Kati Marton (52 page)

TO AN EXTENT THAT WOULD HAVE SEEMED UNIMAGINABLE BEFORE 1992, TO A
degree that dwarfed even the saga of Franklin and Eleanor, the story of the Clinton administration was the story of a marriage. Bill and Hillary Clinton said they sought a “zone of privacy” for themselves, but their own actions, both political and personal, made it inevitable that the press, the public and ultimately a relentless barrage of investigators and
prosecutors would invade their private lives and make Hillary Rodham Clinton the most controversial first lady in history.

The Clintons understandably blamed their enemies for their difficulties—and, to be sure, an unusual number of people hated them. But even their admirers would ultimately have to admit that the Clintons brought on to themselves the attention and most of the crises.

First came the determination of both Clintons that Hillary would be a first lady unlike any of her predecessors. She would be the first to have an office in the West Wing, rather than the traditional East Wing space. The symbolism was clear: only policy makers had precious, if cramped, West Wing real estate. (“You can’t put Hillary in the West Wing,” Vernon Jordan whispered to his friend the president-elect in January 1993. “You don’t understand,” Bill Clinton replied. “That’s a done deal.”) She would attempt the reform of the nation’s health care system—an awesome job, the handling of which damaged her immensely early on in her husband’s presidency. And finally, eight years and countless crises later, she would become the first wife of a president in history to run for public office.

And then there was the unprecedented and relentless furor surrounding a sitting president’s sex life.

Americans ended up knowing more about Bill and Hillary’s marriage—and, in excruciating detail, his reckless behavior—than about those of their closest friends. The Clintons had almost nothing left to hide at the end of their tenure. Even after leaving the White House, when other ex-presidential couples normally fade into the background, the unique circumstances of the Clintons—she a sitting U.S. senator, he a beleaguered high-profile defender of controversial, last-minute presidential pardons—meant that the invasive attention would continue.

The memory of this accomplished and intelligent partnership would be that Hillary saved both their marriage and the Clinton presidency even as he exposed her to the most searing public humiliation of any spouse in American history. Ironically, the woman who measured herself against Eleanor Roosevelt and once publicly scorned Tammy Wynette’s famous song, “Stand By Your Man,” ended up resembling both Eleanor and Tammy.

FEBRUARY 6, 2000
. “Ladies and gentlemen. Please welcome the next senator of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton!” Three hundred fifty-two Democratic party delegates and an audience of thousands roared their approval from the bleachers of the Albany State Capitol as the candidate strode briskly to the podium to accept the nomination of the New York State Democratic Party.

It was, quite simply, astonishing. An incumbent first lady was running for office in a state where she had never lived. Few doubted Monica Lewinsky’s role in Hillary’s Senate run. “After Monica, Clinton had to give Hillary whatever she wanted,” a White House aide said. And, on that night in Albany, in a low-key manner, she neatly flipped the traditional note of spousal appreciation uttered by countless politicians. “I am delighted that the president is here this evening,” she said. “And I am so grateful for his support.” And, with a line that stunned some and amused others, she added, “I would not be standing here tonight were it not for Bill and were it not for all he has done for me ….” It was the perfect echo of a thousand conjugal grace notes from a thousand candidates. Only now, the gender roles were reversed.

Nine months later, New Yorkers elected Hillary Clinton as their first woman senator. Standing quietly behind his wife as she thanked hundreds of cheering supporters in a downtown Manhattan ballroom, the president wiped tears from his eyes. Once again, the Clintons had rewritten the rules.

LOVE AND AMBITION
cohabited seamlessly with the Clintons. A quarter of a century and countless tales of infidelity after they had first met, they still loved to match wits, test their ideas on each other. Clinton chose Hillary rather than any of the blond beauty queens he usually dated or wanted to date. “It’s Hillary or nobody,” he told his mother, who dreamed of other women for her son. “This is a very bonded couple,”
said her longtime friend and former secretary of health and human services Donna Shalala. “As much as anything else, when he goes home at night he wants to talk policy and so does she. He was smart enough to marry a serious grown-up.” Hillary never bored him intellectually, and he understood instinctively that she would help him achieve his ambition.

Clinton knew enough about himself to know he needed one steadying presence in his life. He knew, said a friend years later, that “Hillary would never quit on him.” She loved him and she loved the idea of the life they could build together: he the natural politician, she the intellectual strategist. Bill needed and valued Hillary’s discipline, decisiveness and fierce devotion. She was the serious academic who landed the charming rogue. “Clinton was the first man who made her feel beautiful, not just smart,” observed George Stephanopoulos, who saw a lot of them as a couple.

Hillary endured—but barely—her husband’s philandering because she knew that his attachment to her was based on feelings beyond guilt and indebtedness. He empowered her because she, and later their daughter, were the only people he really needed. In the blunt judgment of a friend who had known Clinton since college, his affairs were simply “recreational.”

At Yale Law School, Hillary was smitten by Bill, but she also saw his political potential. “My boyfriend,” she told her bemused friends, “is going to be president.” Bill and Hillary discovered that they balanced each other’s strengths and weaknesses: his magnetism and her organizational skills forged a single, smooth-running political machine. She was smart and efficient, he was comfortable with ambiguities. He was intuitive; she was deductive. Yet he was probably more emotionally detached than she when confronting adversity or adversaries. He could cajole strangers and seduce adversaries into a common position. She was a fighter. Like Nancy Reagan, she would learn to watch his back, remember slights and urge attacks before their adversaries mobilized. He would compromise and beguile. She would keep him focused and steady and pounce when danger knocked. If she couldn’t tame his vanity, his compulsiveness and his capacity for denial, she could at least temper them.

HILLARY RODHAM WAS
always remarkably self-contained. Even as a child she did not need much parenting. “She was already a perfectionist when she was eight,” her mother, Dorothy, recalled years later. “She always set very high standards for herself. She was almost scary.” In the sixties, when Hillary was in high school, not many girls thought about running for public office. Hillary, however, already thought of the political world, if at first only through marriage. Her stated ambition in high school was “To marry a senator and settle down in Georgetown.” By the time she was at Wellesley, she had become a student leader receiving national attention and a
Life
magazine cover for a provocative valedictory challenging establishment values.

With her suburban Chicago background she also seemed to provide Bill some of the respectability he needed. “He thought she was the best thing he had ever encountered,” said Brooke Shearer, whose husband, Strobe Talbott, was Clinton’s Oxford classmate and later became deputy secretary of state. “He was amazed that she was interested in him.” In 1974, when Clinton was running for Congress in Arkansas (he lost) and Hillary was on the Watergate investigative staff in the House of Representatives, she often called five or six times a day with suggestions for his staff. “Anything Hillary says,” Bill instructed them, “do it. She’s the smartest woman I ever met.” He never swerved from that conviction. “Each thinks the other is the smartest person they know,” according to Stephanopoulos. Their friends see a balance in their relationship. “She has achieved a level of prominence that she never could have gotten on her own,” one of her closest political advisers remarked. “If she hadn’t married him she would have gone back to Chicago or New York and become a first-class lawyer.”

Hillary was the thread in his thirty-year political career, his Colonel House and Louis Howe and much more. While Eleanor Roosevelt was a separate political and moral center in her husband’s presidency, Hillary was integrated into the Clinton White House. Had Eleanor disappeared, Franklin would have been fine (perhaps, some would say, a bit relieved). Bill Clinton needed Hillary to function and survive. “If something ever
happened to Hillary,” said Ann Stock, White House social secretary during the first Clinton administration, “he would be lost. He depends on her for political judgments. She can cut through stuff. When things happen to him, she just comes in and goes right to the core.”

Clinton was the first president to support his wife’s political aspirations. As early as 1990, Governor Clinton asked pollster Dick Morris to gauge how Hillary would fare in a governor’s race in Arkansas. When the poll showed that she was viewed solely as the governor’s wife and would lose on her own, “Clinton told Morris to go back and rephrase the questions,” recalled one of Morris’s former pollsters. “It was the first time in twenty years that Clinton questioned one of Morris’s polls.” The results, however, were the same.

Most of their friends believe Clinton, even with all his political skills, would not have been elected without Hillary. “She brought discipline into the operation,” Ruth Goldway, a friend of three decades and the former mayor of Santa Monica, California, noted. “He was allowed to play the emotional part because she was taking this tough role.” Their friends always assumed that if they reached their goal, the Clintons would have a co-presidency. “They were so used to handling things, just the two of them,” said Derek Shearer, Ruth Goldway’s husband and a friend since Yale. “She was in on all of his political decisions. She is not just a policy person, she is a political person. They managed his campaigns together. She met with the pollsters, she signed off on the media buys. And she always had an area of policy responsibility; in Arkansas it was education.”

In 1980, Clinton was defeated in a re-election bid in Arkansas. Suddenly, he was the youngest ex-governor in the country’s history. Hillary called Morris, and together they repositioned a shaken and devastated Clinton. By 1990, he was back on top, preparing his run for the White House. In May, as Clinton ran for his fifth term as governor, a Democratic challenger named Tom McRae declared that five terms was too many. Standing in the state capitol’s rotunda, McRae called Clinton a coward for refusing to debate him. Suddenly, a woman’s voice interrupted him, “Give me a break!” Hillary, from the middle of the crowd, shouted, “I think we ought to set the record straight. Many of the reports you issued praised the governor on his environmental
and … economic record ….” Hillary had stolen McRae’s spotlight and left him spluttering.