A Woman in Charge (44 page)

The Clintons had run the 1992 campaign with their experience in Arkansas very much in mind. It was a conservative Southern state in most regards, and they understood how to appeal to Reagan Democrats. So it came as a shock to many in Washington, in and out of the media, when the first substantive acts of their presidency, most of them principled, some of them even brave, seemed to signal that the new administration's priorities were actually listing heavily toward what the Clintons' opponents insisted was a “leftist-liberal” agenda.

 

D
EEPER PROBLEMS
were eating away at the Clintons' patina of political astuteness with the administration less than a week old. There was still no nominee for attorney general, and the president and his wife had seemed ethically at sea and legally clueless in the Zoë Baird fiasco. Meanwhile, Hillary's decision to ban reporters from the West Wing had members of the White House press corps seething. (“Well, I want to tell you that I've been here since Kennedy, and those steps have never been blocked to us, and the press secretary's office has never been off-limits. Ever,” Helen Thomas, the dean of the press corps, lectured Stephanopoulos.) The deficit numbers the Bush administration had dumped in their budgetary lap had sent the economic team back to square one, and word was out, accurately, that the new president would probably have to abandon his pledge of a middle-class tax cut, and was even considering—columnists were already writing about it—a new energy tax that would hit the middle class hardest. The latter idea was Al Gore's.

The nascent perception of ineptitude was heightened by an unauthorized, anonymous quote in
Time
magazine that put the White House on shaky ground with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the august Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Unfortunately, Moynihan was the senator upon whom the Clinton agenda—and Hillary—was most dependent, since health care, welfare reform, and the budget were all handled by his committee and, on all three issues, his colleagues accorded him a level of deference usually reserved for a potentate. “He's not one of us,” said an unnamed “top administration official” quoted by
Time.
“We'll roll right over him if we have to.” Unbeknownst to the president or Hillary, the official was Lloyd Bentsen, trying to tell his former Senate colleague, “one gray hair to another,” to lay off the young president. In fact, it sounded like something Hillary would say, and some members of her staff were suspect at the time.

The president, furious at the leak, was on the phone to Moynihan posthaste Monday, January 25, the day the item appeared. “If I find out who did this, they'll be gone, I promise you that,” he told the senator. (He ordered Stephanopoulos to find out who leaked and fire him.) “Well, if you're upset, I'm not,” Moynihan responded, but the affront rankled him (and Moynihan's wife as well, who came to particularly distrust Hillary). The senator would make life difficult for the Clintons for years.

The buzz around town was becoming a question: how could this most surefooted of politicians and his astute staff, including his wife, be stumbling so quickly and so badly? Inside the White House, the cacophony from Congress and the Pentagon, amplified by the press, sounded deafening—especially when Sam Nunn had thrown in his lot with the Joint Chiefs in opposing gays in the military. Nunn purposefully had made his announcement in Norfolk, Virginia, aboard a submarine, to demonstrate the close quarters of military life in which gay sailors would be forced to cohabit. No other controversy could have so underscored Bill Clinton's inexperience with the military (which may have led Senator Hillary Clinton as a freshman to successfully seek a seat on the Armed Services Committee). The timing of Nunn's declaration was itself a declaration of war: it eclipsed Clinton's announcement the same day, January 25, that Hillary would be formally appointed head of his task force on health care, and that Ira Magaziner would be her deputy.

The president had assembled his senior cabinet officers and members of the White House staff (including the first lady's) in the Roosevelt Room to inform them of her appointment. He decreed that Hillary was to be treated like anyone else—an impossibility, of course. He urged those in the room to be as frank and challenging with her as they'd be with any other cabinet member. He intended to submit a health care package to Congress within one hundred days, he told them, a totally unrealistic pledge that he and Hillary had agreed on, and which he repeated before the cameras that afternoon. Asked if the deadline was “hard and fast,” he added, “If it were 101 days, I wouldn't have a heart attack.” But the accelerated timetable was now part of the agenda, and many of those in the Roosevelt Room were aghast as a result. Hillary professed confidence she could meet the deadline.

Hillary, however, was livid that a profusion of official statements and headlines about deficit reduction were already obscuring the broader goals and purpose of the Clinton presidency. She ascribed some of the blame to the same individuals who were expressing, even in these first days, private doubts about the viability of the sort of colossal health care plan she and Magaziner were planning to announce to the president's cabinet. Though she felt collegial toward Panetta, Rivlin, Shalala, Bentsen, and Rubin, she worried they did not understand her husband's priorities or his style of operating; true, they were all on the same side, and everyone was just getting to know one another, but Hillary wasn't wrong about the developing attitude of the deficit hawks.

“Bentsen, Rubin, Panetta—we sat around meetings just looking at each other,” recalled Shalala. “Most of the people sitting around the table had been here before. We had never seen anything quite like it…. This was not Franklin Roosevelt in the middle of the Depression, in which you had to design these huge programs.”

 

H
ILLARY WENT TO
New York during that first week, both to receive a humanitarian award and demonstrate her concern for children by visiting a school, and to visit Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The two women shared more traits than might have been apparent, and were predisposed to liking each other. Both had a public reserve that masked a wicked sense of humor and private irreverence. (Among friends, Hillary was famed as a mimic—especially of pompous politicians.) And both were mesmerized by men of credentials, accomplishment, and wealth. Then there was the obvious: both were married to presidents who, long before they reached the White House, had established reputations as womanizers.

They had met several times before, most recently the previous May. Jackie and her son, John F. Kennedy Jr., had been among the first contributors to Bill Clinton's presidential campaign, even before he had formally announced his candidacy, while he, Hillary, and Betsey Wright were raising money through an exploratory committee. In May 1992, while Hillary was still recovering from the Gennifer Flowers ugliness, Jackie had invited Hillary to lunch at her apartment on Fifth Avenue. Much of their conversation was about how to keep Chelsea shielded from the press; Jackie had been remarkably successful in protecting her own children in New York through their teenage years.

Later, Jackie told friends that of all her successors as first lady, she was most fond of Hillary. Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg said her mother was immediately struck by Hillary's intelligence, her interest in issues related to the well-being of children, and her appreciation of the arts and culture. When Hillary said she liked the ballet, “that sealed it forever,” said Caroline.

On this visit to Jackie's apartment, the conversation turned to the White House, its history, and the strange, undefined nature of being a president's wife. Jackie's refurbishment of the White House had been an oddly defining event of the Kennedy presidency, contributing to the mythology of Camelot and of the dashing, cultured young couple who held court there. Hillary was determined to make her own imprint on the mansion as well. She was discussing the matter with Kaki Hockersmith of Little Rock, who had helped with the decoration of the governor's mansion and stayed on after the inauguration to take the measure of the Clintons' new quarters. Hillary, at Bill's behest, was determined to get rid of the silken “bird wallpaper”—a rare Chinese print, actually—that Nancy Reagan had installed in the presidential bedroom. He said it reminded him of Alfred Hitchcock's movie
The Birds.
Hillary had a great enthusiasm and appreciation for art, music, and ballet, but she was definitely not an aesthete in the sense that Jackie was.

Hillary had spent considerable time researching and reading about the lives of the nation's first ladies, a practice that would continue over several years. To her surprise, she had found Pat Nixon one of the most thoughtful and sympathetic of her predecessors, whose trials as the wife of the disgraced president touched her. As first lady, Pat had gone on the record as pro-choice, before
Roe v. Wade
; she had favored the Equal Rights Amendment; she had taught poor Mexican children in California before marrying. In the White House, she had revivified the Preservation Office, dormant since the Kennedy years. Pat Nixon had abhorred being a political wife, but she adored her two daughters and was a hands-on mother, who was revered by her children. Her younger daughter, Julie, in fact, had written a well-regarded memoir about her mother, whose qualities she felt had been ignored or maligned in the period of her father's investigation and exile.

Hillary, however, identified most with Eleanor Roosevelt, increasingly so as she came under attack for her political beliefs and actions. But in some ways, her situation would more resemble that of Pat Nixon.

Motherhood had been exceedingly difficult for Roosevelt, and the six children she bore had all experienced disorienting and troubled lives. She later expressed regret in putting “too much belief in discipline when my children were young…. I was so concerned with bringing up my children properly that I was not wise enough to just love them.”

Nothing was more important to Hillary than ensuring that Chelsea have as normal an adolescence as possible, despite the extraordinary circumstances of being the president's daughter. Chelsea had gone to a public school in Little Rock. “She was a normal kid, she did everything every other kid did, and by any definition was not suffering any,” noted Melanne Verveer, one of Hillary's principal aides. “So Hillary went up to talk to Jackie about how do you have normal kids when you live in a fishbowl.” Chelsea, for her part, was hardly thrilled at the prospect of leaving Little Rock and her friends for a new life that required twenty-four-hour Secret Service protection. As the governor's daughter, she could come and go almost like any other child. That would be impossible in the White House. Socks, the family cat, would help represent continuity for Chelsea, but no longer could he roam free either. Because the White House fence was wide enough for him to escape the grounds, he had to be kept on a leash whenever he was outside—a metaphor the whole family could identify with.

As in Little Rock, both Hillary and Bill tried to arrange their schedules to fit Chelsea's, to have dinner together in the family kitchen, which they planned to enlarge. One of Hillary's first acts upon arriving at the White House was to instruct her staff that afternoons and early evenings be left as free as possible so she could spend time with Chelsea. “I don't go out unless I absolutely have to,” she said shortly after they had settled into the White House. “I try to be home when she's home in the afternoon, or at least talk to her, have dinner with her, help her with her homework. It's been a difficult move for her, too.” As in Little Rock, Hillary directed her daughter's concentration toward school, church, ballet, and family.

In her relationship with her daughter, it was possible to see all the attributes, intensified, that Hillary's close friends recognized in her but that remained largely hidden from public view. “With Chelsea, she is warm and tender—and provocative, too,” observed Bruce Lindsey, the president's chief personal aide.

In Arkansas, Chelsea Clinton had attended a racially integrated public school not far from the governor's mansion. With Hillary's education portfolio for the state, it would have been unthinkable that she attend private school there. Though the Clintons explored the possibility of Chelsea enrolling in a public school in Washington—as Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter's daughter, Amy, had done—the city's hopelessly inadequate public education system as well as 1990s security realities made that almost impossible. Instead Chelsea was enrolled at Sidwell Friends School in upper Northwest Washington, which Tricia and Julie Nixon had attended while their father was vice president. By 1993 co-ed Sidwell was considered the most “progressive” and racially integrated of the capital's elite prep schools, chosen by the Clintons over the somewhat tonier National (Episcopal) Cathedral schools, which had been attended by Al Gore and the daughters of President Lyndon Johnson.

Hillary's childhood had been marked by the stringent discipline of her father and the nurturance of her mother. Bill's childhood, in Hillary's view, had been adversely influenced by Virginia's willingness to let her older son do anything he wanted. Hillary was determined not to do the same with their daughter.

Bill was a doting father, eager to please their only child, enthralling her with his conversation, his stories, and his knowledge. The structure and discipline were left to Hillary. On one occasion, after Chelsea and several other girls watched a movie in the White House theater, Hillary made them get down on their knees to pick up every kernel of popcorn they had spilled on the carpet. It wasn't like pecking for toothpaste caps in the snow in Park Ridge, but the idea was the same.

9

Portrait of a First Lady

[Dick] Morris's presence helped in unexpected ways.

—Living History

O
VER THE NEXT YEAR,
Hillary and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis periodically phoned each other and enjoyed an occasional lunch. Jackie's White House staff had always been struck by how in control she was, how fastidious about details, and just how involved she was in shaping her image, as evidenced by a paper trail of memos she left behind. Hillary, in her eight years in the White House, left no paper trail of any sort. But her attempts at image-building, and her attempts to remain in control of many things she had never expected to elude her, can be documented just the same.

Early Saturday morning, the tenth day of the Clinton presidency, the Clintons boarded Marine One, the presidential helicopter, for their first trip to Camp David. Despite their obvious need for rest and relaxation, the weekend had been set aside for a working retreat (the idea had originally been Al Gore's) at which the president's cabinet, staff, and campaign consultants would better get to know one another and set “personal goals” for the next four years. It was just the sort of New Age touchy-feely gathering—with two “facilitators” equipped with Magic Markers and metal easels, whom Gore had procured to inspire bonding and brain-storming—that too often lent Clintonia the aura of a boomer romper room. By lunchtime Saturday, however, it was apparent to the campers that Hillary intended to transform the occasion into a war council, to fire up one more time the furnace of the Permanent Campaign and get her husband's presidency back on the rails.

The term “Permanent Campaign” had always denoted a tactical continuity in campaigning for election and governing. In the 1992 presidential race, during which Hillary and James Carville had presided over the creation and operation of the so-called War Room at campaign headquarters in Little Rock, the attitude of the Permanent Campaign came to be symbolized by her bunker and the overwhelming barrage of rapid-response return fire that issued from it, overpowering or outmaneuvering almost every incoming threat. By activating the strategy so soon into the Clinton presidency, she risked eroding the magisterial, mythic, even mysterious advantages that went with occupying presidential territory, commanding the high ground of the White House.

For many of those present, the weekend was a dizzying and disconcerting introduction to the wild personal and political psychology of the Clinton presidential enterprise, and not without its unintended humor. At one session, the president discussed his childhood trauma of being a fat boy ridiculed by other children, and of being knocked down as a toddler by a wild boar and picking himself up. (Hillary, characteristically, gave away no guarded memories.) Camp David, the rustic hideaway in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains named by Dwight Eisenhower for his grandson (now long married to Julie Nixon), was first used as a presidential lodge by FDR, who called the place Shangri-la. Most of the forty aides of the new president and first lady were there for the first time, and, given the cachet of the place, were expecting something much grander than its mildewed, motel-sized cabins. “The sheets are damp,” Bob Reich remarked. George Stephanopoulos was reminded of a low-rent resort in the Poconos.

Before the session, the president had summoned Stan Greenberg and, without mentioning Hillary, conveyed her view, which he shared, that they were governing and being perceived as if they had forgotten the principles and priorities that had been the basis of the Clinton campaign. The necessary fiscal sacrifices being considered by the economic team could not be permitted to undermine the very reasons behind his presidency. The weekend retreat, the president hoped, would help the new economic team and veterans of the campaign to better understand one another.

The managers of the Permanent Campaign from 1980 to 1990 had been Hillary and Dick Morris, their unusual bond sealed by a mutually aggressive approach to the political process. It was also based on a profound understanding of Bill Clinton, his strengths and his weaknesses. “We were the enzymes that helped him digest his thinking…literally sort of his insulin,” Morris said. Clinton sometimes had trouble processing ideas in an orderly fashion and prioritizing them; he needed “someone to help him with that digestive function. Almost like a dialysis machine, or something.” Hillary had often performed that role; Morris said he did as well. Hillary gave a bravura demonstration of the role at Camp David, and also of taking the fight to the enemy.

At the noontime session, as the senior-most members of the new administration watched and listened—awed, admiring, uncomfortable—Hillary delivered a lecture that was to be a defining moment of the Clinton presidency. It was about the Journey, the Story, Enemies, and Villains. No first lady had ever addressed a president's cabinet and staff with such unvarnished political candor (though in the Reagan White House Nancy Reagan had demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of her husband's priorities, and operated discreetly through Reagan's assistant Michael Deaver to manage his time and influence his agenda), or flaunted her obvious primacy in the conduct of her husband's presidency.
^*11
She would lead them in writing what she called “a narrative” for America in the Clinton years, so the country could understand—almost as if being provided a roadmap—where this administration was taking it.

Hillary's evaluation of the initial week of the Clinton presidency, and the damage caused in the combustible environment of Washington and beyond, was on the money. The newspapers were full of inside stories about an economic plan the administration was developing that would stress harsh budget-cutting, deficit reduction, and program-slashing, and would forgo the middle-class tax cuts that the Clinton campaign had promised. What the accounts did not say, because the new administration had not gotten their message out effectively, was that the president and his advisers were developing an economic
recovery
plan to put the country
back on course;
that cutting the budget somewhat and reducing the deficit in a reasonable way were necessary to
recover
from the Republicans'
mismanagement
of the economy that had been so much a part of Bill Clinton's victory in the first place. They were working to deliver what they had promised, not welsh on their commitment to investment or compromise basic principles. Hillary said the belt-tightening that had been forced on them was a necessary first step if they were to deliver jobs, health care, welfare reform, and improved education. What needed to be conveyed to the public, she said, was that the Bush White House had lied about the economic peril the Republicans had put the country in. As in Arkansas, this was a tale of the Clintons' own idealism and the dark forces arrayed against them.

She began by comparing the situation they had inherited in Washington to what she and Bill had faced after rebounding from his defeat in 1980 to win a second term as governor in 1982. Her manner was tutorial. She was unaided by either Magic Markers or notes as she addressed the men and women who would now have to perfect the Story of the Clinton presidency and its aspirations through what would be required of them. His presidency could not succeed, she told them, unless voters came to understand, as the citizens of Arkansas eventually had, that Bill was going to lead them on a long “journey” (and the way she said the word instantly gave it a capital J). Without communicating a Vision, which was another term for the Story (and it seemed by now that she was speaking in all capital letters), he'd walled himself off from the folks who had put him in office, tried to do too many things in his first term, and as a result he was beaten.

But going into the second gubernatorial term they'd captivated the citizens with the tale of good and evil. The villain of the piece had been the Arkansas teachers union, which until then had steadfastly supported Clinton. You show people what you're willing to fight for, Hillary said, when you fight your friends—by which, in this context, she clearly meant,
When you make them your enemy.
Not surprisingly, some of those who heard her words were deeply discomfited.

Right now, the Story was confusing and being written by outsiders in the press and political opposition. That had to change. The Story needed some villains, some wicked enemies. Hillary's colleagues shouldn't hesitate to identify them as Clinton's opponents in Congress, or in the media. They, like the Republicans' fat-cat campaign contributors who were already lining up to oppose health care, were intending to thwart the public will. What better way than to convey the righteousness of the Story? Moreover, said Hillary, health care reform would be the key to Bill's reelection in 1996.

After Hillary's remarks, the president offered an even more demanding list of goals for the administration's first year: the immediate creation of jobs and opportunity through enactment of an economic stimulus plan, in addition to his comprehensive economic plan of deficit reduction and investment; welfare reform; a campaign finance and lobbying reform bill; and a bill mandating national service for young Americans. To this list, he added incremental policies to encourage free trade; environmental protection; reading programs for all those in the workforce in need of them; a reduction in the homeless population; and the creation of more apprenticeship programs in government and the private sector. When Clinton had completed his list, Secretary of State Warren Christopher questioned whether the goals were too ambitious, given how difficult each task would be to accomplish. He suggested eliminating some of the president's priorities.

Hillary challenged Christopher sharply. The secretary's experience in the executive branch was extensive. With Bentsen, Christopher was the member of the cabinet with the most high-level Washington experience. He had served in the Johnson administration as deputy attorney general and in the Carter administration as deputy secretary of state—and that added some heft to the Clinton team. Increasingly, though, Hillary came to view him pejoratively as part of the Washington establishment, though he had made his professional mark as a lawyer in Los Angeles. She now delivered a point-by-point sermonette advocating the antithesis of what Christopher had suggested. She was ignoring lessons learned in Arkansas, and was contradicting her own point of half an hour before, when she said in Bill's first term he had tried to do too much. And he was defeated for reelection.

Immediately after the session adjourned, Hillary instructed Paul Begala and Mandy Grunwald, two of the campaign consultants most opposed to the message of the deficit hawks, to rush back to the White House and prepare a written version of the Story: with heroes, enemies, and villains.

Al Gore's staff had expected the meeting to be his show. But what those present saw was the president telling them they were in danger of losing their way, and then turning over the agenda to his wife to plot their course. She had told them exactly what was expected of them to get back on track. The weekend announced to the senior members of the administration that this presidency was intended to function as a joint venture.

Moreover, they had now seen Hillary in a battle zone, operating with ease, intelligence, and calm. She had taken the measure of the situation, dictated an order of march, and positioned the artillery pieces. She seemed to thrive under the conditions of siege, trouble, crisis, and combat. After less than two weeks in the White House, Hillary had assumed her command as America's first warrior first lady.

 

I
N EARLY
D
ECEMBER,
Dick Morris had flown to Little Rock and met with the president-elect and Hillary in the governor's mansion. “Bill said, ‘Stay in touch with me, and why don't you do it through Hillary?'” according to Morris. “And, I said to Hillary, ‘I'll be your political consultant.'” During the first two years of the Clinton presidency, Morris claimed, he spoke to her at length every two weeks or so. “So, in '93 and in '94,” he said, “I was constantly calling her with advice. And, the calls would always have two parts to them. My advice for her and my advice for him. She was frequently restless during the parts where I was talking about him, but always attentive during the parts when I was talking about her. And, it was very clear to me that she very much felt in business for herself in '93 and '94. She very much felt that she had a task, that she had a goal. Health care was her thing. ‘Talk to me about my image,' she'd say. I would give her advice; for example, at one point very early I remember saying, ‘There's an East Wing and a West Wing to the White House. And they're like barbells that you hold as you walk across a tightrope. And they need to be evenly balanced when you walk the tightrope. Whenever you get a little bit too West Wing, which is substantive, hold a dinner party and get more East Wing, which is social. And whenever you get too much talking about health care policy, you talk about what you like to cook at a state dinner.”

Which was exactly the subject of Hillary's first White House interview with the press, held two days after she'd met with Jackie Kennedy Onassis in Manhattan.

To the outrage of the same White House reporters whom she'd already confined to the basement, Hillary spent several hours talking with Marian Burros, the food editor of the
New York Times,
in a cozy sit-down with unusual ground rules negotiated by her press secretary, Lisa Caputo: there would be no substantive discussion about the likes of health care, or the sputtering one-week-old presidency; only questions about food, entertaining, decorating, and other “first lady” things. It was further stipulated that the interview would be published two days after the Clintons' first formal White House dinner, in honor of the nation's governors, to be held the evening the Clintons returned from Camp David.