Like many an overlong personal essay, Amy Chozick’s new campaign memoir is also an extended case study in modern American self-obsession. That, along with colorful details from the 2016 trail, is probably why it’s such a fun read. There’s more memoir than campaign, much less of Clinton than there is of Chozick’s chase.
It’s a chase that began in 2008 when she covered Clinton for the Wall Street Journal, and took up again in 2016, this time for the New York Times. Chozick admits to a slightly delusional degree of identification with Clinton—whose candidacy none can deny become a vehicle for feminist striving writ large. And she recounts her early years in journalism building toward her protracted gridlock with a cruel team of Clinton flacks Chozick calls simply “The Guys.”
Slipping into Carrie Bradshaw-esque narration, she reconsiders Clinton’s flaws. Her paranoia about the press and reliance upon “The Guys” seem forgivable, relatable even, when recast as an everywoman-ish co-dependence: (emphasis mine) “Didn’t all women have an unspoken urge to nurse damaged men who worshipped us? But then that was me doing what I so often did—imagining Hillary as I wanted her to be and not as she really was.”
In Chozick’s years of trying and failing to get close enough to Clinton to figure her out, what emerges is a revealing contrast between the two women whose lives are, from Chozick’s perspective anyway, totally inseparable. This revelation comes early, in Chapter 2, bookended by anecdotes from a gynecologist appointment where she’s decided to put motherhood on hold. Family planning depends on whether she’ll be covering the White House in coming years: “It was Hillary Clinton vs. my ovaries.”
Despite Chozick’s deep study of her, a personal and professional obsession spanning eight years, the ever-elusive candidate Clinton of Chasing Hillary mostly reflects the male egos around her. “Even her catchiest slogan was about Trump,” Chozick notes. “But it was never about the slogan; it was about Hillary’s inability to articulate why she wanted to be president.” From covering Bill Clinton in 2012, Chozick recalls “total exhaustion from his self-absorption and driveling on,” but can’t deny his irrepressible charm. Hillary, on the other hand, is rightly known by her friends as, “The most famous person no one knows.”
And here’s where her dependence on “The Guys” comes in. Longtime Clinton communications staffer Philippe Reines, whom Chozick calls “Outsider Guy” because of a professed distaste for insider D.C., “was the one who I thought transcended the source-reporter relationship,” she writes. Two of “The Guys” came to her wedding. Of all of them, she called Reines first to say that Jill Abramson, then executive editor of the Times, put her on the Clinton beat in early 2013—before any other major paper. But, “Over the next few years he would become the cruelest, the one whose name I most feared seeing in my inbox.”
As she reported on the growing campaign, he and the other “Guys” stoked her self-doubt, saying, “Just know, you’ll have a target on your back.” A frequent refrain, it’s perfectly pitched to undermine the confidence of a competent but self-conscious striver, the same type of woman “The Guys” maneuver to protect.
What’s weirdly perfect about this book is also everything that’s wrong with it: In making herself so much of the story, Chozick becomes a dominant foil to the subject she relentlessly covered. Whereas Clinton hid from her, Chozick—this being her memoir—bares all. And her bitterness toward the bullies on the Clinton campaign makes her a compelling enough heroine that one wonders: What if Clinton—who at least once broke down in a “f*ck-laced fusillade” during debate prep—had talked about Trump, and his way of getting under her skin, the way Chozick wrote about Philippe Reines? Who, when she last saw him before the election, “had no idea that the next day he’d watch his dream job in the White House slip away to Hope Hicks, a twenty-eight-year-old former Ralph Lauren model.” When Hillary loses along with her antagonistic team, Chozick wins at least a little schadenfreude.
And her memoir makes clear what made Clinton so hard to cover. Strategic effacement let her and her campaign be a vehicle for crowd-pleasing liberal pablum; for feminists’ yearning for a First Woman President or “FWP” as the press corps reportedly called her; for another four years of Obama; for anybody but Trump. (“I stand between you and the apocalypse!” she joked, but not really.) And, for those who remembered the ’90s as a time of great peace and prosperity—and, if your name is Clinton, of great power and calamity—her presidency promised a heady nostalgia trip.
Under all that baggage hid a mostly hollow vision for who she’d actually be in office, all the better to project one’s expectations onto. Even at the end of it all, it isn’t the real Hillary she sees, not the human woman at the heart of the failed campaign. Listening to Hillary’s concession speech the morning after at the New Yorker Hotel, where Chozick insists on witnessing history while editors try to summon her back to the newsroom to write the “How She Lost” story, she sees instead a sort of sacred idol, a fallen feminist hero: “We were watching Saint Hillary,” she writes of the purple-pantsuit-clad Galatians-quoting former candidate.
Clinton’s character as seen by Chozick crystallizes, finally, in the very last pages. Now, she’s had time enough to start a family and reflect on what Hillary’s taught her that she’ll want her child to know. She sees “the Hillary who spent her life doing” and “tried to hold it all together.” She also sees herself: As she sets us loose and promises to get on with her life, Chozick sees that Hillary’s the one “who taught me about grit” and “to believe I could infiltrate the elite media,” the one without whom there would have been no big bylines, no book.
The reporter-subject ambition meld at the core of Chasing Hillary makes for a weirdly spot-on #ImWithHer autopsy. Because in stirring together the two women’s striving in a long, neurotic game of hide and seek, what you arrive at is the lopsided but right-seeming conclusion that if only Hillary Clinton were a little more like Amy Chozick, maybe she’d be president right now.
One cliched conclusion the book can’t escape is that Clinton would be “FWP” were she more open and honest, or even a little looser with the throwaway details canny reporters craft convincingly human portraits from. If only more of her true character had trickled down to voters, or to Times readers, or to one Times reporter in particular, one who so wanted to like her and to be a conduit for her likability. But the problem with this conclusion lies in the thesis Chozick starts with—that bit about “Imagining Hillary as I wanted her to be and not as she really was.”
