, after the second plane hit the World Trade Center, across the street the Journal’s newsroom filled with smoke and debris. Security forced everyone to evacuate, concerned that if the Twin Towers collapsed westerly, they would take the Journal with them. John Bussey refused. As reporters and editors fled to safety, Bussey crawled under a desk to report, waded into the street to talk to people, and wrote a story.

I reread his lead every September 11. “If there’s only one sight I’ll remember from the destruction of the World Trade Center, it is the flight of desperation—a headlong leap from the topmost floors by those who chose a different death than choking smoke and flame.”

Four months later, Bussey flew to Karachi where he met Danny Pearl’s pregnant wife, Mariane, and tried to negotiate the release of Pearl, the Journal’s thirty-eight-year-old South Asia bureau chief who’d been kidnapped days earlier. Instead, Bussey ended up having to watch the video of Danny’s captors beheading him.

Bussey was based in Hong Kong when he called to interview me to be the Journal’s foreign news assistant, based in New York. I don’t remember exactly what he said on that first call, but he was manic and fast-talking and unimpressed with my unimpressive résumé. My name had only gotten to Bussey because of Blythe. I was a rover filling in as the assistant to Tom Wallace, the editor in chief at Condé Nast Traveler, until he found a permanent assistant. I’d, of course, applied for the job, but a senior editor who looked at my credentials shook her head and said, “Yeah, Tom really wants someone who went to Harvard.”

I took one look at Blythe’s résumé—Exeter, Harvard, classical pianist—and decided I hated her. She got the job. Six months later, we skipped out on some PR luncheon our bosses made us cover to go shopping at Loehmann’s. Blythe taught me how to pull an Hermès scarf out of a tangle of marked-down DKNY and has been a dear friend ever since. A few months later, she left Traveler to be the Journal’s foreign news assistant and in typical Blythe fashion would, a year later, get promoted and move to Hong Kong. She put me up to replace her.

I didn’t tell Bussey that I needed this job to save me from a pooper-scooper or worse, law school. I told him I spoke fluent Spanish and had lived in Mexico and had spent a year studying Chilean poetry in Santiago. I talked about how I’d written for the Daily Texan and gotten a grant to report from Chiapas on the Zapatista uprising. We got into a heated debate about NAFTA and Pinochet. He’d read my clips, even the blurbs I’d written for Time Out. This led to an in-depth discussion about where to find the best saganaki in Astoria. I’d left out the part about a prominent literary agent firing me after four months. I remember Bussey being intrigued by my impoverished New York conditions. He asked if I had a TV or AC unit. (I had neither.)

Three weeks and a couple interviews later, Bussey’s deputy in New York, Lora Western, called to offer me the position.

The second I stepped into the Journal newsroom, nearly three years after I’d moved to New York, I felt I’d finally found my people. It was grimy, with low-hung ceilings and reams of printer paper piled up indiscriminately around an open floor plan and pea-green carpet. I arrived at the office every morning before eight. The women wore orthopedic sneakers with skirt suits, and the men all had sweat circles under their pocketed dress shirts. My banana clip fit in just fine there.

Bussey being based in Hong Kong meant I had to be prepared for middle-of-the-night requests to overnight a stash of surgical masks when the stores ran out during the SARS epidemic or to get bulletproof vests to reporters in Beirut or to find Bussey (a notorious cheapskate) a room in Davos for under a hundred dollars that wasn’t a youth hostel.

I once had to take dictation from the Latin America correspondent José de Córdoba as he hid in a bathroom in Haiti during the 2004 coup that ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide. I had to get our Middle East correspondents enough cash to buy an armored BMW in Baghdad. To do this, the Journal wired $40,000 into my personal checking account, which had about $400 in it at the time. I went to Chase to withdraw the cash. I still don’t know if the bank representative was kidding when he asked if I wanted the money in a briefcase handcuffed to my wrist. I then went across the street to the Western Union and after some odd looks and a lot of paperwork that somehow got me around federal rules for international money transfers, managed to wire the cash to Iraq. I’m certain this errand landed me on a terrorist watch list.

But mostly Bussey and Marcus Brauchli, then the national news editor, and the other senior Journal editors encouraged me to blow off my assistant duties. “You want to be a writer, you have to write,” Bussey said.

Marcus once saw me struggling over a pile of newsroom expenses to process and staged an intervention. He picked up a handful of receipts from various countries. The currency conversions alone were making my head spin. By then I’d written several features, including one about people who impersonate Navy SEALs, and helped with 2004 campaign coverage. But I hadn’t yet cracked the front page. “You are not allowed to file a single expense report until I see your byline on page one,” Marcus said. “That’s an order.”

He approved a six-night reporting trip to Iceland so I could write a feature story that ran on the cover of the Media & Marketing section. I wrote half a dozen A-heds—the Journal’s term for the quirky middle column that runs daily on the front page. One was about women undergoing surgery to reconstruct their hymens so they appear to be virgins again, a story I’d come across while browsing the ads in the back of Hoy, the Spanish-language newspaper. I took the F train to Queens to meet Esmeralda Vanegas at Hymen RidgeWood Surgery. “It’s the ultimate gift for the man who has everything,” one of her patients told me. (An editor proposed the headline ONE NIGHT STRAND; we went with VIRGIN TERRITORY.) And I wrote a couple leders—Journal parlance for the serious economic or business story that runs in two columns on the front page.

I also left a delegation of Brazilian diplomats waiting in the lobby so I could finish an interview. I was on deadline and forgot to order coffee and Danish for a meeting with top editors and a dozen Alibaba executives visiting from Hangzhou. I had about 200,000 rupees worth of expenses piled up that I needed to process. I’d screwed up the conversion and thought this was about US$150, but turned out to be more like US$3,000.

I killed it at being a bad assistant.

Bureau chiefs who worked for Bussey used to warn me that I should always check for my wallet when I left his office. I didn’t know what they meant until he offered me a job as a foreign correspondent based in Tokyo. After our talk, I felt like a rock star, the euphoria lasting about four minutes until the practicalities of this position set in. I didn’t speak Japanese. The little I knew about Japan I’d picked up from a couple Murakami novels and a five-day vacation in Tokyo to visit my friend Aika, a man-eating deejay whom I’d backpacked around South America with in college. I could hardly afford to live in New York on my salary, let alone Tokyo.

But I was cheap. The Journal gave me a salary raise to $40,000 a year, and called it “a suitcase relocation.” I had no family or house full of belongings to relocate. I could pick up in the same red suitcase I’d used when I first moved to New York.

My mom cried when I told her. “No, no, I’m really happy for you,” she said through sobbing so loud I had to hold the phone away from my ear. “But JAPAN?!”

A couple of weeks before my big move, Ellen Byron, who covered retail at the Journal, urged me to go out with her on St. Patrick’s Day.

“C’mon, you’ll meet an Irish guy,” she said.

She knew that my fling with an Iraq correspondent who called me habibti and had a fiancée in Washington had imploded. I don’t know if I even liked him that much, but I’d been so impressed with his career and his dispatches from war zones that I became infatuated. I confided this to one of my bosses, a page-one editor who shook her head of short gray curls. “Amy,” she said. “You can’t fuck the copy.”

I agreed to go for one drink, as long as I didn’t have to wear green or talk to anyone wearing a KISS ME, I’M IRISH T-shirt. There in the Pig ’N’ Whistle, the type of generic Times Square pub I would never normally go to, I saw Bobby. He was brooding against the bar, a trio of blondes forming a half circle around him. He wore a khaki trench coat and had the gentlest hazel eyes framed by sad, expressive lines. With a head of thick black hair, he stood a good foot taller than the blondes. He drank a freshly poured pint of Guinness, licking his upper lip to remove the frothy white mustache that formed after each sip.

I tugged at Ellen’s arm, subtly pointed his way, and said, “See that guy right there? He’s my new Irish boyfriend.” He was a friend of a friend, Ellen said and introduced us. Bobby told me he was from a town called Trim, “about forty-five minutes outside Dublin.”

“Isn’t the whole country forty-five minutes outside Dublin?” God, I was awful at this.

But he seemed amused. We all left the bar to see a U2 cover band called Unforgettable Fire. Bobby bet me five dollars that the final song would be “Where the Streets Have No Name.” I agreed, not knowing that he’d already looked up the set list.

When the concert ended and everyone spilled out onto the sidewalk, I handed Bobby a five-dollar bill. He wrapped my navy peacoat around my shoulders and flagged me a taxi. He was drunk and his upper lip quivered. We hugged goodbye. I’d just met him, yet I had the strangest feeling of my feet elevating off the sidewalk. Or maybe it was the sidewalk that had sunk beneath us. Either way, I looked up at him, disoriented, feeling punched in the gut, that place where the heart is.

“CHOZICK, BUSSEY,” THE voice said before I could say hello. He always ran the words together into one Slavic-Norman surname. Chozickbussey. “How’d you like to go to Iowa to cover Hillary Clinton?”

It was 2007 and Rupert Murdoch had just paid $5 billion for the Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones. Management, unsure what the takeover would mean for the paper’s political coverage, needed to install a loyal Journal lifer as Washington bureau chief. And there was no one more loyal than Bussey. Within days he’d left the Journal’s Hong Kong bureau overlooking Victoria Harbour, to move to a dreary office building off K Street. There were no niceties with Bussey. No explanation of what the job would entail or what I’d be paid. (The same salary I’d made when I left Japan, $43,000 a year.)

I’d only moved back to New York from Tokyo a couple of weeks earlier. A squishy brown Kapibara-san charm, a plush version of the world’s largest rodent, still hung from my cell phone—one of my many accessories that seemed appropriate for a twenty-eight-year-old foreign correspondent in Tokyo but that I should’ve retired to a landfill when I got back to the States.

Bobby and I had done long distance for nearly two years. We’d lose entire days (or nights, depending on who was in which time zone) talking via a scratchy Skype connection. I’d stay in the Journal’s bureau late enough to call and wake him up for work each morning, and he’d do the same when the sun set in New York. I had a Miffy calendar on my desk and would mark off the floppy-bunny-eared days until his next visit to Japan or my next trip to the States.

I hadn’t intended to do long distance with the Irish guy I’d picked up in a bar on St. Patrick’s Day weeks before my scheduled “suitcase relocation” to Japan. I also had a rule about not dating guys who worked in finance, but Bobby was more math geek than Wall Street wolf. We shared the same gypsy spirit and even when we lay in bed my last night in New York and I confided how terrified I was to move to Tokyo—to leave everything familiar—Bobby only held me tighter, told me that I had to do it and that he’d come visit.

We fell in love in Japan. Without Bobby, Tokyo was soul-crushingly lonely. With him, we laughed ourselves silly walking through Yoyogi Park. We gawked at the girls in their Bo Peep dresses and the grown men swing dancing, their hair in exaggerated slicked-back pompadours. We practically bankrupted our favorite all-you-can-eat shabu-shabu joint in Shibuya and soaked in Japanese hot springs so long our skin shriveled, Bobby’s cotton yukata hitting knee length on his sinewy six-foot-one frame. “I think we should shack up when you get back to New York,” he said one night.

On his last visit to Japan, I watched him descend the elevator at Narita airport, in the ratty sweater that he’d had since his University College Dublin days. I pressed my hand against the glass partition trying to touch him and watching him disappear into the foreigners’ immigration line. I turned to walk back to the Narita Express, as I always did, but instead collapsed crying outside the duty-free mall. This led to two police officers asking if I was okay. (“Genki desu ka?”) The Japanese don’t do public displays of emotion, especially not that close to the Louis Vuitton. I had to get back to New York.

Six weeks later, Bobby moved his meager belongings into the yellow-walled, rent-stabilized East Village apartment that I’d sublet while I was in Japan. The apartment overlooked a courtyard and a Hare Krishna temple with its cloud of patchouli that made our hallway smell like a hippie’s armpit. Randy Jones, the cowboy from the Village People, lived upstairs and transformed the hot tar of the rooftop into an illegal garden with vines of plump tomatoes climbing up a cinder-block canopy. We were finally nesting.

Bobby’s office wasn’t far from the Journal’s newsroom. He stood next to me on the sidewalk in lower Manhattan when Bussey’s call came in. It was October but warm. We had planned to walk home after work together, maybe getting dinner in Little Italy on the way, the kind of low-key evening activity that normal couples do all the time but that we’d fantasized about in so many long-distance calls. He saw my face and mouthed “What?” rolling his eyes in anticipation.

I didn’t have time to explain. Bussey’s tone sounded panicked, like the time he’d tried to stop Blythe and me from going to Vietnam in the middle of the bird flu epidemic. He’d framed the idea—“How’d you like to go to Iowa to cover Hillary Clinton?”—as a question, but there was only one answer.

“When do I leave?”

7
“Scoops of Ideas”

A zealot cannot be a good cultural anthropologist.

—RUTH BENEDICT, THE CHRYSANTHEMUM AND THE SWORD

DES MOINES, 2007

Unlike most campaign reporters who descended on Des Moines each presidential cycle and for all the steak fries and state fairs in between, I’d spent the prior couple of years covering Japan’s consumer culture. I wrote a front-page story about how Westernized diets were causing young Japanese women to have larger breasts (headline: DEVELOPING NATION). In 2007, as my competitors were meeting campaign sources at Centro (CHEN-trow), Des Moines’s hottest restaurant (though there wasn’t a lot of competition), I was clubbing in Shinjuku with Ken-san, a Japanese deejay friend who went by the stage name Intelligent Milli Vanilli, a phonetic challenge for the Japanese. I didn’t know who ran John Kerry’s 2004 campaign. I’d never heard of Politico or its Playbook. The name Barack Obama sounded only vaguely familiar. When Bussey asked me to go to Iowa, I thought for sure I would be riding the Hillary Clinton beat all the way to the White House.

Years later I confessed to one of The Guys that when I got to Iowa, I didn’t know what a caucus was. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “We didn’t know what a caucus was either.”

I thought it would be a relief to report in English again, but I still didn’t entirely speak the same language as the people I was covering, especially Mark Penn. Penn was Hillary’s trusted pollster who, after her third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, went from being the brains behind the former first lady’s political ascent to the asshole responsible for everything bad about the 2008 campaign. (Poor bastard couldn’t even blame the Russians.)

Mark had some terrible ideas (like his early reminder before the 2008 campaign that “being human is overrated …”), but he always saw Bill’s base of white working-class men as a central part of Hillary’s victory. And he turned out to be correct that most voters didn’t want to elect the “First Mama.”

On the flight from Des Moines to Manchester after Hillary came in third place behind Obama and John Edwards, Penn pushed his combed-over sweep of coarse brown hair over his sweaty forehead and told us, “We’re in a strong position to move forward.” I whispered to Anne Kornblut, of the Washington Post, who sat in the bucket seat next to me and pounded so hard on her laptop that her tray table vibrated, “Is that really how they talk?” Anne smiled at me, as if I were a yapping lapdog that she wanted to silence. She went back to transcribing Penn’s comments.

One time in Japan, during an interview with a high-level executive, I asked my interpreter, Ayako-san, to grill him on a question I knew he was evading. She cautioned, “Amy-san, it is extremely rude to ask the same question twice.” I was always inadvertently being rude in Japan, so I told her to go ahead. The executive’s eyes bulged. He leaned in close, his breath smelling of cigarettes and ponzu sauce. “Amy-san, I have already answered that question,” he said in clear but heavily accented English. “My answer is neither yes nor no.”

I remembered that exchange when I first started covering American politics, and whenever we pressed Hillary and her top aides, I imagined them all morphing into anime versions of themselves, with tiny bodies and round bulbous heads, a floating thought bubble on top: We’re in a strong position to move forward. My answer is neither yes nor no.

EVERYTHING SEEMED LIKE a story to me in 2008. I wrote a feature about campaign hookups, a topic so baked into the process that no one thought Secret Service guys (motto: “Wheels Up, Rings Off”) ducking into reporter’s hotel rooms was news. I even convinced one of The Guys to talk on the record about hookups.

When everyone gushed about how nice Iowans were, I caught up with a Des Moines alt-rock band that had gained local fame for venting about the out-of-state media and political elites in a musical number called “Get Outta Our Town (Caucus Lament).” The chorus went, “Get outta our town / Get out of my face / You barged into our home / With your political race.”

By the time Obama was sworn in in 2009, the Murdoch regime had started to exert its influence at the Wall Street Journal. The new ownership, judging our feature stories as having the “gestation of a llama”—or about 350 days—infused the newsroom with a new metabolism for breaking news. But during the campaign my editors still urged me to look for what they called “scoops of ideas,” the offbeat feature stories that nobody else covered. I didn’t realize how pretentious this sounded until I tried to explain the idea to a Politico reporter who could barely look away from his BlackBerry for the twenty seconds it took to reach into the innards of the campaign bus and pull out our luggage for the night.

“Did you even file anything today?” he asked me as he fished out his roller bag.

“No. My editors don’t really want daily stories,” I explained. My inner voice nudged me, Don’t say “scoops of ideas,” but I didn’t listen. “They want ‘scoops of ideas,’ you know, like rather than writing ‘this happened today’ or getting something from the campaign that’s inevitably going to get out anyway, finding a totally different angle that no one else thought of …”

“Uh-huh, you go ahead with your ‘scoops of ideas,’ and I’ll be over here breaking news,” he said.

What I didn’t tell him was that “scoops of ideas” were my only option. I hadn’t yet developed the killer instinct to compete for news, and my editors didn’t seem to care when the Times’ Pat Healy or Politico’s Ben Smith scooped me. Not that I could’ve competed. I hardly had any sources. Unlike my competitors, most of whom had come up covering New York politics or Congress, no one had heard of my byline or me.

Nor did Bussey’s installing me on the Hillary beat sit well with some of the paper’s more seasoned political reporters. By the time I’d switched to the Obama bus in the spring, my counterpart on the McCain campaign staged an intervention. She pulled me aside outside the Journal’s workspace at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. We’d previously teamed up on covering a debate during which she reamed me out for not grasping the nuances between Obama’s and Hillary’s health-care proposals. (“Her plan is a mandate. Repeat slowly after me, MANdate.”) We’d been paired up again, this time to write the front-page story about Hillary’s speech that night in which she would ask her delegates to unite behind Obama. Like Hillary, my coauthor felt the need to extend a strained show of unity to a less experienced colleague.

“Look, I wanted to say I’m sorry. I know I’ve been really mean to you,” she said, blinking rapidly behind the foggy lenses of her glasses as we stood in the August heat against a chain-link fence adjacent to the Pepsi Center’s parking lot. “It’s just that I really don’t think you’re qualified to be doing this job.”

The only person on the Hillary campaign I really got to know was Jamie, the dutiful press wrangler who remained catatonically upbeat even after four hours on a bus with reporters asking her nonstop questions about when we’d get lunch and whether we’d get our Marriott points and “Jamie, can you pass the granola bars back here? Not those, the peanut butter ones …” and “Jamie, I think I left my power cord in Sioux City …” and “Jamie, how long ’til we get there?” She was so smiley and obedient that behind her back The Guys called her the Golden Retriever.

Jamie led us into my first Hillary town hall, held in the Shenandoah fire station. Tom Petty’s “American Girl” blasted from the speakers. I soaked up the Americana. There were homemade pies set up on folding tables against corrugated metal walls and red fire trucks and old men in patch-covered garrison caps. Their wives wore Christmas sweaters with puffy-paint Rudolphs and tiny flickering Christmas lights. Hillary appeared at the front of the room, and before she even said anything, I stood up from my seat and clapped. That’s when I felt Jason George of the Chicago Tribune tugging at the right side of my parka.

“Dude! Dude!” I’d just met Jason that day, but he had the concerned expression of an old friend saving me from swallowing a handful of sedatives. “What the hell are you doing? You can’t do that.”

I looked at the rest of the press, all staring stone-faced at their laptops, too focused on their screens to notice my faux pas. I quickly sat back down in my chair.

8
“Taking Back America”
IOWA, 2007

Writing for the Wall Street Journal with the nation on the cusp of the 2008 financial crisis came with some built-in advantages. Although I still dressed like a Japanese teenager—meaning I wore everything in my closet all at once, jeans under dresses, under blazers, over cardigans until I was one chubby gaijin layer—Hillary, and those on her campaign staff, assumed I was policy minded and serious. Even other reporters would frequently turn to me to ask what Hillary meant after she’d shout at rallies “Mortgage-backed securities!” and “Sub-prime lending!” All of this despite the fact that I couldn’t tell you what equity derivatives were. “No one knows what derivatives are, that’s the whole point,” the Journal’s finance editor once assured me.

The candidates actually wanted to do interviews with me. I got a forty-five-minute sit-down with Hillary, my longest ever. She predicted the housing crisis, warned that the US could slip into a Japanese-style “malaise” (something I did know about), and criticized NAFTA, the trade deal her husband signed into law in 1993 that would dog her through both of her presidential campaigns.

“There have been some very positive results of trade [but] … there is still too much of the benefits of trade and the global capital markets favoring elites and multinational companies in a way that is not spreading prosperity,” she told me and my Journal colleague, the economics writer, Bob Davis. Bob and Hillary knew what derivatives were.

A couple of weeks before the caucuses, the Journal’s politics editor Jake Schlesinger called. “Edwards wants to sit down for an in-depth interview about the economy after his rally today. Can you get to Vinton by two p.m.?” Jake asked.

I hesitated. I’d been in Iowa long enough to know Vinton was in the Cedar Rapids metropolitan area (if you could call 255,000 people a metro area), a two-hour drive from Des Moines on a good day. But on that day, a blizzard had parked over the state making driving conditions perilous for locals and a particular death trap for a transplant New Yorker driving a rented Hyundai Elantra with no snow tires.

“This would be exclusive. He asked specifically for the Journal,” Jake said, in a tone neither pushy nor impolite but that told me I didn’t have a choice.

“Leaving now,” I said, and started to pull on my army-green parka and snow boots.

The Edwards campaign was in crisis mode after the National Enquirer’s JOHN EDWARDS LOVE CHILD SCANDAL! story broke. We’d all been too polite to follow the story, maybe because Edwards’s wife Elizabeth had cancer or because we all thought ourselves above chasing the Enquirer or both. Still, for Hillary there exists an alternative route in the Rube Goldberg of why she will never become the FWP: The media runs with the Edwards baby-daddy scandal, causing him to drop out before the caucuses, allowing Hillary to pick up enough of his supporters to win Iowa, halting Obama’s momentum before it started, and allowing her to win the nomination and defeat John McCain.

Trucks skidded off the interstate. I could hardly see the road and felt my tires floating on a layer of ice and snow. By the time I arrived in the cafeteria of Vinton High, Edwards was finishing his tirade against the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots. I wouldn’t appreciate Edwards’s “Two Americas” and his populist pitch decrying inequality and global trade until 2016 when Bernie and Trump used an almost identical playbook. Edwards ended up an imperfect messenger, a slick millionaire trial lawyer with a love child. We know, we know, you’re the son of a millworker. But he was ahead of his time.

I found an empty seat next to the New York Times’ Julie Bosman. Julie was the paper’s Edwards beat reporter until, as a Times editor liked to say, “Her horse didn’t just die. He got caught fucking Secretariat.” Edwards concluded his Vinton speech by pointing to our thinly populated press area.

“You see all those reporters in the back?” he said, in a gesture that felt like a game-show host breaking the fourth wall. A scattering of heads turned around. I met eyes with an older white man in denim overalls and a purple-and-gold SEIU button. “They’ll be writing ‘He said, she said,’ while we’re TAKING BACK AMERICA!”

He was even ahead of his time in shaming the elite media.

I approached Edwards backstage as his press secretary had instructed and extended my hand to shake his.

“Hi, Senator, I’m …”

Edwards glanced briefly at me and kept walking. “Just a second honey,” he said, flashing a palm at me in a halting motion. “I got an interview with the Wall Street Journal.”

“I am the Wall Street Journal,” I said.

9
Leave Hillary Alone
WASHINGTON, DC, 2014

I knew Hillary was running again on a Monday afternoon in early May. She’d sent all The Guys, including Outsider Guy who avoided DC and had to fly cross-country, to attend the meeting, along with her closest aides. These included Cheryl Mills, the classy, elusive lawyer who’d defended the Clintons during impeachment and Benghazi and who knew how to drape a scarf in even the hottest State Department convoys to Senegal; Tina Flournoy, a former union leader and boxing aficionado from Georgia whose combination of tenacity and Southern charm made her uniquely qualified to hold the unenviable role of Bill Clinton’s chief of staff; and Huma Abedin, the elegant waif and tabloid fixture who’d worked for Hillary since she was a nineteen-year-old White House intern and George Washington University student.

Ever since I arrived in Iowa in 2007, I’d marveled at Huma the way women tend to marvel at impossibly thin, fashionable women. She was the only one (including Hillary) who didn’t gain at least ten pounds in 2008. It got so bad that by the Indiana primary, I saw Chelsea swat her mother’s hand away (“Mom!”) from a deep dish of chips and salsa. And I watched, hardly able to keep up in my bulky snow boots, as Huma glided alongside Hillary in stilettos during the Scranton St. Patrick’s Day parade. The press speculated about whether Huma had hooked up with one of The Guys who had a fiancée in New York, our very own soap opera unfolding on the plane. But on one flight toward the end of the primary, Huma introduced the ’08 traveling press to her new boyfriend—a promising young congressman from New York named Anthony Weiner.

It had been just over a year since Hillary had stepped down as secretary of state, and now certain that Carolyn Ryan had inherited the personal vendetta against her family, she had instructed her most trusted loyalists to convene at the New York Times’ Washington bureau and express her concerns about my coverage. Why would Hillary do that if she wasn’t running?

When The Guys emailed us a list of the seven aides who planned to attend the meeting, Carolyn wrote back, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

We all agreed the discussion would be off the record, but it didn’t take long for somebody to tip off the conservative Washington Free Beacon, which soon after published a story with the headline HILLARY TO NEW YORK TIMES: BACK OFF. But the Beacon story only mentioned the presence of Original Guy and Huma—who was hard to miss floating through our slovenly newsroom like an exotic bird in a red wool coat. They didn’t know the half of it.

Everyone huddled into the narrow entryway under the bureau’s fluorescent lights. The Guys forced themselves to offer me their usual clipped hello, which always reminded me of Seinfeld opening the door for Newman. “Hello, Amy.”

After some handshakes, Carolyn led everyone down the drab, carpeted stairway to the conference room where The Guys helped themselves to coffee only to find that it had been left over from a previous meeting. The brown liquid was dank and acidic, and the creamer crumpled as it splashed into their Styrofoam cups. We hadn’t planned it that way, but serving stale coffee and day-old Danish to DC’s most powerful people did send an effective message that things probably wouldn’t go their way.

I can’t get into the details. I can only say that they griped about stories I thought were positive, like one about Bill building a charitable legacy in Africa. (They hated the timing.) They complained about stories I thought were neutral, like Hillary working to rebuild bonds with black voters. (Black people never left the Clintons, they said.) They understandably despised a story about a Ukrainian oligarch, Victor Pinchuk, who’d given millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation and had a slew of meetings with State Department officials. (Victor liked the story. He invited me to his annual conference typically held in Yalta, the tsars’ fabled Black Sea resort town. I declined.) But mostly, they hated that the beat existed at all. They said Hillary was a private citizen.

The story that put me on the radar as the Times’ Hillary chronicler and made that proverbial target on my back more like a permanent tattoo arrived in a January 2014 issue of the New York Times Magazine, along with a doughy Hillary moon face floating amid intergalactic dysfunction on its cover. I’d meant for my “Planet Hillary” story to serve as a fifty-seven-hundred-word primer about all the people the Clintons had collected over the years and the “organizational meshugas [that] already threatened, once again, to entangle” Hillary as she prepared for 2016. In an accompanying chart, I categorized the Clintons’ minions (and almost all my would-be sources) into competing solar systems. There was “The Inner Circle,” “The 2008 Victims,” “The People Who Do All the Work,” “Loyal Henchmen,” “Frenemies,” “Poseurs,” and so forth. Not surprisingly, almost everyone hated their designated place in the universe.

Doug Band called to complain that he’d been positioned (in the category “The White Boys”) next to the floating head of the irascible wonk and former White House policy adviser Ira Magaziner. “I can’t believe you put me next to that asshole. You know I hate that guy!”

One of the Poseurs yelled at my editor that the placement could’ve cost him his gig as a paid Fox News contributor. Another offered to get Bill Clinton on the phone to tell us that he wasn’t a poseur. To which my editor replied, “That’s exactly what a poseur would do!” A New York executive told me the “Poseur” label had been the “worst thing to ever happen to me.” (He lived a charmed life.) Worse, I’d been somewhat of a puppet in all of this, later learning that all the poor schmucks who ended up designated as Poseurs had at some point pissed off The Guys, who’d accordingly steered me toward tagging them with that label. One of them, a friend and donor, was also the ex-husband of the buxom blonde whom one of The Guys had an affair with on an earlier Foundation trip to Africa.

I’d started to get used to the idea of breaking some eggs to make an omelet, but with the “Planet Hillary” story, I’d dropped the whole damn carton.

Carolyn always had her reporters’ backs. I knew that after the DC meeting, she’d plop down on the sofa in her office next to the Ping-Pong table and tell me to never doubt my coverage. She’d remind me that we should have a combative relationship with the people we cover—and she’d say that I deserved combat pay. But during the meeting, Carolyn didn’t say much. She disarmed the group the same way she disarmed reporters who came into her office unprepared. She took exaggerated sips of Diet Coke and squinted as they spoke, sometimes jutting her neck toward our visitors and then leftward to me giving the impression that she was listening to crazy talk and craved simultaneous translation.

I kept trying to fill the silences. I apologized. I said I’d try to do a better job next time and I’d be more careful moving forward. But that just pissed The Guys off more. The shrinking violet act and all.

They all seemed trapped in a time warp. Whitewater was yesterday, but all the positive stories and endorsements the Times had given Hillary in recent years were worthless relics.

I could’ve tried to defend myself, but I was up against seven much smarter professional Hillary defenders, including Cheryl, a former deputy White House counsel. I didn’t stand a chance. I kept thinking of the scene from Full Metal Jacket when Matthew Modine’s Private Joker says, “Sir, the private believes that any answer he gives will be wrong and the senior drill instructor will only beat him harder if he reverses himself, Sir!”

My train back to New York after the meeting was delayed for hours. I crouched on the floor of Union Station between a Jamba Juice and an Auntie Anne’s pretzel to charge my iPhone and check my messages. The Guys had dumped me. Their email might as well have said, “It’s not you, it’s me.” Or they could’ve used the same line the Colombian waiter I went on a couple of dates with in my twenties did when he texted me, “U R 2 high maintenance.”

From then on, I was to deal directly with Cheryl.

Though she outranked The Guys, this didn’t feel like a reward. My job required me to have some semblance of a relationship with Hillary’s press aides. There wasn’t even a campaign yet, and I’d already failed. As it turned out, my interlude with Cheryl lasted a couple of weeks until she got sick of me, too, and kicked me back to The Guys. Only this time instead of the OG, I was now to deal with his less experienced but more presentable protégé, the brown-loafers wearer.

Months later, when OG presented his Mini-Me to the rest of the political universe, everyone thought of him as the nice one. They’d gush, “Have you met him yet? He is such a nice guy.” And at first, Brown Loafers Guy was a breath of fresh-faced air. He burst with optimism about Hillary’s future and his own. He had OG’s biting wit and a full suite of adorable facial expressions that played well on cable TV. He had a direct line to Hillary (who adored his adorableness) and none of OG’s dark edge, sexist undertones, or tendency toward high drama.

The Guys got help from outside supporters. A ragtag group called the HRC Super Volunteers sent me a warning: “We will be watching, reading, listening, and protesting coded sexism …” According to their list, sexist language included “polarizing,” “insincere,” “inevitable,” and “secretive, will do anything to win, represents the past, out of touch …”

David Carr always had my back. Like the blunt conscience of the Times, David proved the only person who could really defend me. “HRC’s minions throw brush back pitch at NYT. Look for NYT to lean in and hit one hard up the middle,” he tweeted after news of the DC confrontation leaked.

He’d tell me again and again, it’s not you, it’s them. “You never made a single enemy on the media beat,” he’d say.

Sometimes, when I needed an extra confidence boost, he’d email me one of his David emails. “There is no one else like you,” he wrote. “Doubt yourself as a writer if you need to—it will drive you to new ways of thinking—but don’t doubt that. You are your own damn thing.” Despite writing a weekly column, mentoring Lena Dunham, and helping out on every breaking news story he could get his tarry hands on, David still made time to bestow emails like that (and corresponding spirit animals) on a small army of younger journalists.

Around the same time, The Guys took smug satisfaction in the Times’ abrupt firing of Jill Abramson, a development that had nothing to do with Hillary coverage and that left me, like many young women in the newsroom, floored and sad. David would swing by my cubicle, a scarf wrapped in a Parisian knot around his pencil-thin neck, crumbs from his morning donut stuck in the crevices. He wouldn’t say anything. He’d just make a claw motion with his hand and growl, a reminder that I was the Polar Bear.

But polar bears are also lonely and endangered. I was floating on my own little iceberg, and it was melting fast.

MY INTERACTIONS WITH Hillary over the course of 2014 continued to be few and far between, usually chance encounters when she’d always pretend to be thrilled to see me.

In the spring, Bobby and I went to the premiere of a documentary film that Chelsea had executive produced about the unlikely friendship between an imam and a rabbi. It wasn’t exactly the red carpet event of the century, and I turned out to be one of the only reporters there.

Halfway through the cocktail party, Hillary walked in and made a beeline for the bar. Chelsea had announced earlier that day that she and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, were expecting their first child. I no longer saw myself in Chelsea. She had grown into her celebrity, with flowing, straight hair and a permanent strawberry glow. Chelsea told Elle magazine that in her early twenties, her curls just naturally subsided, an affront to frizzy-haired women everywhere. I also happened to know her New York hairdresser—and a keratin job when I saw it. Chelsea’s press aide told me they’d studied how Britain’s royal family had handled Princess Kate’s pregnancy to devise the media strategy.

“Congratulations! Such wonderful news. How excited are you to be a grandma?” I said, sidling up to Hillary at the bar. I put my hand on her shoulder and felt the luscious satin of her chartreuse tunic beneath my palm.

Hillary took a sip of pinot grigio and as she swallowed said, “Oh, Amy, it is just the absolute best.”

We walked into the crowd. “Secretary, I’d like you to meet my husband, Bobby,” I said.

Bobby, the oldest son of Irish school teachers, is from County Meath, a sweep of fluorescent green farmland on the River Boyne. The Trim Castle, a grand Norman structure used as the backdrop of the movie Braveheart, stands blocks from his family’s redbrick house.

Like many Irish, he has a special place in his heart for the Clintons and their commitment to the peace process. He has hazy childhood memories of the British army shoving their guns into his parents’ Datsun Bluebird when his parents would drive across the border to Belfast. I picked up early on that the best way to get on my mother-in-law’s good side was to declare something Irish superior to its English equivalent. “The brown bread just tastes better in Ireland.” Or, “Why can’t an English breakfast come with black and white pudding?” I learned the Irish words for Christmas sweater, geansaí Nollag.

Bobby had hardly said hello when Hillary interrupted. “Is that an Irish accent I detect?” she said.

They tucked into a corner (out of my earshot) and talked for ten minutes about the Good Friday Agreement, their mutual concern that the crash of the Celtic Tiger could reignite the Troubles. I stood there making small talk with Marc Mezvinsky, watching Hillary and Bobby out of the corner of my eye. They ended up talking for longer than I’d talked to Hillary in months (years?). I wanted to crash, but I didn’t. For all the times Hillary had inadvertently interfered in our relationship, leaving them alone to chat was the least I could do.

In the taxi back to the East Village, Bobby sank down into the seat and propped his knees against the back of the Crown Vic. He isn’t a talker. I usually blab, and he listens and then inserts wisdom and witticisms. But that night in the taxi, he went on and on about meeting Hillary and their conversation with the elation of relaying the time he’d seen U2 play at Slane Castle. I listened, happy to see him so happy, grateful for the reminder of that side of Hillary.

A couple of months later, at a naturalization ceremony that included immigrants from a hundred countries all waving American flags and mouthing the words to Lee Greenwood, Bobby was sworn in as an American citizen. Right after that, he registered to vote. I would try to see the 2016 election, and Hillary, partly through Bobby’s uncynical immigrant eyes. “For fuck’s sake, she brought peace to Ireland. I don’t care if she’s funny on SNL,” he’d say during the campaign.

BY THE FALL of 2014, I thought we’d turned a corner. Or, at least, I’d learned how to handle the beat without raiding my mom’s dwindling Xanax stash. There were actual events to cover. Hillary did the Harkin Steak Fry in Iowa. She campaigned for midterm Democrats. Hard Choices, her empty brick of a memoir about the State Department, came out. The fledgling Hillary traveling press corps trailed her to every dreary midterm rally, every Barnes & Noble and Costco book signing.

We all went to Little Rock for the tenth anniversary of the opening of the Clinton Presidential Library, which drew the 1992 campaign alumni. (“Hey, Hillary! Begala’s still got his jacket,” Bill yelled, pointing to Paul Begala in a denim Clinton-Gore ’92 jacket embroidered with a thrusting donkey.)

The weekend included an after-party at the mansion of the Clintons’ Little Rock decorator Kaki Hockersmith (known in DC as Tacky Kaki) and featuring Kevin Spacey holding court at an outdoor bar doing his Bill Clinton impersonation. And there was a late night at the Capital Hotel bar in Little Rock, where an inebriated Terry McAuliffe put his arm around me and said, “Amy, can you believe I’m governor?!” No. Gene Sperling, Clinton’s verbose economic adviser, cornered me until after 3:00 a.m. to defend the earned-income tax credit. Sid Blumenthal stewed in a corner nursing a Moscow mule.

Ready for Hillary, the group that called itself a “grassroots super PAC” (as if that weren’t an oxymoron) held a donor confab at the Sheraton in Midtown. James Carville, Paul Begala, and other members of the original Clinton war room held panel discussions on topics like “It’s the Economy Stupid” and “Lessons Learned from 2008.”

They critiqued Hillary’s ’08 campaign, telling reporters that “every six weeks there seemed to be a new slogan, and there was nothing people could wrap their arms around.” Harold Ickes, known in the White House as Bill Clinton’s garbageman for reasons that had nothing to do with waste disposal, briefed donors from a third-floor conference room. He predicted a hard-fought 2016 general-election battle in which Hillary would confront Jeb Bush–Rob Portman, a ticket bolstered by a simple message along the lines of “It’s time for a change.”

But the biggest precampaign schmooze fest was the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in New York in September (on my birthday, to be exact), the Davos-like gathering that matches wealthy donors with worthy causes. Because this would be the last CGI before Hillary became a presidential candidate, the press shop had assigned handlers to escort reporters everywhere, lest we run into a donor who went off message. The theme that year was “Reimagining Impact,” not to be confused with 2013’s “Mobilizing for Impact” or 2012’s “Designing for Impact.” There was a lot of impact happening at CGI.

I wrote a brief blog post about the young press minder (an intern, I later learned) who had followed me into the restroom. When I asked one of The Guys for comment, he sent me a press release about American Standard’s “Flush for Good” campaign to improve sanitation for three million people in the developing world. “Since you’re so interested in the bathrooms and CGI,” he said.

It was worse than the Yorkie. It was worse than anything else I would publish for the next three years.

I’d written the potty-minder post as a brief, breezy CGI scene-setter, not a serious commentary on relations between the Clintons and the media. But that’s not how the wider world saw things. The Washington Post published a column THE CLINTON TEAM IS FOLLOWING REPORTERS TO THE BATHROOM: HERE’S WHY THAT MATTERS. The Free Beacon called for one of The Guys, ironically the most decent and professional of the cohort, to “stick his big obnoxious head in the toilet and ‘Flush for Good.’” That didn’t help matters. Until then, I hadn’t fully grasped the impact of a Times story in the viral news era. Bathroomgate was discussed on the Today show, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and ad nauseam on Twitter. I declined every interview request. I just wanted it to go away.

By the time Bill stepped off the stage after CGI’s closing plenary session (called “Aiming for the Moon and Beyond” because he spoke via a satellite link to a couple NASA astronauts who appeared, weightless, on board the International Space Station), the only story out of CGI anyone was talking about was the bathroom incident. “Goddammit, we’re trying to save the world and all these people can talk about is the goddamn bathroom,” was how one person summed up Bill’s backstage reaction.

Hillary’s expletive-laced response was worse. She told The Guys she’d held out hope I might still treat her fairly, but she’d given up on me after the bathroom post. “To be very honest, this episode was upsetting to people, not least of which the foundation team,” Brown Loafers said.

The Guys told me the post and a subsequent selfie I’d tweeted with a different press minder had “humiliated” a young intern. I felt awful about the whole thing. I hadn’t identified the intern and didn’t know her name. I had a handwritten apology note, but The Guys (who demanded I apologize) wouldn’t tell me where to send it. I could handle another fight with The Guys, but the last thing I wanted was for some hardworking kid to be inadvertently swept up in my media shit storm.

After that, The Guys and I tried to avoid one another. They’d ask if I was working with any (preferably male) colleagues or researchers and said they would “gladly” talk to them instead. Of all The Guys, Outsider Guy, who a couple years back had fought to get me access and unleashed on Ugandan military officials who wouldn’t allow me (a “cockroach reporter”) into a Clinton Foundation event, had become the most venomous. Maybe because he knew me the best, ever since Iowa and the time we’d shadowed Bill and Chelsea shaking hands and stirring up mayhem in Las Vegas casinos ahead of the 2008 Nevada caucuses, Outsider Guy also knew how to wound me more permanently than the others. The things he said stuck with me as I morphed, in his eyes and occasionally my own, from ally to cockroach.

On a story about Martin Scorsese killing an HBO documentary on Bill Clinton’s life after Chelsea had allegedly requested final cut, Outsider Guy would deal only with Michael Cieply, my coauthor in Hollywood and a grizzled industry veteran. “It’s hard for me to believe you deal with them for a living,” Cieply said, adding that his brief conversation with Outsider Guy had been the nastiest exchange of a career that had included getting yelled at by Harvey Weinstein and several studio executives sniffing coke off conference tables.

I tried to give The Guys a taste of their own medicine.

One night, at a cocktail party in the West Village townhouse of a former White House aide, a pile of Clinton hands, old and new, talked about the recent news that Robert Gibbs would leave his role as Obama’s White House press secretary to be the top corporate flack at McDonald’s.

“You couldn’t pay me enough,” one of The Guys said.

“I’d rather work for big tobacco. Seems more honest,” a White House aide turned Wall Street executive agreed.

I was in a debate with The Guys about a page-one feature set for the weekend paper. I explained that this would be a heartfelt portrait of Hillary’s mother, Dorothy Rodham, and how her childhood struggles would form the emotional core of her daughter’s 2016 campaign.

“Really? There’s nothing else I should know?” Hired Gun Guy said. “You always find a way to include some kind of dig …”

“You’re serious? You think I’m going to take a dig at her dead mother?”

“I don’t know,” he said, lifting his shoulders a couple of inches and pushing his open-palmed hands out in a cartoonish shrug.

“You know,” I said, taking a sip of rosé and cutting him off, “best case scenario, this all ends with a job at McDonald’s.”

10
“Iowa … I’m Baaack”
INDIANOLA, SEPTEMBER 2014

“Secretary! Can you believe you’re back in Iowa?”

“Hillary! Does this mean you’re running?”

“Can you win here this time?”

Hillary stood in front of a Char-Griller, pretending to flip a steak at the Harkin Steak Fry in Iowa. It was the political event of the year for Democrats, Hillary’s first trip back to the state that had wrecked her 2008 presidential campaign, and the clearest public sign yet that she would run again. (For decades, the Harkin Steak Fry was the mandatory testing ground for would-be Democratic candidates.) I watched as she held the wooden handle of a spatula at a safe distance, as if a garden snake were coiled around the end. Then she gave the photographers a smile so open mouthed and amplified that, looking back on it, I should’ve seen it as a cry for help. The entire Democratic Establishment should’ve seen it. The image screamed all at once, How long do I have to act like I enjoy this shit? and Why the fuck am I back in this state? and Dear God, what am I doing? But what Hillary actually said to the press that afternoon was:

“It’s gurrrrate. It’s fabulous to be back. I love Iowa.”

I LOOKED AROUND the press scrum at the steak fry. We were all scrambling to write almost identical stories, using almost identical quotes and almost identical color (“She smiled in front of hay bales, an American flag and a John Deere tractor.”). The last time I’d been in Iowa with Hillary, I still felt like a foreign correspondent. Now, my journalism had become more like a feeding frenzy than a moveable feast.

I was no longer the kid who didn’t know any better than to stand up and cheer at a town hall. I’d become omnivorous, driven beyond all rationale by byline count and Twitter mentions. I lived in fear of being scooped over even the most insignificant minutia. Politico may have beaten me on the Ready for Hillary fund-raiser at the Standard Hotel in New York. But damn it, I heard the exclusive news that tickets cost $20.16 and that the signature cocktails included an eighteen-dollar gin-and-lime concoction called the Ultimate Ceiling Breaker. We were so starved for tiny morsels of news that I groveled with one of The Guys to use the names of his cats, Uday and Qusay (named after Saddam Hussein’s sons “because they were little terrorists”), in the “Planet Hillary” story. I was starting to see things—even how Hillary flipped a steak—with cynicism, and I feared the coming campaign would engulf what was left of my wide-eyed 2008 self.

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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