A Woman in Charge (52 page)

But the high-ranking deputy agreed there were aspects of the relationship that trapped the two of them in ways that only increased their anger at and resentment of each other. It was obvious that Bill and Hillary could never have achieved what they had without each other, yet it had come at the cost of some great periods of unhappiness.

“Does he need her?” the deputy asked rhetorically. “Yes. Does he like her? Yes. And there are times when he's almost embarrassingly affectionate toward her. But the ambivalence is there on both sides: Because he's trapped in the marriage. He has no way out…it just pops out in ways he can't control. He acts out by fucking around. She's unhappy, and angry a lot of the time, and lashes out at people…. Punishing him, with maybe being remote, going out on her own, establishing her own identity, fighting even harder against his enemies.” The deputy could see Hillary's increasing frustration with Bill in their first year in the White House.

Betsey Wright believed there was an altogether different source and timeline of Hillary's deep anger, locating its beginnings in the 1992 campaign, when Hillary's integrity first came under heavy attack, and intensifying thereafter. In Wright's view, and the view of many of Hillary's close female friends, the political facts of life in the nation's capital and the White House, not her past domestic life with her husband, were the source of her anger, and her resentment was transitory.

“Bill's women problems were not the core,” said Wright. “The core was [the attack on] her integrity, her law practice, her board memberships, her income, the Whitewater development. That was the anger. The White House staff probably knew her only as an angry person because she was being besieged…. The real question is, Is she still an angry person now, or was that just part of what she had to do to survive? That's not always the way she was.” Despite the ups and downs, until taking up residence in the White House, Hillary appeared to have absorbed Dorothy Rodham's lesson with the leveling bubble inside the ruler: stay steady.

But that would have required virtually superhuman restraint during the White House years for any first lady subjected to what Hillary had to deal with, no matter how much might have been of her own making. During her time as first lady, Hillary was being judged constantly—in a sense, penalized—not for what she saw herself as actually doing and believing, but rather as a cartoonish misrepresentation of other people's speculation, envy, anger, and even hatred. Or so she explained it to others. It is certain, though, that Hillary was tested as few public citizens have been.

More than her husband, Hillary thrived on predictability and order. Since inauguration day, the rhythm of her life had changed radically, in ways and to an extent she probably could not have anticipated, despite the baptism of a presidential campaign. Bill was not the only Clinton locked in a golden cage after January 20, 1993. To an even greater extent perhaps, Hillary was finding herself a prisoner of the presidency. For the first time since she and Bill were married, she had no independent life, no identity to pursue separate from his, no outside job, no agenda of her own, no escape. She had little outlet except for her time with Chelsea, no opportunity to shoot the breeze with Webb or enjoy the closeness of her friendship with Vince, who was now her vassal and employee, and who was increasingly troubled and distant. In Little Rock, she had been able to go about her business largely under the radar. Now there was no getting away from the intrusive presence of cameras and reporters and Secret Service agents. Since January her every move and word had been scrutinized. She had no privacy. She had to whisper in the corridors of the White House lest she be overheard by servants or security people. More than ever before, she was a captive of her marriage. She no longer had the option of leaving even if things became intolerable.

“Once that impeachment and the investigation and all that stuff was shut down is when I think she came out of her anger,” Betsey Wright said. “And part of coming out of the anger was what she worked out with Bill. And I think what she worked out with him was: I'm going now…. It's my turn.”

H
ILLARY WAS THROWN
more off-balance than the president in the first months of the administration. Her attention lurched without apparent method from one problem or issue to another. Her seeming disorientation was not without cause. More than Bill, she seemed to recognize early on the seriousness—even intractability—of some of the problems they were already up against, and the interconnectedness of so many seemingly disparate factors that would determine the administration's success or failure. She comprehended, beyond the budget mess and health care, that lethal dangers lay ahead (partly because she had superior knowledge of some of the troubling matters lurking in the past, aside from his womanizing). She recognized earlier that they were under attack from very powerful forces who would use that past to undermine the Clinton presidency.

According to Webb Hubbell, both he and Vince Foster formed the impression by early spring that Hillary feared her health care agenda could become an unintended casualty. Though she felt blindsided by her own economic team, the opposition from Republicans, outside lobbying interests, and a nasty chorus on talk radio felt to her not like criticism on a single issue, but a first strike against “Clintonism.”

After five months in the White House, she was under constant strain, still grappling with the death of her father, unable to get the time or space to grieve in private. More than Bill, she was physically exhausted; she lacked his stamina and was losing weight. A newspaper story noted archly that Hillary “looks thinner than ever, even though she confesses that her exercise regimen has gone the way of the middle-class tax cut since she moved into the White House.” On trips to the Hill, her aides noticed how she would perform perfectly during an appointment, then immediately afterward begin yawning and then collapse in the car on the way back to the White House. Bill would stay up to two or three in the morning, looking at the pictures in the halls, or reading, especially about the presidency, playing cards, picking up the phone at any hour to discuss some matter of strategy. She spent tiring hours each afternoon and evening trying to help Chelsea with her own difficult adjustment, and the extraordinary attention accorded the daughter of a president.

Not surprisingly to those who knew her best, and without calling any public attention to it, Hillary turned to prayer under duress.

On February 24, three weeks before her father suffered his stroke, Hillary and Tipper Gore had been invited to a luncheon of a Christian women's prayer group at the Cedars, a grand estate on the Potomac maintained by the Fellowship, sponsor of the National Prayer Breakfast movement and hundreds of prayer groups under its auspices. They were a surprising group, among them Susan Baker, the wife of James Baker, the Bush family's grand retainer and former secretary of state; Joanne Kemp, wife of former Republican congressman Jack Kemp, who would run for vice president in 1996; Grace Nelson, wife of Democratic senator Bill Nelson of Florida; and Holly Leachman, wife of Washington Red-skins chaplain Jerry Leachman and herself a lay minister at the McLean Bible Church in Virginia, where many prominent Republican senators and conservative luminaries worshipped, including Kenneth Starr. Each of Hillary's “prayer partners,” with whom she tried to meet each week when she was in town, promised to pray for Hillary regularly and presented her with a handmade book of biblical passages, personal messages, and spiritual quotations to help sustain her during her time in Washington. Susan Baker later visited Hillary and showed her great compassion about the death of Hugh Rodham and Hillary's personal political difficulties. Holly Leachman came to the White House to pray with Hillary or just to cheer her up throughout the Clinton presidency.

Hillary would later be accused of cynically becoming religious and adopting more traditional values for the purpose of political advancement after her election to the Senate. That's hard to imagine given that knowledge of her affiliation with the prayer group during the White House years was kept to a few in her inner circle.

 

D
ESPITE
D
ICK
M
ORRIS'S
advice to Hillary about “balancing” the opposing sides of her job, there was little evidence throughout 1993 of the first lady as hostess to the nation, the world, and Georgetown. Hillary's initial approach to entertaining was highly politicized and personalized, reflecting her embattled posture, thus accelerating the Clintons' estrangement from a permanent Washington establishment that was, in many quarters, prepared to welcome them warmly.

No new president and first lady could have done much worse with the locals, or more directly set a presidency on a collision course with the inbred values of the place. In retrospect, especially given the secrets Hillary was trying to keep—embarrassments, more than outright lies—the collision was probably inevitable.

Hillary was not wrong that there were certain institutions and people in the capital, important people, who were vehemently opposed to the Clintons and their ideas, who valued sensational stories or a particular political ideology more than honest, measurable results or sincere attempts at constructive governance. Given the chance, they would derail her. But the Clintons didn't help themselves.

The first lady's social secretary was flabbergasted by Hillary's initial unwillingness to engage in the usual protocols of White House entertaining. The problem soon became so acute that members of the secretary's staff had their own term for it, borrowed from the name of one of the capital's social elite: it was called the Buffy Cafritz problem. (She had for years been a member of the Kennedy Center board and leader of many of the city's charities.)

Part of the Clintons' frustration with Washington was their comprehension of the hypocrisy of the place. The city's dominant ethic seemed too often premised on vicious, interpersonal warfare and ideological combat by day, yet treating the most hateful of combatants as honored colleagues during off-hours, even smiling at and flattering one another across the dinner table.

Instead of the basic business and conversation of the town focusing on the substance of governance (as it once did), the emphasis—conversational and journalistic—now was increasingly on who was up and who was down, and the minutiae of political horse-trading. In a quarter-century of political life in the capital since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, perhaps two or three historic pieces of legislation had become law. Since the bipartisan consensus on Watergate and impeachment, far more energy had been expended on political and cultural warfare than on constructive civic engagement.

In choosing a social secretary who understood the anthropology of the capital, Hillary had made what seemed an inspired choice: Ann Stock, vice president of public relations for Bloomingdale's department store in New York. Stock had established a winning rapport with reporters in the Carter White House as Vice President Walter Mondale's deputy press secretary, and had since divided her time between Washington and Manhattan.

She had considerable knowledge of the contrasting power structures and players in each town: New York, a worldly meritocracy; the smaller federal district, a baronial outcropping still clinging to a peculiarly American version of primogeniture—the seniority system prevailed in Congress and was felt in the lobbying precincts of K Street beyond. This imperative was abetted by a press corps that rarely questioned the effect of such feudal arrangements, in which former members of Congress, ex-cabinet secretaries, and retired presidential aides eventually made the easy (or sleazy) transition from Capitol Hill and the White House to the high-rises of K Street.

Stock was a professional, not a socialite, unlike many of her predecessors, which should have added to Hillary's comfort with her. Her selection came as a shock to the doyennes of Washington society. (“Do I know her?” typically asked one, Polly Kraft Cutler, the widow of columnist Joseph Kraft and wife of one of the town's most eminent lawyers, Lloyd Cutler, who would later become White House counsel for Hillary's husband during the relentless advance of the special prosecutor.)

Hillary came to like and respect Stock, and to rely on her. Unfortunately, for almost a year, the first lady routinely resisted Stock's advice to mollify so-called Permanent Washington, including those who identified themselves as Democrats and were anticipating with considerable ardor a restoration at court after twelve ignominious years of the Reagan-Bush era.

Just as Bob Rubin had undertaken the higher education of Hillary Clinton in Wall Street economics, Stock attempted to tutor her in the equally arcane pseudoscience of Washington protocol. Stock was fascinated and captivated by the woman who had hired her, especially intrigued by some of Hillary's intertwined qualities that might have at first seemed incompatible. “Who would ever have expected her to go to Susan Baker's prayer group, for one? I was surprised by this incredibly together, smart, talented, determined, human, funny woman. I was blown away by her. And that consistent, first view never changed.”