A Woman in Charge (28 page)

More than ever, in fact, the Rose Law Firm—and Vince Foster—were a refuge. Colleagues began to notice subtle differences in her relationship with each of the Amigos.

Bill Clinton and Vince Foster were as different in most aspects of their character as Hillary could have imagined. But she and Vince were, in many regards, a natural fit. “Vince was just born middle-aged,” an acquaintance had observed. Hillary could identify. As Bill once said, “I was born at sixteen and I'll always feel I am sixteen. And Hillary was born at age forty.”

Vince had comparatively little interest in politics, exuded integrity, was meticulous in habit and dress, studied fine wines, was conversant in every nuance of politesse, and spoke ill of almost no one. In the firm, he was regarded as the soul of discretion, and it stood to reason that if ever Hillary would choose a confidant outside her marriage it would be someone of his mien and judgment. He and his wife, Lisa, gave frequent formal dinner parties in their home, at which the social elite of Little Rock felt comfortable.

Hillary found it easy to let her guard down with Vince. “I don't think there was anyone closer to Hillary for twenty years,” said Hubbell. “But I don't think it was sexual. I think it was, Here are two people with like brilliance who enjoyed the same things, enjoyed each other's company and had extreme confidence in each other. I mean, you love a friend more than you love a lover.” At office retreats, Hillary and Vince often remained together while the others went off to play golf or tennis. They would stroll, talk earnestly over a glass of wine, and laugh uproariously.

Those who knew them best doubted that they had had an affair. One friend wasn't sure: “He loved Hillary. I hoped they had an affair. I think they both deserved it. They both had complicated spouses, complicated marriages. I think all marriages go through periods where the partners aren't very close.” Vince and Hillary “found comfort that was unique and special for them,” said a friend of Foster's—who knew Hillary, Bill, and Vince well. As for the Three Amigos, “They did everything together, and Vince and Webb covered her back and handled her business.”

But no matter how contentious her marriage, Hillary rarely, if ever, seemed to doubt how deeply she was in love with her husband, no matter how flagrant his provocations. In early March 1981, she and Bill were in Los Angeles because Nancy Bekavac persuaded Bill to be the speaker at her law firm's Monday partners lunch. During the question period, as he talked of his experience as governor of Arkansas, someone rushed in and shouted, “Reagan's been shot!” All hurried to an anteroom to watch the events on television. Bill looked grave, the color draining from his face. “I looked around,” said Nancy, “and didn't see Hillary. She was back in the corner with her arms crossed, and a hand on each shoulder, cradling herself, all hunched over in the corner. And I went over and said, ‘Hillary…' and she said, ‘Bill gets death threats.' I said, ‘What are you talking about?' She said, ‘When he left the governorship one of the last things he did was to commute a bunch of death penalties to life sentences. And he's gotten death threats [from opponents, crime victims, and death penalty proponents] ever since.'” Nancy sat down next to her, put her arm around her, and realized that, for Hillary, this was not just about Ronald Reagan. “It was so immediate,” Nancy said. “It was so physical.”

 

B
Y
O
CTOBER
1981, Hillary, Betsey, and Dick Morris were ready to set the campaign express back on the tracks. Morris had been traveling to Little Rock to meet with the Clintons and Betsey for a few days each month. He and Betsey could see that Hillary was battle-ready for this campaign, and would be far more involved than in the previous one. She would be the chief adviser and strategist. Working closely with Betsey and Dick, she would persuade Bill to adopt more pragmatic political positions. She seemed to grasp intuitively what needed to be done, and how Bill should do it. First, he would have to apologize to the people of Arkansas, an acknowledgment of what had gone wrong. Bill was hesitant. Hillary was insistent. As Morris remembered it, she said, “Bill, they didn't want to throw you out—they just wanted to make sure you knew how they felt. Put aside your damned pride and show them that you get it.” Morris's polls confirmed her interpretation.

Morris proposed to Hillary, Bill, and Wright that they buy television time for an ad in which Clinton apologized for his mistakes, most notably the car tag increase. This led to an advertising campaign with the theme, “My Daddy Never Had to Whip Me Twice.” Given another opportunity by Arkansas citizens, said Bill, he would pay them heed and not make the same mistakes again. The ads aired in early February, but Bill would not officially announce his candidacy until Chelsea's second birthday, February 27, 1982. At that press conference, Hillary gave Bill a framed picture of the three of them, with the engraving, “Chelsea's second birthday, Bill's second chance.”

The 1982 campaign became the model for their political future, with Hillary assuming a far more direct, hands-on role in terms of policy, strategy, scheduling, and hiring staff for the campaign. She wasn't the campaign chairman in name, but she was the campaign director in fact. After 1982, she and Bill were always in effect their own campaign chairmen. “She was out in front, on the campaign trail, and in charge. She had an opinion on everything. I mean everything. Issues. People. Where Bill was going to speak. I mean everything,” said Woody Bassett, who had been their law student and worked in every campaign. “Hillary was never bashful about telling you when she thought you made a mistake, or when she thought you could have done something better, or if she didn't think enough people were at an event. Bill Clinton would never tell you that, though he might think it. He was the good guy. Hillary was the one that laid the law down and she was the one that made it known if they weren't happy about something.” Successful campaigns usually have a backbone of discipline and Hillary was the one to provide it.

 

T
HEN
H
ILLARY
R
ODHAM
became Hillary Clinton, as she had vowed never to do. Changing her name, which seemed to signal to voters that she was changing her attitude, was as essential to Bill Clinton's future as apologizing for the car tag fiasco. Or, as Jim Blair said about the name change, Hillary “would sacrifice some of her principles to keep political expediency.” Hillary talked to Hubbell about why she now thought changing her name was important. “We had a long conversation that day, and I understood a lot more about her afterward,” he said. “There was the notion of retaining her own identity, which she had submerged in coming to Arkansas, and the conflict of interest sensitivity she felt as a lawyer. And there was something closer to the bone. It hurt her that people would think she didn't love her husband. It hurt her when people asked what Chelsea's last name would be. It hurt her that people in Arkansas didn't try to understand her as much as they wanted her to understand them. But the name had become an issue, and she was prepared to change it to help her husband.”

On the day Bill announced his candidacy, Hillary wore a conservative suit, permed her hair, and said: “I don't have to change my name. I've been Mrs. Bill Clinton. I kept the professional name Hillary Rodham in my law practice, but now I'm going to be taking a leave of absence from the law firm to campaign full-time for Bill and I'll be Mrs. Bill Clinton. I suspect people will be getting tired of hearing from Mrs. Bill Clinton.” But the personal sacrifice was real. “I teared up. I had a lump in my throat,” said Betsey Wright, who knew how hard the decision had been. Hillary had worked her way into it on her own. Bill had never asked her to do it, as she confirmed in a 1994 interview. He had initially resisted the change. “She understood that it was part of a picture that we had painted for the voters that had made them feel alienated from us,” he said. “And she said to me—I will never forget…I respected her so much for this, because she came in to see me, and she said, ‘We've got to talk about this name deal.' She said, ‘I couldn't bear it—if we're going to do this, let's try to win. I couldn't bear it if this cost you the election. It's just not that big a deal to me anymore.'”

The fact that her physical appearance was a campaign consideration also hurt her personally. Though she had resisted her parents' frugality as a child, she had come to respect and even appreciate their rather inconstant ascetic ethic. Her mother, who did not need a Cadillac or fancy clothes, had taught her not to concern herself with frivolousness. Hillary said with great earnestness she had been raised to look for “the inner qualities of people,” rather than what they wore.

She was, in Dick Morris's words, “really taking his career in hand. In meetings typically I would urge a fairly aggressive strategy. Clinton would demur and then Hillary would say, Bill, you've got to do this. This is what you've got to do. And she was always very much the person who would ram home the need to run negative ads, to be aggressive. For the most part, Hillary, Betsey, and I always saw eye-to-eye, and it was Bill who was sort of the odd man out as kind of the naive do-gooder who would come along eventually. She became his campaign manager, and sometimes the candidate was strong, and sometimes he was weak, but she was the manager. And her mental attitude at that point was, This guy is too nice to manage his own life. He doesn't understand how venal people can be. He's not tough enough. I've got to move in and take this over.”

That characterization, of course, ignored a crucial part of the equation: Bill Clinton was perhaps already the best political campaigner in America. No politician better synthesized ideas or knew how to work a crowd, or how to think fast on his feet, or how to analyze the political landscape ahead. Hillary knew how to harness that.

She also became a campaigner. She showed up at a parade where the incumbent Frank White spoke and when he attacked Bill, “she jumped all over me, said I wasn't being truthful about her husband and his record,” White recalled. “This was a new thing in Arkansas politics. She comes in and lays waste to the opponents and you know it's kind of difficult to get up there and let a woman have it.” When White refused to debate Bill she taunted him in absentia: “Frank White would probably try to avoid being in the same room as Chelsea. Chelsea could debate him and win.” The press took note of her transformation. “Mrs. Clinton is almost certainly the best speaker among politicians' wives,” reported the
Arkansas Gazette.
“She is an Illinois native, perhaps a little brisker, a little more outspoken than the traditional Southern Governors' lady…. The name change indicates she's working at softening her image a bit…and succeeding apparently. She has become a good hand-shaking campaigner in the traditional Arkansas style…her spirit shows when she speaks on her husband's behalf.”

She was also motivated: if Bill lost this election, his political career—theirs—was finished.

Bill, and Hillary, won reelection, 55 percent to 45 percent. No other governor of Arkansas had ever lost and come back to be reelected.

 

I
T IS INCONCEIVABLE
that Bill Clinton would have become governor in January 1983 without his wife's having taken charge. Now in office, at her urging he decided that education would be the single issue to define his administration, and that he would put the person he most trusted, his wife, in charge of reforming the state's education system. Before taking the oath of office, however, he had learned that his task would be especially difficult—he was inheriting a $30 million budget shortfall from his predecessor.

The same pattern would repeat itself a decade later. Hillary would be the key to managing his presidential campaign, he would inherit a potentially ruinous budget shortfall, and he would put Hillary in charge of the signature issue of his presidency, health care. The future of his presidency, like his governorship, and perhaps the prospects for his reelection, would depend on her performance.

Bill far surpassed Hillary, or arguably almost everybody else in politics, both in seeing the long-term danger ahead for his state or his country from antiquated thinking and outdated policy, and developing nuanced ideas and substantial plans for dealing with the peril. By the time his family had moved their clothes back into the governor's mansion, he had a sense that the state was facing imminent disaster, just as he perceived in January 1993, when he assumed office knowing George H. W. Bush's people had fiddled with the budget numbers to obscure a huge deficit.

He recognized that his state was not prepared to enter the modern economic age, in which success and competition would no longer be measured in the old manufacturing, mining, and agricultural sectors, but by education-dependent fields such as information services, engineering, and technology. As much as any of the other states, Arkansas was living in the economic dark ages, kept dim by an outdated education system that had left its children far behind the rest of the country in opportunity and achievement.

Clinton had plenty of ideas about how to deal with these problems. He'd read everything he could get his hands on about political economy. Distinguished work in the field had been conducted by friends and classmates, including Bob Reich, now teaching at Harvard. But he'd also learned, from his experience with car tag taxes and Jimmy Carter's transshipment of human cargo, that it didn't matter how good the ideas were if somebody like Frank White could come along and tar your hide with negative ads. To be successful at governing—which was different from being successful at running and winning election—you had to find a way to preempt the critics. Hillary and Dick Morris believed that you had to make somebody else the villain before you got fatally tarred yourself.

This strategy of villainizing became a dominant leitmotif of Clintonian governance, a strategy meant to allow Bill's big ideas and grand goals—and Hillary's tempered idealism and experience—to flourish. The villains were real most of the time, though their views did not always represent a simple black or white choice vis-à-vis the Clintons'. Not all teachers and health insurance executives were bad—but they were all made to seem like part of systemic problems and failures, in which the state legislature or the U.S. Congress were complicit as well. Hillary had learned something about this with her rural health care initiative in Bill's first term, and it didn't hurt to have the local medical association taking her to court.