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Title: Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling by Amy Chozick
Details: Copyright 2018, Harper
Synopsis (By Way of Front and Back Flap): "For nearly a decade, award-winning New York Times journalist Amy Chozick chronicled Hillary Clinton’s pursuit of the presidency. Chozick’s assignments, covering Clinton’s imploding 2008 campaign and then her front-row seat to the 2016 election on “The Hillary Beat,” set off a years-long journey in which the formative years of Chozick’s twenties and thirties became, both personally and professionally, intrinsically intertwined with Clinton’s presidential ambitions. As Clinton tried, and twice failed, to shatter “that highest, hardest glass ceiling,” Chozick was trying, with various fits and starts, to scale the highest echelons of American journalism.
In this rollicking, hilarious narrative, Chozick takes us through the high- (and low-) lights of the most noxious and dramatic presidential election in American history. Chozick’s candor and clear-eyed perspective — from her seat on the Hillary bus and reporting from inside the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters to her run-ins with Donald J. Trump — provide fresh intrigue and insights into the story we thought we all knew. This is the real story of what happened, with the kind of dishy, inside details that repeatedly surprise and enlighten.
But Chasing Hillary is also the unusually personal and moving memoir of how Chozick came to understand Clinton not as an unknowable enigma and political animal, but as a complete, complex person, full of contradictions and forged in the crucible of political battles that had long predated Chozick’s years covering her. And as Chozick gets engaged, married, buys an apartment, climbs the professional ladder, and inquires about freezing her eggs so she can have children after the 2016 campaign, she dives deeper into decisions Clinton had made at similar points in her early career. In the process, Chozick develops an intimate understanding of what drives Clinton, how she accomplished what no woman had before, and why she ultimately failed.
Chozick also reveals how the social fissures in the electorate that drove angry voters to Trump and blindsided Clinton would unexpectedly bring out the tensions in Chozick’s own life—between the red state she came from and the blue state she ended up in, and her desire to climb in her career as a woman but be treated no differently than a man.
Clinton’s shocking defeat would mark the end of the almost imperial hold she’d had on Chozick for most of her professional life. But the results also make Chozick question everything she’d worked so hard for in the first place. Political journalism had failed. The elite world Chozick had tried for years to fit in with had been rebuffed. The less qualified, bombastic man had triumphed (as they always seem to do), and Clinton had retreated to the woods in Chappaqua, finally comfortable enough to just walk, no makeup, no pants suit, showing the real person Chozick had spent years hoping to see. Illuminating, poignant, laugh-out-loud funny, Chasing Hillary is a campaign book unlike any other that reads like a fast-moving political novel.
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Why I Wanted to Read It: I've read actually a multitude of books about various American Presidential campaigns, including many about the 2016 one. I love seeing the other side to famous images and scenes we think we know and have seen so many times.
How I Liked It: Do you want to go behind the scenes and see what famous players you've heard about are really like? Do you want to know what it's like to be a reporter on the trail of a Presidential campaign?
In the increasingly blurred line (if it's not completely gone by now; there's been some efforts to restore it recently) between entertainment and our elected officials, books like this one get published rightly banking that a lot of people would love to see what it's like to be a reporter on the beat (this one specifically) and to see what various famous figures are truly like. So how does the author deliver?
Well, let's be fair. This book is also marketed as a memoir in its own right (rather than just a memoir of the campaign and/or of the author's relationship with Hillary Clinton) and I've had some thoughts about the narrative voice in memoirs. A memoir establishes its main character's voice and in books like this one, has a tricky job to do. The professional journalist, having no opinions and presenting an unbiased view of history, against the human being chaffing behind the scenes and showing us the cracks and the humanity of what we think we know. Katy Tur pulled off this balance surprisingly well in her own memoir of the 2016 campaign, albeit covering a different candidate. She also incorporated a fair amount of memoir in her own right as this book attempts to do. So with that considered, how does this book fare?
The author provides quite a bit of memoir (in its own right) and has quite a bit about Hillary Clinton long before the 2016 campaign, including why as a teenager the author found Clinton inspiring and interesting. She details how she came to follow Clinton professionally, how Clinton treated the press as a whole and her personally, and there's plenty of "rare glimpses" at unflattering, very human Clinton family dynamics (Bill Clinton in private never shuts up about being President or about the 1990s; at one event, Chelsea slapped her mother's eager hand away from the chips and salsa with a "Mom, NO!").
So why isn't this a better book? Well, you can't help but feel that the author had an effect she was trying for that doesn't quite land in execution. On the drawing board, she's a funny, smart, determined, ultimately relatable journalist with a complicated, nuanced long-standing personal relationship with Hillary Clinton.
But in execution, she's trying several '90s sitcoms jammed together (down to the stereotype of a sympathetic gay male friend evaluating her fashion choices and some truly dated language: in decrying sexism in journalism, she laments about standards for "someone with a penis", meaning a man, apparently forgetting in 2018 that trans and nonbinary people exist) and at the forefront is a whiny, entitled, drama-magnet who is all but stomping her foot that Hillary Clinton and her staff aren't granting her special interviews and special privileges.
As far as appreciating the "behind the scenes" and "slice of life" bits, it's hard to dig through to find them in between the author selling her persona amongst personal vendettas with Clinton's staff and some truly bad political takes. The author sniffs at Russian collusion and has a strange, lengthy animosity towards Senator Bernie Sanders. All of his supporters are "bros" who send her vile misogynist hate mail and make antisemitic remarks, which is kind of strange for supporters of a Jewish candidate, but she doesn't appear to question it. (Side note: I'm not saying there aren't a certain breed of obnoxious Sanders supporters who are lax to recognize his faults and deify him at all costs, but separate them from him and recognize sincere supporters versus trolls looking for attention. But I guess if you sniff at Russian collusion, you'll sniff at the suggestion of troll farms.) She devotes a surprising amount of time (and vitriol) to deriding Sanders who she alleges accomplished little to nothing in the Senate in which he's served for several decades and also gave an evasive answer to her question about his campaign.
Buried deep in the weeds of all of this is a conclusion that many who have studied Hillary Clinton long term have formed: she's a complex figure who ultimately sanded off, at least publicly, a lot of her edges to accommodate people who will still never accept her, and there's a lesson in that, particularly in the wake of her losing arguably the ultimate prize and to whom she lost it and what he represents. But this conclusion is too muddled by the author injecting basically her own youthful heroine worship jarringly along with her older, more jaded views that seem too frequently to be clouded by her own personal entitlement with the campaign.
The interesting facets of famous figures (did you know for all Clinton's talk about wanting Eleanor Roosevelt's dream of an all-female press corp and bragging in her own memoir about the fact it was mostly women covering her, she favored and even flirted with male reporters?) and the slices of life as a campaign reporter (after staying in a particularly sketchy hotel, the author was convinced she had an awful case of shingles until a doctor discovered it was just a reaction from the cheap laundry detergent from the hotel) are what's supposed to sell this book, but sadly, they're just too few and far between under the weight of the author's "persona." Her memoir-for-memoir's sake obviously suffers especially this same fate, which becomes less about the choices she's forced to make personally and simply more of the entitled character that leads us through the rest of the book.
There's truly a fascinating story in here somewhere, about the famous, notorious, complicated figure that's gotten the closest any woman has to the American Presidency and what her own journey means for women, for Americans, for people trying to succeed. It's just a shame it's not really being told.
Final Grade: C-
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