.jpg)
For an entire decade, nearly every major decision Amy Chozick made revolved around Hillary Clinton.
From planning her wedding to deciding whether to freeze her eggs, Chozick timed everything to fit with the looming inevitability of a Clinton candidacy. She first covered one in 2008, as a young journalist at the Wall Street Journal. In 2016, she was the New York Times’ lead Clinton reporter.
Chozick chronicles those two journeys across America in a new book, Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling. The result is a memoir that unlike many is not solely dedicated to campaign intrigue. Although there are plenty of insider recollections, Chozick pairs her retelling of two campaigns gone wrong with a starkly introspective take on the state of US politics and whether the media, herself included, may have contributed to the breakdown of norms.
The last time I saw Chozick, we were sitting in the back of a press van in the Clinton campaign motorcade on the morning of 8 November 2016. As part of the traveling press corps, we had just watched Clinton take the final step of a 19-month campaign. At an elementary school in her home town, Chappaqua, New York, the candidate voted for herself. It was the beginning of the day on which she would at long last break what she once called the “highest, hardest glass ceiling”.
When Chozick and I spoke by phone nearly a year and a half later, Donald Trump was preparing to host Emmanuel Macron of France in the first official state visit of his presidency, a diplomatic summit against a backdrop of Twitter tirades against the FBI and mounting legal woes stemming from an alleged affair with an adult film actor, Stormy Daniels.
“I don’t think Trump could have come to power without this media landscape,” Chozick said, noting the extensive number of storylines that accompanied his candidacy. “Donald Trump knew how to capture our attention constantly.”
By contrast, she said, coverage of Clinton always circled back to the same issue: “With Hillary, it was emails, emails, emails.”
Chozick’s paper broke the story of Clinton’s use of a private email server while at the state department. Although Chozick said she grew tired of writing about the emails, she said it was “a legitimate story when the frontrunner for the presidency of the United States is under FBI investigation”.
Chozick’s relationship with Clinton and her campaign staff – never smooth, often fraught – is a recurring theme in her book. In one of her most frustrated moments, she tells her husband: “She really, really hates me.”
I asked if she genuinely felt Clinton hated her. Chozick invoked advice from the Times’ former executive editor – now Guardian columnist – Jill Abramson: “You’re either hated or you’re irrelevant.”
“You’re supposed to have a combative relationship with the people you cover,” Chozick said. “It wasn’t that I wanted us to be her bestie. I tried to cover her fairly for a decade of my life.”
Tensions have nonetheless lingered. Chelsea Clinton used Twitter to accuse Chozick of having got some facts wrong. Chozick notes she hired a professional fact-checker and has avoided engaging in a back-and-forth.
One of Chelsea Clinton’s quibbles concerns a passage in which she is said to have opened a bottle of champagne on election night. The anecdote formed the top of the first published excerpt of Chasing Hillary, a description of the mood inside Clinton’s New York hotel suite as the returns came in. According to Chozick, Clinton told her campaign manager, Robby Mook: “They were never going to let me be president.”
Chozick goes on to offer a distressing examination of whether she and other members of the media were pawns in Russia’s attempt to sway the election in Trump’s favor.
“It’s dizzying to realize that without even knowing it, you’ve ended up on the wrong side of history,” Chozick writes, highlighting the difficulty of reporting on hacked emails belonging to Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. There is almost a tacit admission that perhaps there was some fairness to the Clinton campaign’s repeated suggestion that reporters did not take seriously the alarms they sounded over the Russians and their role in the hacks of Podesta and the Democratic National Committee.
Chozick said Chelsea Clinton’s reaction to her book was part of why she often “felt defeated”.
“To be immediately greeted with antagonism when you’re writing something that was pretty sympathetic and self-reflective reminded me of the constant state of play in the campaign where you just can’t win,” she said.
“You write a positive story, there’s something they hate about it.”
‘This visceral Hillary hatred’
Chozick first traveled with Clinton in 2007, after being plucked from the Wall Street Journal’s Tokyo bureau. Her relationship with Clinton was different then – being a young reporter at the Journal, Chozick noted, was not comparable to being the lead reporter at the Times. The candidate was different too.Chozick recalled Clinton being less guarded and even coming to the back of the campaign plane on Valentine’s Day 2008, to phone reporters’ partners and apologize for keeping them away.
Such anecdotes show a side of Clinton the public may never know. They also reinforce the fact that, beneath the fear of an adversarial relationship, the candidate and her press corps were all ordinary human beings.
It is clear Chozick admires Clinton and recognises the deep-rooted misogyny that greeted her political campaigns. Asked if she thinks Clinton was treated in more gendered terms in her first or second run for the presidency, Chozick described a group of hecklers at a campaign rally in New Hampshire in 2008 who, as Clinton spoke, shouted: “Iron my shirts!”
But sexism was equally impossible to ignore in the “lock her up” chants of 2016, she said, as it is now in the way in which Republicans are running against Clinton in the 2018 midterms.
“There’s this visceral Hillary hatred that’s not really connected to anything in her record,” Chozick said.
In an alternate universe, Chozick would now be covering the first female president. She instead found herself immersed in writing a memoir that culminates in watching Clinton watching Trump’s inauguration.
Behind her are the years of poring over archival documents in Arkansas, watching and rewatching Clinton’s speeches and getting to know those who know Clinton best. When she is not promoting the book, Chozick is busy with a baby boy, living a life she had long put on hold.
Chozick feels she knows Clinton. But she confessed that in many ways, the former candidate remained as elusive as ever.
“It was a relationship that took place mostly in our heads,” she said.
