It was November, a year before the general election. I pulled the collar of my jacket tight around my neck on the short walk into JD's Tavern, the sports bar attached to the lobby of the Radisson, Manchester, where Hillary would soon arrive to share drinks, bar snacks, and some strained small talk with her travelling press.
In the seven months she'd been a candidate, Hillary had only had one off-the-record drinking session with her travelling press. I hadn't been in Iowa and missed it. But I heard a television journalist made the rookie mistake of asking how she met Bill, allowing Hillary to filibuster with a story so immortalised in memoirs and speeches and popular Clinton lore that I could recite it verbatim. "Oh gosh, it was 1971, at the Yale Law Library ..."
The interactions I'd had with Hillary since the campaign started had almost all happened by accident. In September, she'd stopped in at the Union Diner car in Laconia to shake hands. She met a high school French teacher who introduced Hillary to half a dozen of her students, who all wanted a photo. I stood to her left and when Hillary pivoted to make sure she'd posed with all the students, she looked at me and said, "She's not in the class. This one I know, she's not in the class. She may speak French, but she's not in the class."
Shortly before that encounter, I'd written a story looking ahead to the fall. I interviewed aides in the Brooklyn headquarters about their new "efforts to bring spontaneity to a candidacy that sometimes seemed wooden and overly cautious." The Guys [Hillary's protective cadre of male press aides] came through by providing me with an interview with Robby Mook, Hillary's campaign manager, and Jennifer Palmieri, her communications director. I'd hardly left the building when The Guys hosted a conference call with the entire press corps telling everyone almost exactly what they'd told me.
Everything I had thought I could build a story around seemed stale now that top campaign aides had given the same talking points to the rest of the press. Toward the middle of the interview, we'd discussed how Hillary would try to show voters her softer, more personable side. It was the only original reporting I had.
That evening, I sat in my editor Carolyn's office, watching as she scrunched her forehead and lowered her reading glasses to edit my story.
Carolyn cut and pasted entire paragraphs, plucking the juiciest details (like the campaign's recognition that the "Everyday Americans" phrase wasn't resonating) out of a mumble of politicalese ("Our favourability is higher than any Republican").
Even as I reminded myself that a Carolyn edit always made even the dullest stories jump off the page, reading over her shoulder still gave me the reticent, disembodied feeling of a patient watching a surgeon perform an operation on their vital organs.
The front-page headline read "Hillary to Show More Humor and Heart, Aides Say."
The backlash was immediate. "Today's @nytimes story on HRC read more like The Onion: Her detailed plan to show more authenticity and spontaneity. #Justdoit!" former Obama adviser David Axelrod tweeted.
The #ImWithHer crowd always assumed the campaign disliked my coverage because of her emails or my reporting on the Clinton Foundation. But that wasn't it. It was that the day she declared her candidacy, I'd written that she hadn't offered a clear rationale for why she was running. Hillary also hated that I'd broken the news that the mysterious "Diane Reynolds" in her private State Department emails had been Chelsea, writing under her preferred pseudonym. But nothing put Hillary over the edge quite like the "Humor and Heart" story. Donors and top Democrats called her campaign to complain. Jen and Robby took most of Hillary's wrath, but The Guys got it, too, for letting me into Brooklyn in the first place.
That's the thing about being a candidate reporter; you can't hide. If Hillary had to learn to be an inflatable bop bag, bouncing back after whatever the travelling press threw at her that day, The Guys were a cement wall, rough and unyielding and able to block me from receiving basic logistical information or asking a question.
Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail.
Ever since the "Humor and Heart" piece, I'd been iced out. At an event in New Hampshire, Hillary displayed a superhuman cold shoulder, looking right past my multiple shouts of "SECRETARY! SECRETARY!" Instead, Hillary answered a question about why Trump got better ratings than she did on SNL ("Consider the performance"), and adding insult to injury, she called on Fox News, twice.
Obama handled this dynamic differently. Back in August 2008, I wrote a Weekend Journal feature about presidents and body image and whether an overweight electorate could relate to Obama given his intense workout schedule and zero per cent body fat. Okay, so it was an inane idea, and I was widely mocked. The headline "Too Fit to Be President?" and Murdoch's recently buying the paper didn't help matters.
Later that day, the press pool trailed Obama to a roadside farmers market in Florida. He ordered a strawberry milkshake, and as he took a long sip, he looked right at me. We locked eyes as he gulped down the frothy mix. Then he said, "Wow, this milkshake is delicious. Maybe if I had one of these every day, I wouldn't be such a skinny guy."
Obama then ordered strawberry milkshakes for the entire press corps.
I can safely say Hillary didn't want to buy me a milkshake that day in New Hampshire. On the upside, my reporting was right. She started to phase out "Everyday Americans". She had a new favourite line: "Get Ahead and Stay Ahead."
Asked about the email server — "I will continue doing my part for transparency. I'm also going to focus on what's most important ... helping families get ahead and stay ahead." Pressed to release the transcripts of her Wall Street speeches —"I have plans that will actually help families get ahead and stay ahead." Teary stories at a town hall about the toll of the state's opioid epidemic would often be answered with, "We need to make sure every child can get ahead and stay ahead."
Hillary still treated New Hampshire like the womb, a safe, cosy place that made Bill the "Comeback Kid" in 1992 and resuscitated her own campaign in 2008.
Seven years later, she poured herself into the state, feeling as though she knew the place. She said she knew she'd never get the angry voters, the ones who wanted to send Wall St bankers and CEOs and anyone with a Peloton bicycle to the guillotine. But Hillary remained convinced the country hadn't changed that much while she'd been at the State Department.
She was confident she could sway the convincible, rosier voters even if they disliked her. "Hey guys, be angry, and then let's roll up our sleeves and get to work," she told students at New England College. "Anger is a powerful emotion, but it's not a plan."
The ever present press corps.
She told aides that during these town halls, she could see voters' posture change as she explained her practical solutions to help them "get ahead and stay ahead". Shoulders would relax, arms would unfurl, scowls would soften. She had this.
What she didn't realise at the time — and what I didn't grasp either until Bernie [Sanders]beat her in New Hampshire by 22 points — was that getting ahead doesn't mean anything to people who have nowhere to go.
I myself was so influenced by having seen first-hand how New Hampshire had saved Hillary back in 2008 that, despite signs Bernie would win, I too believed she had a lock on the state. Bernie had done Hillary a favour in declaring that people "are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails". In contrast to her demeanour that summer, she seemed breezy and sociable that fall in New Hampshire. Which was why we got an email saying the secretary would like us to join her for "OTR drinks" [off-the-record] in Manchester.
She used to do these things all the time. When I think about Hillary in 2008, I don't see her on the debate stage or working the rope line at a Lions Club. Instead, she is gliding between the aisles of the Hill Force One toward the press, a goblet of Yellow Tail in one hand, and balancing the other against the back of an AP reporter's seat.
At one OTR drinking session with the travelling press in the wood-lined bar of the William Penn Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh, Hillary had been so candid over Blue Moon and oranges (her preferred beer) that when she left we jotted down Hillary haiku, passing around cocktail napkins and each adding a line, confessions in five to seven syllables ...
Pittsburgh campaign stop Blue Moon pints with oranges I killed Vince Foster
In fact, I doubt I would have been so drawn to covering Hillary's second presidential campaign had it not been for seeing her in these settings, which had led to the dopey notion that I had unique insight into who she really was. "You just don't understand what she's like in private," I'd tell anyone who would listen after the 2008 primary. Another favourite observation: "Obama is charming and charismatic to 50,000 people, but Hillary is just as charming and charismatic to five."
But that 2008 image of Hillary had faded by the fall of her second campaign. At times, we were so bored and desperate for stories that we analysed Hillary's head gestures. "Look at that. Wow, she is nodding up a storm," John Heilemann, then of Bloomberg Politics, said on his cable show. Mark Halperin agreed, "Almost a minute's worth during not a very long event." The Times tallied 43 head-nods per minute in a discussion about community banking in Cedar Falls.
Balloons fall from the ceiling after a Democratic presidential rally.
Hillary looked at her 16 almost entirely-female press corps and thought we were hopelessly young and driven entirely by clicks and the financial demands on our struggling news outlets. (The head-nodding stories admittedly didn't help matters.) In the White House, Hillary once said that had her press corps been all women, she might do what Eleanor Roosevelt did and hold 340 press conferences. "That made a big impression on me," Hillary told reporters in 1994. "Mrs Roosevelt only invited women reporters. I don't think I could get away with that."
The thing about a mostly female press corps was that Hillary likes men, preferably the damaged, witty, brilliant kind. She told aides she knew women reporters would be harder on her. We'd be jealous and catty and more spiteful than men. We'd be impervious to her flirting.
I could've taken the journalistic high ground and refused to attend the OTR in Manchester, but the truth was I wanted to cover Hillary as a real person, and to do that I needed a reminder that she was more than the tentative candidate with the tight grin whom I'd watched from a distance for months.
I don't remember seeing her come in, but from the very first — "Hi, everyone. Where should I sit?" — I could tell she would've rather been testifying before the Benghazi committee.
A martini glass appeared in front of her. I noticed her hands, the sunspots of a grandmother, the neatly buffed nails, the modest wedding band, and the gold chain-link charm bracelet with a tiny photo of her granddaughter hanging down. Seeing her scrape the cheese off her flatbread and then leave the bread on the plate, I mentioned the Whole30 — a starvation diet of 30 days of no sugar, no starches, no dairy, and no alcohol that several reporters in the Hillary press corps (including me) were trying to stick to with varying degrees of success. She shook her head. Hadn't heard of it.
I can't say that she was ever impolite, but she delivered some soul-crushing (and not entirely unfounded) criticism of the political press.
We were essentially gossip peddlers, uninterested in policies that affect people's lives and too dim and driven by traffic and Twitter mentions to grasp said policies even if we wanted to. At least, that's how I interpreted it.
Relations between Hillary and the press had been rocky since the start of the campaign, but that evening she exuded a particularly icy aloofness and a how-long-do-I-have-to-talk-to-you-assholes demeanour that made me feel as if I'd never been born. A younger TV reporter, less cynical than I was, later compared her disappointment in Hillary's phony response about Biden mulling a run ("You know, I didn't even think about that. I've got enough to think about") to learning Santa Claus wasn't real.
All I could think about was something I'd read in her friend Diane Blair's journal: "HC says [the press have] big egos and no brains."
When the conversation started to lull, a pile of discarded bread on her plate and an empty martini glass, Hillary looked over at Brown Loafers, her comms guy, who nodded in unspoken obedience. She patted the table with both palms and exhaled something like "Okay! Should we get going?"
Supporters leave a Hillary Clinton campaign rally.
The next morning, I woke up in my ground-floor room at the Holiday Inn Express feeling like a teenage girl just expelled from the pep squad. Still underneath the sheets, I called my husband, Bobby, who was already at work and, unlike me, hardly ever complained.
And yet, for the first time in seven years I woke up clear-eyed and a little sad that ours was destined to be an impossible, tortured, and unrelentingly tense relationship weighted down by old grudges and fresh grievances. To Hillary, I was a big ego with no brain and no amount of cordial small talk could make up for the bad blood between her world and mine. "Not been good at press relations," Diane Blair wrote. "Feels intensely about zone of privacy; constantly betrayed and abused."
On the drive back to Boston I thought of Jill Abramson, before she was ousted as executive editor, sitting on a bar stool at an Irish pub. She was offering career advice to a group of young women journalists. There were the usual concerns about work-life blah blah blah balance and a lament that Albany seemed impossible to cover with a D-cup. "They just assume you're sleeping with your sources," somebody said, and all the less-endowed girls looked down at their pinot grigios.
When a sheepish reporter asked how to come to terms with the distinctly female instinct to always want to be liked, while also writing the tough stories, Jill looked her in the eyes and said in her slow, deliberate way, "I always thought, you're either hated or you're irrelevant."
When I got back to the newsroom, I wrote down the words "You're either hated or you're irrelevant" in black Sharpie on a yellow sticky note that I kept taped to the centre of my computer screen for the rest of the campaign.
Edited extract from Chasing Hillary by Amy Chozick (Williams Collins, $39).
Hillary Clinton will speak at An Evening with Hillary Rodham Clinton, Monday, 7.30pm, Spark Arena.
