Aided by an almost photographic memory, his mother’s cheekiness, charm and good looks, he was popular with the ladies and held so many academic and extracurricular honors that his high school principal barred him from running for class president so that other students would stand a chance. His gifts carried him forward on a wave of achievement, taking him first to Georgetown, then to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and then on to Yale Law School, where in 1970 he was stopped in his tracks by the makeup-less, bespectacled young Hillary in clunky suede boots, tight jeans and an oversized sweater.
Hillary was unlike any woman Bill had ever dated. He preferred the bubbly, big-haired type like his mother—ladies who got along to get along. Few people would describe the young Hillary as such a lady, but Bill was drawn to her nonetheless. He liked her directness and appreciated her brutal honesty. His mother did her best to deflect Bill away from the “homely, opinionated” young Hillary, but Bill would have none of it. He made it clear to his mother that if he married anyone, it would be Hillary.20
In the beginning, neither Bill nor Hillary was sure they would be a lasting couple. They each appreciated the other’s gifts and recognized that their combined strengths might make for a formidable partnership, but Bill worried that, considering all that she could achieve on her own, small-town life in Arkansas might not be enough for Hillary. He knew that regardless of whether she joined him, he would be returning to Arkansas to begin a career in politics. He wanted her to come along but would have understood if she refused.
For Hillary, choosing to follow Bill would come with significant costs. She loved him, and she was convinced that he had the makings of a leader, but the realist in her knew that the path he had chosen might not work out. If she married Bill, she would have to stay with him whether or not he was successful. Had he been from somewhere rich in opportunities, such as New York City, the prospect might have seemed less risky. But by linking herself to a son of far-flung Arkansas, she was potentially and perhaps irrevocably diminishing her chances of achieving success in her own right.
The 1970s were a tough time to be a career-minded American woman, but even women like Hillary, whose academic and professional achievements opened up opportunities unavailable to most, had a lot to lose if they made the wrong choice. Although more women than ever were entering into important positions in government, law and the corporate world, these opportunities were clustered in heavily populated areas where people had progressive attitudes. The South was a different story.
Hillary also had doubts about whether Bill would prove faithful. He had grown up in a household where infidelity was not uncommon. His mother and stepfather had each accused the other of stepping out on their marriage. Even as she aged, Virginia never let go of her party-girl attitude, and there was more than one man with whom Roger accused her of being overly friendly. Some, perhaps even Hillary, believed that growing up in such an environment was one of the reasons that Bill had a reputation as a bit of a womanizer. Hillary herself was not totally convinced his behavior would change once he was married.
For all these reasons, paralyzed with doubt, for two years Hillary strung Bill along while she weighed her options. To give herself time to think, she deferred graduation from Yale Law for a year so that she and Bill could spend more time together. She filled her time volunteering on George McGovern’s presidential campaign and studying childhood development. Together Bill and Hillary graduated in 1973, and, during a trip to London that spring, Bill popped the question. But Hillary was still unsure. Since she could not make up her mind, Bill, who was planning to take the Arkansas bar exam, suggested that they take the exam together—just in case. She took the DC bar exam as well—just in case.
Bill knew that Arkansas would be a challenging place for someone with Hillary’s personality. She could be a bit aggressive—a quality that was seen as unladylike in the Ozarks. He seemed to also worry about his ability to be faithful to her, given his wandering eye. “For the longest time, I’d thought I’d never get married,”21 he once confessed. He liked his freedom, but he consoled himself with the belief that a marriage to Hillary “might not ever be perfect, but would certainly never be boring.”22
Bill’s family made no secret of their disappointment in his choice of Hillary. They were used to seeing Bill with beauty-queen types, and the Hillary Rodham of the early 1970s looked like a throwback to the 1960s. One of her oldest friends, Sara Ehrman, described the first time they met.
“She had brown hair, brown glasses, brown top, brown skirt, brown shoes, brown visage, no makeup.”23 She had long, frizzy hair and she wore thick, heavy glasses that were her only sartorial flourish. She changed frames the way some women might change shoes. On warm days, when she preferred a T-shirt and sandals and hip-hugging blue jeans that showed off her girlish figure, it was easy to see why Bill was such a persistent suitor. But she was not just pretty; she was confident. When the petite young Hillary entered a room, she did so with an attitude bordering on cockiness. She walked straight up to a person and looked them dead in the face. Women did not do that in the 1970s.
Hillary’s decision to finally marry Bill may have had more to do with the fact that she had failed the DC Bar than how she felt about Bill. She had passed the Arkansas Bar with ease, but the DC Bar was considerably more difficult. She was so embarrassed she kept her failure a secret, from even her closest friends, for decades.
Sara Ehrman could not believe the news when Hillary told her she would be moving to Arkansas. “No one moves TO Arkansas,” she said.24 Hoping to discourage her, she offered to drive Hillary to Fayetteville, where Bill was living, and took every opportunity along the way to persuade her not to stay. Hillary may not have been totally convinced that life in Arkansas was right for her, but she was sure that she would give it a chance. Nothing her friend could say would change her mind.
She was in love with Bill and moved by the clarity of his vision for his life. One day they were traveling past a home in town that Hillary told Bill she admired. The next time she saw it, Bill was escorting her over the threshold. He had secretly bought the home. It was too big for him to live in alone, he told her. He asked her to join him there, and this time she said yes. Their marriage would end up being far more challenging than either of them anticipated.
II
A Dangerous Pattern Emerges
The close political partnership for which the Clintons are known today took many years to develop and involved some significant defeats, beginning with Bill’s first congressional race in 1974. Hillary played a persistent, though marginal, role in the campaign. From a phone booth outside of her office in Washington, DC, where she was working on the committee to impeach President Richard Nixon, Hillary would call Bill’s campaign office almost daily with unsolicited advice. Because she was the boss’s girlfriend, her suggestions were tolerated, but they were not usually followed. It was not until after Bill’s 1982 campaign for reelection as governor that Hillary became a leading, rather than contributing, influence on Bill’s campaign decisions.
As governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton went into his reelection campaign filled with optimism. He achieved a number of successes in office that he hoped his fellow Arkansans would remember fondly on Election Day. There had been a few significant missteps regarding an unpopular road tax, but for the most part he felt good about his accomplishments. When his opponent, Frank White, beat him by thirty thousand votes, how the Clintons chose to deal with the defeat showed the differences in their personalities and influenced how they would function as a team in the years to come.
For days after his loss, Bill walked the streets of Little Rock in a fog, asking everyone he knew, over and over, “What did I do wrong?”25
The most frequent criticism he received was that he had tried to do too much too fast. He had championed education reform, regulatory reform and a statewide road improvement project that he hoped to fund with a new car registration tax. In his campaign for reelection, as he greeted factory workers each m
orning looking for votes, workers passed him by angrily declaring that he would never get their vote because he had raised their taxes. His opponent, White, pounded him about the car tax but got even more traction out of an explosive immigration issue—many Arkansans were irritated about the growing number of Cuban refugees being settled in the state. White ran campaign ads accusing Clinton of putting the safety of state residents at risk for the sake of foreigners.
Clinton’s relative youth was also used against him. White, a late-middle-aged Little Rock banker, changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican simply for the chance to run against the younger Clinton. He told campaign audiences that Bill could not possibly relate to the problems of ordinary Arkansas workers because the recent Oxford and Yale grad had never held an actual job.
Despite White’s growing support and the pummeling Bill was getting in the press, the polls indicated that Bill was on track to victory. Hillary had been too distracted by the birth of their daughter Chelsea to pay much attention for most of the race, but in the final days she realized that the reports she was getting from her own sources didn’t match what Bill’s advisers were telling him. She reached out to pollster Dick Morris for advice, but it was too late. When Election Day finally arrived Bill had to face the fact that he had suffered an embarrassing defeat, by a significant margin, in a statewide race, to a man who had never held elected office.
Hillary blamed herself. For years, she had ignored complaints about her plain appearance, East Coast establishment sensibilities and unusual fashion sense. Many Arkansans were confused by her insistence on using her maiden name in a state where such a practice was unheard of. Hillary realized that, because of her refusal to try to fit in, she bore some responsibility for Bill’s loss. So she decided to change her appearance.
Gone was the hippie-inspired, free-flowing hairstyle. She replaced it with a short, sensible bob with blond highlights. Her thick, “Soviet party boss” eyeglasses were swapped out for contact lenses. She abandoned the boxy pantsuit uniforms she had taken to wearing in favor of soft, feminine dresses. She started wearing makeup, affected a Southern twang and changed her name to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Then she turned her attention outward.
She fired members of Bill’s campaign staff and replaced them with old colleagues. She convinced Bill to reach out to the legendarily difficult Dick Morris for help. Morris had helped Bill before but been let go because most of Bill’s campaign staff found him too prickly to work with. Those staffers were dismissed, and Morris was invited back. Next, Hillary turned her sights on Bill.
She convinced him to pick himself up, lick his wounds and run again—not in four or six years as others had suggested, but right away. For the first time, she would take active control over his campaign.
The Clintons’ political partnership came into full bloom during the race to unseat Frank White as governor in the next election, in 1984. Bill played the candidate; Hillary played the strategist. The arrangement enabled Bill to give free expression to his welcoming, amiable side, and Hillary became his attack dog. When Bill balked at using negative ads against his opponent, Hillary forced him to accept their necessity. She took on all challengers and personally attended White’s campaign rallies, where she stood in the audience and challenged any misrepresentation of her husband’s record. She decided whom to hire and whom to fire. No significant media buy or major purchase took place without her sign-off. She shaped Bill’s strategy, edited his speeches and approved his schedule. Dick Morris recalled a comment Hillary made to him about her role during the campaign: “[Bill] is too nice to manage his own life. He doesn’t understand how venal people can be. He’s not tough enough. I’ve got to move in and take this over.”26
On Election Day, Clinton defeated Frank White by ten points. Losing that first reelection campaign had taught him many important lessons—not just about himself as a person, but also about himself as a politician. This time in office, he focused on shepherding a single, signature issue. Two years in the political wilderness had also taught him much about Hillary. He came to believe she was essential to his success. He was convinced that she possessed important skills and qualities that he did not and on which his continued success might depend. When reporters asked Governor-elect Clinton what he would focus on in the coming term, he was proud to say education reform. And he was equally proud of his pick to lead the effort: his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
After Bill’s victory, the Clintons might have thought they had stumbled upon the formula for political success, but their victory came at a price. During the campaign, a dysfunctional and self-reinforcing power-sharing dynamic emerged in their relationship.
Bill had become deeply and unhealthily dependent on Hillary, and she developed a sense of entitlement for having helped turn his career around. She felt she had earned the right to be regarded as a partner to his power. Placing her at the helm of his signature program was an expression of their new power-sharing arrangement. And, for a while, their partnership worked.
After winning a string of reelection races, they were heralded as the future of the Democratic Party. Their defeat of George H. W. Bush to win the White House in 1992 only strengthened their commitment to their partnership. As they arrived in Washington to claim their prize, they would learn the hard way that there were limits to their success—as they watched the explosive consequences of their joint decision-making imperil all that they had built.
III
The First Lady
As the saying goes, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The Clintons’ dysfunctional marriage, laid bare by the stresses of the office, exposed their weaknesses both as individuals and as a team and contaminated their policymaking in the process.
Looking back on the Clintons’ health-care reform efforts, one sees that failure was not always inevitable. Early on, polls showed a healthy public appetite for reform, and serious bipartisan opportunities emerged throughout the process that would have made possible some approximation of what the Clintons sought if they had only been more open to compromise. But compromise was not part of their vocabulary in those days. Ultimately, their efforts to reform the health-care system were undermined by intense secrecy, their personal power-sharing arrangement and their insistence on treating health-care reform like a war in which everyone was either friend or foe.
Hillary’s dream of reforming health care met its official death on August 26, 1994. That was the day when Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell decided that there was neither the political will nor the time to move a bill to the Senate floor before Congress adjourned. After all the Clintons had suffered in their fight to draft the bill, Mitchell’s decision was probably welcome news.
The Clintons entered the White House steadfastly determined to accomplish what had eluded so many other presidents that century.27 With majorities in both chambers of Congress and with supportive poll numbers, the prospects of reforming the nation’s health-care system seemed bright. But, from the start, the Clintons experienced problems—some of which were of their own making.
It was Hillary’s idea to make health-care reform one of the main legislative goals of Bill’s first year in office. Before the inauguration, she had expressed interest in having some sort of leadership role in the government, and after her wish to be White House chief of staff or US attorney general fell through, she proposed taking the helm of some important policy initiative instead. She wanted a high-profile role to play, comparable to the leading role she had played in the campaign. Bill agreed. He felt he owed her big for helping him win the presidency, and if health care was what she wanted, he was happy to oblige. Having witnessed her leadership of the Arkansas education commission a decade before, he had little doubt that she possessed the skills to see it through.
The National Task Force on Health Care Reform was officially announced by the president on January 25, 1993. Chaired by the First Lady, the commission was mandated to issue a report with legislative recommendations within th
e first hundred days of the administration. The president chose his close friend and fellow Rhodes classmate Ira Magaziner to be Hillary’s deputy. The wealthy New York business consultant would join his notable organizational skills with Hillary’s to get a handle on an industry that, in dollar terms, represented a sixth of the nation’s economy.
The colossal scale of the enterprise was painfully clear from the start. Originally established with twelve people, the task force grew quickly to more than five hundred committed, if befuddled, advisers. Hillary parsed the number into twelve “cluster teams” and thirty-eight “sub-groups.” Each group was charged with the task of examining one of seven important problems, crafting a solution and then presenting it to the other groups for review. All the best ideas would be gathered into a draft piece of legislation and presented to Congress for consideration before the summer recess.
To prevent leaks, Hillary insisted that all task-force meetings take place in secure conference rooms on the White House campus. Members were not permitted to speak to the press, their names were not made public—even to the other members of the task force—and discussion documents were carefully numbered and tracked. Senator Jay Rockefeller, a key figure involved due to his Democratic leadership of the Senate committee of jurisdiction, pronounced the operations of the task force more complicated than the invasion of Normandy.
Even working eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, the task-force members had difficulty crafting the legislation in time to meet Clinton’s hundred-day deadline. Hillary put on a brave face, attending as many meetings as she could and building up a command of the subject matter that few could challenge. She met individually with federal and state officials, gave speeches across the country and testified in front of Congress, all in an effort to build support for the initiative. Under the best conditions, her energy, professionalism and commitment would have foretokened success, but dark clouds soon began to gather.
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