Chasing Hillary
The reporter who almost wrote history
Description
In November 2016, Amy Chozick was sitting in a workspace inside the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan, under a literal glass ceiling, waiting to write the story she'd spent nearly a decade preparing to write. She was the New York Times reporter assigned to Hillary Clinton, and she had the historic lede half-formed in her head: the first woman elected president of the United States. The balloons were ready. The confetti was ready. Then the returns came in from Florida, then Pennsylvania, and the sentence she'd carried for years quietly died in her notebook.
"Chasing Hillary," published in 2018, is Chozick's account of those years — 2007 through 2016, two presidential campaigns, one of them lost twice. It is not a policy book and it is not a hagiography. It's a memoir about what it does to a person to follow another person that closely for that long: the airplanes, the motorcades, the identical sandwiches, the campaign staff who treated her as an adversary, the candidate who never quite let her in. Chozick calls herself, only half-joking, a member of a strange tribe whose whole professional identity had become fused to a woman who mostly wished they'd go away.
The book landed as gossip and was read as gossip. But underneath the dishy scenes is a harder question about the peculiar bargain between a candidate and the reporters paid to shadow her — a bargain in which both parties need each other, distrust each other, and end up shaping each other in ways neither fully controls.
The question we’re asking : What does a decade of chasing one person do to the reporter who does the chasing — and to the story she's trying to tell?What we’ll see : An inside account of covering Hillary Clinton across two campaigns, told by the reporter who lived it — and the reckoning that came when the story didn't end the way everyone assumed.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — Ten years on one candidate
Chozick's assignment began in 2007, when she was a young Wall Street Journal reporter sent out to cover Clinton's first run for president. She was ambitious, a little green, and instantly hooked on the adrenaline of the trail. That first campaign ended in the primaries against Barack Obama, and Chozick moved on — but not really. Clinton became the story she kept circling back to, the beat that would define her career whether she wanted it to or not. By the time the Times put her on Clinton full-time ahead of 2016, she had been orbiting this one woman on and off for the better part of a decade.
The book is candid about what that does to a person. Chozick writes about missing her own life — weddings, holidays, the early years of trying to start a family — because the campaign owned her calendar. She writes about the physical toll, the endless charter flights and greasy hotel food, the way the trail flattens time into an unbroken loop of stump speeches you've heard a hundred times. There's a self-awareness to it that keeps the book from being a complaint: she chose this, she loved this, and she also slowly lost pieces of herself to it.
02Chapter 2 — The travelers and the guys
The press corps that trails a presidential campaign is its own small society, and Chozick renders it vividly. She and her colleagues called themselves "the travelers" — the reporters who lived on the plane, ate the same meals, filed from the same cramped filing centers, and formed the kind of foxhole friendships that only exhaustion and shared confinement produce. They competed ferociously for scoops by day and drank together at night. The intimacy was real, and so was the rivalry.
On the other side stood the campaign's operation, and here Chozick introduces the recurring characters she calls, collectively, "the guys" — the young, mostly male aides whose job was to manage, flatter, stonewall, and occasionally punish the press. They controlled access like a currency: a seat on the plane, a background quote, a returned phone call. Fall out of favor and you were frozen out; play along and you got fed. Chozick doesn't pretend she was above the game. She wanted the access, and she made the small compromises that access requires, and she's honest about the discomfort of that.
03Chapter 3 — The story she couldn't get
For all her proximity, Chozick spends much of the book chasing a Hillary Clinton who stays just out of reach. She wanted the human story — the interior life, the unguarded moment, the answer to why a woman this capable inspired such devotion and such loathing at once. What she mostly got was message discipline. Clinton had spent a lifetime being burned by the press, and the armor was total. The result is a portrait of a subject who is everywhere in the book and yet somehow never fully captured.
The 2016 campaign made the problem worse. Chozick found herself covering the emails, the private server, the paid speeches, the drip of controversy that dominated her copy whether she thought it deserved to or not. She reckons openly with her own role in that coverage — the way the Times, and she personally, amplified stories that fed a narrative of untrustworthiness, sometimes on thin evidence. She writes with real unease about the WikiLeaks material, hacked and dumped by actors with an agenda, and about how eagerly the entire press machine, herself included, mined it for headlines.
04Chapter 4 — Election night, and the mirror it held up
The distortion Chozick describes isn't a Clinton problem or a Times problem — it's structural, baked into the way a political press corps and its subject are forced to coexist. Both sides need each other completely. The candidate needs coverage to exist in the public mind; the reporter needs access to do the job at all. But that mutual dependence breeds mutual suspicion, and the closer the two orbits get, the more each side warps the other. The candidate armors up, the press pushes harder, and the space where honesty might have happened closes.
Chozick's decade is a case study in what that costs. She gave the best years of her early career to a woman who never trusted her, inside an institution that pointed her toward the scandal and away from the substance, in a media environment where the fastest story usually beat the truest one. She wasn't a villain and she wasn't a hero. She was a professional doing her job well by the standards of the trade — and the book's quiet horror is the suspicion that doing the job well, collectively, still helped produce a badly distorted picture of a candidate and a country.
05Conclusion
So the historic lede died in a notebook under a glass ceiling in Manhattan, and Chozick was left holding a decade of her life and a story that had ended the way she'd stopped letting herself imagine it could. The balloons never dropped. The sentence she'd carried since 2007 — the first woman elected president — went into the drawer of things that almost were. What she wrote instead was this book: not the triumphant account she'd prepared for, but a more honest and more troubled one.