A Woman in Charge (37 page)

 

N
EAR THE END OF THE YEAR,
only weeks before Bill Clinton was to take office, the nature of his presidency took an irrevocable, unexpected turn: the Bush administration's outgoing budget director, Richard Darman, revealed that the federal deficit was far more substantial than the White House had acknowledged during the campaign. While President George H. W. Bush and his aides had been claiming that the deficit was “only” $250 billion or so, it was in fact $387 billion. The resulting shortfall clouded Bill and Hillary's optimism about sweeping into Washington and expeditiously achieving the panoply of domestic programs and reforms promised in the campaign's platform. The whole complexion of the presidency-to-be was altered by what he—but not she—recognized almost immediately as economic necessity: postponing so many of their promises to the voters and instead cutting the federal deficit close to the bone, to the point even of producing a balanced budget. Health care would be the most important program threatened by the new numbers.

Clinton had never been comfortable in the campaign with any health care proposition that was put to him. It was not a lack of knowledge, necessarily; it was an uncertainty about what the solutions might be. After absorbing the shock of the deficit news, “He didn't think that he either had the time or the ability to figure health care out, given the circumstances,” said a close friend, with whom both Clintons often spoke frankly.

Magaziner had always seemed to Bill cavalier about how large a portion of the federal budget might be consumed in any serious attempt to solve the health care dilemma. (Medical costs in the United States already absorbed 14 percent of GNP, the highest in the world.) Suddenly, he found himself beginning to regard health care as a monster, not just his administration's greatest domestic opportunity. It was in that context that he finally decided that Hillary was the right person to fill the job. And, of course, she wanted it.

In the Clintons' years together, there had evolved an intuitive methodology in which each deferred to the other in what they considered their respective areas of expertise and greater experience, though they often argued passionately about each other's views. “Economics and trade were the issues that he'd really been engaged with for a very, very long time, and [felt] he knew—he has a philosophy, and he had a plan, and he knew where he wanted to go,” said Sale. The same could be said of Hillary in terms of health, education, and welfare issues, especially those most affecting families and children. But confronting the health care quandary—forty million adult Americans had no health insurance whatsoever—would require great skill and expertise both in social policy and economics.

Working within the structure of the Clintons' marriage—instead of the traditional bureaucratic structure of the executive branch—to forge solutions appealed not just to Hillary, but also to her husband. If she were in charge of the issue, the Clintons could maintain an uninterrupted dialogue about its shifting political dynamics and make rapid adjustments in ways no bureaucracy could—as they had done in Arkansas, when he had entrusted her to solve the volatile question of education reform. Moreover, putting her in charge of health care—a specific project, with specific responsibilities, albeit great visibility—seemed to address the question (already of tantalizing interest to the press and to political opponents) of granting the president's wife too overarching or ambitious a formal title, say, assistant to the president for domestic affairs. And it would avoid the appearance of a “co-presidency,” an idea from which he had been forced to flee publicly since the blithe introduction of the campaign slogan, “Buy One, Get One Free.”

 

M
UCH LATER,
when seeing was easy, more than a few of the administration's principals concluded that those first weeks after the election were when Hillary “made most of her big mistakes,” as a senior presidential aide put it. Many of her miscalculations were a result of “overrating the win”—which had come with considerably less than a majority of voters in the three-way race.

During the transition, said one of Bill's principal deputies in the campaign and White House, her combative posture often seemed to announce: “This is the victory for us, and our party, and our generation. And, so that means I'm going to get the job I want. I'm going to have that office in the West Wing. We're going to show the press who's in charge. All our friends are going to get jobs. And, it's not just friends, it's our ideological compatriots who are going to get jobs. This is our chance to do it all the way. And we've got to seize it.”

The Clinton plurality seemed forgotten. “I mean, that was a fault we all had,” said the deputy. “We all fell into it. But she had it pretty deep.” Some friends who knew her well and newcomers to the Clinton entourage sensed in Hillary (though this was by no means a universally held view) an attitude of entitlement: that because of the rightness or even righteousness of what the Clintons were trying to do, Bill and Hillary could ignore some of the natural laws of politics, or the more reasonable protocols and traditions indigenous to Washington. As they came to feel ever more besieged in the White House, this aspect of her character seemed increasingly pronounced, to her great detriment.

Sometimes it appeared inseparable from an attitude of elitism sensed by her co-workers. A high official who worked closely for years with both the president and his wife said, “It's as if she thinks that there are some unpleasant compromises one makes when given the responsibility—perhaps by God—of leading the lesser lights to the Promised Land…. She thinks she should be telling the ‘little people' how to live. Some people react so strongly to her because they sense it about her. Even in the way she gives a speech. She talks sometimes as if she's explaining something to a third grade class.”

To their total surprise and consternation, among the jolts the Clintons endured in the flush of their victory was serious resistance to putting Hillary in charge of health care from the most experienced members of the incoming domestic and economic policy team: Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, the treasury secretary–designate; Congressman Leon Panetta, to be the new director of the Office of Budget and Management; Alice Rivlin, formerly director of the Congressional Budget Office and the newly designated deputy OMB director; and Donna Shalala, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, who had been handpicked by Hillary to be secretary of health and human services. Even a decade and a half after Hillary's health care debacle, it remained secret that the president's senior-most appointees had seen trouble coming from the beginning and opposed her for the job. “Mostly, [these] people thought the idea—the whole system Hillary was setting up—was crazy,” said Shalala, a good friend of the Clintons who had been assistant secretary of housing and urban development in the Carter administration.

The foremost concern was that Hillary's ideas for solving the health care problem, already reflected in the Putting People First agenda, were too ambitious. There was also fear she would become a lightning rod for anti-Clinton sentiment in the Congress and the country. Her internal critics felt that, almost single-handedly, because of her outsized influence with the president, she could set the whole American economy off-course. Hillary discounted and, according to Shalala, even resented the advice of the naysayers. To accept their judgment would have meant to controvert her most basic notion about herself: that given the responsibility and the power, she could solve virtually any problem she applied herself to by dint of sheer force of will, intellect, study, and hard work.

Bill seemed troubled by the internal opposition, however. He kept delaying his announcement of his wife's appointment. It would be five days after his inauguration when he finally made it.

“I suspect that there was a level at which he knew it was a really dangerous idea,” said a presidential deputy who was in and out of Little Rock during the transition. “He was president in no small measure because she stood by him in the Gennifer Flowers mess. And he had to pay her back. This is what she wanted, and he couldn't figure out how not to give it to her. And so he hoped for the best, and jumped over the side with her.”

Even before she settled on the health care job, Hillary was insistent on having an office not in the “social” East Wing of the White House, where other first ladies had traditionally claimed space, but in the West Wing, the demonstrable seat of power. The most influential, and foreboding, voice opposed to giving her a West Wing office was that of their closest Washington friend, Vernon Jordan, who in early December turned down Bill's pleas to serve as attorney general. Because of Jordan's bona fides with both Bill and Hillary, and his savvy in the ways of the capital, it was impossible to ignore his arguments. His view had nothing to do with self-interest or ulterior motive, nor did it reflect disapproval of Hillary, to whom he and (even more so) his wife felt especially close. Jordan—handsome, imposing, the former president of the National Urban League, and as well connected an operator as there was in Washington—believed that the press, Republicans in Congress, and the Clintons' ideologically driven enemies, already gathering, would pounce on any evidence (or even suggestion) of an unelected co-presidency; and they would feast on an announcement that Hillary was to have an office a few feet down the hall from the president's.

Other senior aides also warned that an overt demonstration of Hillary's primacy—whether in the form of a West Wing office or the health care portfolio—would divert public attention from the administration's agenda, and rekindle tales of Hillary as the evil power behind the throne.

Through her surrogates—which was often her preferred mode of battle—Hillary fought back. During the transition, a discerning eye or ear could pick up subtle indications of essential ways in which the politics and personalities of the two Clintons differed. His instinctive tendency, for instance, to accomplish his goals through compromise and accommodation was set against her reflexive urge to stand her ground on principle and fight, even more so after the experience of the campaign. He was always looking for a way to win over opponents before taking up arms. Her approach was more frontal and confrontational, which sometimes undermined the larger plan of battle—but she could also be deadly and on the mark. This difference would have dire consequences for his presidency and her role in it.

Susan Thomases, the woman she and Bill had chosen to organize the staffing of the White House, and Margaret “Maggie” Williams, Hillary's formidable chief of staff–designate, argued strenuously to Jordan and others that the symbolic importance of a West Wing office for the first lady would send an essential signal about the values and priorities of the new administration.

To the surprise of no one who knew Bill and Hillary well, he sided with his wife. If it were up to him, the president-elect told the press later, he might knock down a wall in the Oval Office and have adjoining his and-hers offices. “I don't know that anybody's office has been fixed except mine,” he said. “That's true. We're keeping looking at that. I wish—the office structure in the White House is not the best. We're trying to figure out what to do about that. They won't let us knock down any walls.”

D
URING THE TRANSITION
period in Little Rock, others directly involved in the process of selecting the cabinet and the senior White House staff were Al Gore; Gore's designated chief of staff, Roy Neel; Bill's closest personal aide and offstage facilitator, Bruce Lindsey; Mack McLarty, who had known the president-elect since they'd been in kindergarten together in Hope; and the transition panel's co-chairmen, Vernon Jordan and Warren Christopher. As a group, they could not help but be impressed by Hillary's knowledge of policy issues, which often exceeded their own. Her enthusiasm for what lay ahead was palpable. If she felt any fear or trepidation, she did not betray it. She was well prepared for the topics of the day, her questions revealing familiarity with even the most arcane matters of governance, as when she conducted an interrogation of candidates for secretary of commerce and asked about policies in one of the Commerce Department's least understood bureaus, the U.S. Patent Office.

Usually she was tactful at the table when it came to demonstrating her power. But even before the Clintons had moved into the White House, new members of the administration had caught glimpses of her tendency to overreach through surrogates—more often than not Susan Thomases—without revealing her own hand if things got sticky. In Little Rock, Thomases was said to be talking up a future Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and some newer members of the Clinton entourage, among them Neel, came to regard her as meddlesome, stubborn, and politically tone-deaf. She was also extremely able, had a quick and easy wit, and was one of the best campaign schedulers in the business, drawing on skills refined in the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy, Walter Mondale, Bill Bradley, and Ted Kennedy.