Kati Marton (54 page)

“We don’t talk about deeply personal things,” Dorothy Rodham said. Her pastor, Ed Matthews, explained that Hillary “knows that she has been given many gifts and graces and has greater obligations than ordinary people.” That sense of special mission often came across as self-righteous, a feeling, in the words of Gergen, that “You’re lucky to be in my presence.” Her speaking style, her body language, her unwillingness to talk about herself—all this made her seem inauthentic. Some of Hillary’s harshest critics were angered by her professed spirituality and sought to unmask what they felt was her sanctimoniousness. But in fact her faith was real—and indispensable to her survival.

Not surprisingly, Hillary often seemed to wish she could inhabit a separate, hermetically sealed universe where people were oblivious to her husband’s reckless behavior and his wife’s constant need to forgive him. In August 1998, at the height of the Lewinsky scandal, Hillary refused to acknowledge, as even Britain’s Queen Elizabeth had after her public pain, that it had been a “horrible year.” Instead, Hillary’s press secretary issued a statement. “Clearly this is not the best day in Mrs. Clinton’s life. But”—in the language of the Bible—“her love for [her
husband] is compassionate and steadfast.” This was not what most of the country wanted to hear from the wronged wife. It seemed to many that power—not love—was the tie that bound this couple. But the Clintons were much more complicated than that. Many of those who have spent time in their company felt that there was an almost sexual charge to their intense interaction and arguments. “They get into arguments about substance. He’s gregarious and all over the place,” Shalala said, “but he’s a political genius. She melts when she looks at him. She is both infuriated and totally in love with him.”

The Clintons loved to watch each other perform. They both had an uncanny ability to recall names and obscure details about people they barely know. They could recall thousands of people, people they had known since kindergarten or collected along the way. Bill and Hillary vied with each other for who could recall more names, more personal details. This vast network of public policy-minded baby boomers is part of their shared territory. When Clinton was introduced to Zoe Baird, his first short-lived nominee for attorney general, he seemed surprised there was an overachieving baby boomer who was not his friend. “I don’t know why we haven’t met before,” he told her.

In December 1998, aboard
Air Force One,
returning from a Middle East trip during which the cameras captured Hillary’s ice-cold body language toward her husband, she astonished a fellow passenger, Congressman Sander Levin, when she said, “The president made history during this trip.” As if in answer to Levin’s unasked question, she said, “He’s my president too, you know.” She seemed always to accept, if sometimes reluctantly, her husband’s need to walk near the edge, in both his personal and political life. With Hillary, as with the country, he had the knack for working his way back. “They didn’t get me that time, did they?” he gloated to James Carville in 1992, after his near-death experience in the Gennifer Flowers affair.

What the public did not often see, except in regard to their daughter, Chelsea, was the conventional side of this unconventional union. “He acts like a baby around her sometimes,” Stephanopoulos remembered. “The way he calls her name, Hirrree … dropping the l’s. She loves it.” While a world seemed to separate Nancy Reagan from Hillary, there were some surprising similarities between them. Like Nancy, Hillary was
very protective of the president’s schedule. “‘You are putting too much on it, these meetings are lasting too long,’ she would tell us.” Grunwald recalled:

“They developed an arrogance you don’t get in a place like New York or Washington where you get knocked around and there are a lot of people who are just as smart as you are,” a member of the Clinton Cabinet noted. “You make mistakes and you learn to pick yourself up again. The Clintons never went through that in Arkansas. It’s like they didn’t grow up in some ways.” They behaved, in the words of one of their closest Washington friends, “as if they had LBJ’s [overwhelming] 1964 mandate.” But they didn’t. Clinton won only 43.5 percent of the popular vote, a 5 percent margin over Bush, while Ross Perot got 19 percent as a third-party candidate.

At no point in the entire process was Hillary’s role more important than in that murky, ill-documented but critical period between election day and the inauguration called the “transition.” How much the president-elect owed Hillary was clear. Had she not handled the
60 Minutes
interview as she had, had she not focused him and rallied his troops, it is hard to
believe he would have been elected, or even nominated. Now it was Hillary’s turn. It is hard to reconstruct the precise details of the conversations that took place around the kitchen table in the governor’s mansion in Little Rock, with Vice President Al Gore, Vernon Jordan, Mickey Kantor and Warren Christopher—the transition team leaders. But while the process was chaotic, the outcome was historic. By insisting that half of all senior political appointees be women, Hillary transformed the Washington political culture. It was her most enduring contribution. The women who ultimately headed the Justice Department, Health and Human Services, Energy and, in the second term, State and Labor, all owed Hillary a tremendous debt. (The selection process for attorney general was sloppy. After two women nominees had been found wanting, a third, Janet Reno, was picked, but she was diminished by the fact that her gender had been announced before anyone was chosen.)

Having achieved her constituency’s initial expectations of her, Hillary stumbled. In the exhilaration and high hopes of the early months, the Clintons failed to heed the principle that in politics, the more radical the idea, the softer the approach should be. “Right away she announced she would go by Hillary Rodham Clinton,”
Time
magazine White House correspondent Ann Blackman recalled, “when all during the campaign she was Hillary Clinton. She was making a statement: take me seriously. Then she took an office in the West Wing. Another statement. She was often on the Hill, and outspoken at meetings. She could have changed the way the first lady operates if she had better advice, or if she took advice on how to do things gradually. First ladies have been very traditional. They’ve all had their own personalities and have emerged gradually. She offended people by moving so fast.”

Hillary, who had studied all her predecessors, nonetheless underestimated the nation’s attachment to the traditional role of first lady. She was succeeding one of the most popular presidential wives in modern history, and one of the most traditional. But she believed she could change things rapidly.

“The president was worried,” noted Betty King, ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, a friend from Little Rock since the early 1970s. “It was the first time Hillary was not going to be working. He really wanted her to do something big,” Melanne Verveer,
Hillary’s White House chief of staff, recalled. “Early on, Hillary said, ‘I don’t want to be a symbol.’ She is a doer, a worker who gets things done.” Donna Shalala saw the danger of a too powerful first lady. “They came in talking about a co-presidency. Her friends were talking about her running eight years later. There was an unreality about it. A total misreading of politics. I told her she should go and teach law at Georgetown.”

But Hillary’s passion was for policy making at the highest level. Originally, she wanted to be her husband’s domestic policy chief, but after the president’s pollster, Stan Greenberg, showed the Clintons data indicating that people weren’t ready for such a dramatic move, the president pulled back. Instead, King recalled, “They appointed a woman to that office who was only there because Hillary trusted her, Carol Rasco, a very nice woman from Little Rock, [who] was not up to the job.” They filled the White House with young and inexperienced people and old friends with proven loyalty to the Clintons. Two of Hillary’s partners from her Little Rock law firm, Vincent Foster and William Kennedy, and another old friend, Bernard Nussbaum, took over the White House counsel’s office. They did not want a strong chief of staff because it was understood that Hillary was essentially going to fill that role. Clinton’s childhood friend Thomas “Mack” McLarty, a genial, conciliatory man lacking Washington experience, got the job. “Hillary would come to staff meetings,” a ranking member of the Clinton White House recalled, “and take over. She got things done. But it was humiliating for Mack.” When Erskine Bowles became chief of staff at the beginning of the second term in 1997, he told the President, “Sir, I love Hillary, but I cannot have more than one boss.” Bowles won: he would report only to the president.

HILLARY’S NEED FOR A DEFINED ROLE
led to the Clinton administration’s biggest political mistake. In 1993 health care accounted for 7 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. Almost 37 million Americans had no health insurance. Others had inadequate packages costing thousands of
dollars. One of President Clinton’s goals was to guarantee all Americans a standard package of health care benefits. It was to be the new administration’s single most ambitious enterprise. His choice to lead the effort to reform America’s health care system was his wife. “We needed a talented navigator,” he explained later, “someone with a rigorous mind, a steady compass, a caring heart. Luckily for me, and for our nation, I didn’t have to look very far ….”

The president knew that giving his wife the largest domestic portfolio was risky. “We knew it would be easier to get at her than at somebody else,” said White House Deputy Chief of Staff Steven Ricchetti. “But he had done this with her in Arkansas, with education reform.” Clinton’s Cabinet was less sure. Lloyd Bentsen, Robert Rubin, Alice Rivlin, Laura D’Andrea Tyson and Donna Shalala all expressed concern, although very cautiously. “There were difficult feelings within the administration,” Melanne Verveer recalled. “Some people felt that it should be run from within Health and Human Services, instead of under Hillary. But the president felt she would make the process move forward. He knew she would bring to it a passion and an expertise that no one else could.” Clinton himself said, “People would know I was serious about trying to do this. I thought if we were going to take this on against all the odds, we had to give it our best shot. We had to stretch to the last degree.”

Interestingly, her qualifications were not the issue. “I was always wowed by the extent to which both Hillary and the president understood this stuff,” Tyson, chief of the Council of Economic Advisers, recalled. “She was often the smartest policy analyst in the room.” Clinton’s political blindness to the consequences of his appointment was a blindness born of need and total trust. The president instructed the Cabinet and his staff that Hillary should be treated like anyone else—challenge her, question her. But it simply did not work. The Clintons seemed oblivious to something that was obvious to everyone else. “She absolutely thought that this was the right thing for her to be doing,” said Robert Boorstin, one of Hillary’s media advisers. “But who in the White House is going to say to the first lady, You can’t do that. Nobody thought carefully about how this would look.” One Cabinet member who had
grave misgivings reflected later: “You can make your point only once to the president’s wife, and if it is not accepted, you just don’t press it.”

Hillary claimed she was prepared to take public heat for her unprecedented power. “I understood, as many people never tired of telling me, that this could be a disaster, that I could get blamed …. That didn’t bother me. Heat comes with anything. If I had done nothing, I would have gotten heat. So better to get heat trying to do something important for people.” Health care reform would be an achievement to rival FDR’s creation of Social Security. It would also demonstrate how effectively the presidential couple worked together. “H—” began a typical note President Clinton scrawled atop a memo intended for his wife. “Speechwriters should see this if they haven’t—also I like the idea of having series of issue events—but I’ll defer to you and your team on that. Love, B.”