The Great Depression and the world wars had convinced Americans long ago that no president could do the job without the help of special personal advisers, and as prominent men like Colonel House, Harry Hopkins, Clark Clifford and Sherman Adams rotated in and out of the role, the public came to welcome, and even to expect, their contributions.
The next major iteration of the “right-hand man” occurred some years later, when Bill and Hillary Clinton entered the White House. Many First Ladies have played an important role in presidents’ decision-making—Edith Wilson and Eleanor Roosevelt spring immediately to mind—but none was as conspicuously involved as Hillary Clinton. The public expects the president’s spouse to be a significant force in his or her life, and few Americans were shocked to hear how influential Abigail Adams, Lady Bird Johnson and Rosalynn Carter were. But those were largely discreet relationships, while the Bill and Hillary partnership was out in the open for all to see.
Bill and Hillary entered the White House a perfectly balanced political partnership, tested by years of close and committed collaboration—a genuine team. When Bill became president, he assigned Hillary responsibility for one of his signature policies—the drafting of the ill-fated comprehensive health care reform bill. Few decisions made a larger impact on the evolution of the role of the president’s “right-hand man.” After Hillary, it was acceptable for the role to be held by a woman. Had it not been for her trailblazing service, there may have been no Condoleezza Rice, no Valerie Jarrett and no Ivanka Trump.
President Clinton felt confident enough in Hillary’s political judgment and abilities to make her the administration’s leading voice on health-care reform. His decision would have consequences far beyond policymaking—it would impact how Americans viewed the role of the First Lady, permanently change the political partnership Bill and Hillary had built together and seriously threaten their marriage.
THE FIRST LADY
Dick Morris, a former key staffer to the Clintons, described their private personalities to biographer Carl Bernstein: Hillary, though she seemed cold, was actually the warm and caring one; Bill, who seemed more congenial, lacked authenticity and often merely reflected other people’s emotions back to them. (Photo by Robert McNeely, White House Photographer; Carl Bernstein, The Making of Hillary Clinton: The White House Years [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017])
If I get elected president, it will be an unprecedented partnership, far more than Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor. They were two great people, but on different tracks. If I get elected, we’ll do things together like we always have.1
—President Bill Clinton
Some Americans are uncomfortable with the idea of their president delegating policymaking authority to his wife. They do not mind the First Lady overseeing “family-oriented” activities such as the Easter Egg Roll or urging American boys and girls to “just say no” to drugs, but they chafe at the idea of the First Lady leading anything more consequential. To those Americans, Hillary Clinton’s emergence on the political scene must have been a nightmare.
During the 1992 presidential campaign, the Clintons liked to portray themselves as a two-for-one deal. If their performance in the first year in the White House is to be judged honestly, the concerns that some Americans had about their partnership may have been justified. Their misadventures with Congress while trying to create a health-care reform bill rattled them both and reversed—for a generation—the general public support for reforming the country’s flawed medical system. Americans would discover years later that many of the difficulties the Clintons experienced in their efforts to shepherd the bill could be traced back to dysfunction in their marriage and the harmful power-sharing dynamic they had created together.
After their meteoric rise from the “one-room shack” of a state house in Little Rock, Arkansas, for a brief time Bill and Hillary reigned in Washington as the quintessential power couple. Of all the First Ladies, Hillary was the first to be openly and widely regarded as the president’s right hand. Other presidential wives may have performed this function in private, but Hillary did so in the full light of day. She suffered many of the same criticisms that her predecessors, such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Rosalynn Carter, endured, but President Clinton paid a price for giving his wife such a prominent role in his administration. The price was both political and personal.
After the Clintons failed to enact health-care reform, Bill no longer trusted Hillary’s advice quite as completely.2 Hillary lost confidence in herself and withdrew into a prolonged depression. Bill even suffered his own short bout with depression. Hillary found solace in writing the book It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us (1996); perhaps Bill’s notorious affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky served a similar purpose for him. The breakdown of their partership was as educational for the president as it was for the First Lady. It highlighted their strengths and weaknesses as a team and revealed how unprepared they both had been for the political realities of Washington’s particular brand of cutthroat politics.
Both flawed individuals, the Clintons were each raised in dysfunctional homes and bore the scars of their troubled upbringing into the White House. It is in how they chose to deal with the consequences of their difficult childhoods that one can see the causes that would ultimately lead to their unsuccessful efforts as a presidential partnership.
Not all “right-hand man” relationships are perfect, and the bond of marriage is no harbinger of success, but the Clintons’ partnership shows the dangers that can arise when the president’s most trusted adviser and policy assistant is his or her spouse. Before she stumbled, Hillary stretched the boundaries of the office of the First Lady farther than anyone in history. She changed forever what it means to be a presidential consort and, in doing so, added yet another chapter to what it means to be the president’s right hand.
I
A History of Violence
Noted author and social scientist Harold Dwight Lasswell believed that people who pursue political power are often pursued themselves by deep-seated insecurities.3 If his theory is correct, the burdens of a dysfunctional personality may help explain why individuals like Bill and Hillary decide to seek lives in politics. Lasswell’s theory might also help explain the Clintons’ dysfunction as a couple, their weakness as political partners and even their failure to reform the nation’s health-care system.4 Faced with the conundrum that was the Clintons, Lasswell might look to the trauma they each endured as children to explain their political and personal struggles as adults.
Although it was Bill Clinton who put Hillary on a path to politics, some argue that Bill would never have become president had he not been married to Hillary. A study of his life suggests there is some truth to this assertion. Friends of the Clintons point to the personality traits they shared as clear predictors of their success as political partners. Their shared values and ambitions were just the starting point. Even their individual goals for the future were complementary. “With Bill, you felt he just wanted to be president. Whereas Hillary had this religious zeal.”5 At her husband’s side, Hillary added a bit of altruistic gravitas to his naked political ambition and, in the eyes of some, helped soften and legitimize his drive for success. They were suited to each other in more ways as well.
Hillary had more of a killer political instinct than Bill. He tended to avoid conflict, whereas Hillary was drawn to it. Bill preferred discussion and compromise, whereas Hillary’s typical response was to square up and fight. Political strategist Dick Morris knew their White House dynamic well: “She has a quality of ruthlessness, a quality of aggressiveness and strength about her that he doesn’t have. A killer instinct. Her genre of advocacy is always straight ahead—fight, battle, take the fight to the other side. There’s no subtlety, there’s none of the nuance that he has.”6
Hillary had a natural pessimism that Bill lacked. She became his early warning system about whom not to trust. As a former campaign manager of Bill’s explained their relations
hip: “Hillary has much more ability than he does to see who’s with you, who’s against you and to make sure they don’t take advantage of you. He’s not expecting to be jumped, but she always is. So she’s on the defensive.”7
To be successful, Bill needed someone with Hillary’s qualities and skills. His strengths were her strengths—but, more importantly, in the areas in which he was weak, she was strong. The had both grown up in tumultuous homes, but while Bill’s negative childhood experiences had softened him, Hillary’s made her tough.
Hillary Diane Rodham was born on October 26, 1947, in the city of Chicago, though she grew up in the middle-class suburb of Park Ridge. Her father, Hugh Rodham, proudly paid cash for their first home after saving for years while living in a cramped Chicago walkup. According to Clinton biographer Carl Bernstein, Hugh was a classic misanthrope: moody, bitter, often demeaning and always judgmental.8
He also had a domineering streak. Even with friends, Hugh behaved like a drill sergeant. In fact, during World War II, his job was to oversee the physical fitness of US Navy recruits. In Park Ridge, he had a reputation as something of a loner. He would sit at home by himself most evenings, in front of the television, as life went on around him.
He had been brought up in a family of troubled souls. Once, he walked in on his younger brother who was trying to hang himself in the attic and saved his life just in the nick of time, by cutting him down. His other brother Willard never married and never left home. When their mother died, Willard helped care for their father until he passed. Willard himself died soon after—of loneliness, some family members thought.9
Bernstein thought the signs of depression that Hugh and his siblings showed may have been passed on to his children. Bernstein poetically described Hugh’s sons as “walking adulthood in a fog of melancholia.”10 Biographer Roger Morris believed the Rodham children suffered borderline abusive behavior from Hugh, of a severity that would have crushed other children.11 Echoing that sentiment, Bernstein describes how once, when the cap was left off of the family toothpaste, Hugh angrily threw it out into the snow and forced the person responsible for the offense out into the cold in search of it.12
Hugh withheld affection from his children and only reluctantly praised their successes. Once, when Hillary came home from school with all As and a single B, instead of lauding her achievement, he criticized her for having not done better. Her brother, a high school quarterback, once threw nine out of ten completions during a single game—a stellar achievement, in any other household. But after the game, Hugh needled his son about not completing that tenth pass. Hugh seemed to expect nothing less than perfection from his children. When Hillary joined the softball team, he took her to a ballpark and stood by unsympathetically, bullying her as she swung at pitch after pitch, trying to learn to hit a curveball.
The Hillary Clinton who rose to be one of the most admired Americans in recent history was tempered like fine steel by her father’s constant negativity. If her critics regard her as mean-spirited or bitter, she may have her father to blame. But if people wonder where she got her grace and gritty determination, they have to look to her mother.
Dorothy Rodham’s start in life was almost Dickensian for the extent of her suffering. Her parents, barely children themselves when she was conceived, divorced when she was eight. Dorothy was sent to live with her grandparents, who treated her like a servant. She once recalled spending an entire year confined to her room whenever she was not doing chores.13 When she was fourteen, her grandparents hired her out as a live-in nanny to a nearby family. In return for caring for their young child, she was permitted to attend school, where she finally was allowed to flourish. Dorothy was an engaged and dedicated student. One of her lifelong dreams was to attend college—a goal she would not realize until well into adulthood.
After graduating from high school, Dorothy was invited by her mother (who had remarried) to live with her and her new husband. She hoped her well-to-do stepfather would send her to college, but he never did. Instead, Dorothy was treated no differently than she was when she lived with her grandparents. She left home as soon as she could, at eighteen, and found an office job in the city. Soon afterward, she met Hugh, who was twenty-six and in the navy. He was attracted to her beauty, she to his gruff exterior.
They married in 1942. In 1945, after Hugh was discharged from the service, they moved to the small apartment in Chicago where Hillary was born. By 1950, Hugh had saved up enough money to move the family to an impressive new home in the Chicago suburbs. Despite the difficulties of living with Hugh, Dorothy was determined to make the marriage work, for the sake of her children. Given her selfless commitment to her family, it may be no surprise that it would be Dorothy whose voice resonated the most with Hillary when she was considering divorcing Bill, and it was Dorothy who pressed her to stay in the marriage.14 Some might say it was inevitable that Hillary would encounter difficulties in her marriage given that she had such a poor example to guide her. Dorothy did not have the luxury of family counseling to ease her pain, so Hillary had to watch for years as her mother suffered emotional and verbal bullying from Hugh in silence.15
Dorothy’s love of learning became Hillary’s. After a hyperactive high school career, in which she was a member of the student council, played three sports, wrote for the newspaper and was a high-achieving Girl Scout, Hillary went on to study at Wellesley College. By the time she reached Yale Law in 1969, she was already a national figure. She walked onto the campus known by many of the women there as a rising young feminist after delivering a famous speech at her Wellesley graduation for which she was profiled in Life magazine16 as one of the most notable graduates in the country that year. She was pretty, poised, supremely confident and a genuine leader. It is no wonder that when Bill Clinton met her in 1970, he was a little intimidated.
Some of Hillary’s friends wondered what she saw in Bill; he was not sophisticated in the way they thought she deserved. But there was an instant attraction—he was whip-smart and boyishly charming. His friend Robert Reich liked to make fun of Bill’s aw-shucks good ol’ boy qualities and the way he always seemed to be telling stories about Arkansas. Yet it was precisely Bill’s sense of place that attracted Hillary to him. Other people she met at Yale carried themselves as if they wanted to disown their humble beginnings, but Bill was proud of his roots. Hillary was fascinated by his contradictions—he was part hillbilly, part Rhodes Scholar. Every time they met, she discovered something new.
Bill Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe in Hope, Arkansas, in 1946. (Named for his birth father, William Blythe, he took his stepfather’s surname, Clinton, as a teenager.)
His mother, Virginia, according to some accounts, was a hazardously impulsive young woman17 whose biggest cares tended to be clothes, makeup and attracting the attentions of the neighborhood boys. She was bubbly, charming and outgoing, with dark hair, an open smile and a spicy wit. She liked showy, cocksure men, and they liked her.
When she met William Blythe for the first time, she was perhaps too overwhelmed by his good looks to notice that he was concealing a secret. Later she would learn that not only had Blythe been married three times, but he was still married to his third wife. It was wartime, and perhaps the sight of Blythe in a uniform clouded Virginia’s judgment.
They shared a few passionate months together before his unit was shipped overseas. When he returned for good, he and the pregnant Virginia decided to make a fresh start in a new town. The twenty-nine-year-old Blythe was driving to Arkansas from Chicago to collect his bride when he lost control of his car and crashed. Weak and disoriented, he crawled from the wreckage into the shallow pool of a nearby ditch and drowned.
Pregnant and widowed at twenty-three, Virginia leaned heavily on her mother, Edith, a demanding, opinionated and temperamental woman who would jealously care for young Bill as if he were her own. The infant became a source of tension between mother and daughter, as each thought she knew best how to raise the child. Edith was the type
of woman who would have had no problem sharing her doubts about Virginia’s skills as a mother. Virginia realized that if she wanted total control over the rearing of young Bill, she would need to find a job and a husband. So, leaving Bill behind temporarily with Edith, Virginia left Arkansas for New Orleans, where she studied nursing. She was working as an anesthesiologist in a nearby hospital in 1948 when she was introduced to a car salesman from Hope Springs named Roger Clinton.
Again, letting her passions cloud her judgment, she overlooked Roger’s drinking problem and plucked up her young son from the safe, nurturing home his grandmother had created for him and set him down in the tumult that would come to characterize his youth. Roger Clinton would prove to be a selfish, abusive alcoholic and a destructive risk-taker with a trail of unclaimed children and discarded wives. Young Bill came to call Roger “Daddy,” but their relationship was always strained by Roger’s violent behavior. During one particularly heated argument between Virginia and Roger, when Virginia threatened to leave, Roger took out a handgun and fired it above her head.18
Bill Clinton’s biographers have pointed to his experiences in that household as what fueled his drive into the hero-worshipping world of politics. Biographer David Maraniss thought Bill fit into a category of children of alcoholics that has come to be regarded as the “family hero.” Such children go out into the world to achieve success on behalf of the family in an effort to preserve the family’s honor.19 To say that Clinton was an overachieving student would be a gross understatement.
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