The sweets quickly faded from memory as Hillary Clinton’s influence in the White House seemed to grow. By 1994, Hillary was working on a healthcare bill with a private committee. Detractors accused her of wresting and then squandering power that didn’t belong to her. What she presented to Congress was regarded as a flawed rookie effort. Her proposal was never put to a vote, and when it was deemed a flagrant failure, she was wholly blamed. Accusations included that she had been too know-it-all to incorporate doctors into her plan, that she wasn’t qualified to craft high-level policy, and that she wasn’t a strong enough coalition builder. The main charge, though few said it outright, was that people just didn’t like or trust her. In 1995, Hillary Clinton set tempers to boil when she called out the sexism that had been working against her. “If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle,” she joked.
Healthcare reform was a meaty policy task that Bill Clinton had run on, and by leading the charge, “ultrafeminist” Hillary was accused of emasculating her “wimpy” husband. Her determination to rewrite law, to do the regular work of politicians, encouraged critics to joke that she was a man. A 1995 Spy magazine cover brought this notion to life. It featured a photo of Clinton with her skirt blown up to reveal men’s underwear concealing a bulging penis. The cover line read: “Hillary’s Big Secret.” The masculine Hillary was “welcoming men to their role as the second sex,” quipped the Weekly Standard.
POWER BEHIND THE THRONE
As First Lady, Hillary Clinton represented the “deeply American fear of the unaccountable power behind the throne,” according to Troy, who has written about first families. “There are invisible trip wires around the president that First Ladies trigger,” he told me, and while some First Ladies scoot around them, Hillary Clinton stomped them hard. She made headlines for appearing with her husband’s trusted advisers, attending meetings with top brass, and voicing opinions on policy and government matters.
Troy believes that the more visible a First Lady is, the more likely she is to become a potential target. “There is an understood First Ladies’ version of the Hippocratic oath: ‘Do no harm.’ They can have greater potential to do harm than good,” he said. Hillary Clinton, who was incredibly visible during the campaign and transition into the White House, played into public discomfort with a First Lady’s duty. Troy added that while reporters tend to long for modern, careerist First Ladies like Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, whose stars both rose long before their husbands’, the country still much prefers the traditionalist model embodied by Melania Trump and Laura Bush. More cookies and readings, and fewer opinions and policy roles.
After Bill’s reelection, Hillary morphed from a maniacal puppeteer into First Lady cliché. Hillary haters bathed in schadenfreude, as their target retreated to planning teas and the Easter egg roll. Gone, albeit temporarily, were the accusations that she was a “hall monitor” whose “offputting” “drive and earnestness” polarized the populace. She published Dear Socks, Dear Buddy, a collection of children’s letters to the first dog and cat. She penned a weekly syndicated newspaper column on topics like mammograms, postpartum hospital stays, Big Bird, and trimming the White House Christmas tree, an eighteen-foot Fraser fir. One paper described the column as “nattering cheerily,” having “sublimated her into a nightmarish amalgam of Lady Bountiful, Florence Nightingale and Betty Crocker.”
Toward the end of the Clinton administration, Hillary managed to circle back to policy, helping to pass a federally funded children’s health insurance program and a law to facilitate adoptions from the foster system. These were tremendous gains, but they were perceived as soft and unthreatening woman’s work, which is likely why she was able to achieve them. Ruth Mandel, an expert on women’s political history, put Hillary’s dilemma this way: “When it comes to women, people are not ready to take more than a teaspoonful of change at a time.”
MISTRESS VS. WIFE
When the Lewinsky scandal broke in January 1998, policy took a back seat once more. Pitting Monica against Hillary seemed a natural story line to the media, yet another catfight cage match that came to prominence in 90s news coverage. The prospect of a Mistress vs. Wife smackdown in the Oval Office was delectable. The media wondered who had the most sexual value in the eyes of the same man. In Barbara Walters’s interview with Lewinsky, she asked several questions about Hillary Clinton that perpetuated the public desire for a catfight, including if Lewinsky felt in competition with Clinton; whether the president acknowledged Lewinsky when Hillary was around; and, egging her on, “Did you ever think about what Hillary Clinton would be feeling or might feel if she knew? Did you think about Hillary Clinton?” T-shirts that read “Lewinsky: I Get the Job Done When Hillary Can’t” furthered Walters’s suggestion that the two women were competing. Many, including Walters, seemed to shame the mistress and side with the wronged wife.
Plenty of people wanted to blame the wife, too. After all the perceived softening—a book of letters to pets, healthcare for families, homes for foster kids—criticism reemerged that Hillary Clinton had been deceiving Americans all along and was at her core too power-hungry to be a good wife. Clearly, she couldn’t satisfy her own husband and was at fault for his adultery. His affair was payback for her education and ambition, and for being an ice queen.
Women in particular were quick to assume she stayed in her marriage for sinister reasons. She needed a man—this man—to further her career, they alleged. The affair proved she was a fraud. She was “unmasked as a counterfeit feminist after she let her man step all over her,” wrote Times columnist Maureen Dowd. Her marriage was a farce, according to a Vanity Fair poll that found only 22 percent of people believed the Clintons had a “real marriage,” while more than half called it “a professional arrangement.” In Salon, journalist Jake Tapper termed Hillary Clinton “a shrew whose capacity for denial is equalized only by the pain she’s suffered as a result of the fine print in her Faustian marriage contract.” Bill Clinton allegedly rejected a drafted speech featuring an apology to Lewinsky and her family for their suffering in the spotlight, deferring to Hillary’s “brass-knuckle guidance” and dismissing Lewinsky as “inappropriate” instead.
As the Clintons wrapped up their eight-year stint in the White House and speculation grew that Hillary might run for political office, her ambition continued to be rebuked. It turned out that liberal, successful professional women, just the type who should cheer Clinton and form her base, actually hated her, according to a report in the New York Observer titled “Meet the Smart New York Women Who Can’t Stand Hillary Clinton.” These women were developing a “grudge against Mrs. Clinton as a representative of their sex,” the pink paper disclosed, because she was using a man to access the halls of power. These women just “couldn’t relate to her on a personal level.” Writer Fran Lebowitz called her “a very poor role model for girls” and “regressive” for marrying the president rather than becoming the president herself. She accused Hillary of pandering to the powerful and lacking ideas. Memories of her walking arm in arm with her husband to his impeachment were still fresh. Tammy Wynette, indeed.
“During my time in Washington, I heard Hillary Clinton called many things,” wrote newspaperman Doug Thompson reflecting on the 90s in the online news site Capitol Hill Blue. “‘Bitch’ is one of the more polite terms.”
JANET RENO’S DANCE PARTY
Will Ferrell pitched the skit “Janet Reno’s Dance Party” in his second season on the Saturday Night Live cast. Female cast members believed that Ferrell had “a very female style of comedy,” Yael Kohen, author of We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy, told me, “meaning it was very character-based rather than joke-based.” Eager to prove his comedy chops, he was after a “broad and physical role,” and thought it would be funny to play a “large woman manhandling people,” Ferrell told the Washington Post’s Liza Mundy in 1998.
Colleagues loved the idea of a dance party featuring a deep-voiced, awkward, tone-deaf
, out-of-touch, purportedly lesbian attorney general who danced to the same song ad nauseam to gyrate away her mistakes. “Dance party makes Waco go away,” Reno bellows in one scene, referencing the US government’s attack on a religious cult’s compound in Texas that left dozens dead. Ferrell described the Reno character he created as a “tough woman who lives in this make-believe world.”
SNL in the 90s saw lots of men playing women, but few women playing men. “The sexism is in the fact that you have fewer roles for women if the men are also playing the female roles, and then the women are left playing girlfriends, mothers, or nuns—the traditional roles,” Kohen said. “You have a limited amount of women you can play, and you don’t get to play Janet Reno on top of it.” Tina Fey calls out the SNL problem of casting dudes in drag in her memoir, Bossypants. “I remember thinking that was kind of bullshit,” she wrote of an incident in which Cheri Oteri was overlooked for a part in favor of Chris Kattan in a dress. “I think Cheri would have been funnier.”
In the “Janet Reno’s Dance Party” sketches, Ferrell achieved his recurring role. Eight dance parties aired in total from 1997 to 2000, helping launch him to stardom. Ferrell’s Reno outfit resembles a Halloween costume. His wig approximates her short, flat hairstyle. He dons her face-filling glasses and trademark azure suit. Ferrell towers above the other dancers, like Reno did over her fellow cabinet members. He dances like a jerky carnival ride, throwing gawky elbows and knees.
Ferrell’s Reno speaks in a voice that is evil-cyborg deep, dances awkwardly with teenagers, and barks orders at them, like “No mosh pit!” and “Shut UP! Shut it!” They are unfazed because Reno doesn’t seem to have any real authority in these skits, only poutiness and fantasies. Describing his dramatic strategy for the character, Ferrell said, “I just sound the way she looks.” Comedy about real people usually involves caricature—Alec Baldwin exaggerates Donald Trump’s vulgar language impersonating him on Saturday Night Live; Kate McKinnon magnified Hillary Clinton’s unbridled ambition. But the very fact that Reno is played by Ferrell calls her womanhood into question before the character moves or opens her mouth.
WACO
Ferrell’s portrayal of Reno didn’t materialize out of vapor. From the moment she arrived in Washington in 1993, she was a curiosity to be poked and gawked at. Reno was not the top choice for the cabinet post she would be the first woman to fill. She was the third, nominated only after the prior two succumbed to Nanny gate.
Reno was the consummate outsider. She built her career as a county prosecutor in Florida, far away in both distance and culture from the nation’s capital. She had managed to win elections for state attorney as a straight-shooting liberal Democrat in heavily conservative Republican Dade County, which impressed politicians across the country.
Jamie Gorelick, Reno’s deputy attorney general, told me that Reno “led with her values, which meant that the people in the Department of Justice and outside it followed her just on the strength of her moral stance.” She was called the most qualified of the president’s cabinet officials and received a standing ovation at her swearing-in ceremony. Reno’s approach to law enforcement was as foreign to Washington as tropical birds. A major city police chief with more than thirty years in the force called her “the most refreshing law-enforcement leader I’ve met in my whole career.”
This patina of intriguing newcomer and America-defending cop quickly wore off. Reno had barely been sworn in a month when, in April of 1993, she ordered a tear gas attack to end the siege on cult leader David Koresh’s compound in Waco, Texas. The leader of the Branch Davidian cult was said to be abusing and threatening the lives of women and children there. The strike accidentally started a fire that killed seventy-six people. Later, in a deposition, Reno called the Waco standoff—which began with a weapons raid that claimed the lives of four federal agents—“the most urgent issue I faced when I took office.”
Forthrightly, Reno owned up to approving the plan, took responsibility for the death toll, and apologized sincerely to the American people. A bold admission of guilt and a heartfelt apology from a new government official stunned a populace accustomed to the evasion of wrongdoing that politicians perfect. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton was nowhere to be found, which gave the impression that he had leapt aside to watch Reno take the fall.
Reno called the blitz on Waco the worst day of her life. While onlookers commended her apology, their reverence didn’t last, especially as more information about her decision was released. Her reputation morphed from earnest leader to murderous renegade. The label stuck—protesters at a documentary film about the events fifteen years later wore “Butcher Reno!” T-shirts.
SWAMP THING
Florida being Florida, Reno arrived in Washington with a colorful backstory. Having grown up in the Everglades, she was rumored to be intimate with reptiles, “rassling” alligators with her mama, and hiking through backwoods swamps. She strode into Washington shrouded in this mythology. The political establishment could tell that her look was gossip-worthy. To start, she was very tall—six foot one, to be exact, which elevated her over the heads of many men. She and the president look about the same height and wear similar haircuts at her swearing-in ceremony in March of 1993.
While women politicians usually stand out in the cacophony of dark suits by wearing bright colors, jewelry, makeup, and long hair, Reno did the opposite. Her wardrobe was filled with the considered pastels women lawyers wore in Florida. By avoiding jewelry and makeup, and wearing short hair and a staid palette, she actually drew more attention, “like a pileated woodpecker,” according to the Washington Post article “Why Janet Reno Fascinates, Confounds and Even Terrifies America.” The New Yorker scoffed at Reno’s fashion sense with its “Selections from the Janet Reno Collection” cartoon published in October of 1993. It depicts the attorney general in a series of panels, wearing cheap fabrics, an ugly mustard jacket, and a “mock-croc” belt. In one image, Reno sports a “scoop-front bra and bike short” with a “high-cut Danskin thong brief,” posing with an exposed tummy like a thicker Jane Fonda. The joke was that Reno couldn’t dress herself to save her life.
U.S. News & World Report published an illustration of Reno lassoing a gator. Another drawing represented her as a gun-toting Rambo. These cartoons exploited Reno’s unfamiliar behavior and lifestyle. She didn’t have children or a partner. She was uninterested in parties and socializing, preferring to kayak or hike the Billy Goat Trail in nearby Maryland. “She was not terribly comfortable in the ways of Washington,” Gorelick told me. “She acclimated to it, but it wasn’t her natural environment.”
Since Reno lacked the feminine qualities and life choices typical for women, run-of-the-mill sexism wouldn’t do. Time magazine speculated that Reno got the job in the first place because she had no husband, kids, or nanny, and thus “no Zoë Baird problem.” Instead, because she was awkward and tall, and had no discernible romantic life, she was cast as a man in women’s clothes. She had “a self-conscious hunch to her shoulders” and “awkwardly dangling arms,” according to a New York Times Magazine profile. Because she came off as tough after Waco, and because she openly challenged her boss, the president—like when she publicly pressed him to appoint her to a second term when it seemed clear that he would not—critics attacked her femininity.
For years, the late-night television fraternity spun jokes that Reno was a man. When she appointed an independent counsel to investigate Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign finances—a ballsy move that endangered her boss—Jay Leno scoffed that it was her “toughest decision since boxers or briefs.” Bill Maher compared her to former FBI head and notorious cross-dresser J. Edgar Hoover, whose dresses “fit her perfectly.” David Letterman said he’d pose as Reno, but to do so he needed more shoulder pads. Spy magazine, known for sharp satire and comically doctored photos depicting powerful women as men, plopped Reno’s head atop a gun-toting, Rambo-like body and titled the image “Mother Justice.” To be sure, politicians of both genders are routinel
y mocked for their looks, but it wasn’t just comedians and satirical publications that portrayed Reno as unfeminine. One magazine profile of Reno bore a section titled “Swamp Thing.”
AUNT JANNY
The flip side of Janet Reno the man was Janet Reno the sissy. Her provincial nature, which at first made her interesting and unlike Washington’s political cannibals, soon fed the theory that she was unqualified for her job. Rather than talk forcefully, the nation’s top cop mumbled. Her voice was flecked with “slow Florida twang,” rendering the second weekday “Tewsdee” and poetry “poitree,” projecting the image of slow and stupid often assumed in the Southern drawl.
Reno’s dedication to children and families—the product of years spent in law enforcement watching neglected and impoverished youth grow up to become criminals—was seen as weak. The nation’s head law enforcer was likened to a social worker. While Clinton’s policies were filling jails, Reno advocated against mandatory minimums for drug offenses and championed the drug courts that she had successfully pioneered in Florida to reroute nonviolent offenders. It was a prescient policy, but she was painted as a crime apologist. Some suggested she was “more suited to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services,” a demotion in power and influence.
Reno’s simultaneous reputations for mannishness and weakness prompted speculation about her sexuality, which was rare for a United States attorney general, but not for a woman in power. Some believed her look to be “a sexual signal” that she was a lesbian. Jay Leno insinuated this when he took the liberty of superimposing her head atop Xena the Warrior Princess, the badass in armor with a gay following. Time quoted a friend of Reno’s who said she “would love to have a relationship with a man and have children,” but that it was tough to find someone “not threatened by a successful woman.”
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