Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign

392 Pages·2017·4 MB·English

by  Jonathan Allen

ALSO BY THE AUTHORS
HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

Contents
Cover
Also by the Authors
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1: “Or I Wouldn’t Have Run”
Chapter 2: The Mercenaries and the Missionaries
Chapter 3: Feeling the Bern
Chapter 4: The Summer of the Server
Chapter 5: The Biden Threat
Chapter 6: Mrs. October
Chapter 7: “I Was Certain We Were Going to Lose”
Chapter 8: The Prize and the Pain
Chapter 9: Base Politics
Chapter 10: Turning the Corner
Chapter 11: Canary in the Auto Plant
Chapter 12: Damage
Chapter 13: “Too Easy”
Chapter 14: “Hillary Just Can’t Make Up Her Mind”
Chapter 15: But It Looked Great
Chapter 16: “It’s So Phony”
Chapter 17: “Demeanor Is the Debate”
Chapter 18: Red October
Chapter 19: Comey
Chapter 20: “I’m Sorry”
Chapter 21: The Aftermath
Notes
Acknowledgments
For the lights of my life—Stephanie, Asher, and Emma
—JA
For Remy—who has redefined love and hope
—AP
When we first began reporting for this book in late 2014, Hillary Clinton was the
candidate to beat for the presidency. Her résumé—first lady, senator, and
secretary of state—was unassailable. At her peak in the last job, two-thirds of
Americans had approved of her performance. More important, she had spent a
great deal of time and energy trying to correct the flaws of her 2008 Democratic
primary loss to Barack Obama. And most political analysts believed that
Democrats, coming off his consecutive victories, had two powerful advantages in
presidential elections: a mortal lock on states that provided 242 of the 270
electoral votes needed to win the White House and a superior handle on the
mechanics of turning out voters.
Hillary and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, had been preparing
for this bid for six years. They had rewarded friends and punished disloyal
Democrats after the 2008 race. Bill had raised money for Obama and delivered a
rousing endorsement of the sitting president at the 2012 Democratic National
Convention, a move that helped seal the Obama-Clinton bond. He had
campaigned in Democratic primaries against candidates who the Clintons felt had
betrayed Hillary in 2008. Once she was out of government, Hillary herself had hit
the hustings for Democratic Senate candidates in the 2014 midterm elections.
And, in 2013 and 2014, a super PAC run and funded by her allies had raised
millions of dollars and collected hundreds of thousands of names of potential
supporters. They were Ready for Hillary.
Having written the 2014 book HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary
Clinton, we were convinced that she was indeed running and that no other
Democrat could defeat her in the primary—the same conclusion that kept most
serious Democrats from running against her. Moreover, as party political figures
told us, the fear of reprisal meant that there was a cost for Democrats who didn’t
jump on her bandwagon. Some, like Missouri senator Claire McCaskill, endorsed
her long before she committed to a run. In short, Hillary had every imaginable
institutional advantage in winning the Democratic nomination. As David Plouffe,
the mastermind behind Obama’s 2008 victory, put it in a private conversation in
September 2014, “She’s bulletproof.”
Of course, there were reasons to think that she wouldn’t just waltz into the
White House. It’s hard for a party to win three consecutive presidential elections.
The rise of the Tea Party and other anti-institutional forces in both parties had
wreaked havoc on the establishment since Obama’s first election. And Hillary had
always been a polarizing figure in American politics—particularly when she was
a candidate.
But, heading into our reporting, we thought there was a pretty good chance
that we would be writing the inside story of Hillary shattering what she had called
the “highest, hardest glass ceiling.”
We were surprised, then, when Clintonworld sources started telling us in
2015 that Hillary was still struggling to articulate her motivation for seeking the
presidency. And we were taken aback by how much infighting was going on
below the surface of her campaign at a time when, unlike 2008, very little of it
had spilled into the press. In so many ways, and as some of our sources
acknowledged, Hillary was fighting the last war. She did that with varying degrees
of success. But the variable she couldn’t change was the candidate.
Over the course of a year and a half, in interviews with more than one
hundred sources, we started to piece together a picture that was starkly at odds
with the narrative the campaign and the media were portraying publicly. Hillary’s
campaign was so spirit-crushing that her aides eventually shorthanded the feeling
of impending doom with a simple mantra: We’re not allowed to have nice things.
Every time it looked like she had hit her stride in the race, a new obstacle
appeared in her path. And yet, there were few moments between her kickoff rally
and the closing of the first polls on Election Day when she wasn’t the favorite. So
it wasn’t until the results came in that all of our reporting finally made sense—
that the foreboding signs along the way had been pointing in the right direction
even when they were at odds with the available data.
We made one decision early on in our process that proved crucial in
allowing us access to key players even at times when most of the media were
walled off from Hillary and her senior staff. We agreed to conduct all of our
interviews on background, which provided anonymity to our sources. That gave
them an extra sense of security on the off chance that we broke a vow that we
observed throughout our reporting: none of the material would appear before the
election. We spoke to nearly everyone we asked to interview, up and down the
ranks of the campaign, and many of them talked to us during pivotal periods of
the race.
Without these guarantees, which protected our sources inside and outside the
campaign from the possible reprisal of the next president, many of them would
not have talked with us at all. Others would have been much less candid. The
trade-offs enabled us to get an extraordinary look at the last, tumultuous chapter
of the Clinton era.
In that final hurrah, Hillary broke one glass ceiling—becoming the first
female nominee of a major political party—and forever put to rest the question
of whether a woman could be seen as commander in chief. She collected nearly
65.9 million votes—more than any Republican nominee in American history, just
64,822 fewer than Barack Obama in 2012, and almost 3 million more than
Donald Trump. And she did that while facing a set of trials and tribulations
unlike any other in American campaign history: a partisan congressional
investigation; a primary opponent who attacked her character; a rogue FBI
director; the rank misogyny of her Republican rival; a media that scrutinized her
every move while failing to get that Republican rival to turn over his tax returns;
and even a Kremlin-based campaign to defeat her.
In the end, though, this was a winnable race for Hillary. Her own missteps—
from setting up a controversial private e-mail server and giving speeches to
Goldman Sachs to failing to convince voters that she was with them and turning
her eyes away from working-class whites—gave Donald Trump the opportunity
he needed to win.
This is the story of how it all unraveled again for Hillary. We expect that it
will generate a feeling of righteousness, and perhaps a touch of sympathy, in
those of you who don’t like her. For many of Hillary’s millions of supporters, we
know that it will leave you feeling shattered all over again.
Hillary Clinton had a new rendezvous with destiny on her mind. Her motorcade
sped toward Roosevelt Island on the morning of June 13, 2015. In a little more
than an hour, she would officially kick off what she hoped would be a
trailblazing, glass-ceiling-shattering campaign for the presidency. For most of the
previous forty-eight hours, she had been trying to give a feel of historic
importance to her first major address. It just wasn’t there yet.
She picked up the phone and called her chief speechwriter, Dan Schwerin.
After two days of trading drafts with Hillary, after waiting through the delay of a
power outage at her Chappaqua, New York, home, the bearded thirty-two-year-
old with a signature chestnut pompadour was just about to board the tram
connecting Manhattan to the East River island. He had stayed up all night, pulling
together tweaks to the 3:30 a.m. version of the speech, and he looked hungover.
Now, battling exhaustion and the sweltering heat, Schwerin pulled out his laptop
one more time and sat down on the platform so that Hillary could dictate her final
edits.
The key passage of the speech was an explanation of why she was running
for president: “to make our economy work for you and for every American.” In
the middle of that run—about how she would do it and who she would fight for—
Hillary wanted to connect herself and her campaign to Franklin Roosevelt, the