A Woman in Charge (92 page)

A Democratic colleague touted Hillary as “a workhorse, not a show horse,” which was the kind of filly Byrd appreciated. Still, she set up a brain trust that included former cabinet secretaries, and national security and economic advisers to the president.

She also joined the Senate's most exclusive, and private, prayer group, an acknowledgment by, among others, the most conservative of her fellow senators that they accepted the genuineness of her religiosity. They knew this because several of their wives had already been members of Hillary's women's prayer group while she was first lady.

For all her advances, the most surprising aspect of her first term was that she did little in the Senate that drew much attention as making a difference beyond New York. In fact, save for her support of the war in Iraq, she kept a low profile on many issues of great national import. She diligently sought to avoid controversy. She had spent her whole career looking at the big questions; now she seemed to be taking a more narrow view, resembling in some ways the former senator from her state whom she had despised, Senator Alfonse D'Amato, known as Senator Pothole. She delivered.

More than most senators, the 9/11 attacks radically altered Hillary's agenda. In office only nine months, she and New York's senior senator, Charles Schumer, became the city's most effective advocates for money and services from Washington. Partly through her relationship with Senator Byrd, $20 billion in recovery funds were set aside in the budget for the city. “We're in real trouble, and it's going to take a lot to put the city back together. Can you help?” she was quoted as asking him in a September 12 phone call.

“Count me in as the third senator from New York,” Byrd reportedly told her.

 

O
N
O
CTOBER
10, 2002, the Senate voted to authorize President Bush to use force against Iraq and Saddam Hussein. That day, Hillary took to the Senate floor and delivered a long speech. In part she said:

Because bipartisan support for this resolution makes success in the United Nations more likely, and therefore, war less likely, and because a good faith effort by the United States, even if it fails, will bring more allies and legitimacy to our cause, I have concluded, after careful and serious consideration, that a vote for the resolution best serves the security of our nation. If we were to defeat this resolution or pass it with only a few Democrats, I am concerned that those who want to pretend this problem will go away with delay will oppose any UN resolution calling for unrestricted inspections. This is a very difficult vote. This is probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make—any vote that may lead to war should be hard—but I cast it with conviction.

And perhaps my decision is influenced by my eight years of experience on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue in the White House watching my husband deal with serious challenges to our nation. I want this president, or any future president, to be in the strongest possible position to lead our country in the United Nations or in war. Secondly, I want to ensure that Saddam Hussein makes no mistake about our national unity and for our support for the president's efforts to wage America's war against terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. And thirdly, I want the men and women in our armed forces to know that if they should be called upon to act against Iraq, our country will stand resolutely behind them.

As it became obvious to Hillary and other Democrats who supported the war's authorization that the Iraq adventure was becoming a catastrophe, her tone and her words changed, though later than many of her Democratic colleagues. “If I had known then what we know now, there would never have been a vote and I never would have voted to give the president the authority,” she said in the winter of 2007.

She has since claimed that she didn't expect the United States to go straight toward war when she cast her vote; rather, that the president would endeavor to do what was necessary to get United Nations arms inspectors back into Iraq to determine Saddam's WMD capabilities. “Well, I've said that he ‘misused' the authority granted to him,” she said in 2006. “When I spoke at the time of the vote I made it very clear that this was not a vote for preemptive war; this was a vote, I thought, that would enable diplomacy to succeed because we would have a unified front between the president and our Congress to go to the Security Council to try to get the inspectors back in. Obviously we now know, in retrospect, that the president and vice president and his team probably didn't intend for the inspectors to do their work.”

At the time, according to former national security officials of the Clinton administration, Hillary was being advised on matters concerning Iraq by her husband and Sandy Berger, his national security adviser. Both felt she should support the president in the vote. Soon aferward, Richard Holbrooke also joined her national security advisory group, which continued to help her work through her statements and position on the war.

“Her perspective is of someone who lived and worked in the White House for eight years [as] one of the two right hands to the president, who understands the seriousness of intelligence—not just that available in 2002 and 2003, but available for a decade about weapons of mass destruction and other forms of repression in Iraq,” said a former member of the Clinton administration. “She is familiar [with], and was prone to accept, the president saying, ‘We know things we can't say…that suggest that this is a dangerous regime to the world.' She had been around when her husband bombed the guy because of WMD.”

Though few other senators mistook the vote for anything but an authorization for Bush to invade Iraq without going back to the United Nations, Hillary insists she had a different, literal understanding of what the legislation said, and that Bush would honor it. “That's what Bush said in his speech in Cincinnati on October 7,” she said. “They called me to the White House on October 8 and gave me another briefing. When I got back to my office, [National Security Adviser] Condi Rice called me and asked if I had any questions. I said, ‘Look, I have one question: If the president has this authority, will he go to the United Nations and use it to get inspectors to go back into Iraq and figure out what this guy has?' [Rice replied,] ‘Yes, that's what it's for.' Privately and publicly, that was the argument they were making.”

According to officials in both the Bush administration and Hillary's entourage, there was a conversation between the two women about the meaning of the vote. But that is where the agreement ends, with Bush aides claiming Rice gave no such guarantee and Hillary's camp saying Rice did.

“You are not dealing here with two people with great reputations for candor,” noted a disinterested former aide to President Clinton.

 

I
N THE THIRD
year of her term Hillary succeeded in her effort to be appointed to a seat on the Armed Services Committee—highly unusual for a first-term senator. The first thing she did as a member was to pay a courtesy call on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

It is clear from conversations with her advisers that Hillary's membership on the Armed Services Committee was intended to be the centerpiece of her new credentials for the presidency. She meant to become a defense intellectual, muscular in her approach, a master of the arcana of policy, weaponry, and strategy that would both serve her if elected, and help her get there by eliminating voters' fears about a woman being commander in chief. She had fought the crippling effects of Bill's weak credentials in this area and was resolved (and advised by her husband, among others) to strengthen her position. She assumed from the start that she could count on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in the pocket of her pants suits; the challenge would be to win over swing voters, Republican moderates (and she believed they existed, the more so as the presidency of George W. Bush veered toward both debilitating incompetence and terminal mendacity).

Part of the excitement of a Hillary candidacy was the contemplation of how a new Clinton presidency would work with a woman in charge, and a former president, her husband, behind her. There is no doubt that the Clinton journey continues to be a joint enterprise. As for the state of her marriage, its reality is something known—as always—only to her and Bill Clinton, and their friends seem no more sure than long ago if the perception of the Clinton union by one of the partners is the perception of the other.

By the time of Hillary's campaign for reelection to the Senate in 2006, she had recruited a staff ready for a presidential campaign, a huge fund-raising apparatus and war chest, and a strategy to quickly eliminate serious opposition for the Democratic nomination. The strategy, by all accounts, anticipated for far too long military success in Iraq, and a postwar ability to satisfy America's interests without great sacrifice.

“Her handling of the war issue subjected her to the kind of broader examination that she wasn't expecting,” said a former Democratic senator, an admirer. “It put her in the position of looking backward, not forward, of caving to conventional wisdom instead of moving in the direction of new leadership, new ideas, being bold. Hillary stands for very good things on almost all of the other, traditional issues. Women's rights, child care, health care, minimum wage, etc. She's studied a lot of them. She is a very good senator, one of the best. But the war revealed something about her that she may not be able to get past: the idea that she is a throwback to another time, that she is looking like a tired version of herself.”

One of her former White House aides observed, “I don't know how anything in her life can be deep or honest because she's tied herself in to stay with Bill…. So everything is seen from this kind of warped perspective, in a way. She can no longer be honest about what she actually feels, so it is hard to know if she's being honest about what she says she thinks.”

Another aide referred to her very visible position on flag-burning:

“The only major thing I can remember her doing is the flag-burning statute. That is evidence of the old Dick Morris/Bill Clinton ‘triangulation,' looking for the opportunity to break away from Democratic Party orthodoxy, which is a good idea. But she might have picked something significant; it's not as if flag-burning on the streets of America is a national problem. As a constitutional question it leads you to wonder if she really believes people should go to jail for burning the U.S. flag. I can't believe somebody who graduated Yale Law School believes people should be prosecuted and put in jail for burning the American flag.”

A long-time associate of the Clintons, with whom Hillary has consulted in her quest to return to the White House, said: “She has a very plausible case for president. She had an eight-year supergraduate course in the presidency, a progressive platform. But she should have been more probing and aggressive by this stage, not looking back.” He paused. “Besides, I'm not sure I want the circus back in town.” This may be a succint expression of her biggest obstacle.

 

H
ILLARY'S MEMOIR,
Living History,
was published in June 2003.

“It was a campaign document,” her deputy press secretary in the White House, Neel Lattimore, had said about her first book,
It Takes a Village.
It was meant to define her in unexpected ways.
Living History
was likewise meant to be a campaign document. It is a very revealing document, but not in the sense she intended.

Since her Arkansas years, Hillary Rodham Clinton has always had a difficult relationship with the truth. She is hardly different from most conventional politicians in this regard. But she has always aspired to be better than conventional;
Living History
was meant to demonstrate that. But judged against the facts, it underlines how she has often chosen to obfuscate, omit, and avoid. It is an understatement by now that she has been known to apprehend truths about herself and the events of her life that others do not exactly share.
Living History
is an example of that.

In her artfully crafted public utterances and written sentences there has almost always been an effort at baseline truthfulness. Yet almost always, something holds her back from telling the whole story, as if she doesn't trust the reader, listener, friend, interviewer, constituent—or perhaps herself—to understand the true significance of events.

Hillary values context; she does see the big picture. Hers, in fact, is not the mind of a conventional politician. But when it comes to herself, she sees with something less than candor and lucidity. She sees, like so many others, what she wants to see.

In
Living History,
for example, she fails to note the common view of many of her friends from childhood and members of her extended family that her father was verbally and mentally abusive of her mother, and that other women might have chosen to walk out of such a painful marriage. Instead, Hillary alludes to the “difficult” nature of her father, as if he were merely a complicated curmudgeon. Never does she mention the traumas she endured during her husband's final, desultory term as the governor of Arkansas, which led her to consider divorce five years before the Clintons came to Washington.

To get caught up in the wave of one's time and to experience it and even try to influence its course is to live history. This, Hillary Clinton has done. But to tell history is something else again.
Living History
was intended to get on the record an acceptable version of events that would render the past reasonably explicable, blur the edges, put the past behind her, and allow her to move on with her airbrushed persona, regardless of election results.

As a girl and then as a woman, Hillary has almost always been desperate to be a passionate participant and at the center of events: familial, generational, experiential, political, historical. Call it ambition, call it the desire to make the world a better place—she has been driven. Rarely has she stepped aside voluntarily into passivity. Introspection, however, has not been her strong suit; faith in the Lord, and in herself, is.