Читать книгу Chasing Hillary - Amy Chozick - Страница 19

I knew Hillary was running again on a Monday afternoon in early May. She’d sent all The Guys, including Outsider Guy who avoided DC and had to fly cross-country, to attend the meeting, along with her closest aides. These included Cheryl Mills, the classy, elusive lawyer who’d defended the Clintons during impeachment and Benghazi and who knew how to drape a scarf in even the hottest State Department convoys to Senegal; Tina Flournoy, a former union leader and boxing aficionado from Georgia whose combination of tenacity and Southern charm made her uniquely qualified to hold the unenviable role of Bill Clinton’s chief of staff; and Huma Abedin, the elegant waif and tabloid fixture who’d worked for Hillary since she was a nineteen-year-old White House intern and George Washington University student.

Ever since I arrived in Iowa in 2007, I’d marveled at Huma the way women tend to marvel at impossibly thin, fashionable women. She was the only one (including Hillary) who didn’t gain at least ten pounds in 2008. It got so bad that by the Indiana primary, I saw Chelsea swat her mother’s hand away (“Mom!”) from a deep dish of chips and salsa. And I watched, hardly able to keep up in my bulky snow boots, as Huma glided alongside Hillary in stilettos during the Scranton St. Patrick’s Day parade. The press speculated about whether Huma had hooked up with one of The Guys who had a fiancée in New York, our very own soap opera unfolding on the plane. But on one flight toward the end of the primary, Huma introduced the ’08 traveling press to her new boyfriend—a promising young congressman from New York named Anthony Weiner.

It had been just over a year since Hillary had stepped down as secretary of state, and now certain that Carolyn Ryan had inherited the personal vendetta against her family, she had instructed her most trusted loyalists to convene at the New York Times’ Washington bureau and express her concerns about my coverage. Why would Hillary do that if she wasn’t running?

When The Guys emailed us a list of the seven aides who planned to attend the meeting, Carolyn wrote back, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

We all agreed the discussion would be off the record, but it didn’t take long for somebody to tip off the conservative Washington Free Beacon, which soon after published a story with the headline HILLARY TO NEW YORK TIMES: BACK OFF. But the Beacon story only mentioned the presence of Original Guy and Huma—who was hard to miss floating through our slovenly newsroom like an exotic bird in a red wool coat. They didn’t know the half of it.

Everyone huddled into the narrow entryway under the bureau’s fluorescent lights. The Guys forced themselves to offer me their usual clipped hello, which always reminded me of Seinfeld opening the door for Newman. “Hello, Amy.”

After some handshakes, Carolyn led everyone down the drab, carpeted stairway to the conference room where The Guys helped themselves to coffee only to find that it had been left over from a previous meeting. The brown liquid was dank and acidic, and the creamer crumpled as it splashed into their Styrofoam cups. We hadn’t planned it that way, but serving stale coffee and day-old Danish to DC’s most powerful people did send an effective message that things probably wouldn’t go their way.

I can’t get into the details. I can only say that they griped about stories I thought were positive, like one about Bill building a charitable legacy in Africa. (They hated the timing.) They complained about stories I thought were neutral, like Hillary working to rebuild bonds with black voters. (Black people never left the Clintons, they said.) They understandably despised a story about a Ukrainian oligarch, Victor Pinchuk, who’d given millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation and had a slew of meetings with State Department officials. (Victor liked the story. He invited me to his annual conference typically held in Yalta, the tsars’ fabled Black Sea resort town. I declined.) But mostly, they hated that the beat existed at all. They said Hillary was a private citizen.

The story that put me on the radar as the Times’ Hillary chronicler and made that proverbial target on my back more like a permanent tattoo arrived in a January 2014 issue of the New York Times Magazine, along with a doughy Hillary moon face floating amid intergalactic dysfunction on its cover. I’d meant for my “Planet Hillary” story to serve as a fifty-seven-hundred-word primer about all the people the Clintons had collected over the years and the “organizational meshugas [that] already threatened, once again, to entangle” Hillary as she prepared for 2016. In an accompanying chart, I categorized the Clintons’ minions (and almost all my would-be sources) into competing solar systems. There was “The Inner Circle,” “The 2008 Victims,” “The People Who Do All the Work,” “Loyal Henchmen,” “Frenemies,” “Poseurs,” and so forth. Not surprisingly, almost everyone hated their designated place in the universe.

Doug Band called to complain that he’d been positioned (in the category “The White Boys”) next to the floating head of the irascible wonk and former White House policy adviser Ira Magaziner. “I can’t believe you put me next to that asshole. You know I hate that guy!”

One of the Poseurs yelled at my editor that the placement could’ve cost him his gig as a paid Fox News contributor. Another offered to get Bill Clinton on the phone to tell us that he wasn’t a poseur. To which my editor replied, “That’s exactly what a poseur would do!” A New York executive told me the “Poseur” label had been the “worst thing to ever happen to me.” (He lived a charmed life.) Worse, I’d been somewhat of a puppet in all of this, later learning that all the poor schmucks who ended up designated as Poseurs had at some point pissed off The Guys, who’d accordingly steered me toward tagging them with that label. One of them, a friend and donor, was also the ex-husband of the buxom blonde whom one of The Guys had an affair with on an earlier Foundation trip to Africa.

I’d started to get used to the idea of breaking some eggs to make an omelet, but with the “Planet Hillary” story, I’d dropped the whole damn carton.

Carolyn always had her reporters’ backs. I knew that after the DC meeting, she’d plop down on the sofa in her office next to the Ping-Pong table and tell me to never doubt my coverage. She’d remind me that we should have a combative relationship with the people we cover—and she’d say that I deserved combat pay. But during the meeting, Carolyn didn’t say much. She disarmed the group the same way she disarmed reporters who came into her office unprepared. She took exaggerated sips of Diet Coke and squinted as they spoke, sometimes jutting her neck toward our visitors and then leftward to me giving the impression that she was listening to crazy talk and craved simultaneous translation.

I kept trying to fill the silences. I apologized. I said I’d try to do a better job next time and I’d be more careful moving forward. But that just pissed The Guys off more. The shrinking violet act and all.

They all seemed trapped in a time warp. Whitewater was yesterday, but all the positive stories and endorsements the Times had given Hillary in recent years were worthless relics.

I could’ve tried to defend myself, but I was up against seven much smarter professional Hillary defenders, including Cheryl, a former deputy White House counsel. I didn’t stand a chance. I kept thinking of the scene from Full Metal Jacket when Matthew Modine’s Private Joker says, “Sir, the private believes that any answer he gives will be wrong and the senior drill instructor will only beat him harder if he reverses himself, Sir!”

My train back to New York after the meeting was delayed for hours. I crouched on the floor of Union Station between a Jamba Juice and an Auntie Anne’s pretzel to charge my iPhone and check my messages. The Guys had dumped me. Their email might as well have said, “It’s not you, it’s me.” Or they could’ve used the same line the Colombian waiter I went on a couple of dates with in my twenties did when he texted me, “U R 2 high maintenance.”

From then on, I was to deal directly with Cheryl.

Though she outranked The Guys, this didn’t feel like a reward. My job required me to have some semblance of a relationship with Hillary’s press aides. There wasn’t even a campaign yet, and I’d already failed. As it turned out, my interlude with Cheryl lasted a couple of weeks until she got sick of me, too, and kicked me back to The Guys. Only this time instead of the OG, I was now to deal with his less experienced but more presentable protégé, the brown-loafers wearer.

Months later, when OG presented his Mini-Me to the rest of the political universe, everyone thought of him as the nice one. They’d gush, “Have you met him yet? He is such a nice guy.” And at first, Brown Loafers Guy was a breath of fresh-faced air. He burst with optimism about Hillary’s future and his own. He had OG’s biting wit and a full suite of adorable facial expressions that played well on cable TV. He had a direct line to Hillary (who adored his adorableness) and none of OG’s dark edge, sexist undertones, or tendency toward high drama.

The Guys got help from outside supporters. A ragtag group called the HRC Super Volunteers sent me a warning: “We will be watching, reading, listening, and protesting coded sexism …” According to their list, sexist language included “polarizing,” “insincere,” “inevitable,” and “secretive, will do anything to win, represents the past, out of touch …”

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.”

But the biggest precampaign schmooze fest was the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in New York in September (on my birthday, to be exact), the Davos-like gathering that matches wealthy donors with worthy causes. Because this would be the last CGI before Hillary became a presidential candidate, the press shop had assigned handlers to escort reporters everywhere, lest we run into a donor who went off message. The theme that year was “Reimagining Impact,” not to be confused with 2013’s “Mobilizing for Impact” or 2012’s “Designing for Impact.” There was a lot of impact happening at CGI.

I wrote a brief blog post about the young press minder (an intern, I later learned) who had followed me into the restroom. When I asked one of The Guys for comment, he sent me a press release about American Standard’s “Flush for Good” campaign to improve sanitation for three million people in the developing world. “Since you’re so interested in the bathrooms and CGI,” he said.

It was worse than the Yorkie. It was worse than anything else I would publish for the next three years.

I’d written the potty-minder post as a brief, breezy CGI scene-setter, not a serious commentary on relations between the Clintons and the media. But that’s not how the wider world saw things. The Washington Post published a column THE CLINTON TEAM IS FOLLOWING REPORTERS TO THE BATHROOM: HERE’S WHY THAT MATTERS. The Free Beacon called for one of The Guys, ironically the most decent and professional of the cohort, to “stick his big obnoxious head in the toilet and ‘Flush for Good.’” That didn’t help matters. Until then, I hadn’t fully grasped the impact of a Times story in the viral news era. Bathroomgate was discussed on the Today show, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and ad nauseam on Twitter. I declined every interview request. I just wanted it to go away.

By the time Bill stepped off the stage after CGI’s closing plenary session (called “Aiming for the Moon and Beyond” because he spoke via a satellite link to a couple NASA astronauts who appeared, weightless, on board the International Space Station), the only story out of CGI anyone was talking about was the bathroom incident. “Goddammit, we’re trying to save the world and all these people can talk about is the goddamn bathroom,” was how one person summed up Bill’s backstage reaction.

Hillary’s expletive-laced response was worse. She told The Guys she’d held out hope I might still treat her fairly, but she’d given up on me after the bathroom post. “To be very honest, this episode was upsetting to people, not least of which the foundation team,” Brown Loafers said.

The Guys told me the post and a subsequent selfie I’d tweeted with a different press minder had “humiliated” a young intern. I felt awful about the whole thing. I hadn’t identified the intern and didn’t know her name. I had a handwritten apology note, but The Guys (who demanded I apologize) wouldn’t tell me where to send it. I could handle another fight with The Guys, but the last thing I wanted was for some hardworking kid to be inadvertently swept up in my media shit storm.

After that, The Guys and I tried to avoid one another. They’d ask if I was working with any (preferably male) colleagues or researchers and said they would “gladly” talk to them instead. Of all The Guys, Outsider Guy, who a couple years back had fought to get me access and unleashed on Ugandan military officials who wouldn’t allow me (a “cockroach reporter”) into a Clinton Foundation event, had become the most venomous. Maybe because he knew me the best, ever since Iowa and the time we’d shadowed Bill and Chelsea shaking hands and stirring up mayhem in Las Vegas casinos ahead of the 2008 Nevada caucuses, Outsider Guy also knew how to wound me more permanently than the others. The things he said stuck with me as I morphed, in his eyes and occasionally my own, from ally to cockroach.

On a story about Martin Scorsese killing an HBO documentary on Bill Clinton’s life after Chelsea had allegedly requested final cut, Outsider Guy would deal only with Michael Cieply, my coauthor in Hollywood and a grizzled industry veteran. “It’s hard for me to believe you deal with them for a living,” Cieply said, adding that his brief conversation with Outsider Guy had been the nastiest exchange of a career that had included getting yelled at by Harvey Weinstein and several studio executives sniffing coke off conference tables.

I tried to give The Guys a taste of their own medicine.

One night, at a cocktail party in the West Village townhouse of a former White House aide, a pile of Clinton hands, old and new, talked about the recent news that Robert Gibbs would leave his role as Obama’s White House press secretary to be the top corporate flack at McDonald’s.

“You couldn’t pay me enough,” one of The Guys said.

“I’d rather work for big tobacco. Seems more honest,” a White House aide turned Wall Street executive agreed.

I was in a debate with The Guys about a page-one feature set for the weekend paper. I explained that this would be a heartfelt portrait of Hillary’s mother, Dorothy Rodham, and how her childhood struggles would form the emotional core of her daughter’s 2016 campaign.

“Really? There’s nothing else I should know?” Hired Gun Guy said. “You always find a way to include some kind of dig …”

“You’re serious? You think I’m going to take a dig at her dead mother?”

“I don’t know,” he said, lifting his shoulders a couple of inches and pushing his open-palmed hands out in a cartoonish shrug.

“You know,” I said, taking a sip of rosé and cutting him off, “best case scenario, this all ends with a job at McDonald’s.”