First Ladies (64 page)

By the time the “Whitewater” investment of the Clintons came to public attention a few weeks later, the First Lady may well have welcomed more attention to her appearance. Critics charged that the Clintons had acted improperly, if not illegally, in an investment that went bad in Arkansas a dozen years earlier, and then in 1993, when a related matter came under investigation by the Treasury Department, their aides had conferred privately with the investigators. Subpoenas
went out for the aides—who came from the First Lady's staff as well as that of the president. His chief counsel, Bernard Nussbaum, an old mentor of Hillary's, resigned.

Suspicions got into print, causing Americans to muse about whether or not the suicide of Vincent Foster, Hillary's friend and law colleague, might have been related to a “cover up” of the Clintons rather than the frantic grasp of a seriously depressed man for relief. Shredding of papers at her old law firm raised other questions. What exactly was this Arkansas real estate development that the Clintons invested in, and if they lost money, what was the fuss? To complicate the story, new evidence emerged that Hillary had traded in futures commodities in 1979 and done it very profitably, converting a tiny one thousand dollar nest egg into a hefty $100,000 bankroll, and she had accomplished this remarkable feat in a very few months.

For most Americans, Whitewater became a convenient tag for money matters too complex to comprehend or take sides on. Even seasoned television reporters frequently flubbed pronunciation of Whitewater, making it into Watergate and thus associating the Clintons with the foibles and demise of another president. The First Lady was suddenly center stage, besieged for interviews and statements, not about how she meant to redecorate or dress, but how she had handled money and instructed her aides.

Recalling an old rule of the political game—that winners should keep quiet until they sense they hold the advantage—Hillary waited, refusing all interviews or calls for press conferences. Then, on a Friday evening in April, while much of the nation's attention was diverted to a New York hospital where former President Nixon lay dying, she invited reporters to the State Dining Room and gave her side of the story. It ran in newspapers the next day, front page, but surely to be dwarfed by stories of Richard Nixon's death. The First Lady wore a pink sweater set that emphasized her youth and resorted repeatedly to the need for a “zone of privacy” as an explanation for not telling more of the truth sooner, but she stopped short of admitting guilt. It had been that concern for privacy, she said, that “led me to perhaps be less understanding than I need to of both the press and the public's interest as well as a right to know things about my husband and me.” Now she had been “re-zoned” to tell more.
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A series of interviews with individual reporters followed. Meryl Gordon wrote “Hillary Talks Back” for the May issue of
Elle;
June's
Working Woman
carried an article by Patricia O'Brien entitled “reality bites” while its cover proclaimed “Hillary Hangs Tough.”
The New Yorker
ran a long profile, “Hillary the Pol” by Connie Bruck, who
admitted she had interviewed the president on Hillary's first year when the First Lady could not find time to talk. In perhaps the most hostile of the batch, Leslie Bennetts wrote for June
Vanity Fair
about “Pinning Down Hillary.” Bennetts had not appreciated her treatment: the First Lady brought aides with her to the interview and appeared condescending to the reporter who wrote that she had spoken to her as though “I were a particularly obtuse student and she were wondering how to help me overcome my regrettable ignorance.”
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Behind this flurry of talk lay an important point. The president's wife was being interrogated about substantive, ethical matters, touching on money and power. This was no longer a question of pillow talk with the president—but of how she had used power in her own professional and political life. On Sunday, June 13, the point was made more clearly. In what the
New York Times
called “extraordinary sessions,” the special prosecutor, Robert B. Fiske, who had been named to investigate the Whitewater matter and report to Congress, went to the White House to take sworn testimony from both Clintons. Anyone interested in trivia would note that Fiske spoke with the president for ninety minutes and with the First Lady for sixty.

In the end, she would be cleared of any wrongdoing in the Whitewater matter, but her troubles were far from over. When the Republicans registered big gains in the November 1994 election, taking control of both houses of Congress and winning nearly all sixty seats that switched party affiliation, the First Lady was assigned part of the blame. Did her highly publicized fight to reform health care steer voters into the Republican column? Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization of Women (NOW), announced that it was not the shift in party control that worried her but rather “the shift in political power to enemies of women's and civil rights.”
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Biographer Gail Sheehy, who detected an air of defeat in Hillary at the time, noted that the First Lady well understood her connection to the angry male backlash then surfacing. “ … [F]or many of these wounded men, I'm the boss they never wanted to have … the daughter who they never wanted to turn out to be so independent,” she told Sheehy.
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But Hillary Clinton also shrewdly noted that the changes went far beyond any one individual: “It's not me, personally, they hate—it's the changes I represent.”

Hillary responded immediately to the electoral setback by altering her course. Rather than continuing to carve out a new role for the presidential spouse as legislative leader, holding hearings, and shaping laws, she reverted to the model of activist First Ladies Eleanor Roosevelt, Lady Bird Johnson, and Rosalynn Carter. She would still be
highly visible, giving speeches and working for the causes she believed in, but she would stick to traditional turf for a president's wife. In the syndicated weekly newspaper column that she began writing in 1995, she rarely broached controversial subjects; her speeches promoted mainstream ideas, such as the need to improve reading test scores and make mammograms more accessible. Work progressed on her book,
It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Our Children Teach Us,
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but it made very few fresh observations, repeating what she had stated in previous publications. She continued to travel widely, including one twelve-day trip to Asia, with stops in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, but because she turned the trip into a mother-daughter outing with teenage daughter Chelsea, she broke no new ground.

Her highly publicized trip to Beijing in September 1995 did ruffle some feathers, if only temporarily. Her staff had been preparing for months for her to attend the UN's Fourth World Conference on Women. Now, however, White House advisors worried that a visit to China, when it was making headlines for its poor record on human rights and brutal treatment of dissidents, might be misinterpreted. In the end, she decided to endure whatever criticism ensued rather than feel stymied into staying quietly at home. The speech she gave at the conference was anything but quiet. It included a rousing reaffirmation of women's lives and their claim to respect, while also taking China's leadership to task for suppressing human rights and permitting girls to be less valued than boys. China's leadership gave no indication they even heard her, and the nation's newspapers largely ignored her protest, but women in the audience were jubilant, “It was as good as I could have imagined,” one Tibetan woman told a reporter. “I was very encouraged.”
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Although the success of that Beijing speech might have signaled a turning point for Hillary, the following months brought many more disappointments. In January 1996, suspicion increased about her complicity in the Whitewater affair. Doubts grew about her trustworthiness when billing records from her Arkansas law firm (originally subpoenaed by the independent counsel but reported as lost) suddenly turned up in a section of the White House where she frequently worked. William Safire, who had once written speeches for Richard Nixon, used his column in the
New York Times
to call her a “congenital liar.”
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Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr subpoenaed her to testify in front of a grand jury, the first time a president's wife had ever been required to make such an appearance. Suggestions from the Clintons and their advisers that a deposition taken from her in the White House
would serve just as well—without exposing her to the indignity of having to appear in a downtown Washington court house—were rejected. She testified for four hours.

As Bill Clinton prepared to run for a second term, Hillary faced more problems. The revelation that she had followed the advice of New Age psychologist Jean Houston to boost her morale by engaging in imaginary conversations with people she admired only made temporary news. She mitigated the criticism by joking about how much she had learned from “talking” with Eleanor Roosevelt.
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But when the presidential campaign heated up, she encountered a more serious charge: she was accused of courting big donors by inviting them to the White House and rewarding the most generous givers with a chance to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom.
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Old rumors resurfaced about her role in the firing of White House travel office employees, a possible cover-up associated with Vincent Foster's suicide, and the Whitewater real estate investment nearly two decades earlier.
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Bill Clinton won re-election easily, and Hillary embarked on what might have been a tranquil, lame duck period; it quickly turned into one of the most tumultuous terms ever served by a First Lady. A new round of revelations about her husband's extramarital liaisons began in January 1998, with Linda Tripp. A former White House aide, Ms. Tripp informed Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr that she possessed taped conversations documenting a sexual relationship between her one-time friend, Monica Lewinsky, and the President of the United States. As soon as the national media carried the story, the First Lady went on the popular
Today
show to defend her husband, labeling the story a creation of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” bent on destroying him.
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The president tried to distance himself from Lewinsky by announcing that he had never had “a sexual relationship with that woman.” Both statements would come back to haunt the president and First Lady. After Lewinsky presented physical evidence (a semen-stained dress) implicating him, Bill Clinton went on national television to admit that he had not told the full truth. He also admitted misleading his wife.

For the remainder of 1998, dubbed by Gail Sheehy as the “Year of Monica,” the nation's attention stayed glued to the subject of the president's sex life. Television talk show hosts bantered about berets and cigars; school children tittered about new additions to their vocabularies; sociologists offered their own explanations for “sexual addiction.” For months, the Lewinsky story pushed all others, including those of enormous importance dealing with the economy and foreign policy, off the front page. On December 18, the U.S. House of Representatives
voted, for only the second time in American history, to impeach a president, and Bill Clinton faced trial for obstructing justice and committing perjury. After the Senate returned a verdict of “not guilty” on both counts on February 12, 1999, speculation slowly diminished but revelations of the past months had become part of the public record.

While the president was undergoing his own ordeal, public opinion changed perceptibly on his wife, now viewed as the “wronged woman.”
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Many Americans expressed dismay that anyone with her considerable resources (including a law degree and years of experience working with powerful professionals) would remain married to a man that exposed her to such humiliation.
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Critics suggested that Hillary stayed in the marriage to satisfy her own gigantic personal ambition and to keep herself connected to the power center of the nation. Supporters worried that she had been reduced to the role of “loyal wife,” a label she had strongly rejected during the 1992 campaign when she asserted “I'm not sitting here like some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.”
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Wendy Wasserstein, the dramatist, expressed disappointment that Hillary's “impressive personal qualities of idealism, strength and poise under pressure [were] being used to maintain domestic tranquility, and that maintaining the dignity of her marriage [would be] seen as her greatest professional triumph.”
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It seemed incredible that this was the same woman whom presidential historian Michael Beschloss had singled out in January 1997 as “easily the most influential First Lady in history.”
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But many Americans apparently preferred the “loyal [subjective] wife” to the strong achiever, and the First Lady's popularity ratings rose dramatically, to the highest level since she moved into the White House.

Although she refused to divulge much about her feelings during those difficult months, Hillary began showing signs of a new determination, a realization that her turn had come. Her husband's second and final term would soon end, leaving both of these relatively young, highly energetic people considering how to spend the rest of their lives. Former presidents always present special retirement cases but few had faced the prospect of such an extended post–White House period as Bill Clinton; he would be only fifty-four when he left office. Theodore Roosevelt had finished his second term at age fifty, but without the ban on third terms, he could continue to try to regain the presidency until his death. For Bill Clinton, that avenue was closed, but not for his wife. Former First Ladies had typically retired beside their spouses, and only two widows, Eleanor Roosevelt and Jacqueline Kennedy, had embarked on careers of their own. None had run for public office.