Amy Chozick - Chasing Hillary

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

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

For Bobby

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

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.

Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.

—KURT VONNEGUT, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE

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.