Amy Chozick - Chasing Hillary - Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns and One Intact Glass Ceiling

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.

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

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.