A Woman in Charge (56 page)

The next night, after the two ate a lamb dinner at McLarty's home, the president called around midnight. “Bill Clinton can be highly persuasive one-on-one, and over the next thirty minutes, he made a convincing appeal,” Gergen recalled. “How deep a hole he was in. How my experience and judgment could help him out. How I could serve as a bridge to the press, to Republicans, and to people I respected in Washington. How much it mattered to the country. Would I please consider it?”

The position was billed as counsel to the president, which would put Gergen in the inner circle with Hillary, Al Gore, and McLarty. Gergen understood the most important dynamic of the Clinton presidency, so before agreeing to sign on, he wanted to meet with the first lady. He wanted to know if she was the hard-core liberal pulling her husband to the left that the press was painting her as.

“I didn't want to be there for decoration. So I had to talk to her. I also had to know this wasn't being done against her will.”

Gergen met Hillary on the third floor of the residence while they waited for Bill to return to the White House from a speech in Philadelphia. Hillary was already sold on Gergen, whom she knew fairly well from several Renaissance Weekends. She started in right away about why she thought Gergen was the right choice to help the Clintons. The staff had never established a satisfactory daily routine to make the White House run smoothly. The president was not conveying a single, coherent message, and he didn't have any Washington veterans on staff to help him avoid amateurish mistakes. “She was very positive,” Gergen said. “She said, ‘You've got to help us,' and you know, ‘We really need somebody to help [us] understand Washington.'” Gergen was blunt.
Why did she hate the press so much? Why hadn't she made an effort to court the Washington elite?
Hillary sidestepped. The press had been brutal, she said, but she genuinely wanted to improve the relationship. Sure, she would reopen the press corridor if he thought it would help. And she was planning social events—dinners to court the Washington establishment and a barbecue for the press. Gergen was just as concerned with Hillary's ideology. “If he's asking me to come in and help him get back to the center, I don't want to get in a fight with you about getting back to the center,” Gergen said to her. “I mean, I've got to know where you're coming from. And she said, ‘No, you have to understand I'm much more traditional,' going back to the Goldwater Girl stuff, and you know…‘I want traditional values, and I really think we can do it in a bipartisan way,' and so forth and so on. She gave me all the stuff that is very reassuring about why someone of my background and interests would feel comfortable.”

The internal mess Gergen found when he arrived was greater than he had anticipated. It had been caused to some degree by parallel power structures that had been allowed to form in the White House. “In the new world, the first lady and the vice president maintained sizable staffs of their own whose primary loyalty ran to them, not to the president,” Gergen said. Gergen and his deputy were “tagged as ‘Bill people' when we arrived and everyone assumed he was our liege, which he was, in effect. But we soon found there were ‘Hillary people' and ‘Gore people' who were less interested in the president than in the person they served. Some crossed barriers. The president, for example, had faith in the political judgment of Maggie Williams…and Maggie managed to serve both principals well. But she was a rarity.”

Hillary's criticism of Bill's staff could be caustic, and she made no secret of her view that the staff of the first lady was better and more efficient. “One felt that even though people were on the White House staff, some belonged to her and some belonged to him in their first loyalty,” Gergen said.

Dick Morris said Hillary thought Bill's staff members were too independent: “She'd say, ‘That staff in the White House. They're so screwed up. They just talk to each other. They don't talk to anybody else. They don't care what I think. They don't care what Bill thinks. They just go ahead and do things. And they screw it up every time.'” Said Roy Neel, the vice president's majordomo, “She was very frustrated in having senior staff have a kind of misplaced deference to her, and I think she found it insulting that they wouldn't [engage] with her. It was kind of patronizing, and I think there were people who were frightened of her as well…unclear how they were supposed to relate to her.”

Hillaryland had quickly morphed from an offhand remark in the campaign to a full-blown culture in which Hillary surrounded herself with people who were loyal to her cause and would do her bidding. When the stress of the office got to be too much for the first lady, Hillaryland became a place of comfort that she might not otherwise have had. It was a protective recovery zone. In
Living History
she wrote about their “own little subculture.” She said leaks came from the president's people, not hers, who were discreet and loyal. She spoke of their “camaraderie.”

“She probably has the least amount of staff turnover and the most loyal staff of anybody in Washington,” said James Carville. But the loyalty, some believed, could be blind, and came at a price. A senior aide to the president said the only people Hillary could get close to her on the staff were “Kool-Aid drinkers.” In
Talk
magazine, Hillary's deputy chief of staff, Melanne Verveer, had asserted that the staff didn't hesitate to stand up to Hillary. But others said that meant nothing: the only criticism of their boss had to do with trivial things. “They think because they can say to her, ‘Oh my God, that [outfit] looks ridiculous,' that they have a really honest relationship with her. But I'll tell you one thing. There's not one of them that, when she comes off of an interview, they say, ‘You know, Mrs. Clinton, you fucked up,' or ‘Mrs. Clinton, I mean, what were you thinking?' It doesn't happen,” said the presidential aide.

Tinkering with the levers and personnel changes, however, were just that: tinkering. In the last year of the Clinton presidency, a member of the White House legal team, Mark Fabiani, succinctly and devastatingly explained many of the difficulties of the early days of the administration: “Based on everything that anybody ever found out about that period, she was the one that was directing. During the campaign, they went out and got Jim Lyons, the lawyer in Denver, to write the so-called Lyons Report to justify their investment in Whitewater. She was the general. She said, ‘You know, these people are coming after us. Here's what we're going to do.' And no one ever disputed that. When the
New York Times
threatened to run a front-page story saying that she lied about having released all the Whitewater records, there wasn't even a thought about saying, ‘Well, she wasn't in charge of releasing the records.' Because she was in charge of it. She was the one that made the decision. And as far as I can tell it was that way from then on….

“But it was always very ad hoc. It would be event-driven: scramble, marshal what people you could drag together. Drag John Podesta in. Drag Susan Thomases in. You know, get people in a room. Decide what to do and then, you sort of handle it as part of your other duties. Which never really worked for anybody. The Travel Office was a very similar thing…. No matter what you believe about what she said or didn't say, she was at the center of that whole effort to review the Travel Office. People updated her about it. People talked to her about it. And, you know, she's in the middle of these things, because she wants to be in the middle of these things. And she's concerned about this stuff.

“When there was an [internal] investigation of the Travel Office, she was not under oath. But the counsel's office basically wrote an answer that purported to be her. ‘Mrs. Clinton does not believe…Mrs. Clinton did not do this, or that…Mrs. Clinton did not instigate….'

“Basically, the response was to say, she did not order the firing of these people and wasn't involved in it. And, again, it's the type of situation where the aftermath is much worse than the original action.

“And there was a pattern…. I mean it happened every time. It happened with Whitewater in '92. It happened with the Travel Office. It happened when Foster killed himself. You know, she was the one who got people together and figured out, you know, ‘How are we going to handle this? How are we going to deal with it?'”

 

F
OR THE LAST MONTH
of Vince Foster's life, Hillary spoke with him at most once—and then for hardly a second. Foster's position in the White House was unique. He was deputy counsel to the president, technically the deputy to Bernard Nussbaum, but his knowledge of what was going on in the White House, upstairs and downstairs, was far greater than Nussbaum's owing to his lifelong friendship with the president and, even more important, his relationship with Hillary. In fact, his overriding knowledge of the intricacies of White House business, private and public, exceeded that of the chief of staff, McLarty, or anyone else in the administration.

No one has ever presented convincing evidence that Vince and Hillary were lovers. But they had been, in some ways, closer than lovers, absent the rancor and messy business that usually attends a love affair. By all accounts, Hillary was totally unguarded in his presence, and, until they got to Washington, he in hers, at least as far as his restrained self would permit.

Perhaps even more than Bill Clinton, Vince understood Hillary's good intentions in everything he had ever seen her do. And because he knew her so well, he understood her gray areas, the shadings, complexions, and context that would never be nearly so apparent to someone else.

In four months in Washington, Foster had come to understand the harshness of the place. Unfortunately, he found little to enjoy, not even the physical beauty of the city. The political combat that had come to define the capital and demean the practice of governance was something far removed from anything he'd observed in Arkansas, or from his faraway view of Washington from Little Rock. He had been completely unprepared for the sheer brutality of the place, and he was out of his league.

A first-rate litigator, a wise counselor, a gentle soul, his rapid immersion into the Washington cauldron, feet first, was far different than that experienced by, say, a congressman, who gradually got used to the place without the whole country watching his every move.

Foster came to Washington to personally serve the president and the first lady; by extension, he was there to help them serve the country. His interests were theirs. Let Bernie Nussbaum worry about the institutional sanctity of the White House (Nussbaum actually spent little time doing so, and saw himself as a zealous, pugnacious defender of this president and his presidency).

Only Betsey Wright had ever had as clear a view of what transpired between Bill and Hillary in public and private, and her view was from the perspective of the governor's office; her interaction with Hillary was based on the mutual interest they shared in keeping Bill functioning at his best. Vince's perspective was almost exactly the opposite of Betsey's: though he had first known Bill when they were children in Hope, he had become a presence in his life again only after Hillary came to work at the Rose Law Firm in 1976. He knew more about Bill from Hillary than from Bill. Vince had become a shoulder for her to lean on. Though insouciance was not the first word that many acquaintances would use to describe Hillary, Vince saw that in her and loved it. He shared a side of himself with her as she shared a piece of her life that she could not with Bill. There was nothing threatening to Bill about their closeness, nothing illicit, and he, too, had great appreciation for Vince's qualities of discretion, wisdom, legal skill, and—something Bill often lacked—decorum.

Foster was particularly stressed about the internal investigation of the Travel Office firings. He had brought Bill Kennedy in to work on the audit and FBI investigation, and now he felt responsible. He told Webb Hubbell he was thinking of hiring a lawyer, though Hubbell didn't know if that was for Foster or his deputy. Foster was also worried that there would be hearings on Capitol Hill, and that he would be part of the investigation. The stress was taking a physical toll on him. His face became drawn and gray, and he appeared perpetually exhausted. His wife and children had recently arrived to take up residence. “At the time, we laughed about the fact that Bruce, Vince, and I were all losing weight,” Hubbell recalled. “We called it being on the Stress Diet.”

Particularly grating to Foster was the series of destructive editorials in
The Wall Street Journal
criticizing the president's aides. When one day the newspaper asked him for a photograph of himself, he stalled because he knew the
Journal
's intentions weren't good and because he wanted no part of the political spotlight. Lawyers should do their work in private, he told a friend.

Foster eventually sent in his headshot, but on June 17, the paper printed a column entitled “Who Is Vince Foster?” with a large question mark where the photo normally would have gone. The editorial argued that the Clinton White House tended toward “carelessness about following the law,” and pointed to the example of Foster's refusal to provide the newspaper with a photograph of himself, the
Journal
's Freedom of Information Act request to obtain one, and how Foster and the White House had not responded within a ten-day period as law required. “No doubt Mr. Foster and company consider us mischievous (at best),” the
Journal
's editors wrote. “Does the law mean one thing for critics and another for friends? Will we, in the end, have to go to court to get a reply, or will even that work? Does it take a $50,000-a-day fine to get this mule's attention?”

On June 24, another
Journal
column, “Vincent Foster's Victory,” attacked Foster's partially successful appeal defending the procedures of Hillary's health care task force, in the physicians and surgeons lawsuit. “We suspect that Vincent Foster and Ollie North might hit it off,” the editors wrote.