Kati Marton (53 page)

Bill’s debt to his wife was growing. On January 26, 1992, with his presidential prospects slipping away after Gennifer Flowers claimed an extramarital relationship with him, Hillary famously saved her husband’s career. Sitting beside him during a
60 Minutes
interview, looking squarely at the camera, she confronted the rumors of “problems” in their marriage. “We think that’s between us …. We don’t owe anyone else besides each other …. And you know, it is something that we are just not going to go any further into …. If that’s not good enough, don’t vote for him.”

Hillary seemed to alternate between endangering and saving her husband’s political life. She was most effective when helping him and least effective when pursuing her own agenda. Whenever she tried to carve out an independent policy role as first lady, the public resisted. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this paradox, which she fully understood, contributed to her decision in 1999 to seek office on her own.

IF AMERICANS DID NOT
at first perceive the complicated and seemingly contradictory layers of the Clintons’ relationship, many of their friends and closest associates did. “Her public image is so brusque and so efficient,” Mandy Grunwald, a key campaign aide in 1992 and later one of Hillary’s advisers, remarked. “The notion that she is crazy about him is hard [for people] to imagine. But there is no other rational explanation for a Wellesley and Yale graduate to move to Arkansas, and without even a proposal of marriage there.”

Journalist Joe Klein accidentally witnessed their intimacy in January 1992. Bill had just delivered a rousing address to a Columbia, South Carolina, audience. Klein chanced upon Bill and Hillary kissing, in his word, “passionately” in the dark. This was not, he recalled later, a staged moment for the cameras.

But with the Clintons, other images intrude. On Hillary’s West Wing office wall there was a large photograph of her speaking at a podium,
unexceptional except for the inscription, “You are so good, Love, Bill”—the essential affirmation of her political mentor and partner.

IT MUST BE SAID:
the Clintons left behind a substantial record of achievement in their eight years. The economy was the strongest in history, the budget had gone from a huge deficit to big surpluses, welfare was reformed, crime cut, the largest amount of land protected and preserved. Despite errors of judgment, the Clintons had outmaneuvered their enemies. They had survived. By his final year, Bill Clinton was the master of the office, with the highest eighth-year approval rating in the history of polling, even higher than Eisenhower or Reagan. (These would drop precipitously in his first month as an ex-president because of the pardons scandal.) But the cost was high. The country was exhausted from their eight-year psychodrama, and Hillary, by becoming a senator, helped keep the past alive.

IN JANUARY
1993, there was the promise of change in the air. Bill Clinton, the first president born after World War II, was richly talented. Hillary Rodham Clinton was a New Woman: confident and polished, the first wife of a president with a serious professional life. The Clintons had turned traditional gender roles on their head. Hillary had been the family’s chief breadwinner, the one responsible for their finances. Even their affect challenged tradition: she of the implacable composure, the crisp, trenchant style; he, languid, the sentimental man of a hundred hugs and easy tears. He was among the proudest and most publicly supportive husbands in the presidential chronicles. “In my whole life,” he told an Arkansas group in May 2000, “I have never known anybody who had a better grasp of the issues, a better ability to organize, a better ability to get people who thought they would never get along to work together and to get up every day and just keep going than Hillary. Never.”

Two for the price of one, they proudly proclaimed during their campaign. It had worked in Arkansas, they assumed it would work in the White House. But Washington was different, and they would learn the hard way. When David Gergen was hired to improve presidential public relations during the Clintons’ first year in office, he was told he would have to deal with three separate chains of command: the president’s, the vice president’s and the first lady’s. But such a system, if one can call it a system, could not work. It would take four years and many missteps to learn the lesson.

Though many things in American life had changed by the final decade of the twentieth century, what had not changed was the public’s view that the presidency should not be shared by a husband and wife—not overtly, anyway. Was it sexism, or something else? “The same thing,” asserted Stephanopoulos, “would happen to a man, if a woman were president. It’s about the role of the spouse in the presidency. Everybody will forgive the influence if the spouse appears to respect that line. Why did Hillary need to have the world see her influence, since she had the last word at night and the first word in the morning?”

TO MANY AMERICANS
, Hillary presented a bewildering image. Many people, especially women, were disturbed by her numerous makeovers through the years. Was this proof of her own inner confusion? Her friends remembered Hillary changing her glasses as often as every month, even in college. She herself admitted to some deliberate role playing, trying out different personalities and lifestyles, “now the social activist, now acting as outrageous as a moral Methodist can get.” But was it Hillary or the times that were confused? “All the reporting on Bill Clinton revels in his complexities and contradictions,” Grunwald noted. “He is smart. But he is a Bubba. He loves Elvis, but he reads philosophy and theology. Isn’t he fascinating? Meanwhile, Hillary bears the burden of [society] not being used to women being complex.”

Hillary’s generation was the transitional one in the women’s movement. She was among the fortunate few granted provisional membership in male bastions—if they worked twice as hard and were twice as determined.
“Hillary does not believe she’ll be taken seriously if she isn’t strong,” said Shalala.

“In some ways she was a victim of feminism,” Stephanopoulos contends.

IN AN AGE
when personality trumps other qualities in the public’s eyes, Hillary’s desire to make policy, not stand for something ill defined, troubled many more traditional Americans. Like Eleanor Roosevelt and Rosalynn Carter, Hillary and her efforts to play a public policy role met with considerable public disapproval, but she persisted.

In some ways the country’s expectations of the first lady are almost as specific as those of the president. Certain values had not changed as much as the Clintons thought, or hoped. Two hundred years of myths and memories are vivid in the collective consciousness—Dolley Madison saving George Washington’s portrait from British fire, Eleanor as the moral beacon (not policy maker) of the Depression, Jackie and her son in front of the flag-draped coffin. Hillary sought a public role greater than that of Eleanor and a private influence greater than Nancy Reagan’s. Eleanor, Jackie, Lady Bird and Barbara Bush instinctively understood, or quickly learned, the power of the nonelected office, and used it to help set the tone of their husbands’ presidencies. These women were
willing to reveal a humanity and at times a vulnerability; Hillary was not. By trying to present a perfect facade, she lost a chance to connect with people in the way these women did.

But always, there was the paradox: while she
seemed
cutting-edge, a strong advocate of women’s and children’s rights and health care reform, Hillary was also, in many ways, old-fashioned. She preached the sanctity of marriage and did not permit unmarried couples to stay overnight at the White House. Her Methodist faith became increasingly important to her. “Whenever I think I am like her,” Grunwald noted, “religion is the part that I know is most different about Hillary. It really is a comfort for her and sustains her in a way that’s hard for the rest of us to understand.” Ann Stock recalled that Hillary carried a daily prayer card with her and was, for a time, part of a bipartisan weekly women’s prayer group that included Jim Baker’s wife, Susan. Shalala, a solid Lebanese Christian who had no trouble understanding this aspect of Hillary, observed, “She was a suburban church kid. It was reinforced when she moved to Arkansas because religion is important there. People who move to the city get over that. She never did.”