A Woman in Charge (27 page)

Hillary saw ominous signs before Bill did. By October she told Bill her feeling that polls with him in the lead were wrong, and that he “might actually lose.” She also made a mental note that would inform the conduct of all future Clinton campaigns: the negative ads of Bill's opponent trumped not just the news broadcasts but the reality and complexity of what had happened at Fort Chaffee.

Just eight days before election day, Hillary called Dick Morris in an effort to save the Clinton campaign. Morris had been fired shortly after Bill was elected because so many people on the governor's staff disliked working with him, and Bill himself was ambivalent. To him, Morris combined the powers of a savant with a snake. But he had warned Bill about the potential negative political consequences of raising the car tag fee, and Hillary's practical instincts weren't wrong in asking him to help save the campaign.

Hillary's phone call to Morris initiated her new role in managing Bill and his campaigns. A basic dynamic in the Rodham-Clinton marital and political relationship was undergoing a momentous shift. “She believed very much in him but felt that he needed someone to protect him, someone more maternal or lawyerly more than anything else,” Morris said. “You know, This guy's so nice he'll sign anything and [I've] got to read the contract first. That kind of stuff.”

Morris, in Florida working on a Republican campaign, told Hillary that it was probably too late to salvage a win for Bill, but he went to Arkansas anyway. As was often the case when Hillary considered electoral politics, she was appalled at its unfairness and illogic. Bill's ideas and ideals towered above not just Frank White's, but (to her mind) the whole political class in America. That fact had been on prominent display at the Democratic convention in New York in midsummer. Bill had been a Carter floor whip, and was chosen by the Democratic governors to deliver a prime-time speech as their representative. His speech was enlightened. The time had come to find “more creative and realistic” solutions than the old Democratic coalition had been recycling for two generations, he said.

We were brought up to believe, uncritically, without thinking about it, that our system broke down in the Great Depression, was reconstructed by Franklin Roosevelt through the New Deal and World War II, and would never break again. And that all we had to do was try to reach out and extend the benefits of America to those who had been dispossessed: minorities and women, the elderly, the handicapped and children in need. But the hard truth is that for ten long years through Democratic and Republican administrations alike, this economic system has been breaking down. We have seen high inflation, high unemployment, large government deficits, the loss of our competitive edge. In response to these developments, a dangerous and growing number of people are simply opting out of our system. Another dangerous and growing number are opting for special interest and single interest group politics, which threatens to take every last drop of blood out of our political system.

That synthesis would be the foundation of the “New Democrat” movement in politics that Bill Clinton would come to symbolize over the next ten years. But it was also a synthesis, to some extent, of his and Hillary's ideas. She had labored over preparation of the speech with him, and when she felt his message was becoming too contrarian, too critical of the well-worn path of traditional liberalism, and perhaps intended too much for Republicans tuning in to a Democratic convention in prime time, she moved it back toward basic principles.

But basic principles were of little help in undoing the damage Bill had caused himself, with help from Jimmy Carter and Frank White, in Arkansas. Shortly after Morris's arrival, he brought Hillary and Bill his latest poll, which showed Clinton with less than 50 percent of the likely vote. With Hillary's consent the Clinton campaign bought radio and television time for one last—negative—ad against White.

On election night, Hillary and Bill received the early returns at the governor's mansion, not campaign headquarters, a few blocks away. The first results showed him carrying Texarkana, to the encouragement of his supporters. But Bill told Hillary it was over. Nobody could read election returns better than he could. His immediate reaction was anger—at himself, the press, Carter, the Republicans, his staff. He was calm when he and Hillary arrived at campaign headquarters, but she was trembling, trying to appear composed.

He had lost 52 percent to 48 percent, and in Hillary's words, he “was devastated.” He felt he wouldn't be able to make a proper concession speech and face supporters and reporters. Instead, he sent out Hillary, who thanked them all and invited them to the mansion the next morning for a gathering she later described as being like a wake.

Vince Foster and Webb Hubbell were among the first to arrive. “Bill's eyes were puffy and his voice was hoarse,” Hubbell remembered. “Hillary had dark circles under her eyes. Both of them looked more fragile than I'd ever seen them.” Hillary and Bill never made the same mistakes again. “From then on,” Hubbell noted, “they ran their campaigns themselves, going on their gut instincts, and they never again failed to hit back fast when the situation demanded it.”

That afternoon Hillary and Bill went to lunch with Jim and Diane Blair. An indelible image of Bill remained with Diane: “He was half-laughing, half-crying over the country song on the café jukebox, ‘I Feel So Bad I Don't Know Whether to Kill Myself or Go Bowling.'”

 

B
ILL'S COLLAPSE
after his loss was psychologically and emotionally absolute. He was utterly undone, wounded so critically that Hillary feared he might never recover. “He couldn't face people,” said Deborah Sale. “It was unbelievably devastating. He just thought it was the end of his life.”

Hillary recognized that she was the only person who could nurse him back to health. “She basically had to take care of him,” said Sale. “She is very strong. She felt there had to be some way to shore him up. She felt that recovering politically was absolutely essential to his recovering emotionally. They had to have some sense of hope that there might be a political future for him because he really saw that as a way, as his path in life.”

If she failed, the path she had chosen in life—with Bill, and their grand future as a couple destined to do great things—would be inaccessible. Whether he could regain his emotional and political strength was an open question. Hillary knew the only way to do it was to regain office in two years.

Her instincts for political survival dictated her first major decision toward that end—to call Morris again, only days after Bill's defeat. She wanted Morris to start putting together, with her, the pieces for another campaign.

Meanwhile she seethed at the press for allowing Frank White to make her name part of his campaign. “People said, Oh, you know, she didn't even change her name. This was a terrible thing. But, in fact, this was just an excuse,” said Sale. “They really didn't like [Bill]. They didn't like the way he was conducting himself at the time.” Hillary vented about Jimmy Carter, too—and she has never been one to let go of grudges. Twelve years later, as Bill Clinton ascended to the White House she decreed that members of Carter's inner circle could not serve in a Clinton presidency.

But in Little Rock in November 1980, Hillary was one of very few people who believed that Bill Clinton might still be able to reach the White House.

While she was firm, determined, and encouraging in dealing with Bill, it was difficult for her to keep her emotions under control. First, there were enormous practical considerations. Ann Henry could see how hard Hillary was struggling: “They now have to move out and find another place to live. They have a baby. Living in the governor's mansion you have a lot of things taken care of. Now it's all on you. So she's still going to work. They have this baby. Bill is depressed. No troopers, no maids, no cook, no nothing.”

At Hillary's behest, less than ten days after the election, Bill phoned Betsey Wright in Washington and asked her to come to Little Rock to shut down his office and to put his records and files in order. He told Wright he needed “a trainer to get back on the track.” She arrived to find the staff demoralized and worried about where they were going to find jobs, and Bill deeply depressed and shocked. “It was like going to somebody's house when somebody that you love dies, and you talk about the life that had been lived, and the things that were good, and where you screwed up. I felt like I went to a permanent wake but without the Irish jubilation.”

Betsey moved into the guest cottage on the mansion grounds, and when other friends arrived, the mansion basement. She had brought only a suitcase. She left Little Rock eleven years later.

In effect she was forming a partnership with Hillary to put Bill's political career back together. Along with Joan Roberts, Bill's press secretary, they would come to be referred to by reporters clandestinely as “the Valkyries.”

The files that Hillary and Betsey were so concerned about were not routine official records related to Bill's governorship, but rather the working papers of his life in politics: contacts, phone numbers, addresses, notes made to himself, old calendars, and, absolutely essential, the voluminous collection of note cards listing, in his hand, his campaign contributors and political contacts. Each card was a diary of Bill's interaction with an individual who figured in some way, no matter how small, in Bill's political development: each contribution, each meeting, each letter sent and received. Computers were not yet common, but Betsey found a program that could catalogue the cards—perhaps ten thousand of them.

While Bill wallowed in self-pity, calling friends, asking constituents how he had done them wrong, flagellating himself for bad decisions, and seeking guidance from preachers, Hillary made plans for their move from the mansion to a house in the same Hillcrest neighborhood they had left only two years before. The new house was even smaller than the last. They created a nursery for Chelsea—eleven months old when they moved in January—in a converted attic. Hillary and Bill combed thrift shops and secondhand stores for traditional furniture and a few near-antiques of the sort she seemed to favor. When Virginia looked around their new quarters, she asked why they liked such stuff, remarking that she had spent her entire life trying to get away from old furniture and houses. Then she gave them a Victorian “courting” couch that had been sitting in her garage. The household they managed to cobble together was a depressing display of their slide from life in the mansion. Dick Morris described the decor as a testament to Hillary's lack of domesticity. The furniture, Victorian style in red velvet, looked like “the lobby of a hotel in an old Western movie.” Bill had picked out some of the pieces, heavy German sideboards and chairs, and bric-a-brac that inclined toward the garish and the curlicued. The kitchen had a college dorm feel, said Morris. “The glasses and plates looked like they came from a gas station or supermarket—mismatched, in clashing sizes and designs.”

Bill found a job of sorts at the law firm of Wright, Lindsey & Jennings, little more than a pit stop for Bill with a desk and telephone. Often he was out and about trying to reestablish himself with voters. Politics, he told a class of Diane Blair's at Fayetteville, was “the only track I wanted to run on.” “Political leaders,” he said, “were usually a combination of darkness and light. The darkness of insecurity, depression, family disorder. In great leaders, the light overcame the darkness.”

Hillary had also ever so briefly considered a job offer—as president of Hendrix College, which was affiliated with the United Methodist Church—and then set about rebuilding her life and Bill's. She joined the First United Methodist Church in Little Rock, became a member of its board, and did pro bono legal work on its behalf. Her renewed emphasis on spiritual life led her to give a series of talks around the state on why she was a Methodist, including a visit to a Baptist church across the Arkansas River in North Little Rock where her topic was “Women armed with the Christian sword—to build an army for the Lord.”

Friends from around the country came to see how she and Bill were doing. There were good days and bad. The good ones tended to involve Chelsea. The bad ones tended to involve screaming and tension and, once again, Bill's penchant for other women. Friends surmised that Hillary believed Bill had lost the election in part because, as governor, he had let himself become distracted by the women who always seemed to be throwing themselves at him. “As I look back,” said Rudy Moore, “it is more evident that Bill Clinton was not the same person psychologically in 1980 that he had been before. It must have been something personal, perhaps with his relationship with Hillary, but he was ambivalent and preoccupied. His reelection campaign reflected it.” Later Gennifer Flowers, the nightclub chanteuse with whom Bill had an affair, said their relationship began in 1977 and that Arkansas newspaper reporters were making inquiries about it toward the end of his first term as governor.

To journalist Max Brantley, Bill seemed to be in a period of mourning—for his political career. “Bill obsessed on the subject. He was in a funk for months afterward, and he just couldn't leave it alone. You'd catch him in the grocery store, he was at loose ends, particularly right after he left office, and he'd go on obsessively about the factors that had caused it and what had gone wrong, and was just feeling sorry for himself.” “He really felt like sackcloth and ashes, and that people should be flogging him with whips or something,” Betsey Wright said.

To help ease their transition, Hillary had taken a brief leave from the Rose Law Firm. Now she returned to find a chilly reception. It was clear the partners had expected her to be a rainmaker, bringing in business from the contacts she and Bill had established over the years. “The apolitical firm I'd joined seven years earlier was no more,” Webb Hubbell said. “‘You need to talk to Hillary, Webb,' was the mantra. The message to her boiled down to this: Either leave…or start billing to make up for the liability you create. They wanted Vince and me to talk her into leaving.” Neither of them talked to Hillary about leaving.