Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “I understand the disconnect that you’re seeing,” I said. “And I promise that I’m deeply and sincerely committed to getting special-interest money out of our political system. Unfortunately, the system is currently set up in such a way that for me not to accept PAC contributions in this election cycle would be to simply give control to conservatives using secretive back channels to do things like roll back environmental regulations and strip Americans of social services. I’m a pragmatist, and I’ve always been committed to working for change from within the system. But make no mistake. I believe unlimited fundraising jeopardizes our democracy, and, as your president, I will aggressively fight it.”

  It was by this point after 8:00 P.M., and I thought the exchange would be the emotional inflection point of the event. And I suppose that, publicly, it was. But fifteen minutes later, on the rope line, I got the bombshell. A white-haired man in a Hawkeyes windbreaker had just declared, “I don’t like greedy bankers on Wall Street getting bailed out of their messes while the rest of us struggle to get by.”

  Before I could respond, a network reporter standing behind him, a man named Tiff whom I wasn’t crazy about—he reminded me of an overgrown prep school boy with palpably high regard for his own talents—called over the hubbub, “Senator Rodham, any comment on the rumors that Bill Clinton will announce tomorrow that he’s entering the presidential race?”

  What the hell are you talking about? I thought. I had heard these rumors over the years but not in recent weeks or days. I ignored both the question and the mic angled a foot above my forehead. I said to the white-haired man, “I don’t like it, either. And if you go to my website, you can read all about my economic plans to help the middle class.”

  The network reporter repeated, “Senator, any comment on the rumors that Bill Clinton will announce he’s running?” The reporter’s voice had taken on a tone of beleaguered amusement, as if, rather than his interrupting a conversation, he were the one being treated with disdain.

  I glanced over my left shoulder and made eye contact with Theresa. Neither of us said anything, and—we had been working together for eighteen years—I was almost certain that what she conveyed in this mutual silence was I haven’t heard it, either.

  The network reporter called, “Has Governor Clinton notified you of his decision?”

  “Banks should be held accountable just like people,” the white-haired man said. “They shouldn’t get special treatment.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’m going to address that, and I’ll also create a lot of new jobs, increase the minimum wage, and stop multimillionaires from paying lower taxes than everyone else.”

  The network reporter called, “Will the fact that you and Bill Clinton dated influence the race?”

  1997

  Starting when she was about ten, Maureen’s daughter, Meredith, would come stay with me for a night or two a few times a year—usually if Maureen and Steve were traveling (Meredith’s brothers were by then in college), but in some cases just because Meredith and I had fun together. That she was a kind of surrogate daughter seemed so obvious as to not need articulating between Maureen and me, but it was the daughter part—the child part—that was as precious to me as the surrogate part. Meredith was a respite from all the adults I interacted with, with their agendas and neuroses and cynicism. Meredith did have an agenda, of course, but it was to speak in an English accent, win when we played Connect Four, and convince me to give her ice cream multiple times a day.

  One evening in August 1997, when Senate was out of session, Meredith and I were in the den of my Chicago apartment, eating mint chocolate chip ice cream (hers was topped with gummy bears and mine wasn’t) and watching an interview with a very famous pop singer. The singer was about to turn forty and was divorced, with one child. Near the end of the interview, the host of the newsmagazine said, “As you approach this milestone birthday, you’re an international icon. You have unprecedented album sales, countless awards, and hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank. But tell me: Are you lonely?”

  The singer’s expression was coolly amused—if she thought the question was idiotic, I agreed—and she said, “Well, top-of-game alone. Sure.”

  “Top-of-game alone,” the host repeated. “What do you mean by that?”

  The singer said, “At times, I feel lonely because there’s only one of me. But the plus side is”—she was wearing bright red lipstick and a sleeveless, low-cut black blouse, and she leaned forward and smiled—“there’s only one of me. I was born with special abilities, special creativity, and if it was 1850, I’d be out of luck. But it’s 1997, and the sky’s the limit. I’ve been selling out stadiums for twenty years. I can do it, and I am doing it.”

  As I watched, the hairs on my arms stood up. I hesitate to say that I realized in this moment that I’d eventually run for president, because at some level it was as if I already knew, as if I’d always known. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say this was when I admitted what I knew to myself.

  Meredith was thirteen then. She gestured toward the screen and, with her mouth full of ice cream and gummy bears, she said, “Hillary, she’s like you.”

  Iowa

  April 26, 2015

  9:40 P.M.

  My traveling team, those of us making our way around the state in an armored van, numbered at eleven, including me; Theresa, who in addition to being my traveling chief of staff also held the title of campaign vice chair; my traveling press secretary, Clyde; my campaign trip director, Diwata; my body woman, Kenya; my hairstylist, Veronica; my makeup artist, Suzy; a young video director named Ellie; a not-so-young photographer named Morty; and Darryl and Phil, the two Secret Service agents who doubled as drivers. Of this group, the ones I summoned to meet in my suite in the Marriott in Davenport were Theresa, Clyde, and Diwata.

  I’d already changed into my pajamas, though I kept on a bra—there were certain realities of gravity and time to which I felt it was simply cruel to subject my twenty- and thirtysomething staffers—and also donned a fleece jacket.

  In the suite’s living room, I was in one armchair, Clyde was in another, Theresa sat on the love seat, and Diwata sat in the desk chair that she’d turned around to face the rest of us. “I think we just say we always knew Bill Clinton’s candidacy was a possibility,” I said.

  “I’ll start doing background with the networks and the wires,” Clyde said.

  “Sorry, but ‘We always knew it was a possibility’ will satisfy the travelers for about a minute,” Diwata said. “The travelers” was how we referred to the traveling press corps.

  “He’s out of touch with everyday Americans. That’s number one,” Theresa said. “And out of practice politically.”

  “A lot of people consider ‘out of practice politically’ a recommendation,” I said, and, at the same time, Clyde said, “He’ll for sure present himself as an outsider, and we can’t give credence to it.”

  “Won’t he mostly present himself as Daddy Warbucks?” Diwata said.

  Diwata was twenty-eight, Clyde was thirty-two, and Theresa was thirty-nine. This meant that they knew him more as a tech billionaire than as a politician; when his presidential campaign had imploded, they’d been between the ages of five and sixteen. I wondered if they’d ever watched the 60 Minutes interview. Certainly Theresa knew about my past with Bill—she even knew, as almost no one else did, about my visit to his penthouse in San Francisco in 2005—and I assumed Clyde and Diwata knew I’d dated him. I’d devoted a paragraph to it in my 2002 memoir-plus-campaign-treatise, Midwestern Values. I didn’t include this information to boast but rather to lay to rest that stupid virgin rumor. However, from time to time at appearances or in interviews, I was asked about having dated Bill, and the implication seemed to be that it was a bit of trivia amusing exactly in proportion to its unlikeliness. Why it was unlikely that I’d dated Bill related, presu
mably, to a perceived imbalance in our appearances, or to the fact that Bill now showed up in gossip columns consorting with mildly famous and highly attractive women in their thirties or forties—TV anchors, wellness gurus, B-list actresses. Once, during an onstage conversation at a women’s conference in San Diego in 2006, my bubbly interlocutor had exclaimed, “All I can say is you must have been a fox in law school!”

  In Davenport, I looked from Diwata to Clyde. “Have either of you met Bill?”

  They shook their heads.

  “Have you heard him speak?” I asked.

  “I’ve seen him interviewed,” Clyde said.

  “At his worst,” I said, “he’s long-winded and pedantic, and at his best, he’s dazzling. He can hold the attention of a room, but he also can connect one-on-one in a very emotional, intuitive way.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Diwata. “But, like, post-Obama? He’s just, you know—” She trailed off, and I raised my eyebrows. “Pale, male, and stale?” she said. Diwata herself was biracial, the daughter of a black father and a Filipina American mother.

  I laughed—at sixty-seven, I was just a year younger than Bill, and equally white—and I said, “Again, some consider that a recommendation.”

  Theresa deepened her voice and said, “I just find something about him very presidential. Hard to say what.”

  I deepened my voice, too—this was a routine all of us engaged in—and said, “I’d like to share a beer with him.”

  Clyde, who normally spoke in a borderline falsetto, said gruffly, “Maybe him and me could go huntin’.”

  I looked at Diwata and said, “Point taken, though.”

  In his usual voice, Clyde said, “Here’s where I think Clinton’s campaign is a nonstarter. It’s not just that he cheated when he was married, right? He’s been accused of full-on sexual harassment.” Clyde pulled out his phone, typed rapidly, and said, “Yeah, I thought so. In ’93, he settled a case brought by an Arkansas state employee for $850,000.”

  “Plus, like, orgy parties?” Diwata said.

  I could feel Theresa glance at me delicately, and I made eye contact with her. “Have our researchers focused on Bill at all?” I asked.

  “I’ll check,” she said, “but I don’t think much, so far.”

  By design, I didn’t even know the firm’s name to whom my campaign outsourced opposition research, or the acquisition of damning information about both my potential Democratic and Republican opponents. When my staff members relayed choice findings to reporters, it was through third parties, and when I learned choice findings, it was through my chief of research, a woman named Gigi Anderson, who lived in Washington.

  “Regarding the elephant in the room,” I said, “I trust you all know that I dated Bill in law school and afterward. We almost got married.” I hadn’t mentioned the marriage part in Midwestern Values, but none of them looked surprised.

  In a neutral tone, Clyde said, “Are you in contact with him now?”

  “Not often. Occasionally by email.” I glanced among them. “I really don’t want to spend the primary answering questions about my law school love life. Assuming he does announce tomorrow”—by this point, the rumor was all over the Internet—“let’s come up with two or three anodyne sentences and repeat them ad nauseam.”

  “You want them tonight or first thing in the morning?” Clyde asked.

  “The morning’s fine,” I said. I noticed that Theresa was rolling her lips inward and outward, which she did under stress. She was remarkably unflappable, but this gesture was her tell.

  “Just out of curiosity,” Diwata said, “did we always know this was a possibility?”

  “Everything is always a possibility,” I said. “From the minute he left politics, he’s floated the idea of getting back in. I guess at some point I decided he was crying wolf.”

  “What about this?” Clyde said. “You address the dating stuff during an interview on an entertainment talk show. Daytime, nighttime, whatever, but it’s chatty and conversational.”

  Theresa nodded. “That could work.”

  “It’s just really weird,” Diwata said.

  We all looked at her. “What’s really weird?” I asked.

  Though Diwata was playful by nature, her expression was somber. She said, “It’s weird you almost married Bill Clinton, because he seems so unworthy of you.”

  1997

  On the evening that Meredith and I watched the interview with the pop singer, after Meredith fell asleep in my guest room, I sat in my nest and made notes on a legal pad. I understood that I would need to convince the American people gradually, that it was virtually impossible I’d run for president once and get elected. At that point, Jerry Brown had been in the White House for a year and a half. Based on his lack of popularity—from the start, conservatives had succeeded in depicting him as antibusiness and eccentric—I saw two paths forward. Both involved running for the first time in 2004; that would be my practice. If Jerry managed to win a second term, a Republican would likely win in ’04, so I could run again in ’08 against that Republican incumbent—again as a kind of practice. And then in 2012, I could run with the realistic hope of becoming elected. At that point, I would be sixty-four years old, and, assuming my own senatorial reelections, I’d have held office for twenty years. If either Jerry had just one term or a Republican president got elected for just one term, then my goal in ’08 would be to join the Democratic ticket as the party’s vice presidential nominee and run for president in ’16. This scenario seemed preferable in terms of acclimating voters to the idea of a woman president. In that version, I’d be sixty-nine years old on Election Day 2016.

  That Monday, I called Deb Strom, the executive director of the Victoria Project, which was a political action committee named for Victoria Woodhull that worked to elect pro-choice Democratic women in national races. After an introduction facilitated by my bundler, Bitsy Sedgeman Corker, they had endorsed me in ’92 and helped significantly with my fundraising, and in the six years since, I’d campaigned for other female candidates endorsed by the Victoria Project and I’d also become friends with Deb.

  When I reached her by phone, I said, “I want something, and I think you want it, too, and I’m wondering if you’d like to work with me to try to make it happen. I want to become president.”

  “Oh, Hillary,” Deb said. “Be still my heart.” Then she added, “We’ve already discussed this internally, but we decided to wait until your reelection next year to approach you about it.”

  In a series of confidential meetings over the next several months, six of us met in the Victoria Project’s Dupont Circle office: me; Deb; her deputy; my chief of staff; Greg Rheinfrank, who still worked as a consultant in Chicago and whom I remained close to; and Bitsy Sedgeman Corker. To me, though not to anyone else, Greg referred to us as the Itsy Bitsy Titsy Committee. In most ways, the strategy we laid out aligned with the one I’d developed in my nest, though the collaborative plan contained more specific benchmarks: which Senate committees I ought to join or bills I should sponsor to demonstrate my presidential bona fides; how much money I’d need to raise by what dates. We determined that I’d write a book prior to 2004, that I’d court particular journalists and form alliances with certain members of Congress.

  One March evening, Greg and I left a meeting and walked north on Connecticut Avenue, planning to get a drink at a bar near my apartment in the Kalorama neighborhood. He said, “Don’t you wish you had a crystal ball so you could see if we pull it off and make you the FWP?”

  “What’s the FWP?” I said. Then I said, “Oh.”

  Iowa

  April 26, 2015

  11:04 P.M.

  And then, while I was lying in bed at the Marriott in Davenport, responding to emails on my iPad, my cellphone rang and the name Bill showed up on the caller ID. I knew ma
ny Bills, there was even a twenty-seven-year-old Bill on my speechwriting team, a man with whom I interacted frequently, but only one Bill was in my contacts without a surname. Though I didn’t speak often to this Bill, he retained pride of place.

  When I answered, his voice was warm. “Hillary, it’s Bill Clinton,” he said. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “How are you?”

  “I’m well.” It was the delivery of those two words—distant, almost impersonal, but pleasantly so—that made me know, before he said the rest. He was upbeat but not in a mood to engage; this was perfunctory, I was an obligation, and he was checking me off a list. He was calling to say that the rumors he was running against me were true.

  “Listen,” he said. “You know I have nothing but the highest respect for you.”

  I’ve learned over many decades that people are likeliest to declare their respect when their behavior suggests the opposite.

  “You’re a brilliant woman,” he continued, “and you’re a formidable candidate. But I trust you’ll agree that robust competition in the primary is all to the good. The engagement Democrats showed in ’08 was thrilling”—he was referring, of course, to Barack Obama’s victory over me to secure the party’s nomination—“and that’s why I’m throwing my hat in the ring.”

  I said nothing, and, laughing a little, he said, “You haven’t hung up on me, have you?”

  I wasn’t laughing at all as I asked, “How final is your decision?”

  “Really?” he said. “Not even congratulations?”

  “When are you announcing?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Noon PST.”

  Fury rose up in me—fury at the lateness of this ostensible courtesy call, at his blithe tone, at the enormous personal fortune that allowed him to make such a decision without needing to show his hand ahead of time by forming an exploratory committee for fundraising. And, if I was being honest, fury at myself for not trying harder or earlier to preempt this eventuality.