Chasing Hillary Read online

  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. Mencken

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

  —Hillary Clinton, 1992

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  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

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  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—a rotating cast of about half a dozen 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 Kinney, 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 Stronger Together 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.