I’d only moved back to New York from Tokyo a couple of weeks earlier. A squishy brown Kapibara-san charm, a plush version of the world’s largest rodent, still hung from my cell phone—one of my many accessories that seemed appropriate for a twenty-eight-year-old foreign correspondent in Tokyo but that I should’ve retired to a landfill when I got back to the States.
Bobby and I had done long distance for nearly two years. We’d lose entire days (or nights, depending on who was in which time zone) talking via a scratchy Skype connection. I’d stay in the Journal’s bureau late enough to call and wake him up for work each morning, and he’d do the same when the sun set in New York. I had a Miffy calendar on my desk and would mark off the floppy-bunny-eared days until his next visit to Japan or my next trip to the States.
I hadn’t intended to do long distance with the Irish guy I’d picked up in a bar on St. Patrick’s Day weeks before my scheduled “suitcase relocation” to Japan. I also had a rule about not dating guys who worked in finance, but Bobby was more math geek than Wall Street wolf. We shared the same gypsy spirit and even when we lay in bed my last night in New York and I confided how terrified I was to move to Tokyo—to leave everything familiar—Bobby only held me tighter, told me that I had to do it and that he’d come visit.
We fell in love in Japan. Without Bobby, Tokyo was soul-crushingly lonely. With him, we laughed ourselves silly walking through Yoyogi Park. We gawked at the girls in their Bo Peep dresses and the grown men swing dancing, their hair in exaggerated slicked-back pompadours. We practically bankrupted our favorite all-you-can-eat shabu-shabu joint in Shibuya and soaked in Japanese hot springs so long our skin shriveled, Bobby’s cotton yukata hitting knee length on his sinewy six-foot-one frame. “I think we should shack up when you get back to New York,” he said one night.
On his last visit to Japan, I watched him descend the elevator at Narita airport, in the ratty sweater that he’d had since his University College Dublin days. I pressed my hand against the glass partition trying to touch him and watching him disappear into the foreigners’ immigration line. I turned to walk back to the Narita Express, as I always did, but instead collapsed crying outside the duty-free mall. This led to two police officers asking if I was okay. (“Genki desu ka?”) The Japanese don’t do public displays of emotion, especially not that close to the Louis Vuitton. I had to get back to New York.
Six weeks later, Bobby moved his meager belongings into the yellow-walled, rent-stabilized East Village apartment that I’d sublet while I was in Japan. The apartment overlooked a courtyard and a Hare Krishna temple with its cloud of patchouli that made our hallway smell like a hippie’s armpit. Randy Jones, the cowboy from the Village People, lived upstairs and transformed the hot tar of the rooftop into an illegal garden with vines of plump tomatoes climbing up a cinder-block canopy. We were finally nesting.
Bobby’s office wasn’t far from the Journal’s newsroom. He stood next to me on the sidewalk in lower Manhattan when Bussey’s call came in. It was October but warm. We had planned to walk home after work together, maybe getting dinner in Little Italy on the way, the kind of low-key evening activity that normal couples do all the time but that we’d fantasized about in so many long-distance calls. He saw my face and mouthed “What?” rolling his eyes in anticipation.
I didn’t have time to explain. Bussey’s tone sounded panicked, like the time he’d tried to stop Blythe and me from going to Vietnam in the middle of the bird flu epidemic. He’d framed the idea—“How’d you like to go to Iowa to cover Hillary Clinton?”—as a question, but there was only one answer.
“When do I leave?”
A zealot cannot be a good cultural anthropologist.
—RUTH BENEDICT, THE CHRYSANTHEMUM AND THE SWORD
DES MOINES, 2007
Unlike most campaign reporters who descended on Des Moines each presidential cycle and for all the steak fries and state fairs in between, I’d spent the prior couple of years covering Japan’s consumer culture. I wrote a front-page story about how Westernized diets were causing young Japanese women to have larger breasts (headline: DEVELOPING NATION). In 2007, as my competitors were meeting campaign sources at Centro (CHEN-trow), Des Moines’s hottest restaurant (though there wasn’t a lot of competition), I was clubbing in Shinjuku with Ken-san, a Japanese deejay friend who went by the stage name Intelligent Milli Vanilli, a phonetic challenge for the Japanese. I didn’t know who ran John Kerry’s 2004 campaign. I’d never heard of Politico or its Playbook. The name Barack Obama sounded only vaguely familiar. When Bussey asked me to go to Iowa, I thought for sure I would be riding the Hillary Clinton beat all the way to the White House.
Years later I confessed to one of The Guys that when I got to Iowa, I didn’t know what a caucus was. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “We didn’t know what a caucus was either.”
I thought it would be a relief to report in English again, but I still didn’t entirely speak the same language as the people I was covering, especially Mark Penn. Penn was Hillary’s trusted pollster who, after her third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, went from being the brains behind the former first lady’s political ascent to the asshole responsible for everything bad about the 2008 campaign. (Poor bastard couldn’t even blame the Russians.)
Mark had some terrible ideas (like his early reminder before the 2008 campaign that “being human is overrated …”), but he always saw Bill’s base of white working-class men as a central part of Hillary’s victory. And he turned out to be correct that most voters didn’t want to elect the “First Mama.”
On the flight from Des Moines to Manchester after Hillary came in third place behind Obama and John Edwards, Penn pushed his combed-over sweep of coarse brown hair over his sweaty forehead and told us, “We’re in a strong position to move forward.” I whispered to Anne Kornblut, of the Washington Post, who sat in the bucket seat next to me and pounded so hard on her laptop that her tray table vibrated, “Is that really how they talk?” Anne smiled at me, as if I were a yapping lapdog that she wanted to silence. She went back to transcribing Penn’s comments.
One time in Japan, during an interview with a high-level executive, I asked my interpreter, Ayako-san, to grill him on a question I knew he was evading. She cautioned, “Amy-san, it is extremely rude to ask the same question twice.” I was always inadvertently being rude in Japan, so I told her to go ahead. The executive’s eyes bulged. He leaned in close, his breath smelling of cigarettes and ponzu sauce. “Amy-san, I have already answered that question,” he said in clear but heavily accented English. “My answer is neither yes nor no.”
I remembered that exchange when I first started covering American politics, and whenever we pressed Hillary and her top aides, I imagined them all morphing into anime versions of themselves, with tiny bodies and round bulbous heads, a floating thought bubble on top: We’re in a strong position to move forward. My answer is neither yes nor no.
EVERYTHING SEEMED LIKE a story to me in 2008. I wrote a feature about campaign hookups, a topic so baked into the process that no one thought Secret Service guys (motto: “Wheels Up, Rings Off”) ducking into reporter’s