A Woman in Charge (40 page)

Yet there also can be no question that the Clintons had invited unusual scrutiny by their impassioned promises of probity to voters in the campaign of 1992, and an unwavering inaugural theme—which would begin to tatter even before the festivities were finished—that stressed the ethical reform they said they were bringing to Washington. There was something of an implicit challenge in their manner, almost a calculated recklessness (it would seem in retrospect), not altogether unlike Gary Hart's challenge to reporters to learn for themselves if his claims to fidelity in his marriage were truthful.

Hillary and Bill had had plenty of foretastes—in their years in Arkansas and during the presidential campaign, of the vitriol and determination of their enemies. Certainly there was no indication by inauguration day of any surcease or disarmament by an embittered Republican army that, fearful of what was already being called Clintonism, and emboldened by allies from the religious right, was remobilizing for a holy war. And who should have known better than the new president's wife that Nixon's excesses and resignation had incubated a new investigative era, in both Congress and the press that, compared with the 1970s, seemed unrestrained and oblivious to contextual considerations? The 1992 presidential campaign had made clear that Hillary, as much as her husband, was a moving target for legions who wished them ill. At first glance, it would appear almost unfathomable that the Clintons did not better anticipate and inoculate themselves and their administration against such obvious dangers. To a large degree, any explanation for the disasters that befell them in Washington has to be considered not just in the virulence and cleverness of their enemies, but in the complex relationship between them and the need each perceived, for separate reasons, to protect their secrets.

 

F
ROM THE
C
LINTONS'
point of view, the first public event of inauguration day, an 8
A.M.
prayer service at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the capital's most prominent black congregation, was a matter of great importance, symbolic and literal. Among other factors, wall-to-wall television coverage of the inaugural would begin at the church, and video from the service would be rerun throughout the day. Black America had helped Bill Clinton win the election, turning out for him decisively at the polls. Since childhood his empathy for, understanding of, and easy camaraderie with blacks had been essential to his character, and these marked his identity as a politician and a human being. He and Hillary came to their commitment to racial equality from different backgrounds and environments, but intellectually, personally, and socially they had achieved an extraordinary comfort and ease with black people (and vice versa), all the more notable in an era when so many white professionals and politicians were finding it increasingly difficult to maintain close personal relationships with blacks, no matter how firm their commitment to racial justice.

Vernon Jordan, their closest counselor in Washington, was black. Of Hillary's closest friends, almost as many were black as white. Her mentor, Marian Wright Edelman, was black. The woman she had chosen to be her chief of staff, Maggie Williams, was black. Some of the most important jobs in the new administration were held by black men and women who had marched with Martin Luther King and participated in the great civil rights campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s.

King “was the most eloquent voice for freedom and justice in my lifetime,” Clinton had said at Howard University the day before becoming president, to more than one thousand African-American officeholders specially invited to the inauguration. If any more contrast with his predecessors was needed, this gesture, unthinkable in the era just ending, provided it. When Clinton finished speaking, he clasped hands with the mayor of the District of Columbia and Hillary, and led the singing of “We Shall Overcome.”

The themes of religion and justice were woven into the program of the interfaith prayer service. The red-brick church, dating from the 1860s, was located two blocks west of 14th Street NW, the main corridor of the capital that had burned in the week of rioting that began the night of Dr. King's murder.

 

T
RADITION HOLDS
that the new president and first lady be received on inauguration morning at the White House by the outgoing president and first lady, and that the two presidents ride together to the Capitol, a protocol that has made for difficult presidential changeovers, most notoriously the argumentative, shared limousine journey of Harry Truman and the successor he despised, Dwight Eisenhower. The Clintons arrived at the White House from Metropolitan AME Zion Church twenty-seven minutes behind schedule, accompanied by Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and Ron Brown. The Thomasons wanted an advance peek inside the Lincoln Bedroom, where they had been invited by the Clintons to spend the night.

Despite the harsh words and feelings of the campaign, the Bushes could not have been more gracious on this day. “Welcome to your new house,” the defeated president told twelve-year-old Chelsea, who petted outgoing First Dog Millie, the putative author of a best-selling book that would pave the way for a best-seller by the incoming presidential pet, Socks, the Clinton family cat. “Good to see you; good luck,” Bush told his successor, for whom he'd left a more personal note in the Oval Office wishing him well.

After coffee, the outgoing first lady led Hillary to the South Lawn, where dozens of photographers and reporters had been waiting. On November 19, during a White House tour arranged for the Clintons' post-victory trip to Washington, Hillary and Barbara Bush were swarmed by journalists. “Avoid this crowd like the plague. And if they quote you, make damn sure they heard you,” advised Mrs. Bush.

“That's right, I know that feeling already,” said Hillary, whose hostility toward the press needed no encouragement and, even at the hour of her husband's swearing-in, would get the new administration off to a horrific start with the men and women who would be covering the White House for the next four years.

The Clintons' belongings arrived at the White House in a moving van with Arkansas license tags that pulled into the East Driveway on Pennsylvania Avenue a few minutes before noon, as a procession of much larger trailers containing the Bushes' possessions was leaving through the West Gate. Like the Reagans before them, the Bushes had accumulated a glut of gifts while in the White House, and kept literally tons—a practice the Clintons would continue and for which they, far more than either of their two predecessor occupants, would be roundly criticized upon their leave-taking. Shortly before departing Arkansas, still in their kitchen in the governor's mansion, Hillary and Bill had indulged in a moment of giddy elation that was also, perhaps, a commentary: most of their belongings, she told Robert Reich, who was staying with them at the time, were already packed in boxes. The movers, she pointed out with a certain glee, would haul away the Bushes' possessions on inauguration morning. George and Barbara, she giggled, were moving out to make room for them. Hopefully, chimed in Bill, the Bushes would leave the chandeliers.

 

T
HE
L
INCOLN
B
EDROOM
had been occupied the previous night by the Reverend Billy Graham, who, as the formal inaugural ceremonies got under way at the Capitol, prayed for the nation, its president, president-elect, and vice president–elect as well as their wives, whom he said “would share so much of the responsibility and burdens.” Shortly after noon, Hillary stepped forward from her place in the front row to stand between her husband and the chief justice of the United States, William H. Rehnquist.

The view from the West Front of the Capitol atop Jenkins Hill is, on any day, arguably the most spectacular in all of Washington, an awesome testament of the nation's struggle to realize its ideals and achieve union and preserve freedom—with the Mall and Reflecting Pool stretching below to the Lincoln Memorial, and across the Potomac, the Iwo Jima Memorial and the aligned rows of graves at Arlington Cemetery and the cream-colored Palladian mansion of Robert E. Lee. Now that Hillary was standing at the parapet of the Capitol's West Terrace, she could see the immensity of the crowd below, more than a quarter of a million people jammed together on the Mall, and another 800,000 lining both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the White House, along the route of their inaugural parade.

Al Gore, the son of a senator, had been sworn in as vice president moments earlier by Justice Byron R. White, a last-minute replacement for the ailing Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court's first black justice, a hero to both Hillary and Bill. Custom dictated that the chief justice administer the oath of office to the president of the United States, but this chief justice in the view of the new president and his wife had done untold damage to the United States and to the Constitution that Clinton was about to swear to uphold and defend. When Marshall had argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of Negro schoolchildren in the case of
Brown v. Board of Education
in 1952, Rehnquist had been a law clerk to Justice Robert Jackson, and as Hillary and Bill were aware, wrote a legal memorandum urging the justice to uphold the legality of school segregation, which was finally outlawed in the Court's decision in the case in 1954. Rehnquist had also been head of “ballot security” for Republican presidential campaigns of the 1960s (which Hillary knew, from her work at the Watergate committee, was a euphemism for aggressive efforts to challenge black voter registration, as well as prevent voting fraud such as had occurred in her native Illinois in the 1960 election). Thurgood Marshall had struggled mightily to hold on to his seat on the Court past the inaugural of Bill Clinton, so that another justice in his image—not Rehnquist's or the justices appointed by Nixon and his Republican successors—could be appointed in his stead. He died four days later.

The Clintons intended to reshape the whole federal judiciary after a generation of Republican presidents had packed the courts with conservative judges. The new administration's assistant attorney general, in charge of picking and vetting judicial nominees, was Hillary's Wellesley classmate Eldie Acheson. Acheson had clerked for a federal district judge in Maine, and distinguished herself in private practice in Boston for nineteen years as a litigator in state and federal courts.

Now, as Rehnquist delivered the presidential oath of office, Hillary's right hand remained rock-steady as she held the Clinton family Bible beneath her husband's left hand and heard Bill respond to the chief justice in a strong, clear voice that he would “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Then an immense cheer resounded against the marble front of the Capitol, echoing again and again in waves. As the sound was still reverberating against the facade, Bill kissed Hillary on the cheek, then Chelsea, who had stood on the other side of her father during the oath, and scooped them up in a family hug, whispering, “I love you.” Next, he hugged his own mother, dressed in white and black that matched the distinctive color scheme of her hair; hugged Gore and his wife, Tipper, then hugged mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne and poet Maya Angelou, who had taken part in the ceremonies.

Hillary returned to her seat, still carrying the Bible handed down from Virginia's mother. During the oath, it had been opened to the passage, “For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.” Exactly how the Clintons arrived at this choice of scripture from Galatians to mark the inaugural moment is unknown, though it seems they intended the day's “lesson” to be focused on “corruption,” not on “the flesh.”

In his address, the new president declared, “This beautiful capital, like every capital since the dawn of civilization, is often a place of intrigue and calculation. Powerful people maneuver for position and worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here…. Let us resolve to reform our politics, so that power and privilege no longer should drown the voice of the people.”

When the reverberations of the cheering and applause had at last abated, Bill and Hillary escorted George and Barbara Bush down the Capitol steps to the presidential helicopter, Marine One, which was waiting to whisk them away to an unexpectedly early retirement in Houston, and waved them goodbye.

Not in their worst nightmares could Hillary or Bill have imagined that in eight years, instead of being hailed for their service to the nation, they would be pilloried for what was being carted away in their moving vans at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue; or, even more astounding, be sharing that same inaugural platform again with George and Barbara Bush—at the swearing-in of their son George W., who, having won the presidency by promising a new dawn of compassion and a higher standard of ethical behavior in Washington following the impeachment of Bill Clinton, would escort the Clintons off that same platform.

Perhaps most astonishing of all, as George W. nudged Bill Clinton off the platform on January 20, 2001, Hillary went inside the Capitol to join her fellow ninety-nine U.S. senators for lunch in the Senate Dining Room.

 

N
O INCOMING FIRST LADY
since Jackie Kennedy had received the kind of frenzied attention Hillary was getting from the press and public. The affection of the crowds along the inaugural parade route for her, as well as her husband, was palpable. Shrieks of “Hilllllarry!” and “We Want Hillary” grew louder as she waved from behind the bulletproof glass of the presidential limousine. Soon the chant became “Walk! Walk!” and, she, Chelsea, and the new president stepped from the limousine to walk the last two and a half blocks of the parade route. Hillary in this moment “seemed very much and most impressively her own woman, striding the parade route at her own pace, several yards out of the shadow of a husband who had to stretch to cling to her hand if there was hand-holding to be done,” wrote a
Washington Post
reporter. Despite the chill of a crystal-clear winter afternoon, in a Kennedyesque gesture she left her coat behind in the limousine. But she chose not to remove the enormous cadet-blue hat that had caused consternation among the commentating classes all day—“a blue unidentified flying object that landed on Hillary Clinton's head,” in the words of a newspaper fashion critic, who also confessed bafflement at “the tan tourniquet applied to her neck” (a cashmere turtleneck). All week, her longish blond hair loosely tousled, she had uncharacteristically put on a fashion show, seemingly with ease. Featuring outfits by American designers, she had changed clothes three or four times a day, often wearing dramatically flowing coats and scarves over brightly colored suits and dresses. Many of the outfits, including the one she chose for the swearing-in at the Capitol, were designed not by famous couturiers but by her fashion designer friend from Little Rock, Connie Fails.