LITMIR.BIZ

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that,” Chelsea replied.

      JILL HAD TATTOOS of a New York subway token and the Old English T for the Times. She was a stone-hard badass who cut her teeth covering politics and had known Hillary since she was a lawyer at the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas. Jill had been among the post–civil rights movement wave of Harvard-educated New Yorkers drawn to the South. She had more history with the Clintons than most journalists and more foresight than anyone about what Hillary would do next.

      “It’s obvious she’s going to run again,” Jill said to me in her unhurried way. “We need you to cover her full time.”

      I said yes before she even finished speaking. Hillary and Jill, two women at the vanguard and me in the middle.

      “I would love that,” I said. “Ever since ’08 that’s been my dream job. I’m so honored you thought of me for this. Thank you so, so much.” And then I asked, “When would I start?” thinking Jill would suggest the fall or maybe early next year or after the midterm elections.

      She looked at me instead as if I were a small child. “Immediately,” she said.

      It was 649 days before Hillary would announce she was running for president again, 1,226 days before she would lose to Donald Trump.

      IT TOOK YEARS for me to understand the significance of Jill’s decision and my own naïveté about what I was stepping into. At first, I embraced my new beat with unfettered enthusiasm; I would be covering the FWP for the paper of record. I considered several of The Guys, especially the originals who’d been with the Clintons for years, friends. I knew about their hookups. I knew which reporters they liked and which ones they hated. I’d met their dogs, rescue mutts. We’d banter about the Times staff, and I’d pass on my palace intrigue in exchange for theirs. They’d complain that Chelsea had become a real pain in the ass (“raised by wolves,” was how one of them put it), and I’d commiserate with them about colleagues. I even invited two of The Guys to my wedding.

      The first of The Guys I called to tell about my promotion to the politics team, I’d known since we met on a frozen tarmac in Elkader, Iowa, in 2007. We’d bonded over a shared love of Jason Isbell and our self-proclaimed outsider status. Neither of us lived in Washington or had any desire to. Of all The Guys, Outsider Guy was the one who I thought transcended the source-reporter relationship, and over the next few years he would become the cruelest, the one whose name I most feared seeing in my inbox. I would eventually create a special DICKHEAD file for his emails. I’m certain that I let him down, too, and that my emails likely wound up in a SNAKY BITCH WHO PRETENDED TO BE MY FRIEND file.

      “How cool is that? We’ll get to work together all the time,” I said.

      The line went silent. Outsider Guy’s demeanor was as icy as that tarmac had been, and in an instant I knew that we’d never go back to being friends. I thought I heard his pit bull mix growling in the background. The rest of The Guys’ reactions continued like that, ranging from stunned (“Uh, okay. You know she’s a private citizen, right?”), to aggressive (“Just know you’re gonna have a target on your back.”), to personal (“You don’t get it, do you? Jill hates Hillary.”).

      The Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, wrote that the paper’s “treatment of Mrs. Clinton as an undeclared, free-agent front runner helps her.” Hillary didn’t see it that way. The Guys let me know that their hostility came directly from Hillary. She was outraged. She’d hoped to ride the years between the State Department and her next campaign outside the media’s glare.

      The Times’ decision to put me on the beat so early fundamentally changed how Hillary’s fledgling campaign was covered. Pretty soon, a super PAC called Ready for Hillary gained traction to support her 2016 run. The group became, as one source said, “a make-work program” for old Clinton hands angling to get back in the game. Other news outlets soon announced their own Hillary beat reporters, mostly women: Brianna Keilar (CNN), Maggie Haberman (Politico), Ruby Cramer (BuzzFeed ), Liz Kreutz (ABC), Monica Alba (NBC), etc. The Hillary press corps had started to take shape three years before the election.

      Hillary had a 70 percent approval rating then and hoped to spend her days quietly laying the groundwork for 2016 and her evenings basking in adoration at Manhattan charity galas where she could reconnect with donors. (“Okay, I’m rested!” she’d told a friend when she called before 7:00 a.m. the day after she left the State Department.)

      In this period, she’d be feted for saving the whales, combating malaria, working to eradicate adult illiteracy, supporting the Jews, being a Methodist, cracking down on elephant poaching, speaking out against female genital mutilation, rebuilding lower Manhattan after September 11, and popularizing pantsuits.

      But it wasn’t just that Hillary didn’t want media scrutiny. It was something specific to the Times. Something larger than me. Bill and Hillary both believed that the paper was out to get them. That may sound irrational to people who think, The liberal New York Times, out to get Hillary? But they had their reasons.

      Hillary didn’t see me as I was—an admirer in a Rent the Runway dress chasing this luminous figure around Manhattan and hoping to prove myself on the biggest opportunity of my career. To her, I was simply the latest pawn in the decades-long war that was the NYT vs. HRC.

      I knew almost nothing about this battle other than that it started around the time of my bat mitzvah. In 1992, the Times’ investigative reporter Jeff Gerth broke the story about an Ozark land deal gone awry. The Clintons lost money on the development along the White River, but the subsequent investigation into Whitewater would dog the Clinton administration and ultimately lead to impeachment. The thinking went that Howell Raines, the Times’ Alabama-born Washington bureau chief in the early 1990s, wanted to take down Bill Clinton over some deep-rooted Southern white man rivalry.

      I first read about this feud in journals kept by Hillary’s closest confidant, Diane Blair. Throughout the White House years, Hillary turned to Diane, whom she’d been inseparable from ever since 1974 when they found each other—kindred, outsiders—in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Diane took detailed notes on their conversations (“Talked books,” “Talked about how should she deal with all this shit,” “Told her about our cerulean sky”) in case Hillary, then the first lady, ever wanted to write a memoir. But when Diane died of cancer in 2000 at the age of sixty-one, her husband, Jim Blair, donated his wife’s piles of papers to the University of Arkansas, where Diane had taught political science, having no idea the boxes included some of Hillary’s most intimate confessions. I learned about this trove in early 2014 and have pored over its contents ever since.

      “She and Bill triumphed despite the press, it heightened their antagonism,” Diane wrote in a 1999 entry. “But still, what do you do? Howell Raines of NYT Editor viscerally hates them; wants to destroy.”

      The relationship with the Times went downhill from there.

      In 2007, Hillary blamed the Times for propping up Obama. A front-page story about his basketball pickup games sent Hillary into a particular rage. “She doesn’t have any camera-ready hobbies,” the 2008 Guys had protested.

      I envied Patrick Healy, the Hillary beat reporter for the Times during the 2008 primary. From my perch as a Journal reporter, I thought the campaign treated Pat like royalty, always bestowing on him the aisle seat on Hill Force One, always calling on him second at press conferences, after the Associated Press. I dreamed about one day having that aisle seat, getting that second question. But it had all been smoke and mirrors. The 2008 Guys, most of whom didn’t stick around for 2016, tried to ruin Pat’s life, just like the mix of old and new Guys were gearing up to ruin mine.

      In fairness, the torture worked both ways.

      The Guys would tell you that I was the worst kind of reporter. Sneaky, a traitor whom they’d given the benefit of the doubt to and who had repeatedly screwed them over in return. They’d say I gravitated to salacious details and always played the victim (“the shrinking violet act,” they called it) when all the while I was the one standing over

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