A Woman in Charge (36 page)

The savaging of Hillary as a doctrinaire leftist and/or “Feminazi” who would encourage the dismemberment of the American family soon became a catechism of the Bush campaign, echoed and intensified in the right-wing press. Bill Clinton's record in Arkansas was, of course, hardly that of a leftist, but even before he took the oath of office it became commonplace to attack him through her, and so locate his politics on the outer fringes of the “liberal left,” based on the presumed ideological bent of his wife.

Such attacks on her were exploiting what the Clinton campaign was learning to its own dismay from polls, namely that many voters were coming to believe that Hillary was in the race “for herself” and “going for the power.” These were, in fact, phrases from a strategy memorandum that proposed she assume a low political profile for the rest of the campaign, and that “press opportunities” be contrived to show the Clintons acting more affectionately toward each other, and Hillary as a more traditional, maternal figure. “More than Nancy Reagan, she is seen as ‘running the show,'” the memo said. “The absence of affection, children and family and the preoccupation with career and power only reinforces the political problem evident from the beginning.” Recommended were “joint appearances with her friends where Hillary can laugh [and] do her mimicry.” The Clintons, the memo suggested, should take a family vacation in Disneyland, and the campaign should create “events where Bill and Hillary can go on dates with the American people.”

The more she was vilified by adversaries as a radical feminist, the softer and fuzzier she allowed herself to be portrayed. Encouraged by the campaign's press attachés, a new story line began to take hold in the media about a more feminine Hillary.
W,
the glossy fashion and celebrity magazine, was typically fed tidbits about how the Hollywood production company run by Hillary's friend Linda Bloodworth-Thomason had lent three stylists—one each for hair, makeup, and wardrobe—to give Hillary “a softer, natural, honey-blonde look.” Dozens of reporters on the campaign trail advised their readers or viewers that she was no longer wearing her trademark headbands (too “brainy-looking”); that she had “zipped her lip” and now gazed lovingly and silently at her husband from a wifely vantage point. A few cynics intimated in print that she had undergone a personality transplant, “allowing handlers to substitute the heart of Martha Stewart for her own,” as
Time
magazine put it. But this missed a larger point about Martha Stewart. Divorced, independent, and later to become a close friend of Hillary, she was a powerful, driven, ambitious woman who had established herself near the top of the very male worlds of publishing and communications thanks to the way she wielded the most feminine of arts and crafts.

Hillary would be forced into semi-exile, though less severely than when perceptions of her became overwhelmingly negative after the health care debacle in 1994. Diane Blair's campaign binders reveal that the schedule was contrived to keep her away from the national press and covered more flatteringly by local reporters.

The anti-Hillary rhetoric reached a crescendo at the Republican convention on August 17, where Pat Buchanan, in a prime-time attack, painted Hillary as a radical feminist. “‘Elect me and you get two for the price of one,' Mr. Clinton says of his lawyer spouse,” Buchanan ranted. “And what does Hillary believe?” That children “have a right to sue their parents,” he answered, and a view that marriage is an institution comparable to slavery. “Well, speak for yourself, Hillary. Friends, this is radical feminism.” (Buchanan's assertion was rooted in an article on children's legal rights—“Children Under the Law”—that Hillary had written for the
Harvard Educational Review
in 1974, in which she advocated such lawsuits by minors only in extreme cases of abuse and neglect.)

But the strategy backfired on the Republicans in that it made Hillary a sympathetic character and a political victim of the right, something the Clinton campaign never could have done on its own. Until then, Jody Franklin was quoted in the Blair binders, “it was hard for people to see her as a sympathetic figure because she was too strong, she was too independent, she knew what she believed in, and I think people didn't want to see a warm side to her. Or couldn't feel sympathy. Or connect with her. But then once she was in a position where she was attacked, people could then connect with her. So I think that's really what turned things around.” It wouldn't be the last time.

By the end of the 1992 campaign, Hillary was doing a lot of what presidential candidates' wives had traditionally done: sit demurely onstage through the drone of their husbands' speeches, applaud at the appropriate moments, and wave to the cheering crowds at oratory's end. She had even taken to holding an umbrella over Bill's head when he spoke in the rain.

The final weekend before election day, a cartoon showed Bill saying to a human-sized box with air holes, “Only a few days more, Hillary.”

She and Bill spent the last twenty-four hours in a tempest of campaigning: Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Paducah, Fort Worth, Albuquerque, Denver, then back to Little Rock to cast their votes. Hillary was expecting victory, but took nothing for granted.

Within hours, she and Bill were discussing who should be in the cabinet.

6

A Transitional Woman

[I]t wasn't clear to either of us how this partnership would fit into the new Clinton Administration…. When it came to political spouses, we certainly didn't expect the nation's capital to be more conservative than Arkansas.

—Living History

S
EVERAL DAYS AFTER
the election, Dick Morris and Hillary talked by telephone about what her formal role should be in the new administration. Morris had, contrary to myth, always been closer to Hillary than to Bill. He had, in fact, often found that the only effective way of influencing the governor was through his wife, and so he was well aware of the degree to which the two were a single, intertwined governing and marital power. He had regularly operated through Hillary to get political schemes and projects reconsidered that he'd first proposed unsuccessfully to the governor.

Others in the governor's office tended to view Morris as a kind of Rasputin to the Clintons (the fact that he appeared no taller than Hillary contributed to the image), and labels like “mercenary” or “evil force” seeped into Little Rock political discussions about him. Among the characteristics that Clinton partisans found distasteful was his equal enthusiasm for working on behalf of Republicans and Democrats; he also had a reputation for engaging in almost any kind of subterfuge or negative campaigning to gain political advantage. Morris correctly perceived that Bill Clinton himself had begun to think of him as “something dirty that he didn't want to touch without gloves,” so it was increasingly Hillary who had sounded the alarm when her husband needed help, Hillary who booked Morris's services, Hillary who strategized and plotted with him on Bill's behalf. That pattern had been established on the eve of Clinton's 1980 defeat for reelection.

Now Dick and Hillary were on the phone again, mapping out the future on the grandest stage of all. In her first post-victory conversation with him, Hillary noted that
Time
magazine had suggested she would make a good White House chief of staff—a job held in previous administrations by such skilled political operatives as James Baker, the Bush family consigliere; Howard Baker, the former senator and Reagan white knight from Tennessee (who had famously asked, as vice chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee: “What did the president know and when did he know it?”); and H. R. Haldeman, who ran Nixon's White House (and knew the answer).

Morris said it was a terrible idea because a chief of staff, among other things, was the person who had to take the heat for the commander-in-chief. It was important that the president be able to fire his chief of staff. “I said it's like a baseball owner being able to fire the manager,” Morris remembered. “Something may not be the manager's fault, but you have to be able to fire somebody at some point. And Clinton couldn't fire her.”

Hillary seemed to accept the logic of this, according to Morris, and then raised the possibility that, with her legal background, she might instead make a good attorney general, just as Bobby Kennedy had in his brother's administration; or that, with her experience in the fields of child and family welfare work and education reform, she might make a reasonable secretary of education.

Morris, who talked in staccato bursts with a nasally infused New York accent, responded that secretary of education might be a good idea, “but the better thing would be for her to assume a specific task, become the head of a task force that would deal with a discrete issue, which would be her issue, and develop her credibility like that. And she said, ‘And then maybe in the second term I could become secretary of education?' And, I said, ‘I think something like that might work out well.'”

He was one of several people with whom Hillary discussed the question of being chief of staff or, alternatively, her husband's principal deputy for domestic policy, in title and in fact. That idea, too, was opposed by Morris and by almost everyone else with whom she consulted.

In the end Hillary chose Morris's single-issue approach and settled on an issue of vital interest to the Clintons and America. She would oversee and shepherd through Congress what she hoped would be the single greatest change in domestic social policy since the New Deal, something that had been the unattainable goal of Democrats for decades. The lack of universal health care, or anything resembling it, was a defining failing that set the United States apart from other advanced democracies, and both Clintons were certain that an overwhelming majority of Americans favored universal coverage, even yearned for it. The promise to provide meaningful, affordable, guaranteed health care services to all Americans had been the most resonant pledge of the Clinton campaign, and polls showed that it was perhaps the biggest factor—apart from negative perceptions of President George H. W. Bush, and the third party candidacy of Ross Perot—in Bill Clinton's victory.

Health care was also, in the judgment of both Hillary and Bill, the ideal issue for her to focus her talents and energy upon. Though she had spent most of her professional career as a lawyer representing corporate clients, her more satisfying work (as opposed to remunerative) had been in the field of children's advocacy; and she'd had extensive experience in other aspects of social policy dealing with families and children and health care. The notion that she might be able to bring to the most vulnerable and embattled of American citizens what she and Bill believed ought to be a national right—decent medical care—was beyond enticing. It felt right.

And there was also an obvious political component to the equation, as she would remark to members of the White House staff before the Clinton administration was yet ten days old: fulfilling the campaign's health care promise could ensure the reelection of Bill Clinton in 1996, and a
real
mandate from the voters. With the Clintons' youth, Bill's charisma, her expertise, and the demand by so many Americans that medical costs be contained, how could they not sell such a program to the public and Congress, and at the same time launch the country toward a new era of responsible social policy?

 

A
S THE MEN
and women picked by Bill and Hillary to guide his transition from candidate to president gathered in Little Rock, any doubts that she would be the new president's closest adviser and indispensable deputy—an entirely new kind of first lady—were quickly dispelled. She meant to be involved in the essential decisions of the transition, even to the occlusion at times of the vice president–elect: interviewing candidates for the cabinet (at the kitchen table of the governor's mansion, on occasion), presiding over the selection of White House staff, deciding how to follow through on the major themes of the campaign. Her primacy was abetted of course by proximity: she was with the president-elect after the others involved in the transition had gone back to their hotels, and in the morning before official meetings were convened. Of course, he could trust her judgment, but more than that, Hillary Clinton, her husband had said more than once, possessed the best mind he knew.

If the process seemed a little jarring to the transition's eminences—Vice President–elect Gore, former deputy secretary of state Warren Christopher, and the Clintons' good friend and transition co-chairman (with Christopher) Vernon Jordan—it was familiar to those who had lived through the Clintons' ride through Arkansas politics. Ernie Dumas, one of the state's preeminent political reporters, described the frustration of the governor's first chief of staff, Bobby Roberts, who “would talk about things [with Clinton], get them decided, and then…the governor would talk to Hillary and everything would be turned upside down.” Deborah Sale noted, “He talks to her about everything, and thinks that no one else will listen to him as carefully and challenge his ideas as constructively.” The process was not always pretty. “They don't do anything that isn't
strongly,
” said Betsey Wright. “Whether it's agree or disagree, it's strongly. They are two of the most passionate people I ever met. They love passionately, they argue passionately, they parent passionately, they read passionately, they play passionately.”

The Clinton transition occupied several floors of offices in Little Rock, as well as dozens of office cubicles in Washington. In both places, the chaotic pace of the campaign persisted, as members of myriad task forces rushed to produce hundreds upon hundreds of three-ring binders filled with more information than the intended recipients—the president-elect, his wife, and their advisers—could possibly digest. There were reams of data about virtually every issue the new administration would face—foreign, domestic, political. “Message teams” were assessing the new Congress and how best to approach it; “constituency teams” were analyzing the special concerns of and favors owed to labor unions, women, blacks, gays, blue-collar workers, mayors, and municipalities.

The selection of the cabinet, subcabinet, and senior White House staff was being made, and the new administration's agenda and priorities decided at the governor's mansion. The Clintons were joined Monday through Friday by the others directly involved at a round six-foot-wide table in the family room, just off the formal dining room. The atmosphere was somewhat less harried, though the time pressure was enormous: Bill had promised publicly, if needlessly, to announce his cabinet by Christmas Eve (almost a month before inauguration day), after which Hillary and her close friend Susan Thomases would proceed to staff the White House, with the president signing off on their choices—a process to be kept from the public.

To complicate matters, Bill was visibly exhausted, and confessed to being “bone-tired” after thirteen months of virtually nonstop campaigning. Hillary, fatigued but focused as ever, concentrated her attention on the areas of domestic policy that most concerned her: education, health care, jobs, child care—the issues of Putting People First that had dominated the Clinton campaign. She and the president-elect had agreed on the importance of selecting a diverse cabinet—one that “looks like America,” he had pledged that spring at San Francisco's Cinco de Mayo celebration. (“I will give you an administration that looks like America. The people here will be involved—women and men, Latinos, African-Americans, Asian-Americans.” Soon after, he said, “I would be astonished if my cabinet and my administration and my staff…is not the most fully integrated this country has ever seen.”)

As the slots were filled, and responsibilities defined, the question of Hillary's formal position came to be more and more the focus of attention. Late in November, lawyers examining the question for the Clintons advised that the president's wife could indeed be his chief of staff or his domestic policy adviser, or could serve in any other position that did not require confirmation by the Senate. But she was prohibited from being in the cabinet under an anti-nepotism law enacted during the Nixon administration, a belated response to the appointment of Robert Kennedy as his brother's attorney general.

It did not augur well that such elemental information had not been evident or available immediately. Soon thereafter, Dick Morris expanded on his advice that Hillary head an issue task force. He suggested to her that she take charge of something akin to the Hoover Commission, which had been appointed to study government reorganization by President Harry Truman in 1947 and, two years later, had produced its transforming recommendations. Morris, however, never mentioned health care; it was Hillary who brought up the idea with him, noting that Bill was drawn to the idea of her being responsible for implementation of the campaign's key domestic promise.

Apart from selecting a secretary of the treasury and the other principals of the president's economic team, designating who would oversee the health care initiative was the major decision affecting the new administration's domestic agenda. Al Gore had indicated to the president-elect that this was the job he might most like to take on, drawing on his legislative skills from his years in the Senate and lending it the prestige of his new office. Clinton was intrigued by the idea, but he worried that the job would demand too much, perhaps almost all, of the vice president's time. Hillary had a different objection: she felt Gore, not she, would dominate domestic policy if responsible for health care. Clinton had also been thinking about Senator John D. “Jay” Rockefeller of West Virginia for the health care portfolio. As Democratic governors—Rockefeller had been governor from 1977 to 1985—they had grown close, and Rockefeller had studied the issue extensively. But the Democratic majority leader, George Mitchell, advised against putting a senator in charge of an executive branch task force.

A third, less politically charged name under consideration was that of Ira Magaziner, a mercurial Oxford classmate of Clinton's. The year before, at the high-toned, spiritually infused Renaissance Weekend attended by the Clintons almost every Christmas season, Magaziner had spoken passionately about his role in establishing a public health care system in Rhode Island. Afterward, Hillary and Bill had asked him to contribute ideas on the subject for the campaign, and Magaziner had responded with a series of briefing papers and memoranda that had impressed both of them.

Another Oxford classmate—and close friend—Robert Reich, had been chosen by the Clintons to oversee the assembly of the new administration's economic team. In the period between election day and the inauguration, the Clintons and Reich often convened privately in the cozy kitchen of the governor's mansion, away from the full presidential transition team, to discuss policy and personnel questions. These talks had an almost familial quality, which was hardly surprising: Bob and his wife, Clare (she, like Hillary, was a lawyer with great interest in the rights of children and poor families), had known Bill and Hillary since college.

Early in the transition, Hillary asked Reich if he thought Magaziner was the right person for the health care job. Reich emphatically said no. “If you really want him to do it,” he warned her, “just get somebody to look over his shoulder all the time who's very politically cunning, because he has a tin ear when it comes to politics.” Almost no one, least of all Reich, imagined that on this issue Hillary, with all her years backstage in politics, might have a tin ear as well.