A Woman in Charge (51 page)

On this day, Hillary appeared intent on articulating for herself, her husband, and their presidency an overarching, benevolent, even deistic governmental philosophy that embraced both traditional notions of family and individual responsibility, as well as belief in compassionate government programs to help those less able to help themselves. The Clinton presidency would be the calm spiritual harbor in the ugly political storm. By choosing her husband as president of the United States, the electorate had shown it was intent on “remolding society.” It had now embarked on fundamental change, including the recognition of a proper spiritual realm in government policy; and the faithful at last had a path to follow. To Lee Atwater's question, she responded:

“Who will lead us out of this spiritual vacuum? The answer is, All of us. Because remolding society does not depend on just changing government, on just reinventing our institutions to be more in tune with present realities. It requires each of us to play our part in redefining what our lives are and what they should be…seizing the opportunities that you are given, and of making the very best choices you can. That is what this administration, this President, and those of us who are hoping for these changes are attempting to do.” It sounded a little like a presidential partnership with God.

A few weeks earlier, Hillary had been visited in the White House by Michael Lerner, the editor and publisher of
Tikkun,
a bimonthly secular Jewish journal that was an amalgam of liberal cultural and political commentary, post-Marxist dialectic, Talmudic principle, and New Age jargon.

In Hillary's office, as he had in his magazine, Lerner had propounded his Politics of Meaning, a vision of spiritually infused public life that very much fit Hillary's perception of the raison d'être of government service. Lerner's underlying assumption held that government had satisfactorily addressed the basic question of political rights, if not the economic needs, of the people; “but for the majority of Americans, there's another set of needs, totally ignored: The need to be part of an ethically based spiritual community that links us to a higher purpose. Many of us are involved in social change movements like the women's movement, the environmental movement, the movement for economic justice, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, the labor movement,” Lerner had written. “And yet, we believe that these movements have tended to underplay or even deny a very important dimension of human life—the spiritual dimension.”

In Austin, Hillary borrowed from her discussion with Lerner, asserting that “We are, I think, in a crisis of meaning. Why is it in a country as economically wealthy as we are…there is this undercurrent of discontent—this sense that somehow economic growth and prosperity, political democracy and freedom are not enough? That we lack, at some core level, meaning in our individual lives and meaning collectively—that sense that our lives are part of some greater effort, that we are connected to one another, that community means that we have a place where we belong no matter who we are?”

Her father's dying was obviously weighing on her, and when she did briefly discuss the need to “provide decent, affordable health care to every American” the words sounded almost tortured. “We have to ask hard questions about every aspect of our health care system. Why do doctors do what they do? Why are nurses not permitted to do more than they do? Why are patients put in the position they're in? When does life start; when does life end? Who makes those decisions?…[These] are issues that we have to summon up what we believe is morally and ethically and spiritually correct and do the best we can with God's guidance.

“How do we create a system that gets rid of the micro-management, the regulation and the bureaucracy, and substitutes instead human caring, concern and love? And that is our real challenge in redesigning a health care system.”

By the end of her sermon, Hillary seemed to be lapsing back into the same kind of banal generalities (“We must make change our friend, not our enemy”—the same words that her husband had used in his peroration at Camp David, just before introducing her) that had punctuated her Wellesley commencement remarks. Her answer to most of what ailed the nation—indeed humanity—might be construed as a spiritual malaise that had settled over the planet, and enervated its elites from journalists to politicians.

“What do our governmental institutions mean? What does it mean to be educated? What does it mean to be a journalist? What does it mean in today's world to pursue not only vocations, to be part of institutions, but to be human? And, certainly, coming off the last year when the ethos of selfishness and greed were given places of honor never before accorded, it is certainly timely to ask ourselves these questions.”

Such generalities, both in her remarks at Austin and in Michael Lerner's annunciations in
Tikkun,
led
The New Republic
magazine to comment, “It is good to hear the First Lady is also pro-meaning, but before we sign on, one question:

“What on earth are these people talking about?”

The end of her sermon, about the necessity to reject cynicism, was especially striking for a woman who, only weeks earlier, had sent her minions from the Camp David mountaintop down to the White House swamp to write a story about “villains” and, in her next major appearance after Austin, would advise the Senate Democrats that the time had come to “demonize” those who would slow down the health care train for some important roadwork. “To fill that spiritual vacuum that Lee Atwater talked about,” she said in Austin, would require “most profoundly and importantly…millions and millions of changes that take place on the individual level as people reject cynicism…as they truly begin to try to see other people as they wish to be seen and to treat them as they wish to be treated.”

O
NLY HOURS BEFORE
her father died, Hillary returned to Washington from Little Rock. She had been at his bedside there, along with Chelsea, for two weeks as the family awaited his death.

Upon her return, Hillary found the White House in disarray. She had always been the one person able to keep her husband focused, so her short absence was noticeable. She blamed Bill's staff for making bad judgment calls, for not planning and executing well enough. The health care initiative was in trouble. She was frustrated, sad, and drained.

To make matters worse, Hillary learned that while she had been tending to her father on his deathbed Bill had taken Barbra Streisand—who had gone to the White House to give the president a preview of her new album—and his mother to the annual Gridiron Club dinner (a Washington institution at which the Washington press corps salutes itself and the president). Streisand had boasted about sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom. Soon after, Hillary reportedly ordered Streisand banned from the White House (on the ground that, being unmarried, it would be unseemly for her and her then-fiancé to stay together in the presidential mansion). Members of the press accompanying Clinton on his jog the following morning noticed that he had a deep scratch along his jaw. Dee Dee Myers explained to reporters that Clinton had cut himself shaving. But she, like many of the reporters, came to believe the wound had been inflicted by Hillary in her anger over the Streisand invitation at a time when her father was dying.

Two days later, the president eulogized his “tough and gruff” father-in-law in a simple funeral service at the Scranton church where Hillary, her father, and her brothers had been baptized. Hillary's relationship with her father had been rocky and tense at times, but she felt a heavy weight of grief at his loss. Bill recalled so many years before when Hugh drove to Arkansas to help in that first campaign in 1974. “He never told a living soul I was in love with his daughter, just went up to people and said, ‘I know you're a Republican and so am I. I think Democrats are just one step short of communism, but this kid's all right.'”

As the church bells pealed, naval pallbearers had carried the coffin, draped in an American flag, into the brick-and-stone church. Looking toward his wife and the Rodham family in the front pew, Clinton said, “Lord, they loved to argue. Each one tried to rewrite history to put the proper spin on it. It was a wonderful preparation for politics.”

 

A
T THE END
of the month, on the weekend of April 23–25, Bill and Hillary attended a political retreat for Senate Democrats at the Kingsmill Conference Center in Williamsburg, Virginia, that was closed to the press. Hillary updated those in attendance about the progress of the health care reform task force and the upcoming reform bill.

Hillary's Golden Rule could be a sometime thing. Her remarks now were received with disgust and distrust by two senators in particular, Bill Bradley and Pat Moynihan, who were among the most thoughtful and highly regarded men in Congress and who should have been natural allies of the Clintons. Instead, they became deeply alienated from both. Bradley and Moynihan later said they were flabbergasted at Hillary's words and attitude that afternoon, but each came to believe that the incident was indicative of something more revealing about her character.

Hillary understood—has always understood—that words count, and on this occasion she was asked by Bradley whether the Clintons' failure to meet their promise of submitting health care legislation to Congress in one hundred days—by then only a few days ahead—would make it more difficult to win passage as the administration's plan became competitive with other legislative goals on the calendar. Perhaps some substantive changes might be required in the interest of realism, Bradley suggested.

No, Hillary responded icily, there would be no changes because delay or not, the White House would “demonize” members of Congress and the medical establishment who would use the interim to alter the administration's plan or otherwise stand in its way.

“That was it for me in terms of Hillary Clinton,” Bradley said many years later. “You don't tell members of the Senate you are going to demonize them. It was obviously so basic to who she is. The arrogance. The assumption that people with questions are enemies. The disdain. The hypocrisy.”

Lawrence O'Donnell explained the depth of Moynihan's disappointment with the woman who would eventually succeed him in the Senate. The senator “didn't hold grudges, didn't personalize such matters,” said O'Donnell. “But the ‘demonizing' colored his perception of Hillary, and how she operated, for the rest of his life.”

 

A
PRIL WAS
a particularly difficult month. Hillary had to grieve her father's death while trying to pick up the pieces of health care reform, something she believed would be the most important aspect of her husband's presidency and her legacy. She was angry that other things were taking precedence over her portfolio.

Bill and Hillary recognized they had not been able to make progress on nearly as many things as fast as they had hoped. To mitigate some of the criticism the administration was expecting, Bill held a press conference on April 23, a week shy of the first hundred days. “In this first hundred days we have already fundamentally changed the direction of an American government,” he said. It was a bold statement for a president who couldn't deliver a health care plan within the timeframe he had promised, and whose basic economic stimulus package—the first element of his larger fiscal plan—had failed to pass in the Senate.

On April 30, every member of the White House staff upstairs and downstairs was given a long-stemmed pink rose, and a notecard. It read: “I want to thank you for all the work you've done since the inauguration. We have an historic opportunity to make great things happen in our nation. Thanks for being part of the first 100 days.” Each was signed, “Bill” and “Hillary.”

13

The Cruel Season

[T]o achieve our overall goals for the economy, we had to sacrifice some specific promises.

—Living History

H
ILLARY'S ANGER
at her husband's aides, the Democrats in Congress, and the Republican opposition was heightened by the toxic culture of Washington itself, manifested, as she saw it, in the unchecked power of the press, and personified by a permanent political and social elite more covetous of its personal prerogatives and perks than zealous of the commonweal.

She had arrived in January displaying supreme self-confidence. No first lady had come to the White House with as much substantive experience in government and politics. Yet, somehow, this bright, orderly, and supposedly most logical and disciplined of women failed either to comprehend or appreciate the degree to which the town's political, social, and media cultures were inextricably linked, and required careful tending.

There were Freudian, Machiavellian, even Darwinian theories about her self-destructive disdain for the ways and means of Washington (prior to her election to the U.S. Senate), and her inability to convert an inbred, parochial, local culture to her own uses—as she had in Arkansas, a place that would seem at first glance far less amenable to her charms than the nation's capital. It was all the more confounding because she was now positioned to “do all the good you can” as perhaps no woman in American history before her.

But something essential had changed since the Clintons had left Little Rock. In Arkansas, her hand had always been firmly on the wheel with his, and on the infrequent occasions when their enterprise had been forced to take an unexpected sharp turn, they were accustomed to steering it together. The exception had been after his decision not to seek the presidency in 1988, when his recklessness had almost destroyed any chance of fulfilling their dreams.

In their first months in the White House, a new and unfamiliar political dynamic was in play, owing largely to the hard economic realities they faced. Bill had surrounded himself with a coterie of strangers to deal with the economy, actuaries, Wall Street bond traders, and Washington insiders (however distinguished) whose instincts were almost exactly the opposite of Hillary's. Lloyd Bentsen seemed to have cast a spell over him. Worse, from her point of view, they all seemed to be steering Bill in the wrong direction, pulling against her, oblivious to her guidance and ignoring her navigational skill, heedless of what she and Bill stood for or how he had successfully operated in the past.

In Arkansas, almost no major policy decisions had been made in contravention of Hillary's views, and if they were, she had been present at the creation. Betsey Wright had an inviolate rule: that Hillary, Bill, and Dick Morris, convened by Wright, were always fully involved in consequential discussions and decisions. Since the Clintons had come to Washington, Hillary had to fight both for time on the president's calendar to deal with health care and, incredibly, given their history, for dominant influence over policy and process. The situation increasingly exasperated her, diminished her stature inside the administration, and chipped away at her mystique. Whatever indignities she may have suffered because of her husband's sexual adventuring, she had never before experienced a diminution of her primacy in policy matters.

Bill now seemed to be occasionally avoiding or ignoring her advice, acquiescing even to her exclusion from some meetings that had significant implications for her health care plans. “You keep telling us we have to put off these meetings [to discuss health care] because it's going to hurt the economic plan,” she complained to her husband and his advisers en masse. Others implied in her stead—since it was not the kind of thing she would say—that the situation was
humiliating
to her. He had appointed her to develop the signature policy initiative of the Clinton presidency, yet he and she seemed at times to be operating at cross-purposes to achieve it.

“You could see her feeling hemmed in,” said a senior aide to the president. She believed the administration should ride health care as its lead vehicle, clearing the way for other achievements and reelection in 1996. “Her attitude was, The same people who are making us give up our dreams on the economy are trying to do it to health care, too.”

In Little Rock during the transition, she had put in place, with Bill's approval, a structure to ensure her oversight of all domestic policy. She and Susan Thomases had staffed the White House so that her influence and, if necessary, intervention would almost always prevail. Maggie Williams attended the daily meeting of senior presidential aides chaired by Mack McLarty, whom Hillary had personally favored to keep the trains rolling smoothly. The cabinet and the president's economic advisers had been vetted personally by Hillary, to ensure Bill's comfort and hers, and guard against surprises. She had located her own office in the West Wing, where little of consequence was likely to escape her attention, and others could not fail to notice her big foot. She had intended and expected that the clear goals and priorities she and Bill had evolved over a lifetime would guide administration policy. Those goals were methodically catalogued in a presidential campaign platform she had helped draft, and that hadn't been meant to be discarded the minute the new president was inaugurated, as was the custom.

Fundamental economic decisions, in her expectation, were to be driven by the Clintons' larger goals, not vice versa. But the enormity of the budget deficit had, of course, caught everyone by surprise, and had utterly upset the priorities and planned methodology of governance in the first hundred days, and from there forward. The new economic realities gave the economic advisers, notably the deficit hawks, a sovereignty in social policy that had never been intended—certainly not by Hillary.

By June, she believed
their
agenda was on the verge of overpowering basic principles and programs she and Bill stood for. Bentsen, Rubin, Shalala, Panetta, and Rivlin kept chipping away at her health care design before she could even see the whole picture in sufficient detail herself.

The orthodox litany of the hawks pierced her ears and was unceasing: “It won't be respected by the markets.” “Wall Street won't accept Big Government.” “We must keep down costs.” “If there are price controls, there will be a negative reaction by the markets.” Sometimes Bill seemed to follow his economic aides like a dog on a leash, other times he'd strain and bark and lash out, but in the end he—and, increasingly, she and her health care mission—was restrained by their superior strength. Hillary felt she was losing the fight for the soul of the Clinton presidency.

Bentsen, especially, felt Hillary approached her work with a holier-than-thou attitude that left little room for criticism of any kind. She appeared at times to be uncharacteristically bewildered, driven too often by frustration and increasingly by wrath, instead of her usual methodical ways. Through the summer, the conflict between Hillary and the economic advisers expanded and became both superheated and personalized. Bentsen and his deputies believed Hillary was extracting her own directives about health care in private from the president, and that further advice wasn't welcome. In fact, “we did give the right kind of advice,” Shalala insisted later. “She just didn't take it. The first month, Alice Rivlin gave the president an idea: simply go to the Hill with a set of policy ideas, and then draft the legislation with the Hill, so [members of Congress] would be co-opted. In the end, we co-opted no one.”

The advisers worried that Hillary's plan, as developing, was bloated with overregulation, too ambitious in concept, and too difficult to maneuver politically. Part of the problem was that they could not get a handle on what it was she and Magaziner were proposing exactly, because they both spoke in generalities and promised forthcoming details that rarely materialized with meaningful specificity. To fully realize the “grandiose” (as some of them called it behind her back) kind of reforms Hillary was envisioning might take a decade or longer. It was difficult to get Hillary to focus on the substantive aspects of decisions being made that mutually affected health care and the overall economic plan. “It was hard to get her attention on thinking through the implications of the decisions or anything else,” Shalala recalled. “But that was my experience with Hillary. She was doing twelve things at once, especially after her father's death and the disarray in the White House in her absence.”

Concerned that the president's economic advisers weren't included enough in the health care reform process, Rubin suggested in May that two teams debate how extensive the proposal should be. More than thirty top advisers gathered with Hillary and Bill in the Roosevelt Room to hear the arguments in behalf of two approaches: The first was less costly but essentially covered only catastrophic or serious health problems. The second was much more comprehensive, Bill and Hillary's preferred plan according to those who observed their reactions that day. But, inexplicably, the health care task force hadn't come up with hard numbers about the actual savings over the existing system the plan would produce. The stakes of that were enormous: if the promised savings did not materialize, Clinton's advisers feared he'd have to raise taxes radically. Some of the people in the room were even worried that the plan might cause enough small businesses to go bankrupt and trigger a recession. In private, many members of the economic team were terrified by how Hillary was going about health care reform. At the debate, however, officials who were already wary of criticizing the first lady in front of the president were loath to poke holes in her plan in front of a group. Instead, they pronounced the more comprehensive plan commendable but added phrases like “if the numbers work out” or “so long as it doesn't divert resources from other things we want to do.”

At the close of the three-hour meeting, Hillary warned those present not to talk to the press. Still, accounts reached the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
in a matter of days, with headlines declaring a dispute between Hillary and Bill's economic advisers. The first lady was enraged, and she took her frustrations out on her husband. “Are these people part of the administration or not?” she demanded. “What side are they on? These guys are going to derail you.” The American people hadn't put him in office to reduce the deficit, she snapped. “You didn't get elected to do Wall Street economics.” Worried about future leaks, Bill decided that health care meetings would no longer be so inclusive.

 

B
ILL
C
LINTON,
no matter how fiercely embattled or frustrated in those first six months of his presidency, woke up every day thrilled and enthusiastic about the task ahead. He'd had his sights set on this job since he was a teenager. “I love this stuff,” he often said. An optimist by nature, he had confidence in his vision and his ability to move past the obstacles. His anger and ill-humor in those early months rarely lasted long. The pattern had been established many years before: he blew up, used and sometimes abused people around him who became accustomed to his outbursts (though he seemed oblivious to his own excess), but he was invariably invigorated by the challenges. “The difference between their temperaments is very simple as far as I'm concerned,” said Bob Boorstin, Hillary's deputy for press and communications on the health care task force. “He gets angry, and he gets over it. She gets angry, and she remembers it forever.”

A White House aide who saw Hillary almost daily observed, “Some mornings she would wake up pissed off, and some mornings it would be okay. Sometimes it would be a glorious day. She has the capacity for epiphanous, spiritual awakenings.” Unfortunately, those days on which the spiritual equation was wrong-sided could be brutal for others. “The person on the receiving end never gets over it,” her longtime aide and family retainer Carolyn Huber had observed of Hillary's ire in the last year Bill served as governor.

One of the most senior White House officials, who was often at her (and her husband's) side during the many critical events of the 1992 presidential campaign and the White House years, raised in a conversation toward the end of the Clinton presidency the question of whether Hillary had ever been by nature a genuinely happy or even contented person. This deputy maintained that perhaps the most essential thing to understand about Hillary was that (from what he had learned and observed) she must have been an unhappy person for most of her adult life. And a very angry one at that, in his view, often in a state of agitated discontent in the years he worked with her, sometimes icy cold and embittered, though obviously capable of fun and laughter and warm friendship (though rarely of irony). Not everyone agreed, especially in Hillaryland. And it's important to note that much of the anger and unhappiness seemed to dissipate following her election to the Senate. Thereafter, for the first time since her wedding day, she began to eclipse and succeed in the public consciousness—and Democratic Party—the dominating presence of her husband. It was her turn, and that might have liberated her.

The deputy believed that Hillary's deepest anger was toward her husband, perhaps the source of most of it, unless it came from her childhood and had been aggravated by Bill and the compromises she'd allowed herself to make in their marriage. But the deputy was also aware of the enormous strength of the bond the Clintons had forged, their own obvious belief (most of the time) in the love between them, their shared commitment to certain important values and ideals, to Chelsea, and, within weeks of their arrival in Washington, their growing sense that they couldn't catch a break.

One friend who knew the Clintons quite well thought they were caged in a marriage that they both deeply resented; the ultimate prize, the presidency, was so alluring, however, that it was worth suffering. It might even be redeeming. Such an observation was not terribly original, but was dismissed by most of their close acquaintances.