A Woman in Charge (30 page)

Education reform became the model on which Hillary Clinton would one day build her teetering health care initiative. In Arkansas, though, her achievement was less about the specifics of what worked and what didn't than the fact that she and Bill were able to focus the state for the first time on its educational needs. Their approach was almost holistic. Its aim was to convince Arkansans that, in their desire for better education and willingness to accept controversial action to get it, the state's children were already better off than any statistics could measure. They deserved better than they had been offered in the past. What they had lacked was opportunity. Now Hillary had provided it.

In Arkansas, a generation later, citizens and teachers would still be debating the extent to which Hillary's reforms worked. The record would appear mostly positive: the percentage of high school graduates who went on to college increased within four years from 38 percent to 50 percent; all of the state's school districts complied with the dicta of her commission to reduce class size and offer standard course offerings. In every school district, pupils could take classes in foreign languages, advanced math, and science. However, the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation (named after one of Bill's predecessors as governor of Arkansas) found in a survey of parents, teachers, and administrators that “thus far, the Arkansas school reform effort has bypassed teachers. From their perspective, it has had a heavy, top-down regulatory quality. The result is a serious, large demoralization of the teaching force. They feel constrained by what they perceive to be a stranglehold of mandates, needless paperwork and limited encouragement.”

 

S
INCE
B
ILL AND
H
ILLARY'S
triumph in initiating and funding serious educational reform in Arkansas, Bill was leading a charmed and, on the issues, extremely intelligent political life. Hillary's choice of education as their signature achievement was brilliant politics that had bought him time to think, govern, and put his stamp on Arkansas, and push his ideas onto the national stage. It had also made him virtually unbeatable for reelection, as long as he averted self-inflicted disaster. The educational standards that Hillary had championed were not scheduled to take full effect until 1987, making effective criticism of them virtually impossible until the next decade. The whole education financing package, tied as it was to teacher-testing, was an issue that won Bill Republican and independent votes and gave him a sturdy platform he could run on in 1984 and, by virtue of a change in the Arkansas constitution, for a four-year term in 1986. And it guided his move to the center, away from the shibboleths of traditional Democratic liberalism, giving an intellectual and political framework to his ideas for welfare reform, neighborhood-business tax relief, and other concepts fashioned in the New Democrat mold of his and Hillary's education experiment in Arkansas.

Meanwhile, his politics and profile were getting national attention in the Reagan years. They were seen as a means to energize a moribund Democratic Party. He wanted to run for president in 1988, though Hillary expressed doubts that the Reagan Revolution had run its course. She thought Vice President George Bush would be hard to beat. And if Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas decided to seek the Democratic nomination—a very real possibility, and they both believed he could run a good race—it was obviously out of the question that Bill would oppose him.

 

I
N
1982, Hillary had installed Betsey Wright as Bill's chief of staff, with an office just outside his own, an announcement of Hillary's determination that her husband would never again drift on the job with unchecked ease—whether toward women or ennui, as she believed he had in his first term as governor. Bill easily accessed all the indexed political information Betsey had computerized as he began making exploratory calls in late 1986 and early 1987, the same kind of calls he'd made when getting ready to run again for governor. Some were to raise seed money, some to seek opinions from his old friends and political colleagues as to whether he could win, assuming Bumpers didn't run. When Bumpers announced in late March that he wouldn't be a candidate, Betsey, a first-rate political operator of great repute at every level of Democratic Party politics, dispatched scouts to New Hampshire and Iowa to report back on how quickly campaign organizations could be established in the two early primary and caucus states and who might be available to run Bill's campaign there if he declared for president.

In April, Bill went to New Hampshire for a speech to the state Democratic Party and to do the ritual “testing of the waters.” He had returned to Little Rock enthused, and Betsey then sent teams out to the Southern states that were going to cast ballots in the Super Tuesday primaries. She had already arranged to take a leave of absence to work on an exploratory Clinton presidential campaign, and a substitute chief of staff had moved into the governor's office. Much later, Hillary and Bill both said—not convincingly—that she had preferred he stay out. She persuaded Bill to set a deadline for his decision and said she was prepared to enthusiastically support whatever course he chose. He picked July 15 and reserved the ballroom of the Excelsior Hotel to make his announcement, “whatever it might be,” as Hillary put it. Betsey was certain Hillary wanted him to make the race. Dorothy and Hugh Rodham had bought a condominium in Little Rock and were expecting to move to the mansion to be with Chelsea while her parents were campaigning.

Hillary also called on Geoff Shields, her old boyfriend from the Wellesley years, who had become a Chicago lawyer and power in the Democratic Party there, and Bernie Nussbaum, whom she went to see in New York. “Don't commit [to a candidate] until we talk,” she'd said over the phone to Nussbaum in the late spring, and they arranged soon afterward to meet for dinner in midtown Manhattan. Fourteen years had passed since they'd last had a serious face-to-face talk, though he'd occasionally steered some legal work her way at the Rose Law Firm. They spent the better part of three hours catching up. Nussbaum, who had gone on to become a powerhouse New York lawyer and important figure in the state Democratic Party, found Hillary more accessible emotionally and more fun than when they'd worked together in Washington.

Hillary talked at length about Chelsea and how the birth of their daughter had changed the focus of her life. She seemed softer, less querulous. Only as they were finishing dinner did Hillary raise the subject of the upcoming presidential campaign. Remembering their difficult conversation fourteen summers earlier, Nussbaum said, “Hillary, I know you told me he'd be president, and I acted badly. But isn't this a little early?” Bill Clinton was now forty years old.

Meanwhile, she continued making similar calls, in person and by phone, to a formidable network of old Rodham and Clinton associates and friends who could be assets in a presidential campaign.

 

O
N
M
AY
7, 1987, Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, who had recruited Bill to work in Texas during the 1972 McGovern campaign, grudgingly withdrew his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination after details of his extramarital sex life became a media sensation. Bill was both the immediate beneficiary of Hart's withdrawal, and, understandably, its victim as well. As Webb Hubbell noted, “The rumors about Bill had been rampant for years—he was a man with an appetite, people said. He couldn't pass up a pretty face.”

When reporters in Washington had asked Hart about rumors that he was seeing women other than his wife, he had denied it, and invited the press to follow him if they had any doubts. Predictably, they took up the challenge, and within days the
Miami Herald
had published a story about Hart spending a night on a sailboat with a young woman, Donna Rice, followed by pictures in a supermarket tabloid of Hart and Rice on the boat, named
Monkey Business.

The coverage by the mainstream press of Hart's extramarital life was a departure from journalistic tradition, which had allowed presidents and leading politicians considerable running room in keeping their affairs private, out of the papers and off the air. In Arkansas, no stories had appeared in print about the Clintons' marital problems, despite the familiarity of every statehouse reporter with the rumors and some of the reality. However, a new standard was taking hold based on the Hart experience. If a politician's sex life, particularly indiscriminate sex, could be seen to cast doubt on matters of judgment and stability, it might well be considered legitimate news. In the
Washington Post,
David Broder,
eminencia
of the capital's political reporters and columnists, offered his blessing of the
Herald
's decision to run the Hart story: “What was at issue was Hart's truthfulness, his self-discipline, his sense of responsibility to other people—indeed his willingness to face hard choices and realities…. The fundamental character questions raised by Hart's actions in this incident remain unchanged, and if they are not vital in judging a potential President, I don't know what would be.” Broder was as well aware as any journalist in America of Bill Clinton's awesome political potential and talents and the rumors that hounded him. His words in the
Post
that day could not have brought comfort to Bill, who read the newspapers, or Hillary, who didn't.

Hart's withdrawal had put more pressure on Bill to run, and to quickly wrap up the support of many of Hart's backers. Among the Democrats seriously under consideration, Hart and Clinton most inhabited similar ideological territory. In Washington, a foreign policy briefing for Bill was convened by friends from Yale and from Hart's campaign staff. More significant, the nature of some of Bill's inquiries to friends and associates began changing. He sought Dick Morris's advice about how to confront the “infidelity issue,” expressing “a tremendous terror of the race…which led him to a feeling that this was a terribly inhospitable environment upon which to tread,” according to Morris.

To some friends, he asked whether an expression of “causing pain in my marriage” would be sufficient to keep the press at bay. At a school softball game in which Chelsea was playing, he approached Max Brantley, whose wife, Ellen, Hillary's classmate at Wellesley, had been on Bill's staff in the attorney general's office. “He was using Hart's withdrawal as a sounding board, asking, You know, do you ever outlive your past mistakes? Are they ever forgotten? Are they ever forgiven? Or do you carry them all your life? And is there a point beyond which a politician can expect to be left alone? Is there a time period when you can say, No, that's in my past? Or are you not forgiven for it? Everybody makes mistakes, and it's not right that they should have to pay for them forever and ever and ever. It was pretty clear what this discussion was all about.”

Betsey Wright could see the uncharacteristic doubt and fear gnawing at him. In the post-Hart atmosphere, the rumors about Hillary and Bill's marriage, and Bill's sexual activities, were becoming thunderous, especially when it was learned that he had booked the Excelsior for an announcement.

For five years, Betsey had watched and listened as Bill made arrangements for assignations and slipped out of the office for meetings with various women. Sometimes the troopers gave her sly heads-ups. She had no doubt that a few of them were soliciting women for him.

Wright also recognized that “Hillary had long ago made some peace with his womanizing and the trade-offs. And that what she wanted out of the relationship was worth putting up with some of that…. She was as aware as I was that those women were not people that he wanted any deep relationship with. They weren't the kind of women that he shared a passion with intellectually or for politics or certainly not for Chelsea, who was a huge bond with them.”

But Gary Hart's defrocking had terrified Wright. On several occasions, she tried to tell Bill how vulnerable she thought he was, but he kept evading the issue. The question raised by Hart's withdrawal, he said, should not be about a candidate's sexual life but whether he could be a good president. Betsey doubted that Hillary would have been as tolerant as Lee Hart, Gary's wife, had been. And Bill could be finished politically by a similar humiliation. There had been “huge schisms” in the Clinton marriage since Wright had arrived in Little Rock to help rescue Bill at his lowest ebb, “when Hillary did really drastic things” (which Betsey has never spelled out). But Betsey thought no situation between Hillary and Bill was as fraught—and dangerous to Chelsea—as the one they would face if Bill now sought the presidency.

Two days before his scheduled announcement at the Excelsior, Betsey asked to see Bill privately in the mansion. She arrived with another person, whose name she has never disclosed. “I just thought he had to confront the issue,” she said later. She did not want Bill to be able to deny that the conversation had taken place—as he had done after previous confrontations with her about women, including Gennifer Flowers. Contrary to later media accounts, Betsey did not bring to the mansion a “list” of women she knew Bill had been with, though investigators would later try to subpoena such a document from her. Rather, there was a serious conversation about the implications of Hart's withdrawal in which she insisted that Bill recount for her and the other person present “all of the women he had been with, when and how often.” She explained much later, “This was a conversation. Specifically what I said was, ‘Let's walk through all of the women who might decide that they had a bone to pick with you who might emerge in the middle of the campaign.' And of course I was horrified because I thought I knew everybody. And he came up with these people I didn't know about.” When they had reviewed the names a second time to evaluate which women were most likely to seek out the press, or be tracked down by reporters, she told him it would be disastrous to declare his candidacy, devastating to Chelsea and his marriage.