A Woman in Charge (65 page)

On August 5, the panel announced that Kenneth Starr, a former U.S. Court of Appeals judge who left the bench to become U.S. solicitor general in the Bush administration, would replace Fiske. “It is not our intent to impugn the integrity of the attorney general's appointee but rather to reflect the intent of the act that the actor [
sic
] be protected against perceptions of conflict,” the judges wrote in a four-page order. Bill and Hillary were distraught. Others in the White House were outraged. It would likely mean months and months more of prying into their private lives. Clinton was suspicious of Starr immediately; he wondered why the Democrats hadn't fought off the appointment. Hadn't anybody looked at his record? There had hardly been a peep.

A strategy meeting was convened in Panetta's office. Cutler said Starr's reputation was not that of an ideological jurist—he had written a landmark libel decision in favor of the
Washington Post
and freedom of the press, and he had been a reasonably decent solicitor general in the Bush administration. Yes, he was a staunch conservative, a Republican, but that didn't make him less respectful of the legal precepts of fairness. Meanwhile, Hillary despaired, especially when Cutler confirmed that Starr would probably reexamine everything Fiske had done in his investigation, including Vince's work and suicide, and the disposition of the files in his office. She and James Carville favored a campaign to attack the nomination of Starr as partisan and unjudicial, then to get Starr to refuse the position if sufficient wrath could be aroused among Democrats in Congress and even in the press. Bill thought they were right, but he worried that a campaign obviously inspired by the White House could, as Cutler warned, backfire if Starr took the job and came after them. Kendall was horrified at the prospects of a Starr appointment.

Perhaps the most portentous piece of information had appeared in the
Washington Post
on August 12. It reported that Judge Sentelle had joined two senators from his home state, Helms and Faircloth, for lunch in the Senate dining room a month earlier. No senators had been more savage in expressing their enmity to the Clintons and their politics, or about Whitewater. All three men denied that the subject of Whitewater or replacing Fiske was under discussion; their dissembling was regarded as laughable even by many Republicans on the Hill: Helms said they had talked of “Western wear, old friends, and prostate problems.” There was additional cause for demoralization and objection to Starr's appointment: his law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, had filed a brief in support of Paula Jones's argument that the president wasn't immune from a civil lawsuit. This alone should have been cause for Starr to recuse himself.

It was decided that Bob Bennett would appear on the Sunday-morning television news shows to attack the sacking of Fiske and subsequent choice of Starr. But when no groundswell of support for Bennett's position materialized, Lloyd Cutler disavowed any opposition by Bennett or the White House. Bennett was speaking for himself, said Cutler, not for the president or first lady.

Despite continued quarreling among Clinton's aides about whether to attack the appointment, Bill capitulated a few days later. “Everybody else has talked about that,” he said. “I'll cooperate with whoever's picked. I just want to get it done.”

Hillary asked Cutler what kind of hat he was going to eat.

 

T
HE
S
TARR
appointment, so soon after the hopeful news in Fiske's report, plunged both Hillary and Bill into gloom. Both were edgy, dark, and frustrated. Moreover, for the first time, aides could see that Hillary was frightened. Bill was usually the more optimistic, but the price he was paying for putting Hillary in charge of health care was becoming clear. He recognized that the investigative focus on her and Whitewater, especially the ridicule and derision heaped on her because of the commodities trading episode, was making success at her assignment almost impossible. Her prominence in his administration was untenable in the eyes of his economic aides and many allies on Capitol Hill, he now recognized. He also blamed himself for not accepting the advice of Pat Moynihan and others to wait until after the 1994 election to push for health care, and only after the enactment of welfare reform. Both he and Hillary could tell by summer that the Democrats were heading toward electoral difficulty, even disaster, if they could not slow down the investigative train and somehow rev the engine of health care reform. Neither possibility seemed likely.

When he had appointed Hillary to head the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, Bill had not only promised to submit a comprehensive reform bill to Congress in one hundred days, but he had also pledged that health care would stand as the fundamental achievement of the Clinton presidency. In one of the most memorable moments of his presidency, after the Clintons' return from Martha's Vineyard in the summer of 1993, he'd stood in front of the cameras and explained the relationship between health care, his economic plan, and deficit reduction: “Our competitiveness, our whole economy, the integrity of the way the government works, and, ultimately, our living standards, depend upon our ability to achieve savings without harming the quality of health care.” He'd taken from his pocket a blue plastic card the size of a credit card. Under the plan Hillary was developing, “Every American would receive a health care security card that will guarantee a comprehensive package of benefits over the course of an entire lifetime, roughly comparable to the benefit package offered by most Fortune 500 companies,” he promised.

For a night at least, tens of millions of Americans thought that the country was finally going to get universal health care. That it never happened was largely Hillary's doing, though it is impossible to separate that failure from the siege of the Clinton White House enabled by Whitewater.

Still, she was largely to blame for the political failure. “I find her to be among the most self-righteous people I've ever known in my life,” declared Bob Boorstin, a former reporter for the
New York Times
who joined the Clinton campaign as a writer and became Hillary's deputy for media relations on the task force. “And, it's her great flaw, it's what killed health care, in addition to their joint stupid decision to give it to Ira Magaziner, and to keep it within their friends, and timing, and all sorts of other things, but generally speaking I think you can say at the core of it was her self-righteousness.”

 

T
HE HIGH POINT
of Hillary's health care accomplishment had been her appearance before committees of the House and Senate in September 1993, upon the Clintons' return from Martha's Vineyard. For a week, Hillary awed lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Over the three days, she appeared before Dan Rostenkowski's House Ways and Means Committee, John Dingell's House Energy and Commerce Committee, Ted Kennedy's Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, William Ford's House Education and Labor Committee, and Pat Moynihan's Senate Finance Committee. Even Moynihan was impressed, though he remained skeptical. After she finished her session with Rostenkowski's committee, the congressman kissed her and said, “In the very near future, the president will be known as your husband.” On day two, Hillary's plan won its first Republican endorsement. “I am pleased to be the first. I am absolutely confident I will not be the last,” said Jim Jeffords of Vermont.

It was Hillary's beatification. In each hearing room she sat perfectly poised at a witness table before the committee members, few of whom had reputations for self-effacement. They were seated in a semicircle on a riser, as if to make witnesses before them smaller. Her manner was persuasive, confident, and calm. “I'm here as a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a woman,” she told the House Ways and Means Committee. “I'm here as an American citizen concerned about the health of her family and the health of her nation.” She sat forward in her chair and answered more than 150 questions from the members, never consulting notes or the aides sitting behind her. Her preparation was textbook perfect. Her humor, and even a brief willingness to roll with the punches, was on display.

The only House member who had challenged her seriously was Republican representative Dick Armey of Texas, who referred to her health care plan as a “Kevorkian prescription for the jobs of American men and women.”
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Armey, a deputy to the Republican whip, Newt Gingrich, had also said of the first lady, “Her thoughts sound a lot like Karl Marx. She hangs around with a lot of Marxists. All her friends are Marxists.” In the hearing room, Armey began his cross-examination of Hillary with a promise to make the health care debate “as exciting as possible.”

“I'm sure you will do that, Mr. Armey,” Hillary said. Laughter filled the hearing room.

“We'll do the best we can,” said Armey.

“You and Dr. Kevorkian.”

“I have been told about your charm and wit,” Armey replied when the laughter subsided, “and let me say, the reports of your charm are overstated and the reports on your wit are understated.”

The week may have been the pinnacle of her career as first lady. Hillary was making history, and there were comparisons on the floor of Congress to Martha Washington, Eleanor Roosevelt, and, in one particularly tortured leap of logic, Abraham Lincoln. Freshman congresswoman Lynn Schenk of California described her own mother's admiration for Hillary. “Not since Eleanor Roosevelt has she so admired a woman in public life—and my mother is not a woman who admires easily.” “I hope my mother is listening,” Hillary replied, grinning.

The
New York Times
editorialized on Sunday, “Hillary Rodham Clinton dazzled five Congressional committees last week, advocating health care legislation in the most impressive testimony on as complete a program as anyone could remember, and raising hopes that an issue that had stymied Congress for fifty years was now near solution.” Mary McGrory of the
Washington Post
wrote, “It's a long way to Tipperary on getting health care through Congress. But Mrs. Clinton has made a brilliant beginning. She is a superstar.” She was forty-six years old. Maureen Dowd wrote in the
Times,
“It was, in a way, the official end of the era in which presidential wives pretended to know less than they did and to be advising less than they were.” Newt Gingrich was on the mark as well when he said, “If Ira Magaziner had tried to defend that same plan, he would have been destroyed.”

Hillary's critics had long complained of her tendency to be too clever by half. Nothing demonstrated the point better than her decision soon after to send a copy of the bill she and Magaziner were developing to a friendly California congressman, knowing it would be leaked to the press. The bill was purported to reduce the deficit by $91 billion, a preposterous assertion given the huge dimensions of the program they had devised.

Representatives of Congress, especially Democrats, were incredulous at having been kept out of the loop and then reading about her proposal in the
Washington Post,
before they had been properly informed and briefed themselves. “My colleagues who have taken the time to go look at [the leaked proposal] are kind of appalled by the complexity of it all. It's magic. It is a house-of-cards kind of financing that is going to fall apart when people start to poke at it,” said Democratic representative Jim McDermott of Washington. Even more damaging, Pat Moynihan, who carried more weight on this issue than anyone in Congress, called the calculations “fantasy” numbers. Institutional and ideological opponents seized the opportunity handed them by Hillary and Magaziner. Republicans were content to sit on the sidelines and laugh.

Bob Dole took easy advantage of the situation on
Meet the Press.
“I can't believe they're having hearings on a plan that nobody has seen and we may not see for another thirty days…. I think it's unprecedented.”

Lloyd Bentsen felt compelled to tell the
Post
on background that he was postponing his testimony “until the legislation is complete” and the numbers were available to him. He reached Hillary directly and insisted that Treasury Department experts have the opportunity to verify the economic and cost assumptions of the package the administration would submit to Congress. Leon Panetta also directed that the Office of Management and Budget review the figures. Others could see that the bottom was falling out of Hillary's health care boat; not her.

She had publicly promised during her brief ascendancy to submit a finished bill by mid-October. Now she was restrained by the requirement of input from Treasury, OMB, and other cabinet members. Seeing that a deadline would once again be missed, she stalled. The delay produced one of the more outlandish episodes of modern congressional history, in a curiously ostentatious ceremony at Statuary Hall on October 27. The occasion had been intended to mark the delivery of her health care bill to Congress. The president stood at the lectern and pounded his fist, expressing his desire to provide universal health care to all Americans. But there was no bill.

“I don't remember if it was four weeks, eight weeks, or ten weeks, but it became obvious pretty soon that the opponents had successfully characterized the plan as the government taking over health care,” Roger Altman recalled. “And once that became clear, you knew that the plan, more or less as proposed, was not going to happen.”

Instead of being the new administration's strongest suit, health care reform—desired by an overwhelming majority of Americans, according to virtually every poll on the subject—had become a rallying cry for all the Clintons' opponents and enemies, providing a single issue that mainstream Republicans, the far right, and conspiracy-minded anti-Clinton zealots could agree on. It also gave more self-interested enemies of universal, government-supervised health care—many doctors, insurance companies, owners of small businesses, and individual constituents—a chance to mobilize. Hillary and Magaziner had attempted to woo interest groups—medical, professional, small business—early in the process, but once these constituencies got a look at what was going to be included in the bill, they withdrew.