LITMIR.BIZ

       9

       Leave Hillary Alone

      WASHINGTON, DC, 2014

      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.

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