Amy Chozick - Chasing Hillary

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.”