I thought Hillary was smart and engaging; looking at it now, I find her strangely sphinxlike. I am amazed at how controlled she seems, determined to avoid doing anything that might inflame her detractors. In one conversation, she’s wearing a light gray dress with white polka dots and a floppy bow tied tight at the neck. Her hair looks like Mamie Eisenhower’s—primly styled, close to the head. It all seems market-tested for maximum inoffensiveness. I thought back to pictures of a groovy Hillary in her youth, in granny glasses and skintight bell-bottoms, or decades later, in one workhorse pantsuit after another…they make the dress-and-pearls-and-hose phase seem like a forced detour.
Her voice is different too—so precisely modulated, sometimes lilting in a way that doesn’t sound quite genuine. It’s impossible to picture the woman on-screen letting loose with the hearty, bawdy laugh she’d share so easily later in life.
At one point Hillary gives me a rare peek at their residence on the second floor of the East Wing, and her efforts to make like Jackie and own the role of lady of the house are a bit painful to watch. Entering a common space, she opens her arms stiffly and says, “Isn’t this a beautiful central corridor up here?” Then she leads me to a painting she calls “one of my favorites”： a Mary Cassatt of a mother cuddling two young children in soothing hues—an image of womanhood as maternal, nurturing, and reassuring as one could find anywhere.
Not that career women can’t be maternal and nurturing and love a Mary Cassatt. But as the most prominent woman in America at the time and the face of a new breed, Hillary understood the threat she represented and seemed to be doing her level best to allay people’s fears. Turned out that ladylike lawn strolls and house tours wouldn’t really be enough.
AFTER MUCH “WILL she or won’t she?” speculation, Hillary announced she was running for president in January 2007. A little-known junior senator from Illinois had formed an exploratory committee one week earlier.
A few years before that, while covering a story on Capitol Hill, I was standing on the corner with a camera crew when a car pulled up across the street and a lanky guy jumped out. He dropped his cigarette, crushed it under his shoe, and bounded toward us, hand outstretched.
“Hi, I’m Barack Obama—I’m a big fan!” he said, then headed back to his car.
“Who was that again?” I said as he pulled away from the curb.
“Don’t ask me,” said the cameraman.
Before the New Hampshire primary, we set up shop at the musty Wayfarer Hotel near Manchester, in a bungalow on the property that was normally used as a wedding chapel （Dan Rather broadcasted from there so many times over the years, it came to be known as the Dan Rather wedding chapel）。 Per custom, journalists and political operatives thronged the hotel bar, with everyone—including Hillary’s own advisers—predicting she would lose big.
Everyone was wrong. The victory came down to a single, unscripted moment in a diner when a voter asked Hillary how she kept so “upbeat and so wonderful.” Caught off guard, she actually got misty, replying, “It’s not easy. I have so many opportunities from this country, I just don’t want to see us fall backwards…you know?” Chin in hand, shaking her head. The crowd applauded.
On the debate stage just two days earlier, she had to field a question about the supposed “likability issue” she faced, prompting the faintest of faint praise from Obama: “You’re likable enough, Hillary,” he said, dismissively.
I found it all so frustrating. Ambitious women have always been required to project a certain toughness to head off the idea that they’re simply “too emotional” to make difficult decisions, that their periods or their pregnancies or their hot flashes might cause them to behave erratically, rendering them unsuitable for leadership. Now, back at the diner, showing emotion—being vulnerable, even fragile—was the only way Hillary could break through. It was just another example of our whipsawing “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” world.
I couldn’t imagine where Hillary got her thick skin. Consider: Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto saying, “Men won’t vote for Hillary Clinton because she reminds them of their nagging wives.” Tucker Carlson admitting that “when she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.” Rush Limbaugh wondering whether the country was ready to watch a woman age in the White House—never mind how weary and gray male presidents become, time-lapse-photography-style. Then there was the Hillary rally in Salem, New Hampshire, where two protesters held up signs that said IRON MY SHIRT. Not to mention the Hillary Nutcracker sold in airport gift shops, complete with “stainless-steel thighs.” It was shocking to me how socially acceptable sexism still was.