Kati Marton (59 page)

Fellow Democrats began to see her as a potential candidate herself. If the Lewinsky affair had never taken place, Hillary might not have felt the same compulsion to run for the Senate; she might have been more patient and waited a few years. “I want independence,” she said in September 1999. “I want to be judged on my own merits. Now for the first time I am making my own decisions. I can feel the difference. It’s a great relief.” A friend who advised her to run explained why: “Hillary understood that if she did not carve out her own political life she would forever be remembered for all the scandals …. She could not bear that.”

By vigorously supporting her campaign, Bill Clinton played by the rules the couple had always lived by. On their twenty-fourth wedding anniversary he said as much. “I am very grateful that now my wife has a chance to do what I thought she ought to do twenty-six years ago when we finished law school,” he told a group gathered in October 1999 to support her Senate race. “The only thing that really worried me about our getting married was that somehow she would be denied the opportunity to share her gifts in the most important way.”

Bill and Hillarystill rose and fell together. “Hillary does not listen—really listen—to anybody except her husband. This is his campaign,” one friend said at the time. He did not just follow it, he worked on it, behind the scenes. At 3
A.M.
on September 6, 2000, for example, after an exhausting day of meetings at the United Nations, President Clinton was still up in his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, hunched over a yellow legal pad working on a campaign speech Hillary was to give on education. It was a typical moment in an unusual campaign: throughout her campaign, drafts of her speeches went back and forth between the White House and New York. “B, what do you think of this?” Hillary scribbled on top of texts. After extensive editing, the president signed, “I love you, B.”

IN FEBRUARY 1992,
a young woman had driven over icy New England roads from her Boston college to Manchester, New Hampshire, to volunteer for the Clinton campaign. After Clinton’s victory, she had worked her way up the ranks to a notable position in the White House. Eight years later, in January 2000, as she watched the president deliver his final State of the Union address, working his magic one last time, dazzling his supporters and dumbfounding his enemies, she wept. “So much time and talent wasted,” she said through tears. She spoke for many for whom the Clinton presidency, despite a surprisingly energetic and successful final year, represented as much a lost opportunity for true greatness as well as a series of achievements.

Did Bill Clinton understand how much time and talent he had squandered, how much more he could have achieved? “Don’t let anyone fool you,” his friend and former chief of staff Erskine Bowles said. “He knows. He knows and he feels terrible about the might-have-beens.” When, years before, Clinton was asked if he believed in life after death, he had replied, only half in jest, “I have to. I need a second chance.” His second chance was Hillary’s Senate run. In late July 2000, when a poll showed Hillary running behind her Republican opponent, Rick Lazio, Clinton revealed to what extent he saw her race as his. “Everybody that
always hated me all those years and were so mean to me,” he said, “they’ve all transferred all their anger to her now. It’s almost as if they’ve got one last chance to beat me.”

Never closer than when campaigning, the Clintons ended the presidency as close as they had ever been. Never before had Hillary appreciated him more than while running herself. Hillary’s friend and adviser Harold Ickes acknowledged that she has “a deeper appreciation …she understands now how good he is, and how difficult it is to do what he does.”

In the planning and the organizing of a political campaign, and in once again outmaneuvering their enemies, the Clintons’ personal and public lives were most harmoniously joined. And the answer to the question which for so long obsessed the nation—is theirs a
real
marriage or a political arrangement?—seemed clear. It was both. For though the Clintons’s marriage had perhaps a larger area of mystery than most, a decades-long relationship of deep interdependence cannot finally be
unreal.

It was not by chance that both candidates to succeed Bill Clinton presented perfect marriages to the electorate, stressing family values, morality and putative first ladies who, despite their advanced degrees and substantial personal attainments, conducted themselves in a far more traditional manner than Hillary Clinton. Perhaps the final irony of the Clintons’ turbulent tenure was that their experiment in co-presidency pulled Americans back toward an older attachment to tradition.

THE FINAL WEEKS
of the Clinton administration were unique in American history. For seventeen days, the first lady was also an elected official. At Hillary Clinton’s swearing-in as New York’s junior senator, the president played a proud but distinctly secondary role, assuming a position normally reserved for political wives: he held the Bible. His mood at the end of his tenure was nostalgic. He spoke of his legacy, his accomplishments. For Bill Clinton the future no longer had a precise focus.

For Hillary it was the opposite. She had a new bounce in her step.
The media focus was on her, and for the first time it had nothing to do with the state of their marriage. Entering into the routines and rituals of a United States senator, she quickly got three choice committee assignments that would allow her to become publicly involved in almost any issue in the world: health, environment and banking.

Now her every move was receiving more attention than his. The early signs were that she would be the same kind of senator as she was campaigner: serious, intense and tireless, much more issue-oriented than her husband. She told friends that she would never again repeat the mistakes of her health care initiative in the White House and she was glad she was given a second chance.

She had also told the voters of New York that she would not run for president in 2004. Not everyone was sure this pledge was ironclad. But no one, not even her closest friends—especially not her closest friends—doubted that she would eventually think of the presidency. The only question was when and how.

During the last weekend of the Clinton administration, Bill and Hillary hosted a series of remarkable overnight parties at Camp David. On Friday, January 12, the Cabinet was invited for a last get-together. In historic Laurel Lodge, where the Clintons on their first presidential weekend in 1993 had asked the incoming Cabinet to sit around the floor and, in a classic piece of New Age psychobabble, reveal something secret about themselves, each member of the outgoing Cabinet now rose in impromptu farewell tributes. The mood combined pride and wistfulness, nostalgia and hope. The president did not talk about his own accomplishments but rather about the rewards of public service, despite its many pitfalls. The toasts and tributes were mostly personal reminders of early times with Bill Clinton, and there were frequent references to the future Senator Clinton. A few people referred to the possibility that there was a “future president” in the room. No one doubted who the object of the reference was.

As for Hillary, she looked radiant. She seemed to combine effortlessly the roles of first lady and senator, switching easily from conversations about the past to questions about staffing her Senate office. While the president rambled across the entire range of his voracious intellectual
curiosity, Hillary stayed focused. She had undergone another transformation: liberated from the past, she had finally become the senior partner.

But the Clintons’ roller coaster ride never seemed to end, and the euphoria of January was gone within a few days (along with Clinton’s high popularity ratings). In his last days in office—largely circumventing his own staff and the Justice Department—President Clinton made one of the greatest errors of his entire eight years, pardoning Marc Rich and several other controversial felons. Denounced by his friends and enemies alike for abuse of presidential power, Clinton watched his two-year post-Monica effort to erase the stain on his legacy evaporate almost overnight. Revelations regarding Hillary’s own brother’s role in two of the pardons dragged the new senator into her husband’s post-presidential swamp. Once again, Bill Clinton’s worst qualities, his reckless self-indulgence and sense of entitlement, damaged their personal and political lives. This time, however, Hillary had a signal advantage: time and a platform from which to recover. Within months of her election, through hard work, determination and focus, Senator Clinton had converted her staunchest foes in the Senate into admiring colleagues.

T
RANSFORMED BY
H
ISTORY

TEN MINUTES BEFORE THE END OF HIS 2002 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS,
George W. Bush paused. “I hope you will join me in expressing thanks to one American for the strength and calm and comfort she brings to our nation in crisis,” he said, “our first lady, Laura Bush.”

The audience had been vocal in its support of the President’s rally cry for victory in the war on terror, but many seemed ambivalent when Bush spoke of an “axis of evil” that included the strange bedfellows Iran, Iraq and North Korea. When Bush spoke of his tax policy, half of the
assembled legislators shook their heads and folded their arms. Now fifty-two million viewers watched as both sides of the aisle stood in unison and whooped like teenagers at a high school pep rally.

The President looked up and nodded at his wife from the podium. From the balcony, she stood briefly, primly straightened her dress and acknowledged the applause with her signature smile. She mouthed “thank you” bashfully, and waved briefly. The applause continued. Finally, she reached for her neighbor, Afghan Chairman Hamid Karzai, as if to stop his clapping, and, hopefully, to get the rest of the class to settle down and listen to the teacher—who for the time being was her husband.