Chasing Hillary Ten years, two presidential campaigns, and one intact glass ceiling

FOR MANY FEMALE JOURNALISTS, covering the 2016 election meant facing a particular professional conundrum: Are you a reporter first, or a woman first? How do you stay neutral while covering a unique moment in women's history? Which do you use: your head or your heart? In her funny and insightful memoir, "Chasing Hillary," the journalist Amy Chozick grapples with this question while also providing a much-needed exploration of Hillary Clinton's antagonistic relationship with the press. Unlike "Shattered," by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parneš, which provided an inside look at Clinton's dysfunctional campaign, or "What Happened," which was a personal reckoning from the candidate herself, "Chasing Hillary" doesn't attempt to assess why Clinton lost the election. Instead, it's a first-person account of Chozick's failed 10-year quest to see the "real" Hillary, a quixotic mission that is as revealing in defeat as it would have been in victory. The Impressionist Claude Monet never painted haystacks; he painted the rain, sleet and sunshine between his eyes and the haystacks. In "Chasing Hillary," Chozick has written neither a raw personal memoir nor a biography of Clinton, but rather an account of all the elements that came between Clinton and the journalists condemned to cover her. Her impressions of Clinton are less about the woman herself and more about the brutally effective apparatus that shielded her from public view. People who know Clinton often complain that the press, and therefore the public, never gets to see how warm and funny she is in person. "Chasing Hillary" is the best explanation so far of why that is. Chozick describes Clinton's press shop (which she calls "The Guys") as an anonymous gang of manipulative, unresponsive and vaguely menacing apparatchiks who alternate between denying her interview requests (47 in total, by her count), bullying her in retaliation for perceived negative coverage ("You've got a target on your back," one of them tells her) and exploiting her insecurities about keeping up with her (often male) colleagues. The campaign quarantined the press on a separate bus and, later, a separate plane, often without even an accompanying flack to answer basic questions. It denied Chozick's interview requests even for positive stories, like a piece about Clinton's experience in the early 1970s going undercover to expose school segregation in the South, and refused to confirm the most minor details, like whether Clinton ate a chicken wing or not. It seems clear from Chozick's account that Clinton thought of her traveling press corps as more buzzard than human (although she did write Chozick a note when her grandmother died). Bill Clinton also had troubles with the press, but at least he would say hello at events or tell a longwinded story. Even Trump, who spent the campaign railing against the "fake news" media, seemed to intuit that a cordial relationship with reporters was essential to managing his public image. Trump once called Chozick out of the blue to provide a comment for an article, and they ended up chatting about "The Apprentice." So grateful to be actually speaking to a candidate (in nearly 10 years, Clinton had never called her), Chozick made the mistake of telling him that Clinton hadn't had a news conference in months. Shortly afterward, the Trump campaign began blasting that Clinton was "hiding" from the press. In fact, Chozick spoke with Clinton so infrequently that their entire personal relationship can be summed up in a half-dozen interactions that are shockingly banal: the time Clinton said "hi" to her in Iowa, one 14-minute phone interview, the time Clinton accidentally walked in on her in the bathroom. The fact that Chozick interacted so rarely with Clinton over nearly 10 years of covering her for The Wall Street Journal and then The New York Times is perhaps the most damning evidence of Clinton's self-destructive relationship with the press. "How could we communicate Hillary's 'funny, wicked and wacky' side to voters," she asks, "if we never saw it for ourselves?" Chozick's own funny, wicked and wacky side is on full display, with well-drawn sketches of everyone from fresh-faced campaign interns to the candidates themselves. With her lively voice and eye for detail, "Chasing Hillary" is an enjoyable read, like "The Devil Wears Prada" meets "The Boys on the Bus." Watching Clinton during a town hall gathering was like "catching up with an old girlfriend who cites G.D.P. statistics over brunch"; going to meet Bernie Sanders felt like "when my mom made me visit her emphysemic Aunt Shirley." Her recollections of her adolescence in Texas and early jobs in journalism are just as spirited: After she told her fourth-grade class that she supported a Democratic candidate, "I might as well have pulled on a skullcap and recited my haftorah." CHOZICK ADMITS THAT she should have done a few things differently. There are stories she wishes she hadn't written, questions she wishes she hadn't asked. While she rejects the Clinton campaign's insistence that the private email server was a nonstory, she regrets that Emailgate became a dominant narrative of the campaign. And in a chapter about The Times's coverage of the hacked John Podesta emails, Chozick writes that she landed on "the wrong side of history" because of her own journalistic ambition. "I didn't raise the possibility that we'd become puppets in Putin's shadowy campaign," she says. "I chose the byline. I always chose the byline." But "Chasing Hillary" is not a mea culpa, for Chozick or for The Times. Instead, it's a behind-the-scenes director's cut for readers who closely followed the 2016 political coverage. You may have read articles she wrote on the floor of the Orlando airport, in Las Vegas next to a "Sex and the City" slot machine, on the M42 crosstown bus. Political junkies will enjoy deciphering her various pseudonyms for Clinton staffers, history junkies will find a valuable firstperson account of an extraordinary campaign, media junkies will devour the backstage antics of the traveling press corps. (Chozick only names names when she's complimenting her colleagues; when she complains, she uses pseudonyms.) The problem, of course, is that not everybody is a junkie. And while the chattering class may be intrigued by, for example, Clinton's flirtation with ABC's David Muir, ordinary readers may find themselves swimming in references to journalists and staffers who are far from household names. To her credit, Chozick opens up about her own attitudes toward Clinton more than most political reporters would. Despite the campaign's skepticism of her, it's clear that she admired Clinton. She is acutely aware of the sexist double standards Clinton faced (though readers may rightly wonder why this appeared so rarely in her coverage). She's inspired by the historic nature of the campaign, and hurt by Clinton's iciness toward her. Chozick recalls that the first time she saw Clinton at a town hall, when she was covering her for The Journal in 2007, she stood up and clapped (a huge faux pas among journalists). For her, Clinton's loss is both a personal and a professional blow. Their ambitions were aligned - had Clinton won, Chozick would very likely have been given the historic opportunity to cover the first woman president. But Chozick devotes only a few lines to exploring the broader significance of Clinton's loss beyond what it means for her own career, despite the global implications of the outcome. She records the facts of her life as they occurred during that period (including personal details about her marriage and her fertility) but rarely grapples with the larger contradictions of being an ambitious woman journalist covering an ambitious woman candidate. And even as she documents a campaign that floundered because it had too much head and not enough heart, Chozick risks falling into the same trap: In trying to outwork her male colleagues and outwit The Guys, Chozick at times seems to lose track of the emotional arc of Clinton's rise and fall. "Chasing Hillary" is a portrait of two women with shared hopes and weaknesses, both driven and blinded by an ambition that could be possible only in the 21st century, bound by history but not by love. This book won't make you know Hillary any better. But it will help you understand why you don't. CHARLOTTE alter is a national correspondent at Time currently working on a book about young politicians.