A Woman in Charge (91 page)

Lazio, well funded and backed by the national Republican apparatus and many of the Clintons' old foes, tried to paint Hillary into a liberal corner, but it didn't work. In debates, Hillary won on points, style (if not quite
To Kill a Mockingbird,
then having a certain charm of her own), and a platform that was perfectly tailored to crafting an electoral majority among the state's myriad constituencies, especially upstate, long Republican territory but ill-served by a Republican governor who allowed its economy to stagnate.

What was particularly striking in Hillary's campaign was how it contrasted with the view of leadership she had long embraced and demanded of others. She had sometimes worried that Bill's triangulation (the term was actually Dick Morris's) and centrist balance was too contrived, not principled enough. The leaders she admired were those who had shown the courage to challenge the conventional wisdom—Goldwater, Margaret Chase Smith, Saul Alinsky, Eleanor Roosevelt. In New York she felt risky, unequivocal advocacy would threaten her chances.

In a sense, her “listening tour” was similar to how Dick Morris had guided Bill's campaigns—a method of surveying and polling that established what voters wanted, and what would offend their sensibilities. This became her approach as a candidate.

On November 7, 2000, she won overwhelmingly, 55 percent to 43 percent.

 

N
OT REDEMPTION,
but something else awesomely powerful could be felt among several thousand congregants in the National Cathedral attending the funeral on December 16, 2000, of Charles Ruff, the gentle man who, from his wheelchair, had so eloquently and ably defended Bill Clinton in his trial before the Senate. Something ineluctable passed in the great nave of the cathedral that day, and for those called to witness, the capital city beyond seemed a changed place when they stepped into the sunlight outside.

Ruff lived an exemplary life in the pit that is political Washington, and the capital's judges, journalists, members of the bar and of Congress (of both parties), and not a few humble citizens, had turned out to pay their deepest respects. The eulogy, delivered by the president, was offkey. Clinton could not bring himself to properly thank Ruff for the
personal
service to him, not just during Ruff's defense in the Senate, but as Clinton's counsel through the most perilous months of his presidency. The impeached president instead couched his funereal salute in terms of what Ruff had done for the nation during the recent unpleasantness, as if Clinton's role had been totally incidental to the danger to the country and its institutions.

Viewed from the row behind where Bill and Hillary were seated for the service, their lack of physical or emotional contact throughout the ninety-minute memorial was almost painful to observe. Then, as the congregation began to recess, all eyes seemed to turn to Hillary, and suddenly her presence became the single focus of attention in the cathedral. Cameras trained on her, not him. Congressmen came up to shake her hand and kiss her cheek. Old friends embraced her tightly and wished her well. Strangers stared. To her side, the president stood comparatively ignored, diminished in the commotion over his wife, even a little lost. A new era could be glimpsed at the creation: Hillary was glowing, perfectly turned out, a woman in Washington at the center of the nation's attention, a woman unique in its history.

 

O
N THE SAME DAY
as Ruff's funeral, Simon & Schuster, a unit of the Viacom media conglomerate, announced that it would publish a memoir by Hillary of “her years as first lady.” The announcement ended a weeklong bidding war among publishers, presided over by Bob Barnett. In the end, Hillary would receive the second biggest nonfiction book advance in history, $8 million, slightly less than the sum paid to Pope John Paul II. “As far as I am concerned,” said former senator Bill Bradley, “what she did in signing a book contract is no different than what Newt Gingrich did.”

In 1995, under duress as a result of a House Ethics Committee investigation, Gingrich had returned a $4.5 million book advance from a publishing house controlled by Rupert Murdoch, whose representatives frequently lobby the Congress on behalf of his media interests, seeking tax breaks, exceptions to anti-monopoly laws, and other relief from customary governmental regulation. The Senate, unlike the House, which changed its rules after the Gingrich book controversy, permits income derived from book contracts that reflect “usual and customary” industry practices.

Hillary's contract was anything but “usual and customary,” according to Common Cause and the Congressional Accountability Project, which suggested that she forsake an advance on the book and accept only sales-based royalties, on the grounds that the arrangement posed an obvious conflict of interest. The contract, as reported, was particularly favorable to Hillary in that she would receive up to half her negotiated advance upon signing; large advances are usually doled out over the length of a contract tied to stages of progress in the writing. The
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
both published editorials questioning the ethics of the arrangement. “The deal may conceivably conform to the lax Senate rules on book sales,” said the
Times,
but it is “an affront to common sense.”

The deal was negotiated before Hillary took her Senate seat, but its royalty provisions were later approved by the Senate Ethics Committe. The matter nonetheless recalled the kind of shortcutting she'd been accused of in the commodities trading uproar, raising again the notion that rules for other people didn't necessarily apply to her.

Predictably, Republican senators said Hillary was beginning her Senate career with the same approach to the law that afflicted the Clintons in the White House.

 

D
ESPITE THE FACT
that Vice President Gore had been integral to the Clinton presidency and its considerable successes, he had chosen to distance himself from Bill and Hillary Clinton during his 2000 presidential campaign, to their chagrin. They had hoped that his election, with Hillary's, would stand as a powerful repudiation of the impeachment and the politics that fueled it. Bill and Hillary both believed, as did many astute political analysts, that Gore's strategy had probably cost him the election. But he had wanted to make an implicit statement that he disapproved of Bill's conduct—his aides were
explicit
about his reasons—and the Clintons' ethical lapses.

On December 12, the Supreme Court, in a 5–4 decision, with Justice Rehnquist leading the majority, had dismissed the Gore campaign's attempt to obtain a recount of the disputed Florida results, and George Bush became the president-elect. On January 3, 2001, as vice president and, as specified by the Constitution, the presiding officer of the United States Senate, Gore swore in Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

There was no precedent for her arrival as a freshman senator. She was still living in the White House, still the first lady of the United States. Her presence totally overshadowed that of the other ninety-nine members. They could see on that first day that she was a senator apart, a national figure, with a national constituency already. Those who had served in the chamber for decades (a few since the days when pages attended to cuspidors stationed at each entrance to the floor) understood this was something unique. In the coming weeks and months, people in the galleries largely ignored the other senators if Hillary was on the floor. They pointed at her. On the Capitol subways that link the House and Senate wings, passersby came rushing up to her for autographs, while other, longtime senators, considered the uncommon commotion. From her first days on the Hill, Hillary had a galvanizing effect on hundreds of women who worked there. Usually blasé at the presence of mere politicos, they followed her through the halls, asked her advice, filed applications to join her staff.

For the first time since she had left Washington to join Bill Clinton in Arkansas in 1974, Hillary's slate was her own to keep clean. This was a new beginning. She was now truly a woman in charge.

But soon thereafter, on the Clintons' last day in the White House, January 20, 2001, only hours before they were to go to the Capitol for the swearing-in of George W. Bush, Bill's controversial last-minute pardons set off her fury again—at him. The most offensive of the pardons was of Marc Rich, a fugitive financier whose excesses were the epitome of 1980s greed. His avenue to a pardon was the largesse of his ex-wife, Denise, who had contributed $1 million to Democratic causes, including $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library fund, and as an R&B songwriter gave him entrée into a glitzy New York party world that would enrich his post-presidential life. Other powerful friends and aides of the Clintons had pleaded Rich's case, including former White House deputy counsel Jack Quinn and Beth Dozoretz, the treasurer of the Democratic National Committee and a close friend of Hillary.

While Rich had found favor, Webb Hubbell had not. A pardon would have given him the opportunity to resume the practice of law. He had not personally sought a pardon nor sent emissaries; old colleagues had told his family nonetheless they expected Bill to issue a pardon. When he didn't, Hubbell, his wife, and his children were devastated.

Meanwhile, it was discovered that Hillary's brother Hugh—who in 1994 had run a quixotic campaign for senator from Florida—had been paid $400,000 to lobby for a pardon and commutation of a prison sentence for a client/acquaintance, which the president did not grant, for evident reasons. By then the Rodham brothers had been in the news far more than their sister had hoped. “My family can be very demanding and I apologize for that,” Hillary had said after a previous incident involving her brother Tony, who had screamed at White House aides insisting that a friend get a free ride on the first lady's plane when she was campaigning through Florida on Hugh's behalf. In 1999 the Rodham brothers had formed a company to sell hazelnuts grown in the former Soviet republic of Georgia; that led to a demand by Bill's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, that they dismantle their effort. “They're like mama's boys,” a former Clinton aide told the
New York Times.
“It's a very odd family dynamic. They seem to feel, ‘We've been out there, we've been in this fishbowl, we're not getting anything.' Mrs. Rodham [Dorothy] is always telling Hillary, ‘You're not doing enough for your brothers.'”

 

H
ILLARY'S ABILITY TO
adapt to new circumstances, until she had reached the White House as first lady, had almost never betrayed her. Its success was never more apparent than her first year on Capitol Hill. She had returned to form. She approached almost every aspect of her job opposite the way she had in the White House. When she was assigned a freshman's office in the Capitol basement, she happily accepted it and waited patiently for better quarters, though she could have immediately asked for more space given the size of her constituency. Her modesty, a word not often associated with Hillary, was appreciated by her Senate colleagues, though her grandiosity beyond the chamber as an outsized fund-raiser for her party and Democrat sui generis was a genuine political phenomenon of 2001. With the proceeds of her book deal, she and Bill purchased a $3 million house at the end of a forested cul-de-sac adjacent to the British embassy, which became the nexus of her political operations outside her official office.

On Capitol Hill, she was deferential. The first senators she sought out for conversation, for co-sponsorship of small but useful legislative initiatives, for prayer, for a drink, or for lunch in the Senate dining room tended to be those who had opposed the Clintons most vigorously, some of whom had voted to impeach or convict Bill: Orrin Hatch, Lindsey Graham, Sam Brownback.

She was determined to show them how serious she was. From the moment she was elected, it was widely expected that Hillary would become the bull in the Senate china shop. Instead, she inched her way to the head of the Democratic class by dint of study, speaking carefully and in measured tones. She didn't seek the limelight. (It came to her.) Her tenure as a senator was an extension of the listening tour that helped get her elected. She fetched coffee for her male colleagues, remembered who took cream or sugar, and carried it off with a touch of self-mockery. Hillary's sense of humor, over the next few years, gradually returned.

She learned the ways of the Senate. She identified who her enemies were, or those of her husband, and waged a campaign to win them over, or at least neutralize them. That was the internal institutional strategy. The external strategy was to show her constituents that she wouldn't let them down. She worked particularly hard for those who didn't support her, as if to prove to them that she wasn't who they thought she was. Her small-steps policy in the Senate reflected what she had learned from her husband's car tag experience in Arkansas: she would not forget the day-to-day needs of her constituents while promoting her larger ambitions. She was pleasantly surprised to find that addressing the problems and concerns of the millions of her constituents who lived in upstate New York was often similar to her Arkansas experience. Her representation on behalf of New Yorkers was effective, smart, and bold. Her initial committee assignments were Labor, Health Education, and Pensions; Environment and Public Works; and Budget, all of which enabled her to direct funds to her home state.

On the Democratic side, her first courtesy call was to Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, the dean of the institution, its self-appointed historian and guardian of tradition (and the most effective facilitator of federal largesse to a senator's home state of the past half-century). West Virginia was littered with Byrd-villes, Byrd FBI buildings, Byrd-funded military bases, Byrd federal records facilities, and the best federally maintained road system in the nation.

Hillary had always relished being a star pupil and teacher's pet, and she excelled at playing those roles in the Senate. Though Byrd had years before refused to rescue her health care plan and put it into the federal budget bill (thus effectively guaranteeing its death), she now decided that he had not acted out of enmity or ideological opposition. Rather it was senatorial tradition and the sanctity of the budget process, as he saw it.