A Woman in Charge (45 page)

Hillary, Caputo, and Ann Stock, the new White House social secretary, had carefully rehearsed the points and attitude they wanted to convey (a softer, gentler Hillary than the newly appointed health care czarina). Hillary enthused to Burros about how she'd loved every minute of preparing for the governors dinner, from selecting the menu and china to making a last-minute change in the flowers and the color of the tablecloths.

The story ran on page one, next to a photo of the new first lady wearing a bare-shoulder, black Donna Karan evening dress (very un–Barbara Bush). Hillary expressed surprise to Burros at the attention accorded her dual roles—traditional first lady, hostess-in-chief; and head of the President's Task Force on National Health Care Reform, comparing herself to “every woman who gets up in the morning and gets breakfast for her family and goes off to a job of any sort where she assumes a different role for the hours she's at work, who runs out at lunch to buy material for a costume for her daughter or to buy invitations for a party that she's going to have and after work goes and picks up her children and then maybe goes out with her husband: our lives
are
a mixture of these different roles. I'm still always a little bit amazed at how big an issue this is for people because if they will just stop and think, this is what women do,” she said. “Eventually, I expect, it won't be a subject for a lot of comment. It's still in transition.”

The “news,” such as it was, was that there would be far more American food served at family meals and state dinners than the Frenchified fare of previous administrations, a decision that sent Pierre Chambrin, the French-born White House executive chef of the Bush years, into a
frisson
and toward the door (though this was not mentioned in the
Times
interview). To Chambrin's surprise, Ann Stock had consulted with three restaurant chefs, celebrated for their American cooking, to come up with the menu for the governors.

“We're trying to get a kitchen cabinet, so to speak, of people who will advise us about new menus, new ideas,” Hillary said. “It will keep us up to date about what a lot of American chefs are doing around the country. Asking people for their advice, whether it's about policy or food, is a way to give even more people a feeling of inclusion. And you get good ideas.”

This was just the type of straight-faced earnestness—inclusive food—that (among other things) tended to drive Hillary's detractors around the bend. Not to mention the chef. “I can't say I'm very pleased,” said Chambrin. At Hillary's instigation, some thirty cookbooks stressing low-fat, nouvelle American cuisine were delivered to Chambrin's kitchen. In the chef's estimation, the Bushes had been perfect clients, undemanding and sophisticated (“they had lived all over the world”). The obvious implication was that the Clintons were hayseeds.

The changes in the kitchen were in fact perfectly understandable. The Clintons' desire to show foreign guests, among others, the best of indigenous American culture fit their image in the best sense. In December, a group of American chefs led by Alice Waters, the renowned owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, had sent a letter to the Clintons urging the appointment of a White House chef who would promote American cooking, emphasizing local ingredients and organic food. Hillary told Burros she agreed with many of Waters's ideas. “I think she's been a breakthrough figure in American cuisine, in the kind of food she's prepared and in the kind of positions she's taken. I think what she says makes a lot of sense.” The handwriting was on the wall, or at least on the front page of the
Times:
Chambrin was on his way out.

All of this, in retrospect, might have seemed trivial, but in the capital, a one-industry town, it was part of a congealing judgment among the grandees of the Washington social-political circuit, the chattering commentators, and the permanent White House staff that the Clintons did not mind clearing house and changing local customs at the same time. After less than two weeks in the White House, an impression was already taking hold among those inclined to cause trouble for the Clintons that they were sweeping into town like a band of hillbillies with no respect for tradition or what passed in Washington for good breeding or pedigree, whatever that was.

One of Hillary's most querulous attributes, perfected over decades in public life, was to set herself up as a kind of straw woman—responding to criticism, whether real or imagined, with a claim of being confused about why her actions might be subject to question or even analysis in the first place, when the answers were so obvious (to her at least). With regard to the Burros story, she said people who wanted her to fit in a “certain box, traditionalist or feminist,” were going to be disappointed. She could handle a big job and domestic functions, too. But her dubious premise remained “that people could perceive me only as one thing or the other.”

Hillary chose the
Times
interview to announce her decision to impose a total ban on smoking in the White House (“because of the atmosphere here, and the age of the house, the furnishings”). She had done the same in Little Rock. “It took some people some adjusting,” she said. “We tried not to be too harsh about it. The big issue about health is so paramount to me that I don't think we should permit smoking.” At his desk in the Oval Office, the president was often encountered with an unlit cigar in his mouth.

 

P
ERHAPS NO PERSON
aside from the Clintons knows as much about their political designs, development, ideals, and methodology—together and singly—in the years between 1978 and 1996 as Dick Morris. Only Betsey Wright and Diane Blair had the proximity to be as knowledgeable about the gubernatorial years, with their advantage of friendship and total trust. (Vince Foster, always discreet, was extraordinarily close to Hillary but less so to Bill.) Morris, a firsthand witness through the first three and a half White House years, is brilliant, insightful, prejudiced, megalomaniacal, disloyal, as narcissistic as the president he served, and a Clinton-hating convert of the first order by virtue of his being left no choice than to resign or be fired by Bill and Hillary during the 1996 Democratic convention upon publication of a tabloid report of his affair with a prostitute. His testimony must be judged through the filter of his animus. But he is also a Clinton-hater with a difference: Morris knew both Clintons intimately, and the origin of his bias is not ideological or partisan, though, after his firing, his politics moved far rightward in keeping with his new life as a Fox commentator and Murdoch columnist.

His portrait of the Clintons, drawn meticulously with many shades of light and dark, took form in a series of interviews in the fall of 1999, before he had invented a career for himself as a Clinton-basher. After Hillary's election to the Senate (he didn't think she would run), Morris would publish furlongs of newspaper columns and four books about the Clintons and Hillary in particular, with conclusions and assertions often at odds with his interviews of 1999, when his opinions were far less jaundiced.

Morris began by talking of her “aggression,” her satisfaction in “taking the fight to the enemy,” and her inability to see her own role in harming others (“When she does worry about the payload of the missile, it's kind of like somebody else is delivering it”).

Yet Morris quickly made it clear she could manifest the opposite side as well: “Unlike him she's a normal human being, with emotions. She is capable of love and affection and caring and compassion and warmth and empathy in a way that he is simply not. When he's with other people, he absorbs their emotion and their energy, and gives it back to them with a tremendous radiance that
passes for emotion.
It's nothing phony, it's heartfelt at the moment, but it's
your
feeling coming back to you. When he's alone, he's incapable really of feeling much of anything. He's an emotional albino.”

“Her spiritual mysticism,” in Morris's view, is an essential characteristic: “She doesn't feel all the bumps in the road because she does have a faith…. It's not ‘Let Go, Let God,' because she tries to manipulate the outcome. But I think that she has a peace with herself over the outcome…that in times of threats that loom in her life, or have loomed and still loom, they are such that if she took all of them very seriously she'd be a wreck. I think that there's a kind of detachment that probably has a spiritual sense.”

Surprisingly, Morris almost demeaned her intellect. He called it ordinary. Many colleagues of the Clintons had concluded that Hillary was not as intrinsically bright as her husband (whom they regarded as off the charts). Her intelligence was of a different, more practical order, and few would compare her intellectual curiosity or breadth of knowledge to Bill's.

“He works in a different way than Hillary,” said another of the Clintons' most important aides. “Because his is a more creative intelligence. He can take in the world, and put it together in new ways. She takes in the world, and can at times make good decisions, and can see the fault lines and where the fights are. But she can't necessarily create something new out of it, or create a solution where one doesn't necessarily exist, or have the patience to let the decision present itself. She's much more apt to, when she hits a wall, bang her head into it. He'll figure out a way to get around it or to jump over it.”

“She's not a creative thinker,” Morris said. “She's not a heavily substantive person. She's not a heavy-duty intellectual. He's much brighter than she is. She's bright, but she's not
very
bright. She doesn't spend her time like he does worrying about every problem facing the world, and trying to come up with a solution. She's a lawyer…. She has a certaingenre of intelligence, which is that of a very effective advocate.”

He said Bill's intelligence was of a completely different order: “He's always talking about books that he either just read or something he read in college. And he'll talk about Thomas Aquinas in the conversation. He'll talk about Erasmus. And he'll talk about Paul Kennedy. Or he'll talk about the latest op-ed piece by E. J. Dionne. It will be a mélange, a mosaic…. With her, there are never footprints of anything she's read beyond immediate preparation for her work.”

Others find her bookish. Morris preferred the term “substantive.” Morris said, “She is not supple, flexible, or terribly skillful politically. She's brittle, rigid, the fragility of iron that cracks when you drop it as opposed to steel, which doesn't.” This might reasonably apply to the first few years of the Clinton presidency, but by the end of the second term, she seemed to have learned some important lessons. And certainly, since running for the Senate, she has readily demonstrated a sophisticated political acumen.

In 1999, Morris said she had been “playing the part of Eleanor Roosevelt. There's a conscious, overt mimicry that's going on. It's Eleanor being the dominant person—but others, too. She's almost more like Reagan in the sense that she's sort of playing…the role of activist and socially involved, socially conscious, hard-fighting, aggressive, strong first lady played by Hillary Rodham Clinton. It's a role that she consciously adopted and consciously pursued.”

Like Nixon, said Morris, “she definitely has a streak of ruthlessness and paranoia in her political style, in her personal style. She has enemies. She has an Enemies List. She has people who she talks to, and people she does not talk to. When she's mad at you she doesn't talk to you for months and months and months. She has a very long shit list. And, she believes always in taking the fight to the other side. In every campaign strategy meeting I've ever been in with her, she always wants to run negative ads. She always wants to go on the attack.”

The efforts “to savage women who have been alleged to have had sex with Clinton, or subsequently said that they had sex with Clinton,” always originated with Hillary, Morris said. (If so, she had a handmaiden in Betsey Wright.) “In a real sense she is his human face, not just his advocate…. She's a real person. I think the big frustration of their marriage is that she's married to the most elusive, withholding, anal-retentive man you can imagine. He uses denial of affection as his method of getting people to do what he wants them to do—the ones he's close to—rather than to praise or give affection. It's the strangers he showers everything on…. If he feels that his relationship with you is set, there's nothing to lose…. As he does with her.

“I believe that it's a relationship in which she is…addicted to him. And she adores him. She's the best thing that ever happened to him. But he's very elusive and very remote. And when he requires rescue she gets more attention, more affection, more love, more of the caring that I believe she craves from him, and also more power than she otherwise would get.”

Morris's timeline of the power shifts in the Clinton marriage is compelling. “In terms of getting more power, Hillary's best year at the White House was 1998,” the year of Lewinsky, he asserted. “Her next best year in [power terms] in the White House was 1993, after Gennifer Flowers…. I believe that it's a relationship based on mutual enabling. Because she likes what happens when she rescues him…. I think to the extent that he's capable of loving anybody, he loves her. But it's a very limited capability in the first place. I think that he sometimes resents her and shakes under her domination. Sometimes he welcomes her and needs her, because he requires her rescuing. And, other times he doesn't think a whole lot about her at all….

“I think if she left him it would be a big blow to him, not in the sense that he'd miss her, but in the sense that he would find unacceptable the image of himself that he'd see in the mirror: the man that Hillary left. But he'd get over it, and he would go on.”