A Woman in Charge (90 page)

“I think you have to go through a personal process and a public process, and I don't pretend to know what all they tried to do to begin to patch things up and work at it,” Melanne Verveer said around this time. “But there's been distance. And clearly it's not been without effort on both of their parts to try to heal the rupture. But I think they also both recognize that nobody can understand anybody's marriage, that these people have had a hell of a lot in common for a long, long time, and I'm not sure that either of them can imagine their lives separate from each other.” Fitfully, they began to get to know each other again.

There seemed to be an expectation in the White House that logic would prevail too in terms of resolving the impeachment question, that the new Republican leadership would desist, especially if they read the polls. This ignored an important fact of Washington life: perpetual incumbency. Fewer than 50 House seats out of 435 were usually competitive each election, and those that were in 1998 were already decided; the gerrymandered congressional redistricting meant most members' seats were almost for life if they wanted them, assuming they didn't go to jail or get caught at something that particularly offended their constituents. And it was even more true for Republicans than Democrats. Democratic gains or Bill Clinton's high poll numbers didn't affect the feelings of certain Republican members toward Hillary and Bill. They still despised them. They had nothing to lose, in their view, by voting for impeachment. And the Republican base, the shock troops that turned out the votes and raised the money, especially the evangelical right, fed off Clinton-bashing. Why stop now when they had a chance to succeed in all they had dreamed of? Moreover, if impeachment succeeded, there was still a possibility that a few important Democrats might bolt, and bring enough votes with them to convict.

Such realizations, inexplicably, were slow in coming in the West Wing. “We in the White House were living in denial,” as Blumenthal said. He told Hillary it was almost certain they would be able to make enough votes to stop impeachment. “That never occurred to me,” she said. By Thanksgiving, the reality had penetrated the staff, and last-ditch efforts to find a means of compromise with the Republicans fell through. Greg Craig had publicly stated that the White House was open to some kind of censure or rebuke short of impeachment. Bill's staff counseled that, if he would publicly admit he had lied, he might be able to get a vote of censure. But Kendall continued to counsel him to never admit to a crime, and the lawyer's calculation that Starr or some successor might pursue him after he left office was not unfounded.

Now the clock was running out on the president. On December 11, the Judiciary Committee approved four articles of impeachment for referral to the full House of Representatives. Each vote was along party lines, 21 to 16 and 20 to 16. The first article was for “providing perjurous, false and misleading testimony to the grand jury.”

Hillary and Bill flew to the Middle East the next day for a four-day trip. The strain between them was evident. By now, Hillary had begun expressing her concern to a few close friends that the Clinton presidency—her legacy and Bill's—was going to be judged on the impeachment of her husband and what led to it, and the investigations that from the start had spun beyond control.

On December 16, the day after their return to Washington, the president's military and intelligence team advised that there was only a small “window” to attack sites in Iraq where U.N. inspectors suspected Saddam had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction or was working on their production, as well as other military assets. The Islamic holy month of Ramadan was approaching.

The beginning of the bombing campaign forced the Republican leadership to delay the House debate on impeachment. Republican congressman Joel Hefley said that the bombing “is a blatant and disgraceful use of military force for his own personal gain.” It was one of many similar statements. The Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, said the “timing and the policy” were both “subject to question.” Missiles and bombs were still striking Iraq when the impeachment debate began on December 18.

Finally Hillary broke what was being regarded as a week of public silence about the efforts to remove Bill from office. She delivered a statement on the South Portico. The reporters' stories the next day noted that she looked tired and uncomfortable and almost severe. “I think the vast majority of Americans share my approval and pride in the job the president's been doing,” she said. “We in our country ought to practice reconciliation and we ought to bring our country together.” It was an enigmatic moment.

The next day, Saturday, December 19, before the votes on the articles of impeachment were to begin, Hillary met with the Democratic caucus at Dick Gephardt's request. Her statement the previous day had seemed less than a rousing endorsement for her husband. Though it was a foregone conclusion that the Republicans had the votes to impeach Bill Clinton for high crimes and misdemeanors, it was important to keep defections to a minimum, to lessen the chance that Democratic senators might vote to convict the president, leading to his removal from office.

Now she was “as defiant as the day she blamed the Monica Lewinsky scandal on a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy,'” the
New York Times
reported. She told the closed meeting that she was there in part as “a wife who loves and supports her husband.” Republicans were intent on “hounding him out of office” because they opposed his agenda. “You all may be mad at Bill,” she told them. “Certainly I'm not happy with what my husband did. But impeachment is not the answer.” Nor would her husband resign.

The Republicans that morning were producing unexpected drama. Six weeks had passed since Newt Gingrich had announced his abdication and prepared to leave town. While Hillary was meeting with the Democrats, Gingrich's successor as speaker, Robert Livingston, fifty-five, a member of Congress for twenty-two years, met with his party's caucus and announced that he had been unfaithful to his wife. “I have on occasion strayed from my marriage,” he told them. “I sought marriage and spiritual counseling.” Livingston had come to this juncture by virtue of the pornographer Larry Flynt, owner of
Hustler
magazine. In the midst of the Lewinsky-impeachment madness, Flynt had decided to challenge what he recognized as the hypocrisy of political Washington, especially (but not limited to) those pursuing Bill Clinton. Flynt had taken out a full-page ad on October 4 in the
Washington Post
offering up to $1 million to any woman who could prove that she had had a sexual relationship with a married member of Congress or high-level government official. The ad produced results. During Flynt's “investigation” of a respondent's claim, Livingston's wife, Bonnie, had called the pornographer and begged him not to print the details of her husband's affair in the magazine.

When the House opened its proceedings on the floor that morning, Livingston was the first to speak on the upcoming vote for impeachment. He addressed the president: “Sir, you have done great damage to this nation…. I say that you have the power to terminate that damage and heal the wounds you have created. You, sir, may resign your post.” To that, Democrats, aware of Livingston's statements to the party caucus, shouted that Livingston should resign. “I can only challenge you in a fashion that I am willing to heed my own words,” he resumed. “But I cannot do that job or be the kind of leader that I would like to be under the current circumstances. So I must set the example that I hope President Clinton will follow. I will not stand for Speaker of the House on January sixth.” Those in the chamber were shocked. He had already groveled before his colleagues and admitted he had “strayed” from his marriage. Wasn't that enough? Livingston's colleagues were quick to differentiate between an affair and perjury.

The White House sensed great potential danger in what was happening. Gephardt had disappeared from the floor to confer with the president's aides, and soon a statement was issued in Clinton's name urging Livingston to reconsider. He didn't, and soon after, like Gingrich, resigned from the House. Finally, after two hours off the floor, Gephardt reappeared and spoke in the well of the House. He called Livingston “a worthy and good and honorable man,” which brought a standing ovation on both sides of the aisle. Such were the ways of Washington in this longest season.

The House rejected Gephardt's parliamentary maneuver to force a vote on censure, 230 to 204. Acting on their prearranged plans, the Democrats then marched out of the chamber as voting began on Article I, gathering on the steps of the Capitol to stage a brief protest rally, then turning around and parading back in before the fifteen-minute voting period expired.

On nearly a party-line vote, the House of Representatives passed two articles of impeachment, one for obstruction of justice and the other for lying under oath. Rather than hang his head in defeat, Bill joined Hillary and a slew of Democrats in the Rose Garden, as Al Gore praised the president. The House had done “a great disservice to a man I believe will be regarded in the history books as one of our greatest presidents,” he said. This was a carefully orchestrated show of combativeness, to counter Livingston's suggestion that the president resign. The idea was to turn defeat into victory, and in a sense it worked. But there was the larger picture: the wreckage of what had seemed such a promising and idealistic presidency six winters before, and the young president and his brilliant wife who would change the face of governance in the capital. On their way outside, Hillary and Bill Clinton had barely spoken, and the tension between them was visible for all to see.

 

T
HE OUTCOME
of the president's trial was, given the drama that had preceded it, relatively uneventful. The ceremonial proceedings, the chief justice in his Gilbert and Sullivan robes, the attempts at majestic oratory with their undercurrent of sex, were insipid. It was a low moment in the history of the American presidency, and even lower in terms of a United States Congress already on its way to becoming an institution that ignored its constitutional responsibility as a co-equal branch of government. Nor had the judicial system performed its assigned role without favor. The verdict was as expected, and Bill was acquitted after a five-week trial. The vote on the first article of impeachment was 55 to 45, with no Democrats joining Republicans favoring conviction for perjury; and 50 to 50 on the second article of impeachment on obstruction of justice (seventeen votes shy of conviction), with no members of the president's party voting to convict. The chief justice mercifully gaveled the proceedings to a close at 12:39
P.M.
on February 12, 1999.

As the proceedings ended, Hillary Rodham Clinton had already begun considering whether she aspired to the same United States Senate that had just acquitted her husband.

18

A Woman in Charge

The most difficult decisions I have made in my life were to stay married to Bill and to run for the Senate from New York.

—Living History

W
HILE THE
S
ENATE
was voting on the articles of impeachment, Harold Ickes had spread out a large map of New York state and shown Hillary what was involved in running. There was something particularly defiant about choosing this moment to begin her decision-making in earnest. She had put off more serious consideration while the impeachment process hurtled forward, perhaps in part because, without the stigma of impeachment, she and Bill might still have had a chance to accomplish some of their goals, and redeem some of the promise of their journey. But even then, it was hard to imagine that they wouldn't be remembered primarily for what Bill had done with Monica Lewinsky, and Hillary with health care, and the personal drama they had put on for the nation and the world to watch. Now, Bill looked like the lamest of lame ducks, whatever his popularity ratings. Her anger and pain were still raw.

She and Ickes pored over the map. Ickes enumerated the problems that lay in her path. He pointed to, and they discussed, towns and cities, tiny hamlets, the boroughs of New York City. New York had almost twenty million citizens, and 54,000 square miles that a candidate for the Senate would have to traverse from the Great Lakes to the Canadian border to Fire Island. She had done a lot of campaigning over the years, but nothing similar to this. There would be so much to learn. She had no experience in the internal politics of New York: its ethnicities, outsized personalities, unions, cultures, suburbs, its broken rust-belt economy upstate, and, in New York City, Wall Street and the toughest press corps in the country, reporters who could spot a rube a mile away.

There were many reasons she shouldn't run, and Ickes laid them out. She wasn't from New York. She had never lived there (she and Bill had decided, though, not long after his reelection in 1996, that they would move at the end of his presidency to New York City and divide their time between Manhattan and Arkansas, where Bill would build his library). No woman had ever won office in New York in a statewide race. The press would live up to its reputation. Republican attacks on her in New York would be vicious. And she was still first lady, with official unofficial duties, so how could she be fully involved in such an exhausting campaign?

 

R
UNNING FOR
public office had virtually never been on Hillary's agenda. Only when she briefly trifled with succeeding Bill as governor of Arkansas, in 1990—after their marriage had almost ended, and his depression was so great that he had little interest in continuing in the job—had she considered it. Until then, and after she and Bill reached the White House, she had repeatedly told Diane Blair that she had no interest in elected office. In truth, she had never much liked campaigning, until she found her own voice and, to her surprise, connected with voters as her own distinct person in the 1998 off-year elections, in the gritty precincts that had been her husband's natural habitat. She had asked the voters to elect Democrats not to save Bill's presidency, but rather to support her ideas of constitutional governance and stand against the criminalization of the Clintons' politics, which was how she categorized what Starr, D'Amato, Faircloth, Gingrich, and those aligned with them had done. Every poll that Mark Penn had taken showed that the voters were responding to Hillary as a woman whose values they now seemed to appreciate. Her experience had been almost totally different from campaigning with or for Bill, as an adjunct of his agenda. While virtually everyone else caught up in the Lewinsky business had been diminished or, to some degree, discredited, only Hillary seemed to gain in stature. By the time her husband went on trial in the Senate, every opinion poll indicated that she had become widely admired in a way that Bill wasn't, by both women and men—as a result of
her conduct.
As he was struggling to stay in office, she was coming into her own.

“Very specifically we would say to each other over the years, ‘You can have as great or greater impact by doing things other than elective office,'” Diane Blair said. When she visited the White House, she and Hillary—disguised in a hat or with her hair pulled back behind a headband—would sneak off (with the Secret Service hovering) to Rock Creek Park or the C&O Canal towpath for long walks. On one of these during “a particularly hard week” early in the second term, Diane asked, “‘Well, if you had your druthers right now, what would you really like to do?' And Hillary said, ‘I would like to be in a think tank. I can see a room just loaded with books, next door to a library, and time to really just think hard about some of these policy issues. I just don't feel like I have time to really mentally engage with some of the things that I know are out there.'

“She did not say, ‘Oh, I'd like to be a United States senator, or I want to be a governor.' What she said was, I want to be a policy woman. Until right now [1999], she has not seen elective office as the path that she had ambitions for in any way.” Hillary had never previously felt the need to assert her own “legitimacy,” separate from the single voice of her and Bill's journey. Now, with Bill having squandered so much of what was to have been their presidency, she felt differently.

One of the Clintons' closest aides believed that what was propelling her toward running was “the wrecking of their work, not just the humiliation.” Actually, she wanted to undo both.

“Prior to this—the impeachment, Lewinsky—she was looking forward to having some semblance of a private life,” Deborah Sale said around this time. “And being the senator from New York affords you none. That is something that could hold her back.” Sale noted that Bill Clinton wanted her to run. “He thinks she deserves a chance to be her own individual person. Now if she chose a different way, he would support it, too. But being the senator from New York…”

Talking with Bill about whether she would run for the Senate was a kind of therapy in itself. (They also began weekly marital counseling together with a therapist; only a few members of their staffs were aware of it.) Hillary wrote that gradually they both allowed the tensions to fade. Their relationship was beginning to mend.

Along with Donna Shalala, Ann Jordan, Maggie Williams, and many other friends and advisers, Blair tried to dissuade Hillary from running for the Senate.

Hillary made the decision slowly, deliberately, analytically. Her decision-making process was different from Bill's. Ann Stock, her social secretary, noted that “when you look at her making this decision…every bone in her body says, Yeah, I'd love to do that. But, the introspective person says, Yeah, but I need to examine all parts of this.”

The Lewinsky episode was critical not just to the Clintons' marriage but to Hillary's evolution as a politician. She was married to the most skilled politician of the age, yet there was no denying he was also experiencing the greatest presidential free-fall of the twentieth century, apart from Richard M. Nixon's. Until the day of impeachment when she met with Democrats on Capitol Hill, Hillary had not realized how much Bill was despised—there really was no other word for it—by many of his own party in Congress. She would never put herself in that position, she resolved.

 

B
Y THE LATE
spring of 1999, she seemed ready to run, but one substantial impediment remained: the incumbent senator, Pat Moynihan, who had never been warmly inclined to Hillary. His wife, Liz, despised what she regarded as Hillary's lack of straight talking and dealing. Mandy Grunwald had worked for Moynihan and became an intermediary for Hillary. She tried to convey Hillary's attributes and vulnerabilities to Pat and Liz. Moynihan was not a liberal in the sense of traditional Democratic politics, nor was Hillary. He was an academic, and she would have been comfortable in the same role.

Moynihan was never one to personalize fights or hold grudges, but Hillary's willingness to demonize her enemies had left him with lasting caution about her. He also was a realist and could see the appeal of her candidacy. Moreover, Hillary had learned a lot in seven years in the White House. She was not going to make the same mistakes. He respected her mind. He accepted what was becoming inevitable. Terry McAuliffe had already promised to help raise the $25 million necessary to fund a winning campaign. He thought Hillary could win. Mark Penn's polls also were positive.

On July 7, she stood beside the senator at the Moynihans' nine-hundred-acre farm in Pindars Corner, in rural northwest New York State. Two hundred reporters were there to cover the event. She announced her candidacy. “I intend to be spending my time in the next days and weeks and months listening to New Yorkers,” Hillary said. Bill visited an Indian reservation in South Dakota that day. “Now,” said Hillary, “I suppose the question on everybody's mind is, Why the Senate and why New York and why me? All I can say is I care deeply about the issues that are important in this state, that I've already been learning about and hearing about.” It wasn't totally clear if she was talking about the state or the issues.

 

D
IANE
B
LAIR
was not surprised at Hillary's decision to run. “Being a U.S. senator gives her an ongoing forum in which to pursue the agenda she's always been interested in ever since I've known her.” Diane, Sara Ehrman, and Deborah Sale, among many of Hillary's female friends, were sure she would win. They certainly understood her strengths and her desires; perhaps most important, they sensed her determination to redeem her own legacy.

“I would say that right now most everybody in her life is simply a means of getting where she has to go,” Sara Ehrman said while Hillary was considering whether to run. By then Sara worried that Hillary's Christian progressive optimism was in danger of devolving into arrogance—“God is on my side can be arrogance”—though it was easy to forget something basic about both Clintons: an irrevocable commitment to public service. “I'm not saying she's an unethical person, because she's definitely not,” said Ehrman. “But everything and everybody is now part of the package of getting them there, getting them—her and the president—there for the greater good.” Where Sara had once seen something pure in Hillary, now, after the Clintons' joint trial in the capital city, there seemed something…conventional. But she saw her old friend accurately as still being “on a mission.” “Hillary still believes that she's going to shape the world. She's going to have a place to do it, and if Gore isn't elected, I have no doubt that in 2002 she'll start thinking about running for the White House.”

Whatever else Bill was, he was a practical politician. Hillary welcomed his expertise. In
Living History,
she wrote that they both knew that in running for office she would be on her own as she had never been before. But they were up for building a new kind of partnership. In his memoirs Bill said he was ready to be the able assistant she had once been to him. The role reversal was fascinating.

A whole new dynamic had entered the country's political culture. The first lady's motives were the focus of frenzied debate. Was her marriage now based on love or political expediency? Was she a victim or an enabler? Could she be a forgiving person? Was she running to remove a political stain or because she truly wanted to be in the Senate? Did she want to be president? And ironically: Had the impeachment of Bill Clinton made possible a Clinton dynasty in American politics?

By the time she had declared her candidacy for the Senate, she had arguably become a more polarizing figure than he, inflaming the politics of gender in a way not seen since the first days of radical feminism in America, and perhaps not since the suffrage movement. The Republican Party at the turn of the twenty-first century existed for two overarching purposes: to elect a president and to defeat Hillary Clinton and Clintonism.

T
HE FEATURE OF
Hillary Clinton's campaign for the Senate that proved brilliant, and the model for her subsequent politics, was the “listening tour.”

Under the guise of trying to learn the concerns and complaints of constituents, and to offset the “carpetbagger” effect, she did the opposite of a lifetime's instincts: she restrained her tendency toward unequivocal advocacy and the assertion of her own strongly held views. Instead, she “interviewed” the voters; she made sure not to offend, and she told voters largely what they wanted to hear. In the poll-driven 2000 campaign for the Senate there was hardly a single noteworthy position she embraced that put her at odds with the core constituencies she sought. One principle was beyond compromise, though she enunciated it in the context of her own traditional values: a woman's right to choose.

Getting the nomination of the Democratic Party was easy. Congresswoman Nita Lowey, who had been planning on seeking Moynihan's seat, stepped aside. In the general election campaign, Hillary was blessed with the Republican opponent she drew. New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani had savored running against her, but he self-destructed in a marital scandal at the same time he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Representative Rick Lazio of Long Island became the Republican nominee, and he was out of his league.