A Woman in Charge (35 page)

I
T WAS
H
ILLARY
that night, after
60 Minutes,
who rallied the campaign staff. A message to the troops was clearly called for, and she had good news. A conference call was arranged. The polls were showing that Bill was still leading in New Hampshire, despite Flowers's press conference, despite the tapes. Eighty percent of Americans thought Bill should stay in the race.

“She was her husband's ultimate character reference,” said Brooke Shearer, a friend who traveled with Hillary during much of the campaign and was interviewed by Diane Blair. That role would be Bill's salvation.

The next day Hillary telephoned Tammy Wynette. On
60 Minutes,
Hillary had said, “You know, I'm not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I'm sitting here because I love him and I respect him and I honor what he's been through and what we've been through together. And you know, if that's not enough for people, then heck, don't vote for him.”

Wynette was not pleased. She had publicly demanded that Hillary apologize for…well, it wasn't quite clear what for, but it appeared that she was offended that Hillary hadn't distinguished between her and her famous song, “Stand by Your Man.”

“I didn't mean to hurt Tammy Wynette as a person,” Hillary said. “I happen to be a country-Western fan. If she feels like I've hurt her feelings, I'm sorry about that.” Hillary's attempt did not go over well with the singer, and the following day Hillary again called Wynette at her home in Nashville to apologize personally, and told her she would try to bring up the issue on her scheduled taping of
Primetime Live
with Sam Donaldson that night. After the call, Wynette said, “She seemed like a very nice lady and she seemed genuinely sorry.” The apology didn't exactly fix the problem. “The undercurrent we couldn't eradicate was the notion that their partnership was less a marriage fired by love than an arrangement based on ambition,” said George Stephanopoulos.

Nonetheless, Hillary's appearance on
60 Minutes
was a triumph, and probably had saved Bill's candidacy—because she had indeed stood by her man, as she would do again on the
Today
show when Monica Lewinsky became (like Gennifer Flowers) a household name. Bill finished second in the New Hampshire primary—a near-miracle, given what they had been through. His campaign, and Hillary, were not about to go down.

 

S
TAN
G
REENBERG,
the campaign's chief polling consultant, was in awe of Hillary's talents, her intellect, and especially her tough-mindedness. In 1990, the Clintons came out of a difficult gubernatorial primary nervous about the general election ahead. They invited Greenberg to Little Rock to help manage the rest of the campaign. The candidate's brain trust became Hillary, Dick Morris, Greenberg, and Gloria King, who had replaced Betsey Wright as the governor's chief of staff. “I came in to try to figure out a rationale for why you would give him another term,” Greenberg said years later. Clinton's opponent was attacking him relentlessly on both his record and his character. The overwhelming strategic question, discussed immediately upon Greenberg's arrival, was: “How aggressive to go in attacking the opponent and when to do it. And I can tell you she came down on the side of aggressive, and all on her own. She had a strong point of view…she was a fighter.”

Greenberg, a slight man with wire-rimmed glasses, far more bookish in his appearance than in his muscular approach to campaigning, pronounced all this in a tone of unbridled admiration for both Clintons, and the ability of each to play to his or her respective strengths. Bill “was listening” and took a while to agree. “It was a very spirited discussion. Once we decided what the attack was, and we had his agreement, she wanted to do it strong, and she wanted to do it early. Which was exactly what occurred.” Her political instincts, her urge to defend her man (and herself ) and, once attacked, to go for the jugular won Greenberg over almost immediately. And it was no negative in his eyes that she also counseled aggressive handling of the press.

In fact, Greenberg and Hillary looked at politics through the same lens. From the late 1960s on, Democrats had developed a reputation for being soft. Like her, Greenberg believed that Jimmy Carter, who lost his presidency to Ronald Reagan in 1980, typified that weakness. “I don't mean just soft on policy terms, on crime, or soft on foreign policy. The Democrats were soft in campaigns. They didn't fight. They didn't show what they were made of, and people couldn't trust them to govern. And I think that Hillary was of that point of view that you were not going to have people's confidence unless you could show that you're strong and tough against your opponents. Your opponents need to know that you're not going to be passive, you're not going to be a punching bag, that you're not going to get pushed…that you're going to take control over your destiny.” The Republicans had learned the lesson long before.

Greenberg was with Hillary when she made her first statement defending her husband just after the Gennifer Flowers story broke. “Her attitude was that people will do anything” to derail her husband's candidacy, “and she said it as forcefully as anything she'd ever said in her life. This did not come out of any kind of campaign discussion. She just got up there and said, ‘People have been saying these things about my husband for years.' This was her, and what she believed. The press were stunned by it. It was not a planned moment. She took it to a new level [and] set the tone for everything that followed on that issue. We were in a crisis. And she continually set the tone. Her position was defiant—defiant that this was a political conspiracy, that this was being done by the people who were trying to bring down Bill Clinton, using this issue, playing it out to the tabloid press, and our response had to be defiant. This was politically motivated. People had an agenda, the people that hated Bill Clinton, and that they were using Gennifer Flowers, putting her up to it. Bill Clinton certainly agreed with Hillary's analysis.”

As they moved from the Arkansas scene to the national scene, they carried with them enemies from Arkansas. Those enemies tried their best to take them down in New Hampshire, and the same people played a role later on in future scandals.

“You know, sometimes even paranoids have enemies,” said Greenberg. “I think they have been seared by the experience. I don't view her as an angry person because I've seen her laugh…. I don't see a simmering kind of anger. But she does believe that there are forces out there that aren't right, that are determined to take him down, and I think she views herself as the strong, defiant force that deals with them.”

Nothing demonstrated this more than the revelation, implicitly confirmed in Diane Blair's notebooks, that Hillary pushed after the Gennifer Flowers incident to publicize allegations that Bill's opponent, Vice President Bush, had also had a history of affairs during his marriage. The binders—and other conversations with campaign aides—confirm that she was furious that the mainstream press and even the tabloids had not gone after the supposed story of Bush's private life. Several of Bill's aides took it upon themselves to calm Hillary on the subject and convince her that, if such information were traced back to the campaign, it would be disastrous.

 

O
N
M
ARCH
8, the
New York Times
published a story on its front page headlined, “Clintons Joined S&L Operator in an Ozark Real Estate Venture.” The Clintons had known for at least a month that reporter Jeff Gerth had been looking into their 1978 land deal with Susan and James McDougal, a fifty-fifty partnership in which the two couples had bought land along the White River in Arkansas in hopes of dividing it into forty-two lots and selling them for vacation homes. Bill and Hillary had resigned themselves to seeing the land deal as an unfortunate venture in which they had lost money. The
Times
saw something sinister: conflicts of interest and insider deals to line Hillary's and Bill's pockets. Susan Thomases—officially in charge of the campaign's scheduling but, in fact, Hillary's political deputy and troubleshooter—and the campaign's counsel had met with Gerth the week before Super Tuesday, desperately trying to persuade him to run the story after the primaries that day. Thomases told Gerth that there were documents that would vindicate the Clintons—but, for the moment at least, they were missing. This added to the brew of suspicion, and rather than delay publication, the suggestion that records may have been removed was now part of the story. Gerth's story reported that the Rose Law Firm had performed legal work for McDougal's savings and loan company while Bill was attorney general and governor—but the
Times
failed to note that McDougal was not yet in the S&L business when the Clintons bought the land.

Bimbos, draft-dodging, and now corruption. In Arkansas, Hillary had become accustomed to being attacked—for not taking her husband's name, for being overly tough, for her
way
of doing things. But the
Times
story represented the first time she was being put on a plane of malfeasance such as Bill was all too familiar with. He asked Paul Begala what he should say at a previously scheduled press conference that day. Defend her, Begala said.

Meanwhile, the investigative engines of the
Washington Post
began turning. During Bill's preparation for a major debate on March 15, among all the Democratic candidates, George Stephanopoulos had advised him, “The minute you hear the word ‘Hillary,' rip his head off. Don't let him finish the sentence.” Toward the end of that debate, the candidates were asked whether they thought Clinton could be elected given his “recent problems.” Paul Tsongas sidestepped the question. Former governor Jerry Brown of California did not. “I think he's got a big electability problem,” he said. “It was right on the front page of the
Washington Post
today. He is funneling money to his wife's law firm for state business.” Clinton's face turned red and then he tore into Brown. “Let me tell you something, Jerry,” he said. “I don't care what you say about me…but you ought to be ashamed of yourself for jumping on my wife. You're not worth being on the same platform with my wife. Jerry comes in with his family wealth and his $1,500 suits and makes a lying accusation about my wife.”

Brown asked whether the
Washington Post
was lying. Clinton answered firmly, “I'm saying I never funneled any money to my wife's law firm. Never.”

The next morning, Hillary and Bill were at the Busy Bee Coffee Shop in Chicago, working the breakfast crowd, when a group of reporters walked in. They began asking him about Hillary's job at the Rose Law Firm—whether there were inherent conflicts of interest in being a partner of a law firm that did business with the state. Hillary was behind him, drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. When one of the journalists asked if it was okay to speak directly to her, Bill said, “Sure. Ask her anything you want.” NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell asked the first lady of Arkansas whether it was ethical for a governor's wife to work in a law firm whose clients did business with state agencies. Hillary had been waiting for such a question. “I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies, and had teas,” she said memorably. Later, that quotation often stood alone in the press, seemingly indicating only her contempt for housewives, absent her words that followed: “The work that I've done as a professional, as a public advocate, has been aimed in part to assure that women can make the choices that they should make—whether it's a full-time career, full-time motherhood, some combination, depending on what stage of life they are at—and I think that is still difficult for people to understand right now, that it is a generational change.”

The abbreviated version, in sound bite form, permeated TV and radio news for days, and columnists cited her remarks as evidence of radical feminist disdain for traditional values. William Safire wrote in the
New York Times
that Bill had a “Hillary problem,” and called her words the “second outbreak of foot-in-mouth disease,” the first one being her Tammy Wynette remark.

Hillary went on television again to explain her position, but it was too late. “Cookies and tea” would continue to plague the campaign for months to come. Gloria Cabe, manager of the campaign's Washington office, said they “were inundated with calls from professional women who felt it had insulted them, who made the decision to take a few years off, and many of them talked about baking cookies. And of course lots of cookies were mailed to us…. And the trouble was, I felt like we could overcome the traditionalists, the women who were suspicious anyway of who Bill was and who Hillary was, but when I realized it was eating into our core support, that's when I really got worried.”

 

H
ILLARY HAD BEGUN
the campaign as her husband's full political partner. He had boasted famously that by voting for him, you could “buy one, get one free,” a slogan he had first used campaigning in the New Hampshire primary (with emphasis on his wife's two decades of work on education and children's issues).

The cookie quotation, her defense of her work as a lawyer, and her aggressive, explicit direction of the campaign to discredit Gennifer Flowers had put her stage-front. That had not adversely affected the New Hampshire primary election, but it was the first of a long season of primaries, and her assertiveness in public suddenly loomed as a liability as she found herself becoming a moving target for the Republican right—“The Lady Macbeth of Arkansas,” the “Yuppie Wife from Hell.” A
New York Post
cartoon pictured Bill Clinton as a marionette, with a fierce-looking Hillary pulling the strings.

Delicately, the campaign's strategists and worried pollsters urged the candidate to trim his wife's billowing sails. Hillary, her back up, got the message, though neither the tabloid headlines (“Bill Clinton Love Tapes,” “Gennifer & Bill Romped in Our Apartment”) nor the criticism abated. “Hillary Clinton in an apron is Michael Dukakis in a tank,” declared Roger Ailes, the Bush campaign's designated hit man, soon to be head of the new Fox News channel.