Clinton leaving her daughter's apartment after feeling 'overheated' Sunday.
Brendan Smialowski / AFP
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — Once, twice, three times, then four, reporters pressed Hillary Clinton's running mate on the same simple question: When did he know?
“Yeah, I don’t want to talk about her and my conversations,” he said, "except to just say that I reached out to her as soon as the incident happened on Sunday."
So you didn’t know on Friday?
“I'm not going to get into the content...”
Senator, are you telling us that you didn’t know?
“I reached out to her yesterday in New York. All right? Thank you,” Tim Kaine said again on the final attempt, leaving unanswered whether he’d been told about Clinton’s pneumonia on Friday, at the time of the diagnosis, or two days later on Sunday, after widely circulated video showed the candidate struggling to walk as she made a sudden exit from New York City’s annual 9/11 memorial ceremony.
Who got the news and when suddenly became a question of political importance on Monday, put to figures across Clinton’s orbit, from her vice presidential nominee in his press conference to her campaign manager in an equally persistent exchange on MSNBC. (During that interview, Robby Mook declined to say much more than Kaine, changing the subject to Donald Trump when host Kate Snow asked, “Did the staff not know that she had pneumonia on Friday — am I right in reading that?”)
Most of the campaign found out, like the public, on Sunday. A staff-wide email presented the same doctor’s statement given to reporters, as first reported by the New York Times. The sender was campaign vice chair Huma Abedin, Clinton’s closest and most protective aide, one of the few to know the diagnosis on Friday. Whether the news would have been shared with the public, or even within the campaign, were it not for the video, was a more obvious question for many.
“Never. Never ever, ever, ever,” one longtime Clinton ally answered Monday.
The reason has little to do with pneumonia or the candidate’s health.
To understand it, according to interviews and conversations with people inside and outside the campaign this week, is to understand something about Clinton in this particular moment — some 50 days from maybe parting ways with more privacy in the around-the-clock “protective” media bubble of the White House, and some 25 years into a career in public life that friends and former aides describe as more “insulated” than ever within a tight inner-circle, sometimes leaving all but a few people on the campaign with limited information about their own candidate.
The dynamic played out in public view on Sunday.
Clinton’s press corps, and many of her own aides, remained largely in the dark from 9:30 a.m., when reporters noticed her early departure from Ground Zero, to 5:15 p.m., when they finally received the doctor’s statement. For 90 minutes at the height of the incident, press staffers went radio silent, unable to provide information.
Clinton aides have since said communication should’ve been handled better. (“We take responsibility for that,” Mook said.) But on Monday morning, in a pointed tweet, David Axelrod, President Obama’s former top strategist, outlined the larger issue at play: “Antibiotics can take care of pneumonia. What's the cure for an unhealthy penchant for privacy that repeatedly creates unnecessary problems?”
What Axelrod describes as a “penchant for privacy” has also become a function of the way the Clinton operation works, friends and former aides said, describing a candidate at times insulated from her own campaign by the close company she keeps, narrowing the funnel of information and access to just a few people.
During her first trip of the general election, a bus tour with Kaine across Pennsylvania and Ohio following the Democratic Convention, reporters asked for behind-the-scenes details about the scene on the candidate’s bus — a request that proved difficult to fill because most of her staff was traveling as usual in a van.
The “color” they eventually sent over indicated as much:
“Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine traveled from Philadelphia to Montgomery County to Harrisburg together… They were joined by their families, who enjoyed spending time together and further getting to know each other.”
Clinton has resisted a large personal staff on the road, one person close to the campaign said, preferring to keep the group to a few key figures, namely Abedin and trip director Connolly Keigher. Others drop in from headquarters — senior aides like Jennifer Palmieri or Marlon Marshall — but the regular stable of staff on the road is limited to Abedin, Keigher, press secretary Nick Merrill, a photographer, and a videographer. (Outside U.S. Secret Service, Clinton’s traveling party is smaller than Kaine’s.)
Clinton with aides Abedin (center) and Keigher while campaigning this spring.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
On the trail, this tight cadre of aides tends to act as a “cocoon,” one longtime Clinton adviser said, creating moments of privacy, always heightened to the physical space around the candidate. At a recent rally, a friend observed their effort to prevent “pile up” backstage, sweeping away people hanging nearby or hovering too close.
Day to day, it’s Abedin who deals far more with Clinton than any other campaign member, including chairman John Podesta. Among the traveling staff, only she usually rides with Clinton in the motorcade, invited to share rides seen as the candidate’s chance to decompress. “That’s Huma’s power,” said the longtime ally.
This presidential campaign, Clinton’s second, has all of the discipline and organization that the first one lacked and all but none of the leaks or rogue actors. But eight years ago, people noted, Clinton also had no single gatekeeper, and developed relationships with a wider circle of staffers than she has this year.
Some were quick to link the insularity revealed Sunday to some of Clinton’s failings and missteps as a candidate, including her comment last Friday at a New York fundraiser, her first such event open to reporters, that “half” of Trump’s supporters were some mix of racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and Islamophobic, and belonged in what she memorably described as the “basket of deplorables.”
“Are you so detached that the first time you open up a fundraiser you're talking to a bunch of rich people and call millions of Americans ‘deplorable’?” one longtime Clinton adviser said, describing the “insulated” campaign as a “big problem.”
The campaign still doesn’t facilitate a truly protective pool, demonstrated Sunday when Clinton departed the 9/11 ceremony without alerting reporters. The candidate has resisted taking the final step, a break with precedent, telling aides she just wants to be able run an errand or take a walk without assembling the press.
It’s the same wish Clinton voiced again and again as first lady.
In transcripts of her interviews from the 1990s, autonomy and privacy are subjects she addressed with frustration, longing, and despair. After a year in the White House, she described Washington as a place that could “capture” a public figure, opening up their lives to whatever “some 25-year-old reporter behind a computer could spit out in his lexicon of questions,” as she put it in a 1994 interview.
Twenty-five years later, Clinton holds the view that there’s almost nothing about her that has stayed private.
There was a trace of disbelief in her voice on Monday when CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked her to respond to the tweet about her “penchant for privacy.”
“I think it’s fair to say, Anderson, that people know more about me than almost anyone in public life. They've got 40 years of my tax returns, tens of thousands of emails, a detailed medical letter report, all kinds of personal details. And you know, it's just so — it's so strange that with all of that information out there... ”
Clinton trailed off, leaving the thought unfinished.
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