Kati Marton (57 page)

The culmination of her role as global advocate for women came on September 5, 1995, at the UN Conference on Women, in Beijing. In a speech interrupted by thunderous applause from thousands of women delegates, she took on the conference’s Chinese hosts and the Indian government. “It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated or their spines broken simply because they are girls,” she said. “It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small ….”

People stood for hours along dusty roads waiting to catch a glimpse of the famous American first lady and bask momentarily in her smile.
From the Indian subcontinent to North Africa to South America, Hillary Clinton became a global icon. Not since Jacqueline Kennedy had an American woman stirred such excitement overseas. Many of her earlier critics now hailed Hillary as the administration’s most forceful human rights advocate. And, for this moral Methodist, there was the satisfaction of becoming a voice for the voiceless.

After the debacle of the 1994 midterm elections, she summoned Dick Morris, the man who had saved Clinton in 1980 in Arkansas, to reposition her husband once more. For a long time the president did not even tell his chief of staff, Panetta, or Stephanopoulos about Morris’s role. “I like subterfuge,” the president admitted to Morris, as they worked in secret in the East Wing. It was Morris, code-named “Charlie,” and not Hillary who helped recast Clinton as a moderate centrist, skillfully co-opting elements of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.”

Typically, rather than opt for a quiet family New Year’s as 1995 came to a close, Bill and Hillary joined a thousand other networking baby boomers. Tension and drift in their marriage seemed apparent to many of their friends during the annual Renaissance Weekend celebration held on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. “It was clear from their body language they were in the middle of a big fight,” said one observer. Just before midnight Hillary delivered what Klein called “a self-righteous, overlong policy speech” to a crowded ballroom and returned to her table. Moments later, she returned to the microphone. “They tell me I have to introduce the next speaker,” she said coolly, before presenting her husband.

The following week, Hillary’s executive assistant Carolyn Huber found her missing Arkansas law firm billing records and related papers in the book room on the third floor of the White House. “If you’re about to begin a campaign, you’ve got to get all that stuff out,” Klein speculated. But there were more unpleasant surprises ahead.

Despite her overseas triumphs, 1996 began on a bad note. The first lady, called a “congenital liar” by William Safire in the
New York Times,
received a subpoena from special prosecutor Kenneth Starr to appear before a federal grand jury on January 26. She would never forgive Starr for forcing her to walk the media gauntlet into the federal courthouse. Smiling and waving and flashing her least sincere “glad to see you” smile,
she became the first wife of a president to testify under oath before a grand jury. The reporters cut her little slack. “Whenever I go out and fight I get vilified,” she told Stephanopoulos, “so I have just learned to smile and take it. I go out there and say, Please, kick me again, insult me some more. You have to be much craftier behind the scenes, but just smile.” Even her mother observed to friends that Hillary’s smile and her eyes no longer matched.

Still more bad news came cascading down. A memo from the former head of White House management, David Watkins, discovered the same week, seemed to hold the first lady accountable for the firing of the travel office. “There would be hell to pay,” the memo read, “if we failed to take swift and decisive action in conformity with the First Lady’s wishes.” Watkins later testified he was basing this on hearsay, not direct instructions. As President Bush’s spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, noted, “Mrs. Bush would have known that one call to the chief of staff about the travel office is the same as firing them.” Hillary later tried to explain her misreading of the situation: “Part of the urgency that my husband felt about the agenda he brought with him to Washington made all of us rush in and try to do things before we really understood how Washington worked.”

Hillary was still paying the price for having approached a symbolic, ill-defined situation—being the president’s spouse—as if it were a specific job. Now she understood something she had refused to accept earlier. “It’s not a defined responsibility. I’m absolutely aware of that now,” she told this writer in 1997. “I’ve always had jobs and worked for a living. I’m here, as everyone else in the White House is here, because of one person, the president. It was bewildering to me and has taken a while to get used to.”

BY THE SUMMER OF
1996, her surface transformation was complete. The combination of her lower political profile, her new global stature and her best-selling book had successfully recast her image. Democrats gathered in Chicago to renominate her husband greeted Hillary with sustained, rolling cheers and applause. But Hillary, looking soft and pretty in a sky-blue suit, seemed impatient with the display. With both
hands held up, she urged the crowd to quiet down. Where Bill would have basked in the moment, Hillary was eager to get on with her message. Her melody seemed at war with her lyrics. Her crisp, flat, sometimes edgy tone seemed out of sync with her words, which were relative boilerplate. “For Bill and me,” she told the delegates, “no experience has been more challenging than raising our child ….” Her speech was larded with references to Chelsea doing her homework, homilies about the Clinton’s family life and repeated use of the phrase “my husband wants to….” The speech may have seemed a retreat for the woman who had wanted to take charge of her husband’s domestic agenda, but politically, it was the right move.

Donna Shalala said that during Clinton’s second term, Hillary no longer called her with personnel suggestions. “I don’t see her as [having been as] much of a player the second term. She didn’t go to meetings … [but] we all briefed her, especially when we thought she could be helpful …. She [didn’t] want anybody to be able to write [another] story that she [was] a major policy player.” Hillary sent stand-ins such as Maggie Williams or, later, Melanne Verveer, Harold Ickes or the president’s deputy chief of staff, Evelyn Lieberman, to meetings.

Although Hillary had lowered her public profile, she remained an important political player in the White House after the 1996 election—ironically a bit more like Nancy Reagan. “She was quietly present throughout,” Ricchetti maintained. “The president respected her judgment so much that her impact was always huge. Her influence was felt especially on children’s issues, education, drugs, social issues and politics. She processes people differently than he does. She’s more demanding, harder on people, more suspicious, more definite than he is. Her commitment to ideology is more severe, his is very pragmatic. He likes to get things done and move the ball. But it’s a very strong partnership.”

Verveer said that, in her final years as first lady, Hillary became a better politician as well as a better first lady. “Hers is an instance of successful human development. She did not collapse, she changed. She came to grips with the fact that she had a platform she could use. She became a much more effective speaker, and I think she realized that at times it wasn’t useful to come across that strongly, just because of the way our society perceives women, that you can say the same thing but be less
threatening. She became much smarter about the process and how things work in Washington.”

BUT THEN CAME
another disaster, by far the most serious, and once again Hillary had to rescue her husband under the most painful and embarrassing circumstances imaginable. Monica Lewinsky changed everything, obsessing the entire nation for a year and almost destroying the Clinton presidency. Thanks to the Starr Report, anybody interested in the precise and sordid details of this sorry affair is already familiar with them, but some questions may never be answered. How, for example, could a president who was already the target of the world’s most famous sexual harassment suit engage in this guilt-ridden, joyless, breathtakingly risky business? The fact that Clinton understood the risk he was taking makes it all the more outrageous. When his attorney, Robert Bennett, asked him if he had an affair with the intern, the president answered, “Bob, do you think I’m fucking crazy? … I know the press is watching me every minute. The right has been dying for this kind of thing from day one. No, it didn’t happen.”

Of course, Clinton was not the first politician with an overactive libido and a reckless sense of his own invulnerability. But this was not about sexual satisfaction. Clinton tried desperately to deprive himself of that, as if by holding back he was making it all right. Nor was it emotional or, even more laughable, intellectual. Perhaps Hillary drew a small measure of comfort from the thinness of the “relationship.” Clinton knew Monica was not a woman who could keep anything to herself. When she flashed her thong underwear at him, why did he not push the buzzer and ask that she be immediately removed? What was he thinking? The answer could only be Clinton’s dangerous combination of compulsive reckless behavior and his breezy presumption that he could extricate himself from any situation, no matter how tangled, as he always had.

Clinton’s oldest friends from college, men like Tom Caplan and Tom Siebert, claimed ignorance of their friend’s philandering and rejected outright the idea that he could have harassed women. Caplan says it’s a
ridiculous charge to make against a man who always had women lining up. Like John Kennedy, Clinton compartmentalized. “His best friend is Hillary,” said Derek Shearer. “If you’re cheating on your best friend, who are you going to talk to? Bill had developed a whole way of functioning, where he wasn’t dealing with any of this—until presented with the evidence.”

In the Clinton White House, there was an unofficial role that female staffers and certain Cabinet members played: “We all protected the president from flirtatious girls,” said Shalala. “Anyone of us would walk right up to him and interrupt the conversation before Hillary had to. But I have seen Hillary body-block the president when a woman was coming on to him.” The president’s deputy chief of staff, Evelyn Lieberman, was the first lady’s designated eyes and ears in the West Wing.

The Democratic Convention, Los Angeles, August 14, 2000. The transition from Bill to Hillary begins.

Women aides had been aware of an intern named Monica Lewinsky—whom they had called “Elvira,” after the dark-haired, big-bosomed television character—since well before the scandal broke. “We kind of felt sorry for her,” one aide recalled, “she was always so overdressed, and so eager to please and kind of out of it. And always just hanging around.” Then Evelyn Lieberman moved her out, getting her a job at the Pentagon (where she fell in with Linda Tripp). Stephanopoulos remembered a “flurry” about Monica in late 1995, “when Evelyn was buzzing about it. But then nobody thought about it any more until the day of Clinton’s [January 17, 1998] deposition. I think he came home from that deposition and had to tell Hillary. They canceled their dinner with Erskine Bowles and his wife. You could tell he was in a panic that weekend because he called Betty Currie on Sunday in an anxiety-ridden state.”