Authors: Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History
Tags: #Presidents' Spouses - United States - Political Activity, #Married People - United States, #Social Science, #Presidents & Heads of State, #United States - Politics and Government, #Presidents, #20th Century, #Married People, #Presidents - United States, #United States, #Power (Social Sciences) - United States, #Biography, #Power (Social Sciences), #Biography & Autobiography, #Presidents' Spouses, #Women, #Women's Studies, #Political Activity, #History
Kati Marton (55 page)
There were problems from the moment the president announced that his wife would head the task force on health care, just five days after the inauguration. The size of the task force that Hillary headed (at one time as many as six hundred people), the secrecy of their proceedings, divisions within the Democratic Party, increasingly partisan Republican attacks—all should have set off alarm bells in the White House. But the Clintons were totally committed to creating a national health insurance system. While Hillary and her task force worked behind closed doors, congressional Republicans under Newt Gingrich, working with the physicians’ lobby, mobilized to defeat it.
Before Hillary met with fifty senators, her aides advised she not use the $100 billion figure as the estimated cost for health care. “I don’t care how they do things here,” Hillary retorted. “If they can’t take the truth, at least they’re going to get it from me.” Her political judgment was clouded by her growing antipathy to the invasiveness of the Washington culture. She was angry and frustrated that other members of her husband’s team, working on their economic reform package, were giving short shrift to her health care initiative. His economic advisers worried about its cost, its timing and its scope. The debate was intense. Unable or unwilling to take on the first lady directly, the opponents of her plan resorted to leaks. On May 23, 1993, a
New York Times
headline declared,
“White House Fight on Health Care: It Is Hillary Clinton Versus the President’s Economic Advisers.” The first lady was furious. “Are these people part of the administration or not?” she asked.
One of the few people in the process who expressed her reservations to Hillary was Tyson. “Maybe because I was a woman and her contemporary,” said Tyson,
it was much easier for me to accept her as another person in the room, a policy analyst, rather than the wife of the president. It wasn’t an issue for me. She and the president had encouraged us during our first weekend retreat at Camp David to express dissent inside the administration, not go outside with it. I took them at their word. The more I got involved in these health care discussions, the more concerned I became. I wanted to fulfill my role to provide economic analysis to shape policy. The others couldn’t find a way to express their reservations. Rubin and Bentsen were remarkably quiet and unengaged. They acted like, Well, it’s out of our hands. But Hillary reached out to me about the situation. I had a couple of really good people on my staff who had raised all sorts of concerns about the plan … Hillary at one point talked to me about being a sort of bridge between the health care team and Rubin and Bentsen, and the other economists. But I made it clear to her that basically I had the same reservations that they did. Never did I ever feel vindictiveness on Hillary’s part for our differences. But there was a real possibility for us to become allies during the first term and that may have been undermined by this.
The West Wing, a confined place of narrow corridors and intertwined, rabbit-warrenlike offices, was now seething. If there is tension in one part, it radiates through the walls and into the cubbyholes of staffers hardwired to respond to every twitch from the president or the first lady. “Hillary liked to criticize the president’s staff in front of him,” said Boorstin.
It was her way of saying, You are incompetent. Look at how your staff treats you. Rather than insult him directly, she used the staff. I
remember the day we had the first health care event on
CBS Morning News
at 7 A.M. Hillary is a morning person. The president is not. Hillary had already been on her treadmill, the president was in terrible shape. The president had a statement to give at the beginning. But there was no podium in the Rose Garden. In front of staffers and within earshot of a lot of other people, Hillary exploded. “What the fuck goes on here! How come there’s no podium for him? What is your staff doing?” Nobody said anything. People were scared of her because they knew she could chop off their testicles if she so chose. You did not cross Hillary.
On September 22, 1993, Hillary appeared on the Hill to launch her plan. Sitting alone at the witness table, without a single note in front of her, she gave a stunning performance. “I still have little shreds of paper,” Melanne Verveer said, “that senators would pass me saying, ‘I’ll be doggone if this isn’t the most amazing performance.’” But Steve Ricchetti was worried. “I told Hillary, ‘You’re too good. They’re gonna try to knock you down.’”
The process revealed both Hillary’s strengths and weaknesses. She showed remarkable ability to get out into the country and listen to peoples’ health care concerns, and explain the administration’s reform proposal. She knew how to use the spotlight almost as effectively as her husband did. Whether in the inner cities or on Indian reservations, her patience and her eloquence were unlimited. The clarity of her speaking reflected the orderliness of her thought process. But in the end, many asked themselves, had she really
listened?
She was at her weakest in the area where her husband was strongest: finding common ground, building consensus. “She was really smart on policy,” Tyson noted, “but not the politics of Washington. That was not her strength at the time.” Once she had made up her mind as to what was right, Hillary was unmovable—a striking contrast to her flexible, politically astute husband.
By the summer of 1993, the president’s budget fight with Congress had pushed health care off the radar screen. When she and health care adviser Ira Magaziner presented Congress with a 1,342-page bill, it was
doomed. The plan pledged universal coverage by 1998 and would have prevented insurers from denying benefits to patients with “preexisting conditions.” It was also extremely difficult to follow and pleased almost no one. Conservatives cried “big government,” while the left attacked it as “pro-industry.” Partisan politics had much to do with the defeat. Later, both Clintons admitted they underestimated the political cost of the first lady’s role. “The reaction was more negative than I thought,” the president said. “I will admit, I underestimated this.”
She was reluctant to deal with members of Congress who pushed for a less ambitious but more politically feasible plan. “Bill and I,” she declared, “did not come to Washington to play the game as usual, and to fuzz the differences between universal coverage and access.” She had not yet learned one of the hard lessons of Washington: that the stars in the capital line up on a big issue only once in a while. The Clintons did not understand that it would have been better to get an imperfect deal on health care and try to fix it later. “Hillary let the perfect become the enemy of the good,” said Mandy Grunwald. Hillary’s fondness for secrecy deprived the public of essential information. It also created suspicion and further alienated the media. “I saw that it wasn’t going to work several months before it went down,” Tyson recalled. “It was too big and would have dismantled things that were working fine for the sake of the 15 percent that wasn’t. I could see supporters of the plan peeling off.”
Putting such a huge issue under the first lady’s leadership made her an irresistible political target. “She was not [solely] responsible for the failure,” Tyson maintained. “The president had totally bought in to it. The policy was based on flawed and politically compromised thinking. But the cost of the failure was hers.”
“There was a chance to get it done,” Ricchetti recalled. “In the winter of 1993, Hillary was very popular in the country. She had demonstrated enormous substantive competence. The Republicans thought, Holy God. This is gonna happen! Several GOP strategists wrote, If the president succeeds at this, it’s all over. They will win in ’94. Then two days before Christmas, Troopergate erupted. Then came Whitewater, followed by the cattle futures deal. All of that combined to erode the
Clintons’ political capital. With more capital to spend, they could have got something.”
HILLARY HAD LOST
more than a chance to shape national health policy. She had lost much of the shield that traditionally protects first ladies. Henceforth, she would be treated like the policy maker she wanted to be—and an unsuccessful one at that. She was fair game for political attacks in a different way from other first ladies. A deeper wound was a loss of standing with her husband. He had always relied on his wife not only to look out for his best interests but to do the politically smart thing. He had placed in her hands the most far-reaching social legislation since the Great Society, and she had misread Congress, the media and the acceptable parameters of her role as first lady. After health care, the magic was gone.
It was a terrible personal disappointment. But humility and retreat were not Hillary’s way; at least not public humility. Even the double tragedy in 1993 of her father’s death and the suicide of her closest colleague and friend from Little Rock, Vince Foster, who had become deputy White House counsel, did not reap much media support. Hillary’s glacial self-control seemed to repel sympathy.
Rather than reaching out to the women who covered her—many of them fellow baby boomers—she alienated them.
Washington Post
reporter Martha Sherrill, for one, was at first excited about covering the first lady. Weeks went by, and though she had interviewed all members of Hillary’s family, her childhood friends and her Methodist minister,
I began to get this funny feeling that maybe I was never going to sit down with her. The first time I actually laid eyes on her was at a public event where she sort of toured around like Florence Nightingale. She would not give any interviews. She would not talk about the role of first lady. I was told by her press people that she was pondering the role. That she was letting it percolate and hadn’t decided what her role was going to be. So we ended up writing about her clothes and her hair, because that’s all we had. And I was getting frustrated. I
thought I was asked to cover her because she was supposed to be this new kind of first lady: a serious intellectual and a career woman. And she was turning out to be this sort of ornament, showing off American designers. I became good friends with her staff—Maggie Williams and Melanne Verveer and Neil Lattimore—and they kept telling me she was too busy.
Hillary eventually sat down with Sherrill.
I found her warm and folksy but at the same time sort of preachy. There was a lot of, Let me impart my wisdom on that subject. A mix of Bible and ancient wisdom. There was an attempt to manipulate the press, which backfired. She wasn’t telling us who she was or what sort of first lady she wanted to be. So then all these stories came out about her being Lady Macbeth or Saint Hillary, because she didn’t speak or give interviews for such a long time. With Mrs. Bush you would be told, She doesn’t want to do this story because she doesn’t think it’s good for her. Period. You would never get a straight answer from Hillary’s office. Their arrogance was something. They didn’t know that you produce a schedule for the people covering the first lady the night before. They would say, Well, we’re doing things differently. And then they realized after several months of total chaos that there were certain things they had to do that way for a reason. I think that came from Hillary not wanting to do anything the way it had been done before. Basically she didn’t want to talk about what kind of first lady she was going to be. She was going to
show
us. If Eleanor had gone down in the mines, Hillary was going to do one better.
As far as Hillary was concerned, there were good reasons to avoid the media. “I think at different times she has tried to engage reporters and has come to believe it is a losing proposition,” Grunwald recalled. “She wanted them to focus on substance and they wrote only psychobabble pieces about her.”
Hillary did not think the public had to know who she was, only what her positions on issues were. This was a misreading of the times. In times
as prosperous and peaceful as the 1990s, character and personality tend to be dominant. Hillary tried to defy the trend and return to a less personality-driven political climate. “She wants to be in public service,” said a close friend, “but not in public life. She wants to practice politics the way it
was,
not the way it is.”
Behind this aloof posture was more than a midwesterner’s natural reserve. Hillary probably had more to hide than any other first lady in recent times. “It’s all that scar tissue,” a close friend asserted. “She cries. She doesn’t have his hide. He is spooky, how lightly he takes things.” Jackie Kennedy had floated above her husband’s philandering, which, in any case, never became public until after his death. Lady Bird had rationalized it for her own peace of mind and lived in a different social and media climate. Whatever humiliation she suffered was private until years later. But the revelations and accusations about the Clintons occurred in real time, while they were in the White House—a situation unique in American history.
Hillary tried to rationalize this most intimate of problems by turning it into a political issue. Sex was another weapon that their enemies would use to try to bring them down. “She doesn’t treat the stories about women any differently than any of the other scandals,” Mandy Grunwald said. “So we wonder, how does she feel about Gennifer Flowers or Paula Jones or Monica Lewinsky. She believes it’s part of the same story.
They
are out to get the Clintons. She has pretty good reason to think so, if you look at what she considers the invasion of their lives. She puts it all in a box called ‘Politics.’”