They told me that Jonathan Martin, a sweetheart of a colleague who had recently joined the Times from Politico, was telling Maggie Haberman, his former Politico colleague who scooped me daily, what I was working on. (He wasn’t.) I later accused The Guys of telling Maggie what I had in the works. This not only wasn’t true and made me sound like a psychotic ex-girlfriend, but the accusation marked the beginning of the end of any semblance of a cordial working relationship. They’d gotten in my head, and I let them. I believed The Guys when they’d warn me that my more assertive (male) colleagues would boot me off the beat and tramp over my bloodied corpse.
“In one corner of the steel cage match, Healy and Hernandez. In the other Chozick …” The Guys said. (Healy and Ray Hernandez would become close friends, it turned out.)
But mostly, The Guys loved to say, “I saw what happened to Anne …”
They meant Anne Kornblut. Jill Abramson put Anne on the Hillary beat during the Senate years as Hillary prepared to run for president in 2008. The way The Guys told it, Anne had been done in by Times political reporters, with Pat and Ray leading the effort to oust her from the most sought-after beat in journalism. In reality, Anne left the Times in 2007 for a generous offer from the Washington Post, where she won a Pulitzer and ended up practically running the place before leaving for a high-powered job at Facebook. Anne turned out just fine.
I felt like a hazed fraternity pledge, aware that even as The Guys tormented me, I needed them.
Not long after Sheryl Sandberg presented Hillary with the Women for Women International Champion of Peace Award, I was on a conference call with five of The Guys, going through a list of facts to check for an upcoming story. I tried to negotiate the use of some innocuous color I’d gathered over a casual meal with the high chieftain of The Guys, the longest-serving Svengali and the most-devoted member of Hillary’s court of flattering men. He was the OG, the Original Guy.
“Absolutely not,” OG said.
I groveled. “But you didn’t say it was off the record.”
“I didn’t know I had to say it was off the record when I was inside you,” he replied, paraphrasing a line from the movie Thank You for Smoking in which Aaron Eckhart plays a slick tobacco flack who is sleeping with a plucky young reporter played by Katie Holmes.
Inside you.
The words hung there so grossly gynecological. On the upside, at least I was Katie Holmes in this scenario.
I started to feel alienated in the newsroom, paranoid about whom I could trust. I stopped having lunch in the Times cafeteria. I even missed burrito day, and I lived for burrito day.
The Guys would time their rants (subject line: “HRC/NYT”) to land in my inbox on Friday nights or Saturday mornings, usually when I was walking into a spin class ready to give myself over to an instructor in a sports bra imparting self-help wisdom. (“Who you are in this room is who you are in life.”) But all I heard over Drake was You’ve got a target on your back.
I still felt some kind of a feminine bond with Hillary then, even though in the months I’d been on the beat, I’d only talked to her for two minutes in a freight elevator in San Francisco after I followed her out of an American Bar Association conference. I assumed she kept The Guys around because they were entertaining. (When the RNC placed a fuzzy orange squirrel outside a Hillary event with the words ANOTHER CLINTON IN THE WHITE HOUSE IS NUTS, one of The Guys said, “Wait, I think I fucked that squirrel in 2008.”) They were handsome (by Washington standards). They had potential.
Maybe Hillary wanted to mold them into better men. After all, I’d spent my midtwenties dating an Italian documentary filmmaker who my friends pointed out was more like a homeless man with a camcorder. 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.
Months later, when I explained to my mom why I needed her to violate controlled-substance laws by filling her unused Xanax prescription and FedExing me the pills, she said, “It’s such a shame. If only Hillary knew …”
It took me years, but when my grasp of the real Hillary finally came into focus, I accepted that it wasn’t that she didn’t know how The Guys acted. It was that she liked them that way.
BY THE TIME, Dr. Rosenbaum puckered her severe features at me and snapped off her rubber gloves, I’d already picked up my phone and was scrolling through Twitter. She suggested I get pregnant as soon as possible. “Take an au pair on the campaign trail,” she said. “I have a lovely student from France. The twins just adore her.”
I nodded and imagined piling into a press riser in a high school gym for a campaign rally in Cleveland with an infant, a French au pair, and possibly Bill Clinton nearby.
Until that afternoon, I hadn’t grasped how intrinsically linked my own life and Hillary’s pursuit of the presidency had become. I threw on my clothes, rushed across town back to the newsroom, and made a mental note to find a new doctor.
It was Hillary Clinton vs. my ovaries.
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS, 1996
Doris and my mom worked together at a public school with half a dozen or so pregnant thirteen-year-olds and a vice principal who’d served in the Marines and once wrestled a gun away from a seventh grader. It was Doris who told my mom about her big plans for that weekend: the first lady was in town promoting her child-rearing book, It Takes a Village, and Doris was going to hear her speak.
I can see my mom in the staff room at Pat Neff Middle School, pulling an orange out of the brown paper bag she packed for herself and thinking about this concept of the village raising a child. That same year she would be diagnosed with, and later recover from, breast cancer. I’d bring her strawberry popsicles that stained her lips red during chemo. Most people in Texas adhered to Bob Dole’s belief that “it takes a family to raise a child” and saw the whole village thing as a commie concept from a radical, uppity first lady. The San Antonio Express-News would describe the women’s organization represented at the book event as “‘feminists’ (whatever that means).”
My mom must have told Doris that I had a budding interest in politics, or maybe Doris offered to take me to meet Hillary Clinton, but either way, Doris picked me up early Saturday morning in her white Cadillac DeVille coated in a layer of saffron-colored pollen. The interior smelled like cigarette smoke, and a dangling air freshener shaped like a cowboy boot hung from the rearview mirror. Doris wore her hair in a dyed-black beehive that practically rubbed against the car’s interior roof. She told me she was a psychic and predicted I’d write children’s books one day. She asked me about the tennis team. I told her I’d quit. She told me my mom was proud of me. I said nothing.
Doris signed herself in at the Hilton Hotel conference room overlooking the River Walk and grabbed us a bar table by the windows. She brought me a Coke. I looked at my Swatch watch. I had no idea that would be the first of hundreds (thousands?) of times I’d find myself waiting on Hillary. Clinton Time, I’d learn to call it. By the time Hillary arrived that afternoon at the Hilton, I’d been through four Cokes. Doris smiled, her caked-on makeup cracking around her eyes. She pulled my wrist and led me to the front of the room where Hillary took her place behind a microphone.
“Go! Get in there. Get close,” Doris said.
I don’t remember anything Hillary said that day. But I remember the feeling I had when I saw her, the caffeine and adrenaline, the rush of a real-life celebrity who was not Selena