A Woman in Charge (31 page)

Friends from around the country were already flying into Little Rock for the declaration they expected Bill to make; many had been waiting since college for such a moment. After his meeting with Betsey, he took several of them aside and, with each, shared his growing sense of doubt. A few of them said later they had been quite dramatic in describing their own concerns about how a presidential race would affect Chelsea. Mickey Kantor, a California lawyer who served on the Legal Services board with Hillary, said that Chelsea had approached Bill and himself while they were talking and asked her father about a family vacation planned for the summer. When Bill said he might be running for president and not able to go, Kantor said Chelsea responded, “Then Mom and I will go without you.” Carl Wagner, who went back fifteen years with Bill and Hillary, to the McGovern campaign, and was staying at the mansion, said that as the Clintons were about to walk upstairs to their bedroom, he told Bill: “When you reach the top of the steps, walk into your daughter's bedroom, look at her, and understand that if you do this, your relationship will never be the same. I'm not sure if it will be worse or better, but it will never be the same.”

Hillary wrote many years afterward that Bill was still undecided the day before his announcement. The next day, at the Excelsior, with Hillary next to him and wiping tears away, Bill announced he would not be a candidate in the 1988 presidential election.

“If people had told me five years ago that I would ever have a serious chance to run for president and not take it, I would have told them they were crazy,” he said. “I hope I will have another opportunity to seek the presidency when I can do it and be faithful to my family, my state, and my sense of what is right.” Later in the afternoon, his office issued a statement in his name:

I need some family time: I need some personal time. Politicians are people too. I think sometimes we forget it, but they really are. The only thing I or any other candidate has to offer in running for President is what's inside. That's what sets people on fire and gets their confidence and their votes, whether they live in Wisconsin or Montana or New York. That part of my life needs renewal. The other, even more important reason for my decision is the certain impact that this campaign would have had on our daughter. The only way I could have won, getting in this late, after others had been working up to two years, would be to go on the road full time from now until the end, and to have Hillary do the same thing…. I've seen a lot of kids grow up under these pressures and a long, long time ago I made a promise to myself that if I was ever lucky enough to have a child, she would never grow up wondering who her father was.

Hillary seemed relieved on one level and angry on another. There was no way of knowing when there would be another clear opportunity to gain the White House. Whatever her indignation at the new journalistic environment, she knew that Bill's own irresponsibility was the reason for his decision, and an abdication of more than just his marriage vows. The good news was that Bill would have four more years to build his national base of support, and he would still be only forty-five years old, or forty-nine if the Democrats won in 1988. Meanwhile, they could work on their relationship.

 

B
ILL WOULD LATER
say of the decision, “Finally I felt as though the weight of the world had been lifted from my shoulders. I was free to be a father, husband, and governor, and to work and speak on national issues unencumbered by immediate ambitions.”

Most of his closest friends and associates, however, believed he immediately went into another deep depression of the sort he'd suffered after losing the governorship in 1980. Whatever the case, it is certain that over the next three years the Clinton marriage teetered, as his actions became increasingly compulsive, even bizarre, and deeply hurtful to Hillary.

While he was considering running for president in 1987, Bill had been operating at full throttle, doing what he always did best—campaigning, planning, formulating ideas, creating contacts, working the phones. But when he decided not to run, Betsey Wright noted, “there was an adrenaline cutoff immediately, and the funk after that. I mean, he just thought his life was over. There was nothing else for him to do. And he was nutty…reckless. I couldn't get his attention in the office of the governor. He was tired and burned out on being governor. There wasn't anything to capture his interest in the job. He really got careless with fooling around.”

Still, the affairs of state in Arkansas continued to get attended to in a somewhat decent fashion, good works were performed by the first lady and her husband, important speeches were made about globalization and the interdependence of economies, preschool programs based on an Israeli model that Hillary had learned about were instituted, and at her instigation a successful development bank modeled on one in Bangladesh was established for poor families in Little Rock. But, as so often happened with the Clintons, their relationship began to affect the rotation of the wobbly wheels of state.

There was another brief rush of adrenaline preceding the Democratic presidential convention in July, in Atlanta. Bill was scheduled to give the nominating speech for Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, who had emerged from the group of candidates condescendingly called the “Seven Dwarfs” by some reporters after Clinton and Hart had withdrawn from consideration. In fact, it was a reasonably strong Democratic field, including Senator Al Gore and Dukakis, who remained ahead of Bush in the polls coming out of the Democratic convention.

From the time the Clintons arrived at the convention arena, things began to go wrong. First, the house lights weren't kept dimmed, a customary technique ensuring that delegates would calm down to listen to the nominating speeches. Meanwhile, Bill was cued to begin delivery of his address while demonstrations were continuing on the floor. Betsey ran to find Anne Wexler, who was directing the program, to turn down the house lights to no avail. Dukakis floor whips continued to lead parts of the crowd in chants after Bill's speech was well under way.

Bill then droned on for thirty-two minutes in prime time while the delegates in the hall, even the network TV anchors, grew increasingly restive. Tom Shales, writing in the next day's
Washington Post,
would call it the night of “The Numb and the Restless.” When Bill finally said, “In closing,” the hall erupted enthusiastically in rowdy relief. The late-night TV comics would have a ball with their monologues the next night. Not for one minute had Clinton commanded the audience's attention.

Hillary, pinned in her seat as television cameras and news photographers documented her misery, was already thinking about how to publicly accuse the Dukakis people, and explain how what had happened was their fault, according to the Little Rock aides she spoke with afterward. The fury at the Dukakis people was more than justified. The speech had gone through nine drafts—she had never seen Bill work so hard on a text—because the nominee and his aides kept adding suggestions. Still, it timed out at sixteen minutes, four less than the allotted twenty, which should have been just enough to accommodate the pauses for applause and demonstrations of enthusiasm on the floor. On their way to the convention hall, Hillary, Bill, and Betsey had stopped in the nominee's suite to give Dukakis one last look at the text, partly because of Bill's concern that the speech was too long and, in Betsey's words, “overburdened” with ideas and a tone not his own. “Great speech,” Dukakis had said. “That's what I want. Give it.”

Leaving the hall, Hillary had wanted to go back to the hotel with Bill, who was only beginning to sense how terribly things had gone wrong, though he knew it was bad. “She was going to take care of Bill, and she felt that they just needed to get out of there,” recalled Betsey. But Betsey, who knew many of Bill's rhythms as well or better than Hillary, felt “he had to talk it out.” He proceeded that night to “talk to anybody he knew that he ran into. And we did that until about two o'clock in the morning. And Hillary stayed with us, but we weren't hanging on to Bill. He was moving around the restaurants and bars,” trying on the one hand to get a read on how bad it was, and, on the other, looking for reassurance that it wasn't as bad as he thought.

 

I
N THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH
of the 1988 Democratic convention, Harry Thomason, a television producer friend of the Clintons whose brother as a boy had sung next to Bill in the church choir in Hot Springs, called from Hollywood with the suggestion that Bill go on the Johnny Carson
Tonight Show
and make fun of the speech he delivered to the convention. Bill agreed, and Thomason arranged it. And Bill's self-deprecating interaction with Carson, who told the audience not to worry, “because we've got plenty of coffee and cots in the lobby,” and then placed an hourglass on his desk as he introduced Bill, was triumphant.

Here was an essential difference between Hillary and Bill: he was far more capable of genuine irony than she, able to salvage a difficult situation by mocking himself. Self-deprecation is not her forte; her attempts are stiff and come off rehearsed usually, though with close friends she can sometimes mock the most obvious, and usually superficial, aspects of her countenance, like problems with her hair and headbands.

What had he been trying to do in Atlanta? Carson asked. Bill said he'd been trying to make Dukakis—never known for rhetorical splendor—look good. “I succeeded beyond my wildest imagination,” said Bill, adding that Dukakis was so fond of the speech that he wanted him to go to the Republican convention to nominate George Bush, too. The audience howled.

The redemption didn't last long.

 

M
ARILYN
J
O
J
ENKINS
was Hillary's worst nightmare: an attractive, accomplished, rich antagonist with whom Bill believed himself to be in love. He wanted to end his marriage. Hillary refused. She would fight to keep her marriage and her family together, she told Betsey Wright. She had put too much of her own heart and mind and soul into her partnership with Bill to abandon it. She had invested too much.

In 1992, after the affair had played itself out, Hillary answered an interviewer's question for
Glamour
magazine with words that may have shed unintended light on at least some of her thinking during the “Jenkins period” of their lives.

No marriage is perfect, but just because it isn't perfect doesn't mean the only solution is to walk off and leave it. My strong feelings about divorce and its effects on children have caused me to bite my tongue more than a few times during my own marriage…. One of the many difficulties with divorce is that it becomes a public matter. It goes to court. Painful child custody decisions must be made. Regardless of individual feelings, everyone involved in the process, especially a parent, has an obligation to temper the pain children will inevitably experience.

Betsey Wright had concluded toward the end of 1988 that Bill was “having a severe midlife crisis.” She told him, “Bill, you're crazy if you think everybody in this office is oblivious to the fact that you're having an affair. You're acting like an idiot. We're all seeing the way you giggle, the way you shut the door, you know, this is just dumb. Too many people on this staff know about it.” The troopers knew about it, she said. Hillary and Bill were screaming at each other in the mansion. Plus, Wright could see “he was playing some games with some of the women I had on staff, and I had been able to keep all of that under control. Heavy flirting. They would amazingly have to run errands out to the mansion when Hillary wasn't there, and stuff that was just driving me crazy. He wasn't doing his job. He wasn't paying attention. He was resisting trying to make his appointments. And he was having this affair.” Wright did not at the time know the woman's name, or particularly want to.

“I was switching the people I always sent with him on the road,” said Betsey. “So it would just be the ones that I thought would keep him out of trouble the best. It was just a very dangerous era of time.” Bill began a series of assignations, she was convinced, that were increasingly heedless even by his standards. “And I really did eventually become quite depressed over all of this. And I'm sure I was driving him crazy then, too. And I mean he came to really resent that I always knew when he was screwing up. By the time the whole thing came to a head he just went crazy in '89. He nearly burned his relationship with Hillary. He burned it with me. Then he decides he wants to fix them both. He can't. That's when I resigned and left the governor's office, because I knew he couldn't fix both relationships at the same time.

“I talked to Hillary several times during that period by phone, and we were pulling our hair about him. He was a mess. During one of the conversations she said, ‘There are worse things than infidelity,'” and gradually—in pieces from her and Bill—the story came out that Bill had told Hillary he wanted to leave the marriage. Hillary had not been very specific, but she was clear enough. According to Wright, “Hillary [also] said, ‘What you have to remember, Betsey, is that he is an adult and he is the governor, and we have to let him be responsible for his actions.' And I said, ‘Hillary, you've always been so much better about standing back and doing that. I always feel like I've got so much invested in this, and it hurts me when he acts like an idiot.' And I was never able to stop beating him over the head…. She would pull back. I used to be in awe of her ability to do that. And I don't think she ever stopped doing that…. But this Jenkins was different.”

Marilyn Jo Jenkins was about the same age as Hillary, a Southerner, a beauty, a mother of two young children, a businesswoman with an MBA from Western New England College in Springfield, Massachusetts. She had grown up in Crossett, Arkansas, and had attended Henderson State College in Arkadelphia, where she'd met the man she would later marry, Norman Jenkins III, a military man. Her sister had married into one of the wealthiest families in Arkansas, the Blands, who made their fortune in soda-pop franchising. After fifteen years of marriage, Jenkins divorced her husband in 1984. She then began work as a customer service representative for Entergy Arkansas. When she and Bill began seeing each other, probably in 1988, she was a marketing manager there.