Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns and One Intact Glass Ceiling. Amy Chozick
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to know people go to bed with their Twitter decks. Sex must be obsolete,” wrote John Podesta, the veteran White House aide who would serve as Hillary’s campaign chairman.
“I just spit out Diet Coke onto my desk,” Brown Loafers replied. “We’re at 1,791.”
Six days and nearly eight thousand retweets later, we got word that Hillary would be holding a “brief press conference” after addressing a Women’s Empowerment Principles event at the UN. An email from The Guys included details for “those of you that are not already coming,” which included just about everyone. The alert sent several hundred reporters, cameramen, producers, and photographers to storm the otherwise sleepy UN credential office. The room had the feel of a multicultural DMV with brown twill carpet, vintage desktop computers, and the words MEDIA ACCREDITATION printed on typing paper and stuck to the wall.
A lone UN staffer seated behind a low desk tried to handle the deluge of requests to get inside—a process that typically takes weeks and requires background checks, social security numbers, passports, and recommendation letters. The Guys emailed us all at 11:27 a.m. saying we had to reply by 11:45 a.m. to secure a spot.
At the risk of revealing my complete lack of journalistic instinct, I’ll admit that when Schmidt first told me about how Hillary had used clintonmail.com, I’d thought it was another one of his killer scoops, but nothing earth shattering, certainly not a “nuclear winter,” as a former National Archives official called it. I think I said, “Oh wow, cool story. Thanks for the heads-up.” Even after seeing the reaction to that first story, I predicted the fever would lift in a week or so, that people would get tired of reading about the intricacies of the Federal Records Act (snooze) and move on. But the story only gained speed. I’d never been a part of anything like it. The standout scandals of 2008 (Jeremiah Wright, Bristol Palin’s teen pregnancy) mostly offended along ideological divides, storms that would eventually pass. But the private server was more like an avalanche, blind outrage that barreled through every newsroom and war room, devouring everything.
All this came in the midst of Bobby and my finally concluding a two-year apartment hunt, having settled on a co-op on the Lower East Side in a hulking redbrick midcentury tower that still had a Shabbos elevator that stopped on every floor.
Bobby had done all the paperwork to secure a more favorable mortgage. “Do you promise to be there? All you have to do is show up,” he’d said the night before organizing our tax returns and pay stubs and contracts I’d never seen before into a manila folder.
“Yes, of course, I promise. I’ll be there.”
And I was there, sort of. As Fred from Citibank explained our fixed interest rates, I was also on a conference call with my editors planning how we’d cover the UN press conference. I unmuted the call.
“I can file quick off the presser if Schmidt wants to take the lead …” I said.
Then I muted the line and turned back to Fred. “Yep, yep, that all sounds good. Where do I sign?” The next thirty years of my life was now tied to a mortgage payment that I paid almost no attention to, Hillary once again overshadowing a marital rite of passage.
“Is there anything you care about more than Hillary? Anything? Jesus. And there’s not even a campaign yet,” Bobby said when we walked out onto the street the morning of Hillary’s UN presser. He handed me the manila envelope. “Do you think you could drop this in the mailbox? It has to go today. Could you maybe squeeze that in in between Hillary since I’ve done everything else?”
I grabbed the envelope.
“Yes, yes, of course. I’m really sorry, but …”
“I know, you have to go. Just don’t forget to mail it.”
I tried to kiss him, but he gave me an icy cheek. I waved the envelope at him in a you-can-count-on-me motion. I watched his tangerine ski jacket, the one that he’d pulled from a discount rack and that every winter I tried to get him to replace with a sensible neutral color, disappear into the Midtown crowds and rushed to the far East Side.
I arrived at the UN press office hours after the rest of the horde and grabbed the first UN worker I saw to ask if I was in the right place. “I’m going to say this and try not to sound too sarcastic,” she said in an upper-crust English accent. “But what about me makes you think that I care or know the answer to your question?”
The day got worse from there.
This wasn’t the way Hillary wanted to start her second campaign, but there was a kind of cosmic alignment. I’d blown off a marital obligation to push my way into prototypical Clinton chaos at the UN—a bureaucratic, impenetrable organization, well intentioned but ultimately out of step with the modern era.
I waited with a delegation of Ethiopians in a security line that snaked around First Avenue. When we got through, a guard escorted us to the area known in UN parlance as the stakeout, where heads of state and special envoys talk to the diplomatic press in front of a bisque-colored wall with a UN SECURITY COUNCIL muslin backdrop. To our right was a glowing red EXIT sign and to the left were the fifteen flags of Security Council members so shoved together they resembled a tangle of tablecloths hanging at the dry cleaners. But the only visual we cared about was the almost life-size replica of Picasso’s Guernica looming behind the podium. The press couldn’t pass up the symbolism. Hillary confronting the media against the backdrop of a carnal, bloody battle scene. The mother of all advance fuckups. “I thought that painting was in fucking Madrid!” one of The Guys said.
HILLARY WAS AT the UN to mark the upcoming twentieth anniversary of her 1995 address on women’s rights in Beijing. I was fascinated by Hillary’s Beijing speech, both in what she said to the women’s delegation (“Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights.”) and in what the speech meant to her political formation. Hoping to put the failures of Hillarycare behind her and forge her own identity, Hillary, then forty-seven, defied the West Wing and insisted she address the cavernous conference hall that hosted the UN Fourth World Conference on Women. Critics at the time called the speech part of the first lady’s “radical feminist agenda” and “antifamily,” but even then her aides saw it, with the help of a savvy PR strategy back home, potentially becoming Hillary’s “I Have a Dream” moment.
She’d hardly left the State Department when she told her team she wanted “to build on Beijing” and make known, especially to women too young to remember, that she’d been at the feminist forefront. There were plans for a Hillary Beijing Bitmoji—an animated blonde with a Betty Draper bob and powder-pink suit—and a press rollout around the anniversary. I had written a fifteen-hundred-word story that traced her career and upcoming presidential campaign back to Beijing. It never ran in print.
The email story caused all Planet Hillary’s competing, concentric circles to combust.
No one frothed at the mouth blaming the email controversy on a voracious and irresponsible news media more than the Ragin’ Cajun. James Carville’s bald head and jutted jaw quickly blanketed the cable airwaves. “Y’all are just going to go out there and say, ‘She raised more questions than she answered,’” Carville told MSNBC. Then in the least helpful defense I heard, Carville reminded viewers of the laundry list of previous Clinton scandals. “Do you remember Whitewater? Do you remember Filegate? You remember Travelgate? You remember Pardongate? You remember Benghazi?” We do now, James.
Mandy Grunwald, the mysterious media consultant long immortalized in Clinton lore dating back to 1992, suggested Hillary do a sit-down interview with someone friendly, Robin Roberts, maybe. Hillary could explain that she’d done it for convenience and a lot of the emails were about Chelsea’s wedding and yoga and planning her mother Dorothy Rodham’s funeral. It would all be so relatable.
The newcomers—Jim Margolis, the recently-hired adman; and the pollster Joel Benenson, both Obama campaign veterans—argued that Hillary should do a handful of interviews with the Times and the Post, serious outlets that most people wouldn’t accuse of being too cozy. Hillary hated this idea.
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