Living History (40 page)

Ten days later Robert Fiske released the preliminary finding in his fast-moving Whitewater investigation: First, no one in the Clinton White House or Department of the Treasury had tried to influence the RTC inquiry. Second, Fiske concurred with the opinions of the FBI and Park Police that Vince Foster’s death was a suicide. He further concluded that there was no evidence his suicide had anything to do with Whitewater.

To the dismay of many on the Republican Right, who had openly fueled speculation about Vince’s death, Fiske issued no indictments. A few conservative commentators and members of Congress, such as North Carolina Republican Senator Lauch Faircloth, called for Fiske’s head. Ironically, on the day Fiske’s findings were made public, my husband inadvertently paved the way for his replacement by signing the renewal of the Independent Counsel Act sent to him by Congress. It was something he had promised to do, and he kept his word.

Because of the growing Republican criticism of Fiske, I had argued against signing the legislation unless the appointment of Fiske was grandfathered into the bill. I feared that the Republicans and their allies in the judiciary, led by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, would figure out some way to remove Fiske because he was impartial and expeditious.

I shared my fears with Lloyd Cutler, who had replaced Bernie Nussbaum as White House counsel. Lloyd is one of the great men of Washington, counsel to President Carter and adviser to many other political leaders. A first-rate lawyer, he helped build one of the most prestigious law firms in America. When I told him what I feared, he told me not to worry. Lloyd, a true gentleman, assumed he was dealing with men of similar manners and even told me he would “eat his hat” if Fiske was replaced.

According to the newly enacted law, the independent counsel had to be chosen by a “Special Division,” a panel of three federal judges appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Rehnquist had handpicked David Sentelle, an ultraconservative Republican from North Carolina, to head the Special Division.

According to news accounts, Judge Sentelle was seen in mid July having lunch with Faircloth and Senator Jesse Helms, another of my husband’s outspoken critics. It may have been a coincidence, and Sentelle later claimed that the three were merely old friends discussing prostate problems. But on August 5, a few weeks after that lunch, the Special Division announced the appointment of a new independent counsel. Robert Fiske was out, replaced by Kenneth Starr.

Starr was a forty-eight-yearold Republican insider, a former appeals court judge who had stepped down to become Solicitor General in the first Bush Administration, a traditional path to the Supreme Court. He was a partner in Kirkland & Ellis, a law firm with a lucrative business defending tobacco companies. Starr was a staunch conservative; unlike Fiske, he had never been a prosecutor. He had been outspoken about the Paula Jones lawsuit, appearing on TV that spring to argue for the right of Jones to sue a sitting President, urging that the case proceed quickly. He had also offered to write a friend of the court brief on her behalf. Based on the evidence of these conflicts of interest, five former Presidents of the American Bar Association called on Starr to forgo serving as independent counsel. They also issued a statement questioning the three-judge panel that selected him.

Starr’s appointment greatly slowed the progress of the investigation. Most of Fiske’s staff resigned rather than work for him; Starr did not take a leave of absence from his law practice, as Fiske had, and thus was a part-timer; Starr had zero criminal law experience, so he was learning on the job. Despite the mandate of the statute that an independent counsel conduct an investigation “in a prompt, responsible, and cost-effective manner,”

Starr never set a timetable or showed any sense of urgency, in contrast to Fiske, who intended to wrap up the investigation by the end of 1994. It appeared from the beginning that Starr’s goal was to keep the issue alive at least through the 1996 election.

Given these troubling conflicts of interest and early warning signs, it was clear that Starr was replacing Fiske not to continue an independent investigation, but for partisan purposes. I knew immediately what we were facing, but I also knew there was nothing I could do about it. I had to trust our justice system and hope for the best. I did, however, remind Lloyd Cutler of his hat-eating offer and suggest he might choose a small one made of natural fibers.

Partisan politicking was nothing new in Washington; it came with the territory. But it was the politics of personal destruction―visceral, meanspirited campaigns to ruin the lives of public figures―that I found disheartening and bad for the country.

All spring and summer, rightwing radio hosts with national audiences stirred up their listeners with terrifying tales from Washington. Rush Limbaugh routinely told his 20 million radio listeners that “Whitewater is about health care.” And I finally understood that, yes, it was. The ongoing Whitewater investigation, despite Fiske’s findings, was about undermining the progressive agenda by any means. Limbaugh and others rarely criticized the contents of the Health Security Act or any other policy the Democrats introduced. If you believed everything you heard on the airwaves in 1994, you would conclude that your President was a Communist, that the First Lady was a murderess and that together they had hatched a plot to take away your guns and force you to give up your family doctor (if you had one) for a Socialist health care system.

One afternoon in Seattle at the end of July, I pulled into town as part of the Health Security Express. Inspired by the Freedom Riders who traveled by bus across the South in the early sixties to spread the message of desegregation, health reform advocates organized this nationwide bus tour in the summer of 1994. The idea was to spread the word about the health care plan at the grassroots level and generate crowds from the West Coast to Washington, showing Congress that there was support for the bill.

We started in Portland, Oregon, where I sent off the first troop of riders. It was a lively event, despite the record-breaking heat and the vocal protesters who surrounded the site. As the buses pulled out, a small plane dragged a banner across the sky that read: “Beware the Phony Express.” Not an inexpensive stunt.

Local and national radio hosts had been inciting protesters all week. One of them had urged listeners to come down and “show Hillary” what they thought of me. The call to arms attracted hundreds of hardcore right-wingers: militia supporters, tax protesters, clinic blockaders. At least half of the 4,500 people who came to my speech in Seattle were protesters.

The Secret Service warned me that we might run into trouble. For once, I agreed to wear a bulletproof vest. By then I had become accustomed to the constant presence of security, to having intimate conversations within earshot of Secret Service men and women who I sometimes thought knew more about me and my family than did my closest friends. They had urged me before to avoid certain places or to wear protective clothing; now, for the first time, I heeded their warning. It was one of the few times I felt in real physical danger. During the rally, I could hardly hear my own voice over the booing and heckling. After the speech ended and we were driving away from the stage, hundreds of protesters swarmed around the limousine. What I could see from the car was a crowd of men who seemed to be in their twenties and thirties. I’ll never forget the look in their eyes and their twisted mouths as they screamed at me while the agents pushed them away. The Secret Service made several arrests that day, and they confiscated two guns and a knife hidden in the crowd.

Neither random nor spontaneous, this protest was part of a well-organized campaign to disrupt the health care reform bus caravan and neutralize its message, according to journalists David Broder and Haynes Johnson. Everywhere the buses stopped, they were met with demonstrators. The protests were openly sponsored by a benign-sounding political interest group called Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). Reporters eventually discovered and disclosed the fact that CSE worked in concert with Newt Gingrich’s Washington office. And, as Broder and Johnson wrote in their book, The System, the generous sponsor behind the group was none other than the reclusive but increasingly active Richard Mellon Scaife, the rightwing billionaire who was also financing the Arkansas Project.

When we returned to Washington after the bus trip, we continued to try to work for a compromise with Republicans in Congress on various aspects of reform. I admired Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island for his principled stands and decent manner; he had been an early supporter of reform and an advocate for universal coverage. Senator Chafee had worked with his Republican colleagues to develop his own thoughtful proposal and hoped that, by melding his plan with ours, he would garner enough bipartisan support to pass a bill. Chafee made heroic efforts to bridge the gap between Republicans and Democrats, keeping up his effort until he was the lone Republican still fighting for reform.

Finally, he, too, abandoned his cause. Without a single Republican supporter, health care reform was like a patient on life support being given last rites.

Even so, we made a last-ditch effort to bring the Republicans to some sort of compromise.

Senator Kennedy pressed Chafee one more time, to no avail. At a heated meeting in the White House, some of Bill’s advisers argued that he should publicly address the nation and explain how the Republican leadership had tried to derail reform. He could talk about his attempts to build a consensus and ask why Dole, Gingrich and others were so unwilling to come to the bargaining table. His message would be a presidential challenge to Congress to get the job done. Another group argued vehemently that it was more prudent to let the bill die without fanfare. In advance of the elections, they believed we didn’t need another controversy and worried that a presidential statement would draw greater attention to a political failure.

I thought that the country needed to see the President fighting, even if he lost, and that we should try for a vote in the Senate. The Finance Committee’s compromise had been voted out of the committee, and Senator Mitchell, as Majority Leader, could bring it directly to the floor. Even if that strategy resulted in a Republican filibuster, as some in our camp predicted, I thought it could work in our favor. Members of Congress would be more accountable to their constituents come the November elections. And Democrats would not be left in the worst of both worlds: the Republicans never having to vote against reform, and the Democratic majority failing to pass new legislation. The more cautious strategy won out, and health care faded with barely a whimper. I still think that was the wrong call. Giving up without one last public fight demoralized Democrats and let the opposition rewrite history.

After twenty months, we conceded defeat. We knew we had alienated a wide assortment of health care industry experts and professionals, as well as some of our own legislative allies. Ultimately, we could never convince the vast majority of Americans who have health insurance that they wouldn’t have to give up benefits and medical choices to help the minority of Americans without coverage. Nor could we persuade them that reform would protect them from losing insurance and would make their medical care more affordable in the future.

Bill and I were disappointed and discouraged. I knew I had contributed to our failure, both because of my own missteps and because I underestimated the resistance I would meet as a First Lady with a policy mission. I also felt bad for Ira, who had taken a lot of criticism that was unfair and unwarranted. Bill appreciated his hard work and asked him to head up the Administration’s Working Group on Electronic Commerce. Ira did a great job establishing the government’s approach for encouraging electronic commerce. He was soon praised in the business community for his insight and became known as the “Internet Czar.” But our most critical mistake was trying to do too much, too fast.

That said, I still believe we were right to try. Our work in 1993 and 1994 paved the way for what several economists dubbed the “Hillary Factor,” the purposeful restraint on price increases by medical providers and pharmaceutical companies during the 1990s. It also helped to create the ideas and political will that led to important smaller reforms in the years following. Thanks to the leadership of Senator Kennedy and Senator Nancy Kassebaum, a Kansas Republican, the nation now has a law guaranteeing that workers will not lose their insurance when they change jobs. I worked behind the scenes with Senator Kennedy to help create the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which by 2003 provided coverage to more than 5 million children of working parents too well off for Medicaid but unable to afford private insurance. CHIP represented the largest expansion of public health insurance coverage since the passage of Medicaid in 1965, and it helped reduce the number of Americans without health insurance for the first time in twelve years.

Bill signed a series of bills that I had worked for, including laws ensuring that women be allowed to stay in the hospital for more than twentyfour hours after childbirth, promoting mammography and prostate screening, increasing research into diabetes and improving childhood vaccination rates so that go percent of all two-year-olds were immunized against the most serious childhood illnesses for the first time ever. Bill also took on the tobacco lobby and began seriously addressing HIV/AIDS here at home and around the world. He used his presidential prerogative to extend patients’ rights to more than eighty-five million Americans and their dependents enrolled in federal health plans and to those covered by Medicare, Medicaid and the Veterans Health System. None of these actions represented a seismic shift on the order of the Health Security Act. But collectively, these reforms of health care policy improved conditions for tens of millions of Americans.

On balance I think we made the right decision to try to reform the whole system. By 2002, with the economy in trouble again and the financial savings of managed care in the nineties having leveled out, health insurance costs were again rising much faster than inflation, the number of people without insurance was going up and seniors on Medicare still didn’t have prescription drug coverage. The people who financed the Harry and Louise ads may be better off, but the American people aren’t. Someday we will fix the system. When we do, it will be the result of more than fifty years of efforts by Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Bill and me. Yes, I’m still glad we tried.