The walls that Hillary built

For many female journalists, covering the 2016 election meant facing a particular professional conundrum: Are you a reporter first, or a woman first? How do you stay neutral while covering a unique moment in women’s history? Which do you use: Your head or your heart?
 

In her funny and insightful memoir, Chasing Hillary, the journalist Amy Chozick grapples with this question while also providing a much-needed exploration of Hillary Clinton’s antagonistic relationship with the press. It’s a first-person account of Ms Chozick’s failed 10-year quest to see the “real” Hillary, a quixotic mission that is as revealing in defeat as it would have been in victory.

People who know Clinton often complain that the press, and therefore the public, never gets to see how warm and funny she is in person. Chasing Hillary is the best explanation so far of why that is. Ms Chozick describes Ms Clinton’s press shop (which she calls “The Guys”) as an anonymous gang of manipulative, unresponsive and vaguely menacing apparatchiks who alternate between denying her interview requests (47 in total, by her count), bullying her in retaliation for perceived negative coverage (“You’ve got a target on your back,” one of them tells her) and exploiting her insecurities about keeping up with her (often male) colleagues. 

The campaign quarantined the press on a separate bus and, later, a separate plane, often without even an accompanying flack to answer basic questions. It denied Ms Chozick’s interview requests even for positive stories, like a piece about Ms Clinton’s experience in the early 1970s going undercover to expose school segregation in the South, and refused to confirm the most minor details, like whether Ms Clinton ate a chicken wing or not.

It seems clear from Ms Chozick’s account that Ms Clinton thought of her travelling press corps as more buzzard than human (although she did write Ms Chozick a note when her grandmother died). Bill Clinton also had troubles with the press, but at least he would say hello at events or tell a long-winded story. Even Mr Trump, who spent the campaign railing against the “fake news” media, seemed to intuit that a cordial relationship with reporters was essential to managing his public image. Mr Trump once called Ms Chozick out of the blue to provide a comment for an article, and they ended up chatting about “The Apprentice.” So grateful to be actually speaking to a candidate, Ms Chozick made the mistake of telling him that Ms Clinton hadn’t had a news conference in months. Shortly afterward, the Trump campaign began blasting that Ms Clinton was “hiding” from the press.

The fact that Ms Chozick interacted so rarely with Ms Clinton over nearly 10 years of covering her for The Wall Street Journal and then The New York Times is perhaps the most damning evidence of Ms Clinton’s self-destructive relationship with the press. “How could we communicate Hillary’s ‘funny, wicked and wacky’ side to voters,” she asks, “if we never saw it for ourselves?”

Ms Chozick’s own funny, wicked and wacky side is on full display, with well-drawn sketches of everyone from fresh-faced campaign interns to the candidates themselves. With her lively voice and eye for detail, Chasing Hillary is an enjoyable read, like “The Devil Wears Prada” meets “The Boys on the Bus.” 
 

Chasing Hillary is a behind-the-scenes director’s cut for readers who closely followed the 2016 political coverage. You may have read articles she wrote on the floor of the Orlando airport, in Las Vegas next to a “Sex and the City” slot machine, on the M42 crosstown bus. Political junkies will enjoy deciphering her various pseudonyms for Clinton staffers, history junkies will find a valuable first-person account of an extraordinary campaign, media junkies will devour the backstage antics of the traveling press corps. 

The problem, of course, is that not everybody is a junkie. And while the chattering class may be intrigued by, for example, Ms Clinton’s flirtation with ABC’s David Muir, ordinary readers may find themselves swimming in references to journalists and staffers who are far from household names.
 

To her credit, Ms Chozick opens up about her own attitudes toward Ms Clinton more than most political reporters would. Despite the campaign’s scepticism of her, it’s clear that she admired Clinton. She is acutely aware of the sexist double standards Ms Clinton faced (though readers may rightly wonder why this appeared so rarely in her coverage). She’s inspired by the historic nature of the campaign, and hurt by Ms Clinton’s iciness toward her. 

Chasing Hillary is a portrait of two women with shared hopes and weaknesses, both driven and blinded by an ambition that could be possible only in the 21st century, bound by history but not by love. This book won’t make you know Hillary any better. But it will help you understand why you don’t.

© 2018 The New York Times News Service

CHASING HILLARY

Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling 

Amy Chozick

Harper/HarperCollins Publishers

382 pages; $27.99